LCI (Commander) EDH Set Review

 Okay, we're in the final stretch here. Today we're looking at the new commanders and cards from the LCI Commander precons. This will be a long one, so strap in.

First up, let's see the commanders of each deck.

 

Right off the bat, I feel like Brass and Don Andres below got effect-swapped. Again there is probably a story reason I don't know about, but I feel like the ressurection effect should go on the Vampire guy and the theft-related effects should go on the Human Pirate. But that aside, neither of these new Legends gets my blood pumping to build that Pirate tribal deck, so I will continue to wait and let WotC cook.

Again, this is cool, but just doesn't spark that urge to build within me. Keep trying. WotC!

Whatever else I might say to this guy's credit, he's still nowhere near as cool as Amalia Benavides Aguirre.

Again, just completely outclassed by Amalia. But, gorgeous artwork and an interesting build-around in its own right. Still as much as I like the creative approach this and Clavileno take, I'm just all-in for Amalia.

 

Okay we have a winner here, this time. As much as I loved the U/W Merrow of Llorwyn, this Hakbal guy seems absolutely busted as a Fish commander. He's very Simic and very powerful, yet in a much less obnoxious way than the typical pushed Simic Mythic guys we usually get. I'm extremely motivated to build this one.

On one hand I appreciate that this guy isn't just another busted Simic ramp/draw commander, but on the other, it just seems bad. I definitely could be missing something. It does synergize with Explore; I caught that interaction, I just don't think it's very meaningful. Whatever, this thing bores me. It's a cute lil guy though.

I appreciate that Gishath and Zacama have their fans, and deservedly so, but this is the Dino commander that really speaks to my soul. You all know of my deep and abiding love of Maelstrom Wanderer, so it should come as no surprise that I'd gravitate to this dude. I can't wait to build Pantslaser the Dino-Gacha.

I was very confused by this card until I remembered that Enrage exists. Definitely made specifically for that niche. Fine for those that were waiting on an Enrage commander, I suppose. Not my bag, so I don't really know if it's actually good or not. Too hyped for Pants anyway so let's move on.

 

These next two aren't in the precons, as their color identities don't even fit the four decks we're getting, so I have no idea where/how you get them but they are legendary creatures so we'll talk about them as commanders anyway.

 

Why the hell is this not in Abzan instead? I have very specifically been wishing for a card that both populates and proliferates, but the intersection of those two abilities BY FAR fits the Abzan wedge better than it does Sultai. I have no idea what to do with this in Sultai but I practically have the list already built in Abzan. Ugh. What a nightmare.

 

I completely forgot this idiot had a back side, but it's too much of a pain in the ass to fix it now. Also I just hate this card anyway so I just don't see the need to put that bit of effort in if I'm just going to say "thank you, next" and move the fuck on.

Alright, now to the non-Legend stuff.

Five mana 2/2? Yikes! Oh, wait, this is a color-swapped Tendershoot Dryad. Alright then, this seems fine actually. Probably quite good, even.

More DFC hell. I don't really like DFCs much. This one is neat, but I'm probably not going to play it.

Same as above. Cute design, but not really my style.

Pretty good Rabid Bite variant. Feels more like an uncommon to me, but whatever. Rarity is kinda arbitrary in these precon decks anyway. Great removal option for green decks with massive commanders - if your guy is 6 power or better you almost certainly want to give this a try.

Grasp of Fate as a dinosaur. Great discover hit off Pantlaza, which is obviously what it was designed to be. Probably less exciting for the other big Dino commanders, but still probably a welcome bit of on-theme removal.

I'm not sure about this one. Putting the choice into your opponents' hands is usually bad and while sometimes a card like this will break "the Browbeat Curse" and be playable, but I don't think this is one such card. I mean I might play this in Edgar for tempo reasons, but I'm far from sold.

Aight, this one seems far better. I don't think most Edgar Markov lists have quite enough lifegain sources to really make this work, but in Orzhov Vampire lists (like my girl Amalia!), I think this is far more likely to perform.

I mentioned I hated finality counters but I'll reiterate the point here. Because that aspect, plus the tribal restriction, AND the restriction to pilfering your own graveyard alone just makes this look pathetic next to even Debtor's Knell or Virtue of Persistance. Of course if you're in mono-White and playing a tribal archetype, this is kinda the best you can do. Still a stinker, though.

Weird use of devotion but cool design. I think you mainly play this just to make a bunch of Vampire tokens, but if you happen to get the Devotion effect that's just a bonus. Definitely would play in Orzhov vamps, but probably not Edgar Markov. 

More surprised to see Coven here than I was Devotion on the card above, but I guess it makes sense. Worth noting this is not mechanically tied to vampire decks in any way, so you can just use it wherever you think you can reliably get that trigger. So, like, redundancy for Alesha, perhaps? Neat card, but possibly not as reliable as one might hope. Karmic Guide is probably better in most cases.

Here's a Vehicle I'm not all that jazzed about. It's certainly spicy, and is obviously a massive upgrade over Coastal Piracy, but it's very much a take or leave it card, in my opinion, unless you're running it for thematic reasons. So in a Pirate deck, sure this is great, but for most other archetypes I'll just stick with Bident of Thassa.

Your merfolk army suddenly all taking to the skies can certainly catch an opponent with their pants down. Encore is a nice touch, too, as this is sure to be a prime removal magnet. I like it. It's not mind-blowing, but it's certainly solid.

This is going to be SO annoying in planeswalker-heavy builds. I loathe it already.

I kinda like Parley. Well, I like Selvala. Okay, I like it when one of my opponents is playing Selvala. This just seems really "meh" though. I don't see a compelling use case for this.

LOL, this is probably the best pun name I've seen WotC make in ages. Kudos. Solid card, but like Whelming Wave and similar cards we've seen, this is great if it fits the theme you're doing, not so great otherwise.

Reasonable protection from Wrath effects for your vamps. Cool. Can't help but be a greedy bastard and wish this said "undying" instead of "persist" but that's probably completely unreasonable. Protecting your army seems good nonetheless.

LOL this thing is wacky. Partner? Does anything else in the set even have Partner? WHOSE BIRD IS THIS?!

Not terrible, but there are better options for both self-mill and reanimation. You're likely playing this strictly for theme/flavor, rather than cause it's the best card for the job.

Holy shit this thing is fucking absurd. I think most Edgar lists would rather see this in their opening hand than Sol Ring, and that's just nuts. Bonkers. People on Arena are going to see you play this T1 and just scoop, not knowing your hand is full of lands and white cards, LOL.

Odd card, not sure how to rate it yet. Populating your 1/1s from Edgar Markov, for example, doesn't seem quite good enough. The sorcery half is just whatever. Fine if you have the opportunity to go for it, but I think you play this almost entirely for the Enchantment half, if at all.

This pun is lame compared to Wave Goodbye, but I appreciate that the attempt was made. Seems a bit slow and clunky for the current state of the format. Even casual decks seem to be a bit too fast and over the top for this level of durdle. I like that it exists but fear it will struggle to be relevant in the average meta.

Swing and fling, bruh.

Equipping your Treasure tokens seems like a bit of a nightmare to track in paper, but I guess it's not the worst thing we've seen. I am just detecting a very clear trend in WotC designing paper Magic cards as if they just assume that everyone is playing digital Magic so these concerns over IRL/paper complexity appear to matter less and less to them these days. Then again, few cards are as obnoxious to track in paper games as Cathar's Crusade and that hasn't stopped most of us from playing it regardless. Still, despite WotC officially saying on many, many occasions that paper Magic is still more important than digital, the complexity/memory issues they are introducing seems to indicate that the official stance is little more than PR.

More juicy tech for Enrage Dinos. Someone tell Ulvenwald Tracker to ditch the bear and start hanging with the Dinosaurs. Fun card, and probably perfectly acceptable in any Dino deck, not just the Enrage-focused lists. Makes combat math and absolute nightmare for your opponents, and probably will get you some free wins when they forget exactly what this thing does.

Man, at first I thought this really sucked ass, but I missed that it says "copy this twice". I'm certainly not above running some Regrowth type effects, and getting back three permanent cards for 2 mana is a fantastic rate. But like all these Descend 8 cards, it's pretty sketchy outside of decks that are heavily focused on self-mill or other graveyard-based fuckery.

Dino draw to draw more Dino.

Great bit of recursion for your Merfolk (and/or Druid) tribal decks. Neat stuff. Retrace seems odd until you consider the heavy explore theme in this deck, which will likely provide an ample surplus of lands to discard once it gets going. Outside of specifically Hakbal, this gets a little more iffy. Then again, Simic has a number of popular commanders that happen to be Druids - Kinnan, Tatyova, Imoti, and Rashmi to name just a few. I probably wouldn't run this JUST for my commander alone, but chances are good most of those decks run a few other Druids incidentally, and you could probably find a few more that fit whatever your deck does quite easily.

"Can i offer you a nice egg in this trying time?"

 -- Frank Reynolds

Very solid rate for a Myriad guy. Relevant utility damage trigger. Hard to imagine this not being mandatory in pretty much any Dino deck. Lack of Trample probably doesn't matter that much, but of course it would be welcome to help it get through and do it's thing. But hey, that's certainly an easy problem for Green to solve.

Notable that it doesn't say "until end of turn". No, it just stays as whatever you copy until you decide to have it copy something else. Clearly useless outside Dino decks, but let's face it, those are going to be more popular than ever after this set, I think. This is one that I think is perfectly fine if you wanna run it, but it's not an essential piece.

I'm just not that into Map tokens, I guess. Maybe they'll play better than I imagine, but right now my feeling is that most of these cards are just decent. I kinda wish this followed the "Tireless" pattern - i.e. 3/2 for three, makes a Map when you play land - but doubling the effect of your Maps and other Explore effects is pretty cool too.

Another solid looking role filler. Not mechanically exclusive to Merfolk decks, but wants at least to be in lists with heavy +1/+1 counter themes. But that particular archetype is severely spoiled for choice, and I know every time I build around +1/+1 counters, be it Simic, Abzan, or some other G/x combination, I wind up with enough playables to build two decks, so this guy is up against some wicked competition if you're considering him outside of a Hakbal build.

Keyword salad! This thing does it all. Vampires are notorious for going wide, and quickly, especially in Edgar Markov decks. Should be trivially easy to power this out by like T5 or so in an Edgar list. I can certainly seeing this somehow turning out to be more clunky and awkward than it looks on paper, of course. But my gut says this is very much worth checking out. I really think this thing is just going to kill people out of nowhere, especially in groups that skimp on removal.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Flash. Saving a guy from removal is, of course, a sweet effect that we can probably make use of quite easily. But giving all your Merfolk Flash is the main attraction, to me. I am a die-hard fan of cards like Leyline of Anticipation or Alchemist's Refuge. When you can just do everything, or at least most things, at the last possible second, it feels so damn good. This set may not be the tipping point for me building a Pirate deck, but it sure as hell is going to get me to finally build a Merfolk deck. And this is probably my favorite of all the new Merfolk in the set. So good.

Meh. Even in a Pirate build, I think I'd rather just run a few of the Swords of X and Y instead.

More flash enabling along tribal lines, but somehow I'm not as stoked about this one. Depends on the tribe, I guess, but overall I think this is a little too narrow and restrictive to be all that exciting. Decent, maybe, but nothing to get worked up over.

Okay. That's it! We're done; go home.

Lost Caverns of Ixalan EDH Set Review

 Once again, we're back to discuss the Rare cards of LCI. After this we will talk about any Commons and Uncommons I feel are significant to our format, and that'll be that... Oh, well, wait. I guess there's also the LCI Commander stuff to talk about to!

EDIT: Okay so I had planned on doing on further post to talk about Commons and Uncommons from the main set, but after looking over the spoiler there were just so few cards that I felt worth mentioning that it didn't seem worth doing a post for like 2 or 3 cards that weren't all that exciting anyway, so consider this the final piece of the main set, and after this we'll go straight on to the Commander cards.

 Okay then, on with the show.

 

Oh, cool, a new toughness matters card. Probably great for Arcades/Ikra/Doran players and not much else? Then again it's sort of a 6/6 semi-hexproof for 4 mana so it might see a tiny bit of play elsewhere.

A new confluence, but this one is kinda hyper-focused, so I don't expect this one to see much play. Are Caves going to be the new Gates? Doubt it.

Wow, okay, solid Dino-based ramp at a low enough spot on the curve to matter (for Dino decks, anyway). Seems well positioned to be a critical piece of ramp for the Zacamas and Gishaths of the world. I'd probably be willing to play this in Yorvo, even.

More Dino-centric ramp, but mostly I just see another 2-drop dork for Etali decks on Arena. Ugh. The possibility to recurs your dead dinos is nice, but realistically I think it's a bit slow and durdly to be all that reliable. Oh, also I will take this moment to say I loathe Finality Counters.

Amusing, but probably not terribly efficient. I mean, yeah, you'll probably just go ahead and play it in your Simic Merfolk decks, but then you probably just try to play it out on curve for like 2-3 mana tops. Fine, but whatever.

BONK

3/4 Vigilance for 3 is quite nice, and the Map tokens are certainly not irrelevant. Should be a slam dunk for Simic Merfolk, much more so than the Spelunker above. Another one I might even find room for in Yorvo, just due to the solid cost/stat rate.

This is to Brago what Vito is to Teysa. Meaning, your poor friends are traumatized by your Brago deck, but you still wanna do Brago things. This should soften the blow, right? In all seriousness, this seems significantly worse than Brago, yet still capable of being annoying. Annoying, but not traumatically so. I actually wish he did something else, like make a 1/1 Spirit token when a card enters the battlefield from Exile or something like that. Kinda dull, as he is.

Yikes. With this spiritual successor to Karlov of the Ghost Council, I'm not sure which one is actually better. Either way, this is easily the most exciting Orzhov commander I've seen since, well, Uncle Karl himself. 

Karl is probably better at playing a more grindy, controlling game, and his ability to exile things is certainly more widely useful than Amalia's board wipe ability, but this thing can more easily pop off and one-shot someone out of nowhere.

Not really feeling this one. Don't have much to say about it, just doesn't pique my interest at all.

Good Lord, they are really committed to making me like Vehicles for some reason. And it seems to be working. I mainly just look at this and see a card for Jhoira (Weatherlight Captain, obvs). But it has a lot of potential for other use cases, I'm sure.

We've come a loooong way from Vesuvan Doppelganger (a fact that makes me a little sad, as for many years, Vesuvan Doppelganger was one of my absolute favorite Magic cards ever, but now it's barely even playable, outside of like Clone Tribal decks). A 4/4 for four that Explores every turn is already decent, but add that it can selectively copy something else if there is something worth cloning and now it really has potential. Very solid.

Hmm. I really don't know what you do with this in EDH. Seems very much like a Standard card to me. Not an interesting commander, and I don't see it doing all that much in the 99. Just sort of okay, I guess.

So, basically this is a Dreadbore that, if you cracked a fetchland, can also hit a Sol Ring? I guess if you're still running Dreadbore this is stricly better like 1% of the time. Still worth making the upgrade if you have it, because that rare instance where it does 2 for 1 is probably going to be big swing for you. But it still requires a lot of specific conditions to be that good.

At first I thought this would be a great fit for Atla Palani (it even references her in the name) but the fact that it forces you to sac your Eggs might actually make it a liability moreso than an asset. That said, you can cast this post-Combat so you at least have some time before the first sacrifice happens. Also, Atla decks that only run like 3 big Eldrazi or whatever won't want to dilute their creatures with a whimpy 5/3. Yeah this one seems like it has a few things working against it, but I'm sure it'll get played in "fair" Atla decks regardless.

Shit, that's quite interesting. Probably my Golgari bias is showing but I really like this. At first I thought it was only so-so, but then I realized that it doesn't say "creature" it says "nonland permanent" so it hits Enchantments, Artifacts, Planeswalkers, and whatever else I may be forgetting. Battles, I guess? So it's actually quite versatile despite the Fathomless Descent restriction placed upon it. Self mill decks likely find it trivially easy to work around. Sidisi, Gitrog, Meren, etc. will probably be thrilled to have this.

Another potential Dimir/Sultai self-mill card, but it's not wildly powerful or exciting, just some solid card advantage. It's not bad, but far from a must-run even in those self-mill strategies. 

Three mana for a looter is kinda underwhelming, but it helps set up the flip condition of course. Even better you basically get your 4 mana investment back immediately upon transforming. I think this might be solid in mono-color decks, mainly. I would 100% run this is Feldon of the Third Path, for instance.

Generic "choose a tribe" tribal card. Probably not as good as just running Panharmonicon but solid stat/cost rate and Ward 2 might make this worth running as a redundancy that attacks and blocks.

This is mostly very underwhelming, but it is worth noting that sacrificing a bunch of treasure tokens can power this up very rapidly. Still pretty mid, though.

LOL this looks like a jank rare straight out of the original Mirrodin block or something. Seven mana for a 3/3 that isn't Meteor Golem seems wildly hard to justify even with all its other text. Matches up poorly to Myr Battlesphere. I have a hard time envisioning where this might actually be worth playing. Casual Brudiclad maybe?

I don't even know, man. I mean, yeah, you can cheat this with some Changelings, but do you just slot this into whatever deck you already happened to have some changelings in? Does the self-mill portion matter to that deck? I guess maybe it could work in certain Horde of Notions lists. I guess. 

Fine card for Gitrog.

Cool cycle. Dual manlands are neat.

This one is objectively the best because it turns into a Llama. Not open to discussion.

Shark is also a very powerful creature type. My Wrexial deck circa 2011 would have killed to have this card.

Probably my least favorite of the cycle, but still good. Would definitely run this in Stonebrow.

Insect is kind of a strange choice of creature type here, but fine. Menace, plus the solid attack trigger makes this quite appealing.

And this helps you activate your manlands, I guess. Probably not running it just for that purpose. Probably not a great card in EDH, to be honest, unless you just have a shit ton of utility lands for some reason. Yeah, very niche, at best. Probably just straight up useless.