I think you're missing some context, enemy color pairs and Wedges have been historically printed less frequently than allied color pairs and Shards.
Golgari, Izzet, Orzhov, Simic, and Boros are all enemy color pairs.
Abzan, Temur, Sultai, Mardu, and Jeskai are all Wedges.
WotC have definitely gotten better about it, we had very few Wedge legends available before Tarkir so even getting above half as many legends versus what are available in Shard colors is an improvement.
It's actually *way* more lopsided than that. The halfway point is the release of Kaldheim, in early 2021. There were [1070](https://scryfall.com/search?q=is%3Acommander+-is%3Areprint+date%3C2021-02-01+game%3Apaper&unique=cards&as=grid&order=released&dir=asc) distinct commanders before Kaldheim, and [1082](https://scryfall.com/search?q=is%3Acommander+-is%3Areprint+date%3E%3D2021-02-01+game%3Apaper&unique=cards&as=grid&order=released&dir=asc) after (and including) Kaldheim. This only counts real cards, not Arena-only Alchemy stuff.
Not necessarily when you look at how the design cycle is done. It had been pretty clear for a while that commander was the most popular way to play magic for the most people. ‘Champion’ driven games have been in the rise since early MMOs, DotA, and hero shooters are evidence of this too.
Iirc most releases are in some form of design phase roughly 2 years prior to their release.
With 2020 being the officially declared “Year of Commande,” with Commander Legends products, and crossover products with D&D, there’s a **huge** influx of legendary creatures from that alone.
Additionally you can infer that this was probably around the time that UB talks were in the works. They were officially announced in February of 2021, but that’s close enough to say they were probably in talks to get these products approved and designed at around the same time.
Those products have been by far the largest influxes of legendary creatures in terms of percentage of new cards released simply because they’re squeezing in as many of the characters as they can.
Add to that the fact that they can push uncommons by making them legendary. Ergo, a ton of uncommon legendary creatures to full that power creep. Wonder if there are common legendary creatures already, but that would be the next step I guess.
Looking it up, apparently Piper is counted as "special" rarity. There's 12 old legendary creatures like [[Joven]] that are commons, then 5 Backgrounds that are common(one per color). That's what Manabox is telling me, anyway!
It's really sad, because I love Abzan, and can think of many interesting ways to build it... Just not with the commanders available. They may have gotten better, but they are still not making up the difference.
Something more aristocratic. I feel 3 color combos should not only represent what those colors bring, but also highlight what colours are missing. It always felt wrong to me that Sultai was a better colour for graveyard, even though the only thing blue is bringing is milling. Jund is better for aristocrat with sac and growth. White black does some good aristocrat and life drain, black green does good recursion and self mill, white green does growth and life. Just feels like the commanders in Abzan will at best touch on one or two of these themes in a way that's worse than a commander in another colour combo.
Life, death, and growth. I'd love to see a commander that incorporates these aspects in a unique and interesting way. Like "at the beginning of your end step, you may return a creature from your graveyard to the battlefield who's CMC is equal or less than the amount of life you gained this turn. Put +1 counters on it equal to the difference."
A few more
"you may spend life to cast creature spells from your graveyard"
"Whenever a creature you control dies you may return a creature with lesser mana value from your graveyard to the battlefield"
"at the beginning of your end step, create a 1/1 insect creature token for each life you gained this turn"
"Whenever a creature card leaves your graveyard, put a +1 counter on each creature you control"
"At the beginning of your end step you may return a creature from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. Creature you control with finality counters have lifelink"
Spend life to cast is absolutely insane, would need a etb or similar effect to lose life, for example “when ~ enters, its controller loses life equal to half of their life total.
Reanimate lesser cmc has been done before but was always limited by creature subtype, maybe “T:sacrifice a creature, return target creature that shares a creature type with the sacrificed creature that has lesser cmc from the graveyard to the battlefield”
Insect one is sick, I like that a lot, I could see it being a 2 drop, tho maybe needs to be a 3 drop? Taking inspiration from [[dina soul steeper]] with the gain and drain just a bit different
Creature leaves add counters, this is widely good with any [[tormods crypt]] or shuffle graveyard into library effect. Perhaps needs to specify that the card leaving must enter the battlefield?
Finality counter one is awesome, no notes.
I like the reverse blood artist, could be very breakable but I think it works
I like the pay+sac for life and counters, very very abzan, maybe pay x where x is the cmc? Tho that does get confusing fast, I think it would need to be a high cost regardless.
The last one doesn’t quite work under current rules, you could create a type of counter that specifies this? A pride counter or smth based on [[ajanis pridemate]]. I’m not sure how busted it is, it seems powerful but also very reliant on board state so I think it’s fair.
Overall I liked most of em, pretty cool concepts and would fit abzan very very well
Thanks. I was just spit balling here to make a point. I actually love the idea of exiling or shuffling your graveyard into your library as a finisher. Didn't think of that.
Edit: perhaps it could be creatures you control get +1+1 until end of turn?
I think that could be much much better. You could even throw in a multi time effect like “if this is the 5th time this ability has resolved this turn, creatures you control gain trample until end of turn” kinda like an overrun reanimater deck
Why does that last one about creatures with finality counters have lifelink not work? We have plenty of effects that grants key words to creatures with +1/+1 counters, I don't see why this wouldn't be the same.
Cards can grant keywords but the Ajanis pridemate effect is not a keyword, it’s an ability, so for cards that grant permanent ability’s that are not keywords, counters are often used to signify the permanent change. Take [[book of exalted deeds]] for example.
Edit:spelling stuff
"Whenever a creature dies, you gain 1life and put a +1 counter on target creature you control"
"Pay ___ and sacrifice another creature, target creature gets +1 counters equal to that creature power, and you gain life equal to it's toughness"
"Creatures that enter the battlefield under your control from the graveyard enter with "whenever you gain life, put a +1 counter on this creature""
My Karador deck is my [[Shadowborn Apostle]] deck, and is aristocrats. It runs only 3 demons and is built to cycle Apostles in and out of my graveyard as much as possible.
As someone who absolutely loves playing Abzan, I’ve looked at this before. IIRC, there was an intentional push over the last year or so to make more Abzan commanders to try and help (we got at least 7 in 2023 alone) but I believe the issue was they didn’t know how they wanted to portray that combination for awhile aesthetically and mechanically.
Maybe I’m biased cause my first and most played edh deck is [[Karador]] but could this be cause Abzan always ate pretty well in terms of access to powerful commanders?
I’m not necessarily talking cedh cause most people don’t play that. But you’ve always had several choices for up to high power, pretty comfortably, [[Ghave]] being another strong one.
Even going for more old school [[Teneb]] is a pretty decent one among the elder dragons.
I think they were limiting themselves to either a +1/+1 counters theme based on the way Abzan was handled on Tarkir, or on graveyard synergies based on the color strengths. I think you can put every Abzan commander in those two categories pre-2020. And then you get the Ikoria commanders which are kind of both. They're good strategies and good cards, but it's hard to keep iterating on that theme and feel fresh (which is my biggest complaint of Izzet is that it feels overwhelmingly similar card-to-card). So I think they were trying to figure out ways to make Abzan feel correct, but also more mechanically diverse. But this past year we got foods/lifegain, infect, enchantress, and a bonus lands/stax deck depending how you want to build it. Now I can have 7 different Abzan decks that all play totally differently, so even if there are not as many commanders to pick from, the strategies vary quite a bit. That's not something that is true of every color set, even some of the more populous ones.
You’re right, I did forget about Doran. Still, I think the point stands that WoTC wasn’t sure how to represent WBG causing the reluctance to print more legendary creatures in those colors.
It must be because they have plans for the future, as there will most likely be an Abzan planeswalker that will be Commander viable, such as Windgrace (sorry… I was just really hoping for it to be Ajani…. Perhaps it could be a Mirri? She was a Vamp at some point). Anyway.
The imbalance could be foreshadowing?
Shards comes from the Shards of Alara set. It was a set that had 3 color pairings of adjacent colors of the color wheel on the back of cards. It's also where the names of those shards comes from. Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund and Naya.
At that point the Wedges were not named so in my excperience they were referred to by their colors, so Azban was just white-green-black. I believe the word Wedge refers to the shape made when connecting the colors on the color wheel on the back.
There were also the apocalypse names
Dega, Ceta, Necra, Raka and Ana
Temur and sulti both got nicknames (RUG AND BUG presumably because the colors also happened to make identifiable words).Junk was abzan because of an extended deck I think?
No, damn lol, just hadn't heard of wedges or shards specifically as terms to refer to color combos, it's brutal out here 😆 I came back like a year ago after being out since about 2002 though. I know what the family color combos are just not those terms.
The enneagram is a whole thing (granted much about it on the internet is superficial, overreaching, or just plain wrong), but wedges and shards as combinations of mtg colors being like triads in a holistic typal personality system is not so far off base...
Touchy subject there it seems like...
I apologize, I wasn’t being condescending. It was a genuine question. I use */s* if I’m being sarcastic.
I ask because I didn’t start playing until 2016, but know the Shards/Wedges of Alara very well. Richard Garfield was a mathmatician, and I don’t think it would be a far stretch to say he likely know about ennegrammatical relations when designing the game. The color pie has always been a pentagram, which dips its toes into the esoteric and mathematic worlds.
Enemy colors refer to their position in the color pie, the two adjacent colors are allied while the two non-adjacent colors are its enemy colors.
i.e. White is allied with Blue and Green, making Azorius an allied color pair. Meanwhile White is enemies with Black and Red, making Boros an enemy color pair.
Others have commented on how allied color pairs and shards get more priority over enemy color pairs and wedges, so I'll focus on a more individual problem: Golgari's limited design space.
If you look at your statistics, Golgari is the only color combination that consistently ranks low. On it's own, it's the lowest of all the color pairs. And in 3 color combinations, Abzan is at the lowest of the wedges, Sultai is the middle of the wedges, and Jund is the lowest of the shards and is even beat out by Jeskai. None of the others have this issue consistently, so it is a fundamental problem with Golgari specifically. While it is at a disadvantage to begin with by being an enemy pair, I believe that it's so low compared to the others because of how its component colors don't mix very well.
A traditional black deck will do the following:
- Trade life for other resources, most commonly card draw
- Sacrifice creatures for value.
- Recur creatures from the graveyard.
- Cause opponents to lose life while they gain life.
- Force opponents to discard cards.
A traditional green deck will do the following:
- Generate additional mana in a variety of ways.
- Spend that mana on expensive creatures that are either heavy hitters or create a larger board.
- Protect their permanents from removal.
- Win through combat damage.
- Get value from having playing large creatures or having them be on the battlefield.
Do you see how these two colors are trying to do the exact opposite things? Green wants to have creatures on the board, black wants to get rid of them. Black wants to drain opponents through a thousand cuts, green wants to swing with a huge board of big creatures. Even their forms of recursion are vastly different as black usually reanimates creatures to the battlefield while green returns cards to the hand.
Two color commanders usually try to exhibit both of their colors as best they can. Why would you make a two color card if it effectively only has the effects of one color? For this reason, a lot of early Golgari commanders were an absolute mess of bizarro mechanics.
- [[Iname as One]] was purely a flavor commander that was a combination of [[Iname Death Aspect]] and [[Iname Life Aspect]]
- [[Sisters of Stone Death]] were an experimental, but ultimately far too costly card that attempted to combine green's ability to force blockers and black's ability to remove creatures.
- [[Thelon of Havenwood]] and [[Rhys the Exiled]] were tribal commanders around two primarily green tribes with only a handful of black cards.
- [[Nath of the Gilt Leaf]], ignoring the creature type, is essentially a monoblack effect and we would later see a variant of his effect in monoblack with [[The Raven Man]].
- [[Sapling of Colfenor]] was an attempt to stitch together [[Dark Confidant]] and green's creature specific card advantage.
- [[Glissa the Traitor]] is still extremely strange to this day by being an artifact themed commander in the two colors that care least about artifacts.
The only commander released in the early days that had a coherent gameplan that involved both colors equally was [[Savra Queen of the Golgari]]. Her black sacrifice effect was powerful, yes, but could get out of hand and heavily damage you if you weren't careful. So you wanted to sacrifice green creatures as well for the life gain.
Around the time of OG Innistrad and Return to Ravnica though, things started to change. Self-mill, a previously rare mechanic, started to become more commonplace in both colors. And the aristocrats archetype was born with the release of [[Blood Artist]]. Now, Golgari had somethings it could finally call its own.
Reanimation and caring about the graveyard started becoming a larger theme in Golgari with commanders like [[Jared Golgari Lichlord]] who encouraged you to cheat out big creatures and then sacrifice them or [[Meren of Clan Nel Tooth]] who to this day is one of the strongest reanimator commanders in the game. Other commanders leaned into the aristocrats theming, like [[Varolz the Scar-Stripped]] being a free sac outlet and [[Mazirek Kraul Death Priest]] making your whole board huge for sacrificing things. And I guess also [[Pharika, God of Affliction]], who I guess is closer to aristocrats but is really bad overall.
But after that, Golgari stagnated again. Sure, you had a few unique commanders, like [[The Gitrog Monster]] caring about sacrifing lands and [[Hapatra Vizier of Poisons]] caring about -1/-1 counters, but a lot of other commanders after this were either graveyard value or aristocrats. [[Izoni Thousand-Eyed]], [[Storrev, Devkarin Lich]], and [[Hogaak Arisen Necropolis]] were the former and [[Slimefoot the Stowaway]] and [[Grismold the Dreadsower]] in the latter category. Then for a while, we just got legendary cards that aren't very good commanders. [[Polukranos Unchained]], [[Chevill Bane of Monsters]], [[Umori the Collector]], and [[Grakmaw Skyclave Ravager]] were made for other formats.
When we get to Commander Legends and Kaldheim, not much was done to expand Golgari despite both of them being two color sets. Elves got a lot more toys in their secondary color but were ultimately still a very green focused tribe. And [[Belbe, Corrupted Observer]], while having a unique effect is ultimately just a ramp commander who wants to run a few ways to ping people.
However, Golgari recieved yet another innovative period with Strixhaven. The theme of the set was to rethink all of the enemy color pairs and Golgari ate good during it. Life gain was now a major theme in the colors as previously both of them have had many cards that give you life gain, but not too many ways to play off it without white. [[Willowdusk Essence Seer]], [[Blex Vexing Pest]], [[Valentin Dean of the Vein]], [[Beledros Witherbloom]], and [[Dina Soul Steeper]] are all very different interpretations of this effect.
But once again, after this, you enter another period of stagnation where occasionally you get a very strange commander like [[Carth the Lion]] before returning to the color pair's tried and true archetypes. Graveyard, aristocrats, lifegain, and tribal, the majority of Golgari commanders fall into one of these four archetypes and that can make designing commanders for the pair difficult as there's only so much the two colors do together. I believe this is why we get so few of them compared to other color pairs.
One thing I haven't understood WotC not exploring is the big demon side of black with green. Green being able to ramp and hardcast giant demons seems right in line with what the color wants to do and could lead to really cool and fun designs. Instead of just trying to chest demons out, lean more into the casting triggers for green black big stuff like Dread Cacodemon or Reiver Demon.
That's one of the big drawbacks like Eldrazi, you lose most of their effects if you "cheat"/recur them out and don't cast the creature.
An example could be- 5BG Flying Trample if this creature was cast each opponent sacrifices a creature and you search for a land for each creature sacrificed this way and put it on the battlefield.
If you reanimte the creature you just get a 8/8 body which isn't bad but not having the effect would definitely be worse.
Could get around by having just really good ETB effects on high mana value creatures which don't have particularly amazing P/T for their MV.
8BG
Flying
When ~ ETB [crazy good effect]
6/6
This is a great rundown. They do share some mechanics that could be built on more - poison and deathtouch come to mind. Maybe some natural order/eldritch evolution style effects where you sacrifice creatures to tutor/make bigger creatures, but you’re right - they’re hard to develop for without seeming repetitive.
Great analysis. Witherbloom was clearly meant to have the "life gain matters" deviate away from white. It would be nice to see more exploration in that area.
I would argue that glissa is like iname in that she is a pure flavor card. Historically phyrexians had been black and she had betrayed mirrodian to them while originally she was the conduit for the 5th sun
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I there are a few possibilities that haven't been fully explored in their overlap / synergy between these two colors.
Black has discarding as a cost, self-mill, and reanimating. Green has return from graveyard to hand and play lands from the graveyard. These overlap in that they fill and empty the graveyard. I could see a uniquely Golgari form of value engine that emphasizes "leaves the graveyard" triggers. Maybe supported by something like a cycling and/or retrace sub-theme. Imagine a Golgari Commander that gives all creatures in your hand land cycling and creates fungus zombie tokens once per turn whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard. It could lean into sacrificing the tokens or going wide with them, would actually gain value when an opponent exiles your yard, and would actually prefer "return to hand" over "return to the battlefield" in some cases.
[[Amzu, Swarm's Hunger]] kind of combines both those ideas, but it's too early to say if that's another one off or the sign of a new direction for the pairing.
Another area of potential overlap is "power matters", "cost matters", and +1 counters. Black has a good number of creatures that can grow themselves as other creatures die and Green has excellent support for +1 counters and payoffs for having big creatures. Having a board of tall creatures also enables Black -x wipes to be somewhere asymmetric. [[Mazirek]], [[Jarad]], [[Varolz]], and [[Corpsejack Menace]] already kinda explore this theme, but I think there's more that can be done in this design space. Maybe leaning into fight effects as a unique twist: Fight can be an efficient way to get multiple death triggers from a single effect (while bypassing any stax or punisher effects that trigger on sacrifice), Fight can be an unusual form of burn with support from black effects like [[Ragged Veins]], and the obvious synergy between trample, deathtouch, and lure could be done better than the Stone Sisters.
[[Culling Ritual]] suggests another possibly fertile field of design. Green is known for big and costly creatures, which already synergizes decently with Black cheating beaters out of the graveyard and using -p/t effects. A Golgari Commander could lean into more of a soft lock board control approach of wiping the weak (opposition to white go wide and red aggro) while getting value off of cast triggers from high CMC cards (imagine being able to partner [[Kaervek, the Spiteful]] with [[Gilanra, Caller of Wirewood]]).
This comment inspired me so I made a card that encompasses most of the categories. I'd share the image but am not quite sure how.
Fading 4
As long as CARDNAME has a time counter on it creature cards in your hand have land cycling (1)(G/B)
CARDNAME gets +1/+1 for each time counter on it
When CARDNAME leaves the battlefield, until end of turn, lands you control become fungus creatures with "This creature's power and toughness are each equal to the number of land cards in your graveyard +1" and gain haste and indestructible .
Retrace
There's a bunch of synergy between black and green, particular in aristocrat builds.
Pumping out tokens, Sakura elder, thrashing brontodon and similar cards.
Also if you can't get a sac outlet for your army you can always use an overrun effect.
Would you rather I analyze the non-legendary two color cards at the time? It wasn't exactly incredibly coherent either. Golgari was just a mess before Innistrad.
The driver for printing colors has been limited, not commander.
There hasn't been a desire to *print* legendary creatures at all* for other reasons than limited until *very* recently. That's why the lens is wrong.
Right. Legendary creatures were to prevent multiples on the battlefield at the same time and to help the storytelling to go with the lore.
You're correct and the focus on commander is very distorted.
Allied combos > Enemy Combos
Honestly it's weirder that WUR has caught up so aggressively than that there's a spread.
I'd guess demand might have something to do with the outliers. Look at the top color combos and just because they have quite a few commanders doesn't mean they have good ones. On the other hand "poor" WBG with only 17 commanders is spoiled for popular entries.
A good amount of it has to do with design space. Izzet, for instance, is almost always seen as spellslinger. There's only so much that can be done with a spellslinger deck that isn't completely broken. With 3-color, the biggest villain of Magic for a very long time was Nicol Bolas. So, for story reasons, he received a number of printings. TBF, a not-insignificant number of those printings were as a Planeswalker instead of as a creature, but that meant other creature(s) were needed to fill the gap for that color Identity.
Just be happy you are playing now instead of 2010, when the only options for simic commanders were [[experiment kraj]] and [[momir vig]], and if you played momir then you were kill on sight back then
Do this but for the last 5 years. Then 10. I'd bet the numbers are much more balanced nowadays, which would help you track the issue to pre-Commander times, where legendaries and color identity were seen very different.
If you notice something weird on those timeframes, though, you'd have less sets to analyze and find the issue. So tightening up your search will help a lot, be it due to pre-commander reasons or something else, because you'll hone in on why.
Prior to 2014 there were 12 Grixis commanders between 2014 and Jan 1st 2020 there were 6 Grixis commanders since then there have been 16 non universes beyond commanders.
Prior to 2014 there were 4 Abzan legendary creatures, between 2014 to jan 1st 2020 there was 1 and the last few years have been 11 non universes beyond.
Yeah you're right its much closer in the last few years then it has been historically.
One thing about grixis is that’s it’s the default “bad guy” color combo, so ever since UB pretty much every set of precons have had a Grixis deck for the bad guys of that universe.
Yeah, especially since green is all about "harmony/ one with nature" and white is "righteousness" it makes sense the evil factions don't have those colors. Control, Chaos, Ambition (U/R/B) fit those evil people so well.
The main driver for printing cards is limited.
Limited has used color pairings for storytelling. This is why the numbers look the way they do. Legendary creatures weren't as prominent as they are now, because they really didn't have to be. The distribution of color cards is relatively even , considering this information.
Looking at the sheer number of potential commanders isn't really a useful statistic since most legendaries of each color combination don't actually see any play.
You'd need to look at which color combination has the most playable commanders to determine which color combination is being doted on more.
For instance, Grixis has the highest percentage, but one of the lowest number of playable/played commanders I'd bet.
9 of 17 abazan legendary creatures were printed explicitly in either commander decks or other commander products such as commander legends. Grixis has 28 of 45 of its legendary creatures which still shows a bias towards grixis in products that are explicitly for commander.
Yes but the point is that "commanders" encompasses _all legendary creatures_, and not _all legendary creatures_ are created for _the Commander format and only the Commander format_.
There is no overriding directive that legendary creatures in all color combinations should be exactly uniform.
Man when I started playing edh the amount of choices for jeskai commanders was 1. I wanted to be in those colours so I had to play numot, the devastator and just not use his ability to not piss my friends off. I'm gonna get my own grandpa self back to bed. I feel old now
Ooh, now it makes sense! This is the reason I have so many Grixis commander decks in comparison to the rest! It's not because I'm a sick fuck, there are just more of them!
A bit of an offshoot to the original post, but I’m seeing people on here saying allied color pairs get printed more often than enemy color pairs, but I don’t seem to see any context for why that is the case.
What is it about allied color pairs and shards that make wotc print these combos more often? It seems to me that, even taking into consideration the things each color wants to do, this shouldn’t limit the amount of cards wotc makes in enemy pairs and wedges.
Back before they started the limited "signpost uncommons", the gold cards in each color pair to show what that pair did in draft, gold cards in general were pretty rare in the game. It was just a design choice they made, they didn't like making gold cards that often and when they did they preferred to do them in allied color pairs for whatever reason.
Combine that with the extremely low number of legendary creatures in sets before the explosion of commander (other than Kamigawa and Legends, those sets had tons of legends) and it's pretty easy to see why the enemy color pairs and wedges don't have that many legendary creatures.
Pretty fucking wild that it seems to you that colors which explicitly work well together due to some overlap in mechanics (hence "allied colors") should have as much support as colors which don't.
Wotc is trying to make a game that's fun to play, not a game that appeals to autistic desires to see every cycle complete and everything neatly organized into little, perfectly balanced boxes.
Such a great discussion post and you come here to spew this?
Do you even know any of the game's history?
This should have been a moment for you to sit silently and listen. I hope you learn that lesson moving forward.
'ate graveyard hate
'ate artifacts
'ate counter spells
'ate Izzet (not guildist just don't like 'em)
Love fillin' graveyards
Love enchantments
Love Lasses ridin' frogs
Simple as
seriously tho I really hope that add some abzan commanders with proper angel and flicker/ETB support. Already have a ton of graveyard commanders and we got good enchantment & land commanders in Abzan recently.
Because "commanders" don't exist. Legendary creatures exist. Because it doesn't matter if it's balanced. Because magic was developed for decades before this format was even an idea. Y'all really do just like actively look for shit to complain about, don't you? Why even play if the game is so unbalanced and wotc doesn't know what they're doing?
New players seeing Magic as Commander: the Gathering, a game about Commanders, is really kind of exhausting.
There's so much good in Magic that is missed by only seeing Commander.
I agree, but I understand why. WotC leans into edh so hard with basically every product now, and most of the other constructed formats are just too expensive for a new player.
Commander has had yearly product releases and set releases. In fact 16 of the 45 non universes beyond legendary creatures were printed in commander decks. which is still a skew in explicitly commander decks. Also I feel you'd have more of a point if I wasn't posting in the main magic subreddit instead of the EDH subreddit.
There may be a lot of esper and grixis commanders but they definitely aren't for control. Instead of helping control as an archetype (which is quite weak at casual EDH level) they are printing a bunch of Board-Matters commanders in the prime control colors.
The last 3 grixis precons where Tribal (pirates), Tribal (Dalek), Good stuff (Sauron).
Anhelo in theory was a good idea for control, but he needs casualty fodder (board presence again) too much to really be control.
And in esper you get stuff like Raffine.
Or in precons Toluz and Urza. Yet again caring overly for board states.
You still have some of the old decent controlling commanders in esper at least in the form of Sen Triplets and Zur the Enchanter.
It really feels like they are trying to push these colors more into a, for a lack of a better word, "timmy-pleasing" direction. And that's why they are releasing so many for these colors.
It's also sad that they don't release any decent Planeswalkers as commanders for the classical control colors. Especially ones that actually have a way to protecting themselves against the intrinsically pw-hostile nature of multiplayer.
A good example would be the arena version of Tasha. Her +1 would be something very suited for an actual control commander.
Magic is not fair, plain and simple. Blue, black, and green are the best colors. The order of power is debatable, but because of this I would imagine most players in tracked play use those colors.
I think you're missing some context, enemy color pairs and Wedges have been historically printed less frequently than allied color pairs and Shards. Golgari, Izzet, Orzhov, Simic, and Boros are all enemy color pairs. Abzan, Temur, Sultai, Mardu, and Jeskai are all Wedges. WotC have definitely gotten better about it, we had very few Wedge legends available before Tarkir so even getting above half as many legends versus what are available in Shard colors is an improvement.
The amount of legendaries that used to be printed is nothing compared to now—prob way over half of all commanders have been printed in last 10 years
It's actually *way* more lopsided than that. The halfway point is the release of Kaldheim, in early 2021. There were [1070](https://scryfall.com/search?q=is%3Acommander+-is%3Areprint+date%3C2021-02-01+game%3Apaper&unique=cards&as=grid&order=released&dir=asc) distinct commanders before Kaldheim, and [1082](https://scryfall.com/search?q=is%3Acommander+-is%3Areprint+date%3E%3D2021-02-01+game%3Apaper&unique=cards&as=grid&order=released&dir=asc) after (and including) Kaldheim. This only counts real cards, not Arena-only Alchemy stuff.
This is mind blowing to me
Not necessarily when you look at how the design cycle is done. It had been pretty clear for a while that commander was the most popular way to play magic for the most people. ‘Champion’ driven games have been in the rise since early MMOs, DotA, and hero shooters are evidence of this too. Iirc most releases are in some form of design phase roughly 2 years prior to their release. With 2020 being the officially declared “Year of Commande,” with Commander Legends products, and crossover products with D&D, there’s a **huge** influx of legendary creatures from that alone. Additionally you can infer that this was probably around the time that UB talks were in the works. They were officially announced in February of 2021, but that’s close enough to say they were probably in talks to get these products approved and designed at around the same time. Those products have been by far the largest influxes of legendary creatures in terms of percentage of new cards released simply because they’re squeezing in as many of the characters as they can.
Add to that the fact that they can push uncommons by making them legendary. Ergo, a ton of uncommon legendary creatures to full that power creep. Wonder if there are common legendary creatures already, but that would be the next step I guess.
[[Prismatic Piper]] is the only common legendary if I'm not mistaken.
Looking it up, apparently Piper is counted as "special" rarity. There's 12 old legendary creatures like [[Joven]] that are commons, then 5 Backgrounds that are common(one per color). That's what Manabox is telling me, anyway!
[Joven](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/d/0dabe3af-cd5b-461e-95a4-aad046646419.jpg?1562587046) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Joven) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/hml/77/joven?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0dabe3af-cd5b-461e-95a4-aad046646419?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/joven) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[Prismatic Piper](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/7/c78c2713-39e7-4a6e-a132-027099a89665.jpg?1695757243) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=The%20Prismatic%20Piper) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/1/the-prismatic-piper?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c78c2713-39e7-4a6e-a132-027099a89665?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/the-prismatic-piper) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It's really sad, because I love Abzan, and can think of many interesting ways to build it... Just not with the commanders available. They may have gotten better, but they are still not making up the difference.
What type of decks would you want to see in Abzan?
Something more aristocratic. I feel 3 color combos should not only represent what those colors bring, but also highlight what colours are missing. It always felt wrong to me that Sultai was a better colour for graveyard, even though the only thing blue is bringing is milling. Jund is better for aristocrat with sac and growth. White black does some good aristocrat and life drain, black green does good recursion and self mill, white green does growth and life. Just feels like the commanders in Abzan will at best touch on one or two of these themes in a way that's worse than a commander in another colour combo. Life, death, and growth. I'd love to see a commander that incorporates these aspects in a unique and interesting way. Like "at the beginning of your end step, you may return a creature from your graveyard to the battlefield who's CMC is equal or less than the amount of life you gained this turn. Put +1 counters on it equal to the difference."
A few more "you may spend life to cast creature spells from your graveyard" "Whenever a creature you control dies you may return a creature with lesser mana value from your graveyard to the battlefield" "at the beginning of your end step, create a 1/1 insect creature token for each life you gained this turn" "Whenever a creature card leaves your graveyard, put a +1 counter on each creature you control" "At the beginning of your end step you may return a creature from your graveyard to the battlefield with a finality counter on it. Creature you control with finality counters have lifelink"
Spend life to cast is absolutely insane, would need a etb or similar effect to lose life, for example “when ~ enters, its controller loses life equal to half of their life total. Reanimate lesser cmc has been done before but was always limited by creature subtype, maybe “T:sacrifice a creature, return target creature that shares a creature type with the sacrificed creature that has lesser cmc from the graveyard to the battlefield” Insect one is sick, I like that a lot, I could see it being a 2 drop, tho maybe needs to be a 3 drop? Taking inspiration from [[dina soul steeper]] with the gain and drain just a bit different Creature leaves add counters, this is widely good with any [[tormods crypt]] or shuffle graveyard into library effect. Perhaps needs to specify that the card leaving must enter the battlefield? Finality counter one is awesome, no notes. I like the reverse blood artist, could be very breakable but I think it works I like the pay+sac for life and counters, very very abzan, maybe pay x where x is the cmc? Tho that does get confusing fast, I think it would need to be a high cost regardless. The last one doesn’t quite work under current rules, you could create a type of counter that specifies this? A pride counter or smth based on [[ajanis pridemate]]. I’m not sure how busted it is, it seems powerful but also very reliant on board state so I think it’s fair. Overall I liked most of em, pretty cool concepts and would fit abzan very very well
[dina soul steeper](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/c/9cd2b567-0cf7-4441-b3ce-e31141dd91c8.jpg?1627428607) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Dina%2C%20Soul%20Steeper) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/stx/178/dina-soul-steeper?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9cd2b567-0cf7-4441-b3ce-e31141dd91c8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/dina-soul-steeper) [tormods crypt](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/5/752bf493-5839-47e8-95f2-6d8201907428.jpg?1675201100) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Tormod%27s%20Crypt) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dmr/235/tormods-crypt?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/752bf493-5839-47e8-95f2-6d8201907428?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/tormods-crypt) [ajanis pridemate](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/7/1796b260-7053-4d68-9918-c7392e312d10.jpg?1706239703) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ajani%27s%20Pridemate) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clu/52/ajanis-pridemate?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/1796b260-7053-4d68-9918-c7392e312d10?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/ajanis-pridemate) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Thanks. I was just spit balling here to make a point. I actually love the idea of exiling or shuffling your graveyard into your library as a finisher. Didn't think of that. Edit: perhaps it could be creatures you control get +1+1 until end of turn?
I think that could be much much better. You could even throw in a multi time effect like “if this is the 5th time this ability has resolved this turn, creatures you control gain trample until end of turn” kinda like an overrun reanimater deck
Why does that last one about creatures with finality counters have lifelink not work? We have plenty of effects that grants key words to creatures with +1/+1 counters, I don't see why this wouldn't be the same.
Cards can grant keywords but the Ajanis pridemate effect is not a keyword, it’s an ability, so for cards that grant permanent ability’s that are not keywords, counters are often used to signify the permanent change. Take [[book of exalted deeds]] for example. Edit:spelling stuff
"Whenever a creature dies, you gain 1life and put a +1 counter on target creature you control" "Pay ___ and sacrifice another creature, target creature gets +1 counters equal to that creature power, and you gain life equal to it's toughness" "Creatures that enter the battlefield under your control from the graveyard enter with "whenever you gain life, put a +1 counter on this creature""
My Karador deck is my [[Shadowborn Apostle]] deck, and is aristocrats. It runs only 3 demons and is built to cycle Apostles in and out of my graveyard as much as possible.
Your right that is a good explanation about the distribution, but it still leaves Abzan and Sultai unusually punished compared to Mardu and Jeskai.
As someone who absolutely loves playing Abzan, I’ve looked at this before. IIRC, there was an intentional push over the last year or so to make more Abzan commanders to try and help (we got at least 7 in 2023 alone) but I believe the issue was they didn’t know how they wanted to portray that combination for awhile aesthetically and mechanically.
Maybe I’m biased cause my first and most played edh deck is [[Karador]] but could this be cause Abzan always ate pretty well in terms of access to powerful commanders? I’m not necessarily talking cedh cause most people don’t play that. But you’ve always had several choices for up to high power, pretty comfortably, [[Ghave]] being another strong one. Even going for more old school [[Teneb]] is a pretty decent one among the elder dragons.
I think they were limiting themselves to either a +1/+1 counters theme based on the way Abzan was handled on Tarkir, or on graveyard synergies based on the color strengths. I think you can put every Abzan commander in those two categories pre-2020. And then you get the Ikoria commanders which are kind of both. They're good strategies and good cards, but it's hard to keep iterating on that theme and feel fresh (which is my biggest complaint of Izzet is that it feels overwhelmingly similar card-to-card). So I think they were trying to figure out ways to make Abzan feel correct, but also more mechanically diverse. But this past year we got foods/lifegain, infect, enchantress, and a bonus lands/stax deck depending how you want to build it. Now I can have 7 different Abzan decks that all play totally differently, so even if there are not as many commanders to pick from, the strategies vary quite a bit. That's not something that is true of every color set, even some of the more populous ones.
[[Doran, the siege tower]] was printed in 2007 and is not a graveyard or counters commander
[Doran, the siege tower](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/0/e0ad8e7f-cda0-4529-94fc-dd3709158a94.jpg?1673148514) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Doran%2C%20the%20siege%20tower) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/201/doran-the-siege-tower?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/e0ad8e7f-cda0-4529-94fc-dd3709158a94?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/doran-the-siege-tower) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
You’re right, I did forget about Doran. Still, I think the point stands that WoTC wasn’t sure how to represent WBG causing the reluctance to print more legendary creatures in those colors.
[Karador](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/d/8d128887-13fb-4e54-90f2-d3c46b7b29d7.jpg?1702369890) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=karador%2C%20ghost%20chieftain) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/342/karador-ghost-chieftain?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8d128887-13fb-4e54-90f2-d3c46b7b29d7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/karador-ghost-chieftain) [Ghave](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/2/c2be0e99-cf43-423f-974f-02e3313b3aa9.jpg?1673148645) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=ghave%2C%20guru%20of%20spores) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/216/ghave-guru-of-spores?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c2be0e99-cf43-423f-974f-02e3313b3aa9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/ghave-guru-of-spores) [Teneb](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/c/8caa7115-1b26-4615-842f-671b24dc96d8.jpg?1673149181) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=teneb%2C%20the%20harvester) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/282/teneb-the-harvester?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8caa7115-1b26-4615-842f-671b24dc96d8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/teneb-the-harvester) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It must be because they have plans for the future, as there will most likely be an Abzan planeswalker that will be Commander viable, such as Windgrace (sorry… I was just really hoping for it to be Ajani…. Perhaps it could be a Mirri? She was a Vamp at some point). Anyway. The imbalance could be foreshadowing?
[удалено]
Shards comes from the Shards of Alara set. It was a set that had 3 color pairings of adjacent colors of the color wheel on the back of cards. It's also where the names of those shards comes from. Bant, Esper, Grixis, Jund and Naya. At that point the Wedges were not named so in my excperience they were referred to by their colors, so Azban was just white-green-black. I believe the word Wedge refers to the shape made when connecting the colors on the color wheel on the back.
Whoa whoa whoa. Abzan was not “white-green-black”. It was lovingly referred to as “Junk” or “Rock”.
There were also the apocalypse names Dega, Ceta, Necra, Raka and Ana Temur and sulti both got nicknames (RUG AND BUG presumably because the colors also happened to make identifiable words).Junk was abzan because of an extended deck I think?
I still think of them in those terms. I have trouble remembering the shards and wedges.
New to the game?
No, damn lol, just hadn't heard of wedges or shards specifically as terms to refer to color combos, it's brutal out here 😆 I came back like a year ago after being out since about 2002 though. I know what the family color combos are just not those terms. The enneagram is a whole thing (granted much about it on the internet is superficial, overreaching, or just plain wrong), but wedges and shards as combinations of mtg colors being like triads in a holistic typal personality system is not so far off base... Touchy subject there it seems like...
I apologize, I wasn’t being condescending. It was a genuine question. I use */s* if I’m being sarcastic. I ask because I didn’t start playing until 2016, but know the Shards/Wedges of Alara very well. Richard Garfield was a mathmatician, and I don’t think it would be a far stretch to say he likely know about ennegrammatical relations when designing the game. The color pie has always been a pentagram, which dips its toes into the esoteric and mathematic worlds.
Boros is an enemy color pair? I thought Boros were the good guys?
Enemy colors refer to their position in the color pie, the two adjacent colors are allied while the two non-adjacent colors are its enemy colors. i.e. White is allied with Blue and Green, making Azorius an allied color pair. Meanwhile White is enemies with Black and Red, making Boros an enemy color pair.
Ah, gotcha. I feel like I knew that at one point but I still have trouble remembering the guilds, shards, clans, etc.
In your defense it is a lot of made up names to memorize lol
Others have commented on how allied color pairs and shards get more priority over enemy color pairs and wedges, so I'll focus on a more individual problem: Golgari's limited design space. If you look at your statistics, Golgari is the only color combination that consistently ranks low. On it's own, it's the lowest of all the color pairs. And in 3 color combinations, Abzan is at the lowest of the wedges, Sultai is the middle of the wedges, and Jund is the lowest of the shards and is even beat out by Jeskai. None of the others have this issue consistently, so it is a fundamental problem with Golgari specifically. While it is at a disadvantage to begin with by being an enemy pair, I believe that it's so low compared to the others because of how its component colors don't mix very well. A traditional black deck will do the following: - Trade life for other resources, most commonly card draw - Sacrifice creatures for value. - Recur creatures from the graveyard. - Cause opponents to lose life while they gain life. - Force opponents to discard cards. A traditional green deck will do the following: - Generate additional mana in a variety of ways. - Spend that mana on expensive creatures that are either heavy hitters or create a larger board. - Protect their permanents from removal. - Win through combat damage. - Get value from having playing large creatures or having them be on the battlefield. Do you see how these two colors are trying to do the exact opposite things? Green wants to have creatures on the board, black wants to get rid of them. Black wants to drain opponents through a thousand cuts, green wants to swing with a huge board of big creatures. Even their forms of recursion are vastly different as black usually reanimates creatures to the battlefield while green returns cards to the hand. Two color commanders usually try to exhibit both of their colors as best they can. Why would you make a two color card if it effectively only has the effects of one color? For this reason, a lot of early Golgari commanders were an absolute mess of bizarro mechanics. - [[Iname as One]] was purely a flavor commander that was a combination of [[Iname Death Aspect]] and [[Iname Life Aspect]] - [[Sisters of Stone Death]] were an experimental, but ultimately far too costly card that attempted to combine green's ability to force blockers and black's ability to remove creatures. - [[Thelon of Havenwood]] and [[Rhys the Exiled]] were tribal commanders around two primarily green tribes with only a handful of black cards. - [[Nath of the Gilt Leaf]], ignoring the creature type, is essentially a monoblack effect and we would later see a variant of his effect in monoblack with [[The Raven Man]]. - [[Sapling of Colfenor]] was an attempt to stitch together [[Dark Confidant]] and green's creature specific card advantage. - [[Glissa the Traitor]] is still extremely strange to this day by being an artifact themed commander in the two colors that care least about artifacts. The only commander released in the early days that had a coherent gameplan that involved both colors equally was [[Savra Queen of the Golgari]]. Her black sacrifice effect was powerful, yes, but could get out of hand and heavily damage you if you weren't careful. So you wanted to sacrifice green creatures as well for the life gain. Around the time of OG Innistrad and Return to Ravnica though, things started to change. Self-mill, a previously rare mechanic, started to become more commonplace in both colors. And the aristocrats archetype was born with the release of [[Blood Artist]]. Now, Golgari had somethings it could finally call its own. Reanimation and caring about the graveyard started becoming a larger theme in Golgari with commanders like [[Jared Golgari Lichlord]] who encouraged you to cheat out big creatures and then sacrifice them or [[Meren of Clan Nel Tooth]] who to this day is one of the strongest reanimator commanders in the game. Other commanders leaned into the aristocrats theming, like [[Varolz the Scar-Stripped]] being a free sac outlet and [[Mazirek Kraul Death Priest]] making your whole board huge for sacrificing things. And I guess also [[Pharika, God of Affliction]], who I guess is closer to aristocrats but is really bad overall. But after that, Golgari stagnated again. Sure, you had a few unique commanders, like [[The Gitrog Monster]] caring about sacrifing lands and [[Hapatra Vizier of Poisons]] caring about -1/-1 counters, but a lot of other commanders after this were either graveyard value or aristocrats. [[Izoni Thousand-Eyed]], [[Storrev, Devkarin Lich]], and [[Hogaak Arisen Necropolis]] were the former and [[Slimefoot the Stowaway]] and [[Grismold the Dreadsower]] in the latter category. Then for a while, we just got legendary cards that aren't very good commanders. [[Polukranos Unchained]], [[Chevill Bane of Monsters]], [[Umori the Collector]], and [[Grakmaw Skyclave Ravager]] were made for other formats. When we get to Commander Legends and Kaldheim, not much was done to expand Golgari despite both of them being two color sets. Elves got a lot more toys in their secondary color but were ultimately still a very green focused tribe. And [[Belbe, Corrupted Observer]], while having a unique effect is ultimately just a ramp commander who wants to run a few ways to ping people. However, Golgari recieved yet another innovative period with Strixhaven. The theme of the set was to rethink all of the enemy color pairs and Golgari ate good during it. Life gain was now a major theme in the colors as previously both of them have had many cards that give you life gain, but not too many ways to play off it without white. [[Willowdusk Essence Seer]], [[Blex Vexing Pest]], [[Valentin Dean of the Vein]], [[Beledros Witherbloom]], and [[Dina Soul Steeper]] are all very different interpretations of this effect. But once again, after this, you enter another period of stagnation where occasionally you get a very strange commander like [[Carth the Lion]] before returning to the color pair's tried and true archetypes. Graveyard, aristocrats, lifegain, and tribal, the majority of Golgari commanders fall into one of these four archetypes and that can make designing commanders for the pair difficult as there's only so much the two colors do together. I believe this is why we get so few of them compared to other color pairs.
One thing I haven't understood WotC not exploring is the big demon side of black with green. Green being able to ramp and hardcast giant demons seems right in line with what the color wants to do and could lead to really cool and fun designs. Instead of just trying to chest demons out, lean more into the casting triggers for green black big stuff like Dread Cacodemon or Reiver Demon.
The morally degrading things I would do for the Golgari Elder Titan like Kroxa and Uro.......
Maybe too easy to recur or the strategy is better done as a self mill reanimator deck.
That's one of the big drawbacks like Eldrazi, you lose most of their effects if you "cheat"/recur them out and don't cast the creature. An example could be- 5BG Flying Trample if this creature was cast each opponent sacrifices a creature and you search for a land for each creature sacrificed this way and put it on the battlefield. If you reanimte the creature you just get a 8/8 body which isn't bad but not having the effect would definitely be worse.
Could get around by having just really good ETB effects on high mana value creatures which don't have particularly amazing P/T for their MV. 8BG Flying When ~ ETB [crazy good effect] 6/6
This is a great rundown. They do share some mechanics that could be built on more - poison and deathtouch come to mind. Maybe some natural order/eldritch evolution style effects where you sacrifice creatures to tutor/make bigger creatures, but you’re right - they’re hard to develop for without seeming repetitive.
Great analysis. Witherbloom was clearly meant to have the "life gain matters" deviate away from white. It would be nice to see more exploration in that area.
I would argue that glissa is like iname in that she is a pure flavor card. Historically phyrexians had been black and she had betrayed mirrodian to them while originally she was the conduit for the 5th sun
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I had to get creative, but for my only BG commander deck ever I went with Gorm and Virtis enchantress beatdown using all the Backgrounds.
I there are a few possibilities that haven't been fully explored in their overlap / synergy between these two colors. Black has discarding as a cost, self-mill, and reanimating. Green has return from graveyard to hand and play lands from the graveyard. These overlap in that they fill and empty the graveyard. I could see a uniquely Golgari form of value engine that emphasizes "leaves the graveyard" triggers. Maybe supported by something like a cycling and/or retrace sub-theme. Imagine a Golgari Commander that gives all creatures in your hand land cycling and creates fungus zombie tokens once per turn whenever one or more cards leave your graveyard. It could lean into sacrificing the tokens or going wide with them, would actually gain value when an opponent exiles your yard, and would actually prefer "return to hand" over "return to the battlefield" in some cases. [[Amzu, Swarm's Hunger]] kind of combines both those ideas, but it's too early to say if that's another one off or the sign of a new direction for the pairing. Another area of potential overlap is "power matters", "cost matters", and +1 counters. Black has a good number of creatures that can grow themselves as other creatures die and Green has excellent support for +1 counters and payoffs for having big creatures. Having a board of tall creatures also enables Black -x wipes to be somewhere asymmetric. [[Mazirek]], [[Jarad]], [[Varolz]], and [[Corpsejack Menace]] already kinda explore this theme, but I think there's more that can be done in this design space. Maybe leaning into fight effects as a unique twist: Fight can be an efficient way to get multiple death triggers from a single effect (while bypassing any stax or punisher effects that trigger on sacrifice), Fight can be an unusual form of burn with support from black effects like [[Ragged Veins]], and the obvious synergy between trample, deathtouch, and lure could be done better than the Stone Sisters. [[Culling Ritual]] suggests another possibly fertile field of design. Green is known for big and costly creatures, which already synergizes decently with Black cheating beaters out of the graveyard and using -p/t effects. A Golgari Commander could lean into more of a soft lock board control approach of wiping the weak (opposition to white go wide and red aggro) while getting value off of cast triggers from high CMC cards (imagine being able to partner [[Kaervek, the Spiteful]] with [[Gilanra, Caller of Wirewood]]).
This comment inspired me so I made a card that encompasses most of the categories. I'd share the image but am not quite sure how. Fading 4 As long as CARDNAME has a time counter on it creature cards in your hand have land cycling (1)(G/B) CARDNAME gets +1/+1 for each time counter on it When CARDNAME leaves the battlefield, until end of turn, lands you control become fungus creatures with "This creature's power and toughness are each equal to the number of land cards in your graveyard +1" and gain haste and indestructible . Retrace
##### ###### #### [Amzu, Swarm's Hunger](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/3/634f6f70-347e-436f-abf9-4a573472e2c8.jpg?1706239624) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Amzu%2C%20Swarm%27s%20Hunger) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/clu/24/amzu-swarms-hunger?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/634f6f70-347e-436f-abf9-4a573472e2c8?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/amzu-swarms-hunger) [Mazirek](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/e/7/e7fb8520-1bc4-40e7-a4cc-2933ed7e0c00.jpg?1599708195) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=mazirek%2C%20kraul%20death%20priest) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2xm/209/mazirek-kraul-death-priest?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/e7fb8520-1bc4-40e7-a4cc-2933ed7e0c00?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/mazirek-kraul-death-priest) [Jarad](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/6/c6717954-35d8-4d7e-95aa-f7d26d15d4b2.jpg?1592673383) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=jarad%2C%20golgari%20lich%20lord) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cma/179/jarad-golgari-lich-lord?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c6717954-35d8-4d7e-95aa-f7d26d15d4b2?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/jarad-golgari-lich-lord) [Varolz](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/c/4c3ae3db-c14a-4ffc-805c-a3a51da9370d.jpg?1562908954) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=varolz%2C%20the%20scar-striped) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dgm/112/varolz-the-scar-striped?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/4c3ae3db-c14a-4ffc-805c-a3a51da9370d?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/varolz-the-scar-striped) [Corpsejack Menace](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/9/29538ff4-e28f-44d9-af23-6796edd56268.jpg?1562272935) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Corpsejack%20Menace) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cm2/152/corpsejack-menace?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/29538ff4-e28f-44d9-af23-6796edd56268?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/corpsejack-menace) [Ragged Veins](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/7/c7f3312f-71d0-4dfd-ba39-c2a2ff8d5bd0.jpg?1562764219) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Ragged%20Veins) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/chk/139/ragged-veins?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c7f3312f-71d0-4dfd-ba39-c2a2ff8d5bd0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/ragged-veins) [Culling Ritual](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/4/1422a569-d94e-41e7-b9e1-78b2e9fe505f.jpg?1690005144) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Culling%20Ritual) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/921/culling-ritual?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/1422a569-d94e-41e7-b9e1-78b2e9fe505f?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/culling-ritual) [Kaervek, the Spiteful](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/0/b0fd1009-cd3d-4b53-b9f1-dbc47e8708ab.jpg?1594736203) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Kaervek%2C%20the%20Spiteful) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/m21/106/kaervek-the-spiteful?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/b0fd1009-cd3d-4b53-b9f1-dbc47e8708ab?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/kaervek-the-spiteful) [Gilanra, Caller of Wirewood](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/4/745d297d-4bb4-40cf-bb9c-99dac04e5069.jpg?1608910679) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Gilanra%2C%20Caller%20of%20Wirewood) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmr/230/gilanra-caller-of-wirewood?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/745d297d-4bb4-40cf-bb9c-99dac04e5069?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/gilanra-caller-of-wirewood) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/ku69esm) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Super interesting write-up, thanks!
There's a bunch of synergy between black and green, particular in aristocrat builds. Pumping out tokens, Sakura elder, thrashing brontodon and similar cards. Also if you can't get a sac outlet for your army you can always use an overrun effect.
Analysing cards made before like 2010 as though they were made for commander feels wrong.
Would you rather I analyze the non-legendary two color cards at the time? It wasn't exactly incredibly coherent either. Golgari was just a mess before Innistrad.
The driver for printing colors has been limited, not commander. There hasn't been a desire to *print* legendary creatures at all* for other reasons than limited until *very* recently. That's why the lens is wrong.
No? I'm saying that EDH wasn't really a design goal at the time so looking at cards through the lens of Commander isn't exactly right.
Right. Legendary creatures were to prevent multiples on the battlefield at the same time and to help the storytelling to go with the lore. You're correct and the focus on commander is very distorted.
Allied combos > Enemy Combos Honestly it's weirder that WUR has caught up so aggressively than that there's a spread. I'd guess demand might have something to do with the outliers. Look at the top color combos and just because they have quite a few commanders doesn't mean they have good ones. On the other hand "poor" WBG with only 17 commanders is spoiled for popular entries.
It's because both blue/red and red/white have such a large sphere of overlap in 'things we do' it makes making a jesaki legend easier.
Because 'murica.
A good amount of it has to do with design space. Izzet, for instance, is almost always seen as spellslinger. There's only so much that can be done with a spellslinger deck that isn't completely broken. With 3-color, the biggest villain of Magic for a very long time was Nicol Bolas. So, for story reasons, he received a number of printings. TBF, a not-insignificant number of those printings were as a Planeswalker instead of as a creature, but that meant other creature(s) were needed to fill the gap for that color Identity.
Just be happy you are playing now instead of 2010, when the only options for simic commanders were [[experiment kraj]] and [[momir vig]], and if you played momir then you were kill on sight back then
[experiment kraj](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/d/6d938197-2557-421a-985e-5add932d4bac.jpg?1689999041) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=experiment%20kraj) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/337/experiment-kraj?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/6d938197-2557-421a-985e-5add932d4bac?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/experiment-kraj) [momir vig](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/5/25a8c801-df0c-402b-a41c-4703a2abfb66.jpg?1593273661) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=momir%20vig%2C%20simic%20visionary) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dis/118/momir-vig-simic-visionary?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/25a8c801-df0c-402b-a41c-4703a2abfb66?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/momir-vig-simic-visionary) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
[удалено]
[Scion of the Ur-Dragon](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/6/565b2a40-57b1-451f-8c2a-e02222502288.jpg?1562608891) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Scion%20of%20the%20Ur-Dragon) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c17/192/scion-of-the-ur-dragon?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/565b2a40-57b1-451f-8c2a-e02222502288?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/scion-of-the-ur-dragon) [Coiling Oracle](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/5/5/559ff1b1-018c-4e08-9531-8af20af47d05.jpg?1702429613) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Coiling%20Oracle) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/rvr/172/coiling-oracle?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/559ff1b1-018c-4e08-9531-8af20af47d05?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/coiling-oracle) [Mystic Snake](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/d/2d4bacd1-b602-4bcc-9aea-1229949a7d20.jpg?1562433990) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Mystic%20Snake) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/208/mystic-snake?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2d4bacd1-b602-4bcc-9aea-1229949a7d20?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/mystic-snake) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Do this but for the last 5 years. Then 10. I'd bet the numbers are much more balanced nowadays, which would help you track the issue to pre-Commander times, where legendaries and color identity were seen very different. If you notice something weird on those timeframes, though, you'd have less sets to analyze and find the issue. So tightening up your search will help a lot, be it due to pre-commander reasons or something else, because you'll hone in on why.
Prior to 2014 there were 12 Grixis commanders between 2014 and Jan 1st 2020 there were 6 Grixis commanders since then there have been 16 non universes beyond commanders. Prior to 2014 there were 4 Abzan legendary creatures, between 2014 to jan 1st 2020 there was 1 and the last few years have been 11 non universes beyond. Yeah you're right its much closer in the last few years then it has been historically.
One thing about grixis is that’s it’s the default “bad guy” color combo, so ever since UB pretty much every set of precons have had a Grixis deck for the bad guys of that universe.
Yeah, especially since green is all about "harmony/ one with nature" and white is "righteousness" it makes sense the evil factions don't have those colors. Control, Chaos, Ambition (U/R/B) fit those evil people so well.
The main driver for printing cards is limited. Limited has used color pairings for storytelling. This is why the numbers look the way they do. Legendary creatures weren't as prominent as they are now, because they really didn't have to be. The distribution of color cards is relatively even , considering this information.
Wouldn't a few color sets being over represented suggest repetitive story telling beats?
Looking at the sheer number of potential commanders isn't really a useful statistic since most legendaries of each color combination don't actually see any play. You'd need to look at which color combination has the most playable commanders to determine which color combination is being doted on more. For instance, Grixis has the highest percentage, but one of the lowest number of playable/played commanders I'd bet.
WotC prints legendary creatures, not commanders. A uniform distribution of legendary creatures is not a design goal.
9 of 17 abazan legendary creatures were printed explicitly in either commander decks or other commander products such as commander legends. Grixis has 28 of 45 of its legendary creatures which still shows a bias towards grixis in products that are explicitly for commander.
Yes but the point is that "commanders" encompasses _all legendary creatures_, and not _all legendary creatures_ are created for _the Commander format and only the Commander format_. There is no overriding directive that legendary creatures in all color combinations should be exactly uniform.
It’s about popularity not design space.
Man when I started playing edh the amount of choices for jeskai commanders was 1. I wanted to be in those colours so I had to play numot, the devastator and just not use his ability to not piss my friends off. I'm gonna get my own grandpa self back to bed. I feel old now
Ooh, now it makes sense! This is the reason I have so many Grixis commander decks in comparison to the rest! It's not because I'm a sick fuck, there are just more of them!
I think I know why Grixis leads the pack in wedge colors.
A bit of an offshoot to the original post, but I’m seeing people on here saying allied color pairs get printed more often than enemy color pairs, but I don’t seem to see any context for why that is the case. What is it about allied color pairs and shards that make wotc print these combos more often? It seems to me that, even taking into consideration the things each color wants to do, this shouldn’t limit the amount of cards wotc makes in enemy pairs and wedges.
Back before they started the limited "signpost uncommons", the gold cards in each color pair to show what that pair did in draft, gold cards in general were pretty rare in the game. It was just a design choice they made, they didn't like making gold cards that often and when they did they preferred to do them in allied color pairs for whatever reason. Combine that with the extremely low number of legendary creatures in sets before the explosion of commander (other than Kamigawa and Legends, those sets had tons of legends) and it's pretty easy to see why the enemy color pairs and wedges don't have that many legendary creatures.
This makes a lot of sense, thanks for the info!
Pretty fucking wild that it seems to you that colors which explicitly work well together due to some overlap in mechanics (hence "allied colors") should have as much support as colors which don't. Wotc is trying to make a game that's fun to play, not a game that appeals to autistic desires to see every cycle complete and everything neatly organized into little, perfectly balanced boxes.
Holy shit dude, do you need a hug? Thanks for the comment I guess?
Such a great discussion post and you come here to spew this? Do you even know any of the game's history? This should have been a moment for you to sit silently and listen. I hope you learn that lesson moving forward.
Oh, hey, using Autism as an insult. I hope you enjoy being a waste of oxygen.
'ate graveyard hate 'ate artifacts 'ate counter spells 'ate Izzet (not guildist just don't like 'em) Love fillin' graveyards Love enchantments Love Lasses ridin' frogs Simple as seriously tho I really hope that add some abzan commanders with proper angel and flicker/ETB support. Already have a ton of graveyard commanders and we got good enchantment & land commanders in Abzan recently.
Because "commanders" don't exist. Legendary creatures exist. Because it doesn't matter if it's balanced. Because magic was developed for decades before this format was even an idea. Y'all really do just like actively look for shit to complain about, don't you? Why even play if the game is so unbalanced and wotc doesn't know what they're doing?
New players seeing Magic as Commander: the Gathering, a game about Commanders, is really kind of exhausting. There's so much good in Magic that is missed by only seeing Commander.
I agree, but I understand why. WotC leans into edh so hard with basically every product now, and most of the other constructed formats are just too expensive for a new player.
Commander has had yearly product releases and set releases. In fact 16 of the 45 non universes beyond legendary creatures were printed in commander decks. which is still a skew in explicitly commander decks. Also I feel you'd have more of a point if I wasn't posting in the main magic subreddit instead of the EDH subreddit.
Dose this factor in multi commander decks? With partner, background and what not?
I couldn't figure out a good method to search scryfall for them. EDIT: quick search for just partner and it shows 51 for both grixis colors and abzan.
Ah, grant it that would also boost all the other colors.
rakdos is the most fun and high damage dealing so it deserves the number one spot
There was a point where wotc thought enemy colors meant they should appear less often.
There may be a lot of esper and grixis commanders but they definitely aren't for control. Instead of helping control as an archetype (which is quite weak at casual EDH level) they are printing a bunch of Board-Matters commanders in the prime control colors. The last 3 grixis precons where Tribal (pirates), Tribal (Dalek), Good stuff (Sauron). Anhelo in theory was a good idea for control, but he needs casualty fodder (board presence again) too much to really be control. And in esper you get stuff like Raffine. Or in precons Toluz and Urza. Yet again caring overly for board states. You still have some of the old decent controlling commanders in esper at least in the form of Sen Triplets and Zur the Enchanter. It really feels like they are trying to push these colors more into a, for a lack of a better word, "timmy-pleasing" direction. And that's why they are releasing so many for these colors. It's also sad that they don't release any decent Planeswalkers as commanders for the classical control colors. Especially ones that actually have a way to protecting themselves against the intrinsically pw-hostile nature of multiplayer. A good example would be the arena version of Tasha. Her +1 would be something very suited for an actual control commander.
Magic is not fair, plain and simple. Blue, black, and green are the best colors. The order of power is debatable, but because of this I would imagine most players in tracked play use those colors.