This week we got the reveal of the face commanders from Commander Masters set coming later this year. I was excited about these because one of the announced decks was my dear Eldrazis. My brother on the other hand was thrilled to see the Slivers return as well. We were gearing up for a battle of the titans in a few months, but then the face commanders were revealed. Now, I won’t go as far as to say that the sky is falling and these decks are already doomed to be terrible, but I will say that they left me wishing that the face commanders were at least a little more inspired. Let’s just cover the decks and you can decide for yourself.
Let’s start with the lovely hivemind, the Slivers. The Sliver Gravemother is the face commander of this deck and is an expected WUBRG to cast for a 6/6 Legendary Sliver that reads; The “Legend Rule” doesn’t apply to Slivers you control. Each Sliver creature card in your graveyard has Encore X, where X is its mana value. Where it also has Encore 5.” Now this is honestly right up the alley of the Slivers. Finding a way to circumvent the rules and bring back others that you have lost in the game, all while pumping up the others is nothing new to this tribe. But under the right circumstances, this may be just the new best commander for them. While The First Sliver will give your slivers cascade, Imagine a later turn and casting this for its echo cost of 5 colorless mana, and getting 3 of them. This will not only let you do the cascading triggers a million times and fill your board but god only knows what other chaos comes down with it. This is easily an instant board presence and one that is likely to end the game. And this is just one example of how powerful this ability is. To me, this is taking a powerful deck and giving it one more piece to make it even more deadly.
Now for my personal favorites, the Eldrazi. This commander seems so uninspired to me. Zhulodok, Void Gorger is 5 generic and 1 colorless Legendary Eldrazi that is a 7/4 and has: colorless spells you cast from your hand with mana value 7 or greater have “cascade, cascade”. And that is it. While the newer Sliver commander only enhanced what you were trying to do already, this one only really helps you try to snowball a little harder. I could easily see putting this into the 99 of an Eldrazi tribal deck but there is little to no world where I run this as a commander over one like Emrakul, the promised end, or Ulamog, the ceaseless hunger. Honestly, any of the other titans have more reason to be in the command zone. In magical Christmas land (as Jimmy and Josh from the command zone would say) this card is awesome. But casting this for 6 does nothing for me right away and the big cards I’m looking to cast off of it are probably turns away. That is too much time for my opponents to get rid of this before I get any use out of it and with only 4 toughness it won’t be hard. In the words of King Arthur from Monty Python, “You make me sad”.
But it’s not all about me. What do you all think about these two new commanders for the big bads? Do you like them? Do they seem like a cheap cash grab? Let me know what you think in the comments below or find me on Twitter (@thisissteps17) and tell me all about it, maybe you can change my mind and I can get excited about these new decks. Thanks for reading and we will talk to you next time.
AoE Table Top 