Commander with Nick Wolf: The Legends of EMN WRITTEN BY Nicholas Wolf

Hello dear readers. It’s been two weeks since I last waxed Commander at you, though it’s felt like eons. Pokemon Go has a habit of taking hold of a person and before one realizes what has happened, one is standing in the middle of a field at 3AM cursing the name of Onyx before all the gods, old and new. As much fun as the diversion is to hunt pocket monsters, it’s time to get down to business, and this week, that business is Eldritch Moon. While everyone was wandering around the streets staring at their phones, WotC went ahead and dropped another expansion into the Multiverse, and it’s our solemn duty to analyze (read: make jokes about) all the relevant candidates for our Commander lists. I’m feeling like arbitrary point values are the way to go when judging value this time around, but we’ll get to that later.

This week, let’s chat about the legends. Every time there’s a new set and we get a legend or seven, for better or worse, people are going to build a list around each one. And Eldritch Moon, with its mash up of, well, mash-ups, has some interesting options. We won’t score the legends on my arbitrary points scale since they’re largely subjective, and also I’ll be writing articles about most or all of them in the future, so you’ll actually have to read all the words to see my opinion instead of scrolling down to the score. Sorry.

Gisela, the Broken Blade & Bruna, the Fading Light

There’s a lot of disparity in quality here, especially if you’re talking about the less interesting formats like Standard. One of these angels is currently going for a cool 2450 PucaPoints, while the other is checking in at a paltry 198. For we Commander players, the hardest part of this discussion is which angel should be the boss, and which should reside in the 99. The goal here is obviously to smash them together to form Brisela, but what’s the best way to do so? People are surprisingly quite divided on the subject, anti-pun intended, and like which Pokemon Go team you opted to join (Valor forever), which camp you choose defines you as a person forever. Will you choose to use Gisela as your commander who will push your decklist toward Voltron, encouraging you to use equipment and auras to take advantage of her innate efficiency in combat? Or will you opt for Bruna, who costs roughly a million mana, but provides a lot of versatility with graveyard fiddling that mono-white doesn’t normally enjoy? Bruna players can get clever, trying to figure out ways to tutor up and Entomb her better half in order to dig her up with Bruna’s trigger and meld immediately. I’ll reserve judgment for when I inevitably write an article devoted to Brisela.

Emrakul, the Promised End

Surprise, it’s Emrakul. I caught a Tentacruel up north last weekend and named it Emrakruel, and I thought that was so damn clever I have to include that here. (Also, do other people use the term “up north”, or is that a distinctly Michigan thing? If it helps the visual, I was probably drinking Faygo and eating Traverse City cherries at the time.) Anyway, back to the spaghetti monster in the sky. It’ll be interesting to finally cast an Emrakul in Commander, though it’s not the one I really want to be casting. Mindslavering someone is pretty fun in any format obviously, but for us in Commander, it’s not quite as devastating as it is in 1v1 Constructed formats unless Academy Ruins is involved. Still, having this on a commander means that if you have the mana to cough up you can reliably shut down an opponent, sometimes for good, just by casting (and not even resolving, just casting) your Commander. I’m interested in trying this out, and since we have [[Wastes]] and plenty of newish colorless cards, making a mono-brown deck is easier than ever. By my count, there are eight card types, which means you can get Emrakul for the low, low price of five mana, though if you actually manage to do that in a colorless deck I’ll be impressed. I’ve expressed my thoughts on outrageously costed commanders before, and this is not the exception. But rules are meant to be broken. Or mutated into tentacle monsters. Whatever.

Ishkanah, Grafwidow





While everyone was all, “where’s my Werewolf commander Wizards you owe me this isn’t fair I’m going to sue you,” there was a small, silent contingent of Commander players, whispering into their beers at the bar about the lack of spider bosses. Well, Eldritch Moon has risen, and both parties are satisfied...kinda. We’ll get to that Werewolf in a minute, but for now, let’s look at the new queen of creepy crawlies. (A note: While people were wailing about Werewolves, and others were pining for spiders, I’ve been sitting here lamenting my lack of Jellyfish commanders. But you don’t see me complaining on MTGSalvation, do you? Don’t look it up.) If you’re like me, when this card was spoiled you cheered, clapped your hands together, and said “Time to make a spider deck!” Then ten minutes later, with Gatherer open in one tab and PucaTrade open in another, you slowly realized that spiders, as a tribe, are not that good. Sure, you can shut down that flying game so hard people will think you broke gravity, but if your strategy was to jam every spider and spider-related card into your list and call it good, you’re not going to win a lot of games. It might be a lot of fun to maniacally cackle as you name all your spiders Boris and Charlotte as you resolve a Spider Climb targeting your Spitting Spider equipped with a Spidersilk Net, but come on. Ishkanah herself is pretty interesting despite her arachnoid misgivings. She’s not super expensive, so that’s nice, and while she won’t be striking fear into the hearts of opponents with her stats, she’s not garbage either. Her delirium trigger feels a little odd, as if during testing she originally pooped out spiders every upkeep, or at least in some way consistently created tokens. As it stands now, only getting the chance to create tokens once means that her other ability is much less threatening. To really make use of her activated ability, we have to find our spiders elsewhere, which brings us back to the part where most spiders are bad and to make this commander good we have to play bad cards. That doesn’t add up for me, and this is coming from a guy that loves the card Spider Spawning more than most.

Thalia, Heretic Cathar

New mono-colored commanders have to be either really good or really interesting to spawn new archetypes, since there are already so many great legends in mono colors to compete with. And with Eldritch Moon, we got THREE white commanders. So not only are they competing with every other mono-white commander that has come before them, they’re competing with each other as well. If I’m choosing which of the three mono-white legends is best, though, I’d award that honor to Thalia, barely edging out Gisela’s raw power. Original Thalia, Guardian of Thraben has been an excellent commander to use when your playgroup tries to get cute with the combos or other shenanigans, but sometimes it’s annoying when you find you’re also taxing yourself. New Thalia doesn’t have that issue, and if you often match up against decks that feature a lot of fast creatures or fancy broken lands, new Thalia will quickly make them realize they’re facing an Uphill Battle. Unlike most new versions of old cards, the new iteration of Thalia actually works extremely well with the old one, and if you want to put together a mono-white tax list, I’d actually suggest using new Thalia and sticking the old one in the 99. I’ll definitely be putting together that list to the dismay of my playgroup, and I will report the results to you folks when the time is right.

Ulrich of the Krallenhorde

Yay, finally! A Werewolf commander! Our dreams are realized. But wait! I keep reading it, and the words on it seem wrong. It doesn’t say “whenever you flip Ulrich, you win the game, you get to keep all your opponents’ cards as penance, and they all have to buy you sick BMX bikes and slushies.” Something doesn’t add up here. Wizards is messing with us. Our dreams are not realized, we realized our dreams are dead. Well, either our dreams were impractical, or Ulrich really isn’t good at all. After ruminating on the subject for some time, I’m happy to report that the answer is actually neither. We’re allowed to dream what we want, but by no means does Wizards owe us anything. Although Ulrich isn’t the Werewolf boss many had hoped for, he isn’t the drink-coaster-level terrible that rabid disappointment causes people to claim. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ulrich is the fact that he shines brightest not in Commander but in Standard, where +4/+4 and fighting are more highly valued (not that that makes him good in Standard, as if I know what “good in Standard” even means these days anyway). This is not a slight against you as a person, I promise. It’s mildly disappointing, sure, but instead of shaking your fists at WotC, let’s figure out what we can do with this. They’ve been pushing the fight mechanic a lot in the past few years, and if we’re playing Gruul colors, we’re going to have a lot of great creatures we can use to punch other people’s creatures in the face, so that’s cool. And besides, you and I both know that like spiders, werewolves aren’t really all that good anyway. There are a handful of great ones, like Huntmaster of the Fells, and plenty of good ones, like Mayor of Avabruck and Duskwatch Recruiter, but do you really want a bunch of slots in your 99 filled with stuff like Village Ironsmith and Ulvenwald Mystics?

And don’t even get me started on Greater Werewolf.

Gisa and Geralf

As someone who plays blue/black zombies, this expansion has felt quite literally like Christmas in July, and the necro-scientist siblings Gisa and Geralf are making a strong case for taking over commander duties. Turning every zombie into Gravecrawler is insane, and Grimgrin, Corpse-Born might be taking a back seat to its creator (and his sister) as soon as I get my mitts on a copy. My particular list (which I feature in its Sultai form here) is less powerful than it could be simply because I just want to cast a bunch of zombies and have everyone leave me alone while I fishbowl, but Gisa and Geralf might push me to really dig deep (my pun game is set to maximum tonight) into what comborific things I can pull off when I get a free zombo from the yard every turn. Anafenza, the Foremost is still the bane of graveyard-based decks, but if I’m playing black and blue and can’t kill one measly creature, I have brought shame upon my house. Since I already wrote about zombies not too long ago, I’ll just mention in a week or two how much Gisa and Geralf improves things (unless you want a new write-up, in which case all you have to do is ask nicely and also send me those new double-sided foil zombie tokens).

All right, friends, there we have it. Which legend are you most excited to build around? It’s still the spider, isn’t it? First frogs, now spiders. Kids these days. Tune in next week to crack open the rest of the set where I will inevitably write a sentence and a half about the actual card then get sidetracked with a dumb joke and award it a score that means nothing and doesn’t help anyone. Set reviews are fun. See you later.

Nicholas Wolf is a writer who lives in Flint, Michigan. He's been playing Magic: The Gathering since Tempest and still doesn't consider Urza's Saga to be broken at all. He prefers building decks that have either have 40 cards (Limited), 100 cards (Commander), or 50 cards (Tiny Leaders).

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