The fact that his ETB trigger is tied to casting him prevents him from being easily abused, but board wipes are always going to be useful in Commander. Works well with monoblack’s big mana, but once you start adding other colors you gain access better draw spells. The best place to use it, however, is in a Blue/Black deck, where your reanimation engines will allow you to abuse the ETB trigger as the Sorcerer repeatedly sends himself back to your graveyard for reuse.Ī card draw spell that doubles as a removal spell for players in the late game. Add in any sort of bounce or blink engine, and it’ll convert your worst creatures into counterspells. Note that it’s a Wizard, which means you can always rebuy its effect with Riptide Laboratory.Īt its very worst, it’s a slightly overcosted Essence Scatter. If you’re willing to pay the price, then it’s a cheaper, one-sided Evacuation on an ETB trigger, which is definitely worth losing a fatty for. However, I think there is definitely a place for it alongside Blue Commanders with powerful ETB/death triggers, including Keiga, Lavinia, Zegana, and Sharuum. Pretty much an auto-include for Edric lists.Īs an Aura, it’s a lot more fragile than most blink engines (and it is essentially a blink engine). It’s not quite as good as Rite of Replication, but I think it’s going to be useful often enough that it’s still worth running in any Blue deck that can reliably generate large amounts of mana. While it’s not as efficient as some mass token producers, the ability to scale the effect to the amount of mana you have and minimize your exposure to board wipes makes this card an autoinclude in any White token list. Notably, both Zurgo and Ruhan are Warriors with 7 power, which means that the Foremost can single-handedly drop their clock from three turns to two.
It’s tribal restriction makes it pretty niche compared to Silverblade Paladin, but there are still some good uses for this card in Voltron strategies. If you’d still like to run her, I’d recommend taking a look at some of the better hate bears in monowhite, including Grand Abolisher, Aven Mindcensor, Leonin Arbiter, Thalia, etc. Changing one 2/2 into a 3/3 every time you commit another card to the board isn’t going to make much of a difference when you’re trying to kill multiple opponents that each have 40 life, and in the meantime, her insistence on using nontoken creatures just makes you more vulnerable to board wipes. The ultimate is great, but you should probably avoid looking at a planeswalker’s ultimate when deciding whether or not to run them.Īs a Commander, Anafenza is clearly trying to encourage a nontoken weenie strategy, but I don’t think the incentive she gives is strong enough to make it worth your while.
However, she doesn’t protect herself well, and the high starting loyalty that would guard her in other formats is less helpful in a format full of giant monsters. Narset is the type of planeswalker that can grind good value over several turns but isn’t great if she doesn’t survive. The +1 draws half a card in the right deck and the -2 can copy a sweet spell. He is pretty comparable to Bloodgift Demon, but his (relatively attainable) ultimate boosts his status from “value engine” to “value engine + win condition.” He protects himself, draws cards, summons dargons what more could you ask for? Sarkhan might have a prohibitive cost, but has all the signs of a great walker.
In addition to examining the new niche cards and potential staples, I’ll be looking at the Legendary Creatures of Dragons of Tarkir and generating ideas for how to build around them. Whenever a new set is released, I like to go through the set and discuss all the cards that I think have applications in Commander.