Goonhammer Reviews The New Commander Masters Cards

Today we have a bit of an unusual one, diving in to review ALL of the new cards from the Commander Masters set. While the main booster set itself doesn’t contain any new cards, the 4 preconstructed companion decks released alongside it each have 10 new ones so we will be giving our thoughts on these additions to our favorite format.

 

The New Cards

 

Abstruse Archaic

FromTheShire: Combining All-Stars Strionic Resonator and Rings of Brighthearth? Count me all the way in. Obviously it’s limited by being a tap ability on a creature and only working on colorless sources, but this is an extremely rare and useful effect, and a lot of the things that get targeted are colorless anyway. Whether played fairly doubling up hideous Eldrazi cast and attack triggers or for combos, this is a great card. Nice to have something meaningful low in your curve in Eldrazi decks too.

BPhillipYork: These Archaic Avatars are fun hefty-ish mid size creatures that cost all colorless mana. At least, I’m going to assume they will continue to be that, Wandering Archaic was a fairly bonkers card, this is quite a bit tuned down, nonetheless a really solid card for things like Eldrazi decks since they have tons of triggered abilities (when cast is a cast trigger, so still qualifies) and Annihilator is also triggered. Anyway I’m kind of a sucker for big dumb colorless things. In terms of being like really “good” this card ain’t it. But fun.

Loxi: Copying effects are always good. I think they almost are a bit too evergreen to even make a big fuss over at this point, but it’s hard to deny how effective they are. This has it’s place in a lot of colorless decks and even in some control/combo decks that rely on a lot of activated effects from artifacts.

 

Anikthea, Hand of Erebos

FromTheShire: Enchantress reanimator seems like an absolute blast to play, there are a ton of hilarious but way too expensive enchantments I’d love to cheat out. You’re in great colors for enchantments, enchantment payoffs, tutoring, graveyard shenanigans…. everything you could ask for. Hell you even have tools to get something back from exile like Riftsweeper and Pull from Eternity. Overall the token being a creature is a slight bummer, but it does offer up the upside of being able to use things like Song of the Worldsoul to get extra copies of your Zombie enchantments which seems like a blast.

BPhillipYork: This is a really solid Abzan enchantment commander. Honestly really solid for mid-beatdown decks. Some of the Enchantresses are enters battlefield triggers instead of cast, and the ability to reanimate enchantments means you can mill them in there and then reanimate. Reanimating things like Legion Loyalty or Debtors’ Knell is fun and dumb, but if you want to do something “actually good” reanimating stax pieces could really lock the board down while you grind people down or set up an infinite combo with enchantments.

Loxi: I really love the design of this because it shores up the one criticism I would have had for enchantment creature decks: “Are there enough good enchantment creatures alone to build around?” While that answer might be yes, this gives you such a great toolbox and fixes the enchantress issue of being a value engine without a win condition. When in doubt, just smash some face.

 

Battle at the Helvault

FromTheShire: Some cute temporary removal for the enchantment precon, but this Avacyn ain’t really Avacyn. It’s a cute nod but the OG is good because she gives your board indestructible, and while this is a useful token it’s nothing more than a solid beater.

BPhillipYork: This is just so expensive, there’s way you could sort of break it, like removing counters from it which would get really annoying, but if you do that someone will probably blow it up. Getting Avacyn is fine but it’s really just an Angel token.

Loxi: This is neat, but I feel like this is just played a suspended Avacyn with extra steps. I see the merit in being able to reanimate this and do some goofy stuff, but I’m not 100% sold. Still a crazy beatstick nonetheless though.

 

Boon of the Spirit Realm

FromTheShire: There’s reason Door of Destinies sees very little play compared to Coat of Arms, and it’s because one of those cards ends a game out of nowhere, while the other slowly ticks up before eating a Krosan Grip at the worst possible time for the owner. In an unmodified precon pod this is absolutely going to win you games, in larger play you’re going to have to do a lot of work to maybe get there.

BPhillipYork: This is basically Cathars’ Crusade but for enchantments. Which is okay, especially if you build around turning enchantments into creatures, one option would be to set up a bunch of fattie enchantments and keep casting Wrath of God and then animate them all at once. For 5 mana though this is probably a fairly niche card, unless you’re running a very specific kind of deck or going to take advantage of enchantment token generators.

Loxi: 5 mana feels a bit hefty since this will take a bit of time to ramp up, but this can reach a critical mass pretty quick with a draw engine in play. I’d run this for sure if you want to go wide on those enchantment creatures but I would expect this to get blown up a lot before you can really get too crazy with it.

 

Cacophony Unleashed

FromTheShire: Solid for leaning heavily into enchantments, coming down late game end either devastating your opponents or ending the game outright with a one sided board wipe. Obviously not the only one I’m running but as part of the suite in the appropriate deck I dig it. The creature part is kind of whatever but I’ll take it.

BPhillipYork: I frankly kind of find it annoying when cards like this are shoved into a deck with a commander all about cheating out big fat enchantments. Like, why do they do that? And if the product is intended for newer players then why create the confusing if you cast vs enters battlefield distinction that’s almost certainly going to trip up new players. Anyway, 7 mana for a possibly asymmetric wrath effect isn’t completely terrible, but it’s really too expensive, especially since there’s only one card like this, if there were 3 or 4 maybe you could sort of depend on it.

Loxi: I wouldn’t run this over other board wipes most of the time. 7 mana is a bit much for when you’ll want to rip that “oh crud” button, and it seems a bit win-more as a finisher. It’s neat that it can fill both roles, but I think it’s not particularly noteworthy at either.

 

Calamity of the Titans

FromTheShire: 6 mana mass exile is excellent, and this is perfectly positioned to transition your Eldrazi deck from ramping and doing some utility things into the late game where you start dropping your haymakers by clearing out whatever riffraff the table has gotten out in the meantime. Works great in artifact decks as well.

BPhillipYork: This is a dangerous card, basically Ugin, the Spirit Dragon‘s ability but not quite, but a powerful way to board clear especially if you are running a deck that just generates crazy amounts of colorless mana and then dumps out big fat Eldrazi.

Loxi: I’m happy to see they chose to add more nonpermanent spells to the pool for colorless, and this will most likely be an auto-include since it can realistically slot into any colorless deck as a solid sweeper. Big fan of this one.

 

Capricious Sliver

FromTheShire: One of the biggest problems you can run in to with tribal decks, which are inherently creature heavy, is dumping out your hand quickly and becoming the threat, and then failing to draw gas to close out the game. Especially with the ability for Slivers to gain evasion, double strike, tapping for mana, etc, this can easily turn into fantastic card advantage. Love it.

BPhillipYork: Decent card draw for Slivers, though by the time you have a 4 cost Sliver out and are connecting with Slivers for combat damage you should be threatening to outright kill your opponents. This is good for some kind of mid-range no buffs strict Sliver deck or something like that. The problem is that Slivers ramp up so much that most players probably won’t feel comfortable letting you chill out with dangerous amounts of Slivers.

Loxi: Card draw is necessary enough for a deck that floods the board super fast that even paying a premium for just a bit of mediocre impulse draw is probably still solid when you can stack the effect up so much. Plus, this archetype usually leans more towards wanting to dump out cards anyway, so a lot of your deck you won’t worry about wasting the cards you’ll exile.

 

Chandra, Legacy of Fire

FromTheShire: I don’t hate it, it’s actually truly built for a commander game at least. I feel like most of the time the game plan of grinding out a win with planeswalkers doesn’t actually pay off and you’re better off doing something big and splashy out of nowhere, but if we keep getting cards like this maybe that becomes a viable strategy.

BPhillipYork: This is a solid planeswalker for a planeswalker centric deck. If you already have several planeswalkers Chandra is potentially mana positive, but I really like her ability to drop an Earthquake or something like that as soon as you cast her. Protecting planeswalkers is rough but you can potentially just keep clearing the board of creatures with spells that don’t kill or deal damage to planeswalkers, in which case you can just grind them down with abilities like Chandra’s.

Loxi: +1 for Chandra.dec. I like that she provides a proactive finisher for superfriends. I think many archetypes in Commander suffer quite a bit from being very strong but lacking a way to push the game forward after you build a board or set up a value engine. This pushes superfriends into a long, grindy value game that can actually slug your foes out, which I think highlights what the deck really wants to do well. Plus, everyone loves lavagirl!

 

Commodore Guff

FromTheShire: This is fine I guess, if you really want to be superfriends in only these colors for some reason. Much better in the 99, it really hurts to not have access to Doubling Season or Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice.

BPhillipYork: All of Guff’s abilities don’t seem to combine well with the reality of playing planeswalkers in Commander, making wizards to cast planeswalkers means you can’t do damage based board clear to protect them, having to have another planeswalker in play to benefit from him really is just kind of meh, and his colors are kind of meh too. Would it be broken if Guff could +1 himself as a trigger? He’d roll out, do a ping and then get +1ed, so he’d have 3 loyalty, which does mean you could use his ability again on turn 2 (if he survived) and then he’d die if you -3ed again. That doesn’t seem broken to me. At all. It doesn’t even seem good.

Loxi: I was hoping for a sharkboy transition here, alas. Not-Buff-Guff is pretty neat, although I fear he may suffer from being in stark competition with Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice for planeswalker commanders. While Fluff-Guff is a bit more on-theme and has access to blue, proliferating is really, really good in superfriends. I’m all for not just releasing cards that are out of the park powerhouses, so I think Guff will be popular and way more fun to actually play against, but people who want to optimize their deck to the top might skip over him due to this.

 

Composer of Spring

FromTheShire: Love, love, love this card. It’s very easy to wind up drawing 2, 3, 4 cards per enchantment with all of the Mesa Enchantress effects in these decks which results in a hand with a bunch of extra lands, and putting then directly into play can offer massive ramp potential. Once you hit 6 you can even switch to putting in enchantment creatures if you like, though you will miss out on the cast triggers.

BPhillipYork: Potentially this could be a game winning loop with things like Parallax Wave and Starfield of Nyx but it’s practically in the Step 1: Get underpants, Step 2: ??? Step 3: profit plan. Other than that it’s a decent source of ramp in an enchantment/enchantress deck, especially if you have landfall triggers.

Loxi: This being two mana makes it particularly good. It has a low enough floor that it’s a fantastic inclusion, and I’m always on board for Constellation cards.

 

Darksteel Monolith

FromTheShire: It’s a lot of mana to start, but jumping from 8 mana immediately to a Titan is very powerful. The biggest question is if you have enough big stuff in hand for long enough to take advantage of the cost reduction. If you do though and can be slamming a couple Titans or other huge threats per turn this will absolutely close out the game.

BPhillipYork: Well this is uh, a card. Actually cheating out big expensive artifacts is relatively difficult. Making a ton of colorless mana isn’t that hard, but then you have the mana. So why do you need the cheat out more stuff? It’s kind of a win more thing, but yeah, if you can keep drawing you can keep dropping 2 titans per turn which is… threatening.

Loxi: If you have the mana to play this, you have the mana to do something a lot more interesting. There are also enough exile effects that being indestructible might not protect this enough even if you can stick it.

 

Demon of Fate’s Design

FromTheShire: Stop me if you’ve heard this before, cheating mana costs is good. Once per turn is limiting but this can still let you start slamming multiple spells per turn which is what you want to be doing.

BPhillipYork: This is a solid reanimation target for a creature focused enchantment deck that also has some way to recover life. So if you can handle that many caveats, go to. Absolutely not worth paying 6 mana for the hard way, cheat out this Demon so you can cheat out other things.

Loxi: De-man! Fighter of the Night Man!

Paying life for spells is really good, and it honestly has a strong enough body that it’s solid on it’s own. Most enchantress decks have some lifelink easily accessible too which can help prevent you from bleeding out.

…Champion of the Sun!

 

Descendants’ Fury

FromTheShire: Good for decks like the Sliver deck that can pop out a bunch of tokens and then sacrifice them to add real cards with extra abilities to the board. Not the fastest and being post combat is a bit of a bummer since you’re not benefitting from lords until the next turn, but value is value.

BPhillipYork: I think this can be broken, obviously for like tribal decks that make a ton of  tokens that’s a solid way to cheat out tons of better creatures. Could also be used to turn your commander into a tutor for a specific thing, Derevi, Empyrial Tactician shenanigans come to mind, and anything using Pyre of Heroes in a similar fashion. This is a little less controlled and a bit more upfront, but with no tap and no activation cost. Most likely use case is Goblins, and particularly as a way to grab Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and go infinite. All around decent card, but I think it should probably come in at 3 mana.

Loxi: Jam this in a lot of Goblin-esque token decks and see profit. It works fundamentally similar to how you’d want to run a lot of Polymorph type decks: if you rely on triggering this with tokens, you can stuff your deck full of high cost cards and just let them flood the board whenever you connect with this. I’m not sure what creature typing would fit best for this, but I’m sure it can pull some weight.

 

Desecrate Reality

FromTheShire: Neat to see another Eldrazi card that cares about mana costs. Instant speed exile 3 things and reanimate something from your yard is great, even in non Eldrazi decks.

BPhillipYork: This is a big dumb colorless haymaker for Eldrazi decks, and it’s awesome. It’s like an inverted adamant, which is pretty cool, I don’t think colorless adamant has been done before, and the ability to destroy lands in addition to anything else is really solid. Given it’s an instant, you can respond to a “titan” reshuffle graveyard trigger, and reanimate any of the odd mana cost Eldrazi if you want.

Loxi: This is a stupid amount of value on one card. I see no reason to avoid running this in colorless, period.

 

Flayer of Loyalties

FromTheShire: Hell yes. I love annihilator because as previously established I am a bad man so I would be on board with this even if it didn’t have the threaten effect. With it tacked on, I am in love. Bonus points for stealing someone’s commander with counters on it and one hit KO-ing them. Great nod to Eldrazi Conscription, give me more of this.

BPhillipYork: Solid big fat Eldrazi that grabs an opponents creature and lets you slam it into someone else. The targeting doesn’t read “creature that another player controls” so you technically use this on one of your creatures if you want to give it haste, annihilator 2, and trample.

Loxi: You don’t need me to explain why this is big and scary. If you’ve never been in play with an Annihilator goober on the table, it will humble you.

 

For the Ancestors

FromTheShire: I just can’t see running a draw spell that can whiff in commander where we have access to basically every card ever printed.

BPhillipYork: This is really too expensive unless you have some trick to manipulate the top of your library.

 

Gatewatch Beacon

FromTheShire: In a superfriends deck this is useful enough to justify running a 3 mana rock. Sometimes that extra counter pushes you into ultimate range immediately, or quicker enough to be worth it, and with Atraxa you’ll never run out of counters to throw around.

BPhillipYork: This is potentially a solid card to enable Planeswalkers especially if you need them to come out and do something immediately and just need another +1. A solid card for Atraxa, Praetors’ Voice superfriends decks (oh wait are you allowed to play her still they killed her off with a building off-screen lol) since proliferate will keep triggering up your beacon. This is on par with, though slightly worse than, the others of the wave of semi-playable 3 cost mana rocks, like Cursed Mirror and Midnight Clock.

Loxi: If there are enough planeswalkers in your deck that this puts a turn closer to using their ultimate or a powerful loyalty ability right as they enter, this might be good. I don’t think I’d drop to a one-color three mana rock if I don’t get some serious value from it though.

 

Ghoulish Impetus

FromTheShire: Neat tool for the enchantment deck to ward away the biggest threat at the table without drawing too much heat from the owner, and then it returns to your hand if the target ever happens to die. Also useful for forcing an attack if you can make a deal for someone else to trade if they are attacked by the goaded creature.

BPhillipYork: I like this card, solid. Though in my experience, if you goad something your opponents will just let it through rather than kill it off, at least at the LGS level.

Loxi: Goad cards are sweet, I don’t think I’d play it in a traditional enchantress shell but it’ll support forced combat decks really well.

 

Guff Rewrites History

FromTheShire: Mass Chaos Warp but worse is pretty intriguing, not being able to hit enchantments and guaranteeing they will hit something to cast are significant downsides though. One of the reasons it became such a staple is that it let you deal with a card type you otherwise couldn’t in red, and it always offers the possibility they can whiff into an instant or sorcery or land. Here you get to do it to everyone, including yourself, but you also let them CAST the card, which means even more ways things can go wrong.

BPhillipYork: Weird card, there are weird ways to lock this out and make it a fairly decent asymmetric card where your opponents don’t get to cast it (stuff like Grand Abolisher means they don’t get to cast it, or other stax pieces.) I don’t know if this is intentional but I think they cleverly exempted Enchantments because sagas are history. But maybe not. A bit frustrating simultaneously though since red has always struggled against enchantments, and yet another red control spell won’t let you deal with them.

Loxi: No, not Book-Scuff-Guff!

 

Yeah have fun explaining this one to your table if you want to run it. The card is fine and fun, but that text really sucks to read.

 

Hatchery Sliver

FromTheShire: Super powerful to be able to double or triple up on your lords or give yourself backup copies of useful effects, while also going wider faster to benefit from all of said abilities. Excellent.

BPhillipYork: Dangerous card that will let you really explode with lots of Slivers, especially with things like Gemhide Sliver letting your Slivers generate mana.

Loxi: I cannot stress enough how good just having access to extra card-free dudes while playing “deck that wants a lot of dudes” is. Even if the effects from some Slivers won’t stack, just having more things to dump mana into is really powerful.

 

Jaya’s Phoenix

FromTheShire: Copying a loyalty ability can be very good and it is unlikely to ever truly go away in the deck that wants it, solid.

BPhillipYork: I like Phoenixes and this one is a more interesting one, red reanimation is a bit more interesting than black, and all these ways to get back Phoenixes is a bit random but also kind of cool.

Loxi: Might require a bit of finesse to make this work, and 5 mana isn’t super cheap either, but copying some abilities can be really strong. It’s also so easy to get back to the battlefield that I think it ends up being pretty solid. Note that a lot of planeswalkers (read: Black) have loyalty abilities involving sacrificing creatures, so this makes a good piece of fodder to chuck to that.

 

Lazotep Sliver

FromTheShire: Afflict is solid if you don’t have evasion on board yet and are getting chump blocked and while typically just making one big dude with amass isn’t great in commander, making a massive dude that can suddenly get the wide array of buffs Slivers offer can be terrifying. They board wipe you and next turn you give your 20/20 flying and double strike? Yikes.

BPhillipYork: I like amass slivers, that’s awesome. The card is so-so to bad, but fun for mid Slivers decks.

Loxi: Afflict damage might add up pretty fast if your meta has a lot of other wide-board creature decks as well.

 

Leori, Sparktouched Hunter

FromTheShire: Usually this is going to let you double up one loyalty ability, in the rare instances where you have Chandra Tron or whatever on board this is hilarious. Still think it goes in the 99 based on color identity.

BPhillipYork: So doubling planeswalker abilities is kind of scary, especially with access to blue, since several Teferis allow you to take extra turns, and this can easily get out of control (also you could give give this bad boy double strike), and pretty much just keep taking turns.

Loxi: I’m curious to see people run this as a commander, 3 mana lets this get rolling pretty early. Good keywords to boot. I’m sure Leori won’t be nearly as popular as Don’t-Bluff-Guff, but I quite like this one.

 

Narci, Fable Singer

FromTheShire: Nice utility piece for Tom Bombadil, doesn’t do enough on its own to be your general IMO.

BPhillipYork: This card seems like it’s for Tom Bombadil to actually accomplish something. However you can sacrifice enchantments for interesting things, also interesting with the Seals – Seal of Doom for example, though Sagas are officially sacrificed when they hit the final lore counter, so this is some really strong Saga synergy. Also kind of interesting with Ghen, Arcanum Weaver as well as just using sacrifice creatures with enchantment creatures.

Loxi: I know there have to be some ways to make loops with this to draw your deck, and I almost feel like that stands out more than the sagas side. If you want sagas, I think you want access to all 5 colors from Tom Bombadil, but I can still see this being potent if you have a way to speed through sagas quickly.

 

Nyxborn Behemoth

FromTheShire: 2 mana 10/10 trampler that can be made indestructible is damn solid. Even 5/5’s and 6/6’s hitting you every turn in commander becomes a problem faster than you anticipate, and obviously even more so for this guy.

BPhillipYork: It’s a 10/10 with trample that can sacrifice enchantments and gets cheaper when you have enchantments. If that appeals to you, definitely go for it. I myself do not really see the attraction, 10/10 is threatening but not actually that dangerous. The ability to give it indestructible is a bit more interesting.

Loxi: BIG.

 

Omarthis, Ghostfire Initiate

FromTheShire: This is kind of an odd one that doesn’t grab me right away. I guess you go for like a Steel Overseer / The Ozolith / Walking Ballista type deck with some Arcbound creatures thrown in?

BPhillipYork: I guess there are ways to set up this kind of loop and turn things over, but manifesting creatures seems like a lot of work and you risk having manifested lands or things like that. And then manifest doesn’t save you any mana, there are some ways to cheat over manifested creatures, but given how easy it is to make a lot of colorless, it just seems like extra steps.

Loxi: Why in the world is this in the colorless precon? Just since it’s colorless, which makes sense but it seems odd.

I have no clue how to really optimize out this commander in a way that it doesn’t seem like a worse green counter commander but I think it’s a unique and interesting addition to the pool of colorless legendaries.

 

Onakke Oathkeeper

FromTheShire: A plus for superfriends decks to have another Sphere of Safety effect since usually Propaganda style cards don’t care about attacking planeswalkers. Still, a lot of the time people are going to be fine with paying 1 to attack with their 1 creature and kill your most important walker.

BPhillipYork: War Tax cards are fine, the reanimate a planeswalker is decent but costs so much. This tax ability does notably protect planeswalkers, which is rare, most of the War Tax effects only protect you from being attacked, which is part of the difficulty of playing planeswalkers in commander. The ability to do it before your turn and then untap is potentially really valuable, and could be used in conjunction with insta ult and insta emblem planeswalker setups which is pretty decent.

Loxi: I like that this further supports planeswalkers as being a pillowfort-y archetype. This is another card that I don’t particularly think is outstanding, but is cheap and versatile enough that it can’t hurt to hold a slot, especially since it can snag a key planeswalker that gets picked off.

 

Ondu Spiritdancer

FromTheShire: Copying your powerful enchantments is obviously really good. Even better in a Daxos the Returned deck where you can trigger it on each players turn.

BPhillipYork: If you make this Spiritdancer an enchantment then copy it you will create infinite copies of itself. That doesn’t seem particularly good but it’s kind of funny to me. Other than that this is like “copy Rhystic Study” and that’s strong.

Loxi: This card is fine but seriously, we really need to assess how many effects copy stuff now, it’s pretty wild.

I’m not a copy hater, I love the copy machine in my office!

 

Regal Sliver

FromTheShire: Basically means you can always draw an extra card per turn off of monarch, and then can get a big temporary lord effect. Not bad.

BPhillipYork: This is just way too expensive for this effect.

Loxi: Interestingly this basically just makes it so you can always pick up the monarch at the start of your turn since you’re practically always just vomiting Slivers. I don’t hate it but it’s one of the less interesting new Slivers, I can see jamming it just to add monarch to your tables.

 

Rise of the Eldrazi

FromTheShire: This card is awesome. Take out the biggest problem for you, draw 4, and give you another turn to swing away with your Titans? Good lord yes. Plus it’s uncounterable on top of that? Hell yes.

BPhillipYork: Yeah an extra turn spell that draws you 4 cards and destroys a permanent and can’t be countered is uh, awesome. Sure it costs 12 mana, so it’s ludicrously expensive, but colorless mana is cheap, and this is fun.

Loxi: Is it win-more? Yes. Is it exactly what people want to do when playing Eldrazi? Yes.

At this price, it should exile though, but who am I to critique.

 

Rukarumel, Biologist

FromTheShire: Rukarumel is kind of addressing a problem that people sometimes think they have that I don’t think is actually a problem. Yes it’s kind of neat to give your necessary utility creatures your tribal type but the vast majority of the time it’s really not benefitting you that much. Making the token is handy at least.

BPhillipYork: Parsing this card is kind of a hassle, but this will let you turn all your Elves also into Goblins, and then make more Slivers that are also Goblins. Which, Elves for ramp isn’t bad. Sliver/Elf deck is pretty dangerous, it solves Slivers biggest problem, consistent early game ramp. It just feels like double tribal is missing the fun point.

Loxi: I actually think they should have made this either a purely Sliver support card or not, because I agree with BPY: the wording here is really funky. That being said, this is a pretty neat card that lets you run some other weird tribal support in your Sliver decks and might make a fun less-outright powerful Sliver commander which is something the archetype could seriously use.

 

Skittering Cicada

FromTheShire: Shimmer Myr is great, this is great, sometimes it gets bigger which okay sure I’ll take it.

BPhillipYork: So now 3 things that cost 3 mana that have flash and let you cast colorless things with flash. That’s a lot of support for an archetype, Liberator, Urza’s Battlethopter is probably the strongest of the 3, but this lets you dump out Eldrazi on your opponents end step and then attack immediately, which is pretty dangerous.

Loxi: You can stop reading the card after the flash bits, that alone can make this really useful. Dodging a turn of sorcery speed removal and being able to drop your threats in the end step before your turn is nuts in an Eldrazi or artifact deck, and turning it in to a beatstick after is just gravy.

 

Sliver Gravemother

FromTheShire: The legend rule bit won’t matter most of the time but is still a plus. This mostly seems like a good way to encore a bunch of your stuff back after a board wipe to win the game, and as such I think it’s a lot better as a surprise from the 99 than sitting in your command zone.

BPhillipYork: Another 5 color Sliver is fine, Encoring Sliver Legion is pretty hilarious, you’ll get 3 Sliver Legion, each giving all Sliver creatures +1/+1 for each other sliver you control, which, at a minimum means +12/+12, so you’ll have 3 17/17s and an 18/18. Which means you can probably instakill at least 1 player, but if you have 1 or 2 more Slivers that should be enough to kill everyone off.

Loxi: I’m personally not as big of a fan of this one, but I think it’s still genuinely good. Slivers want to amass a huge force, so getting more temporary guys is fine, but you really have to push your own graveyard out a bit to do anything proactively with this. There are scenarios where you might be just waiting to have a relevant Sliver get clipped to use the encore effect.

 

Sparkshaper Visionary

FromTheShire: I’m the obsessed with Birds guy, and this is still a bad plan.

BPhillipYork: I don’t really understand this card, I guess it lets you beat up your opponents (or their planeswalkers lol) for 3s, and get some scrying in. If combat damage via planeswalkers that are turned into 3/3 Birds is your gameplan to win, please let me know if you ever win a game.

 

Taunting Sliver

FromTheShire: Useful in theory but there are enough Slivers that I doubt this makes the cut.

BPhillipYork: Goad is fun but I don’t think it’s really what Slivers want to be doing.

 

Teyo, Geometric Tactician

FromTheShire: Pretty decent way to shield your walkers for a bit if either player next to you has a non-threatening board, especially if you are proliferating.

BPhillipYork: This is a cool defensive planeswalker, the ability to trade draws is useful with white’s ability to benefit from such things.

 

Titan of Littjara

FromTheShire: If you sneak this in as your curve topper before a boardwipe hits, it’s fantastic. If you draw it after, at least it still triggers on attacks so maybe you can claw your way back in to things.

BPhillipYork: This is a weird kind of cool card, obviously synergies with tribal decks or token generators, but at 6 mana you better be drawing 5+ cards when you drop it.

 

Ugin’s Mastery

FromTheShire: Obviously meant for the Omarthis deck and glad to see it get some support. Not really for me though I think, I just am not putting the puzzle pieces together on why you want to make a colorless manifest deck.

BPhillipYork: Potentially you can use this to cheat out big fat Eldrazi but you’ll miss out on both their cast triggers and their attack triggers, which is most of the point.

Loxi: Great synergy with a lot of colorless cards and a really fun and flavorful way to cheat cards besides free casting, especially since it requires a bit of finesse to control what’s on top of your deck in addition to the other criteria. I dig it.

 

Vronos, Masked Inquisitor

FromTheShire: Cool way to provide protection for planeswalkers with the plus ability that isn’t the usual +Whatever: Make a token. Unfortunately the ult is bad.

BPhillipYork: Who is this guy? Anyway his ability to protect an actually important planeswalker is decent. Kind of funny, but oh well. The -2 is also solid. Making a 9/9 is whatever.

Loxi: Phasing alone provides great protection for planeswalkers and justifies the cost pretty well on this one, as long as you can keep Vronos himself from getting put under fire.

 

Zhulodok, Void Gorger

FromTheShire: Now we’re talking. This guy can do some incredibly busted things because again, cheating mana costs is very, very good. My Maelstrom Wanderer deck is one of my favorites, and I can’t wait to build this dude too.

BPhillipYork: Solid midrange Eldrazi, also good commander if you’re committing to colorless colorless instead of cool things like 5c colorless (aka Morophon, the Boundless).

 

 

 

That wraps up our look at the set’s new cards. We’ll be back next time with the first of our upgrade articles on the decks these cards are from. In the meantime, if you have any questions or feedback, drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.