Commander with Nick Wolf: Horde of Notions WRITTEN BY Nicholas Wolf

Hello, hello, hello, friends, and welcome back. I hope your week went well, and if you're prepared to read about something other than the concept of two creatures melding together to become one, then let's chat about Commander.

Of course, we're going to talk about meld as well. It's my job to keep you informed. WotC spoil-er...revealed some new cards, as they are often wont to do this time of year, and on a few of them we were treated to a couple new keywords. They're very cleverly named of course, because if cleverness was currency, WotC would be a bank. First, we have meld, which takes the concept of synergy to an entirely different level. The gist of it is simple - if you have two specific cards, they meld together and become one. There's some judgy rules stuff that we have to get ironed out, but concept wise it's pretty simple to figure out.

How does meld relate to Commander? That's the tricky part. In other formats, you can have multiple copies of each part of the meld cards so the chances are higher you'll be able to get all the pieces together at once. For we Commanderians though, we're limited to one copy of each part in our decks, so it'll be more difficult. We have a buttload of tutors, however, which will certainly ease the pain. But will we see meld cards that are even worth struggling to find? Time will tell, but it's safe to assume the price for a Tooth and Nail isn't going down any time soon.

Before we move on, I want to let you guys in on a little secret. So far we've been shown what is probably the premiere meld duo in Bruna and Gisela:









Both are interesting on their own. People are heralding Gisela as the second coming of Baneslayer Angel, and Bruna is...well...a really expensive conditional Karmic Guide. But together, they become this monstrosity:







We all love overpowered, oppressive creatures that limit opponents' ability to play Magic, right? Like Void Winnower and Iona, Shield of Emeria? Obviously if you can pull of melding the two angels together into this thing, you're sitting pretty high on the hog.

Okay, now for that secret I mentioned. Don't tell anyone, but I think the best Commander for this new meld mechanic will be Captain Sisay. She can tutor up both halves of Brisela since they're both legendary, and she gives us access to both green and white, which in turn gives us lots of other fun tutors, like the aforementioned Tooth and Nail. Maybe in a few weeks we'll check one what the Captain can do in a post-meld world.

Let's talk a little about the next keyword revealed: emerge. Those of you who remember living in the dysfunctional miasma of Kamigawa block will recognize shades of the "offering" mechanic present in emerge, as both offer you discounts in mana for sacrificing a creature to help pay for something. Unlike "offering", though, emerge does not require a creature type restriction to be met, and is thus likely more versatile. Here's the example we have so far:





The emerge cost is an alternate casting cost, and in this example it's actually less than the regular cost. So you have the option to play this guy for 5U minus the cost of the sacrificed creature. We don't know if there will be any emerge cards worth playing in Commander. But chances are high we'll see a handful of pushed rares and mythics that Meren of Clan Nel Toth players will be clamoring for in the coming weeks. Keep in mind, however, that in this example, while the card itself is colorless, there's still that annoying blue pip in the emerge cost, which means for our purposes, it's only playable in blue decks.



Lastly, we have escalate, and it's also immediately reminiscent of past keywords of yore. In escalate's case, we're reminded of several different old keywords simultaneously. Like Shattering Spree's replicate, it adds effects the more you pay, but like charms and commands (like Izzet Charm or Dromoka's Command) it offers different effects to choose from. Or maybe it's like entwine, as featured on yes-I'm-referencing-it-again, Tooth and Nail; or kicker. It's like all of these keywords, but at the same time, different enough that it feels fresh. I like options, and if you're a Commander player, so do you. We only have one copy of a given card in our lists, so if that one card can do by itself what three or four cards can do, then it deserves our attention. Here's an example of what we've seen so far:







I don't want to talk about too much as far as individual cards go since we'll be saving that for later, but even at uncommon, this particular card shows great promise. It's clearly meant for limited, as the blowout potential of a surprise untap of two creatures and a Celestial Flare for the low low price of four mana is as swingy as white combat tricks can get. And if you want to spend a few more nickels, you can get yourself a nice four life on top of all that value. I'm no Limited scientist, but it'll be scary to attack into open mana when Eldritch Moon hits the draft tables.

All right, now that that is out of the way, let's get to the matter at hand. Last article, I posed to you, the readers, which Commander we should talk about for today's article. The voting was close, but Horde of Notions won the day. Apparently you all prefer elementals over atogs and scarecrows, and while I may not agree with you, I'm a man of my word. So I humbly present to you, Horde of Notions:

DECKLIST

Horde of Notions (Commander, by Nick Wolf)

As you can see, when you pick a commander that only cares about elementals, most of the cards in the list will either be elementals or at least elemental-friendly. Perhaps I should have saved this list for Earth Day, what with all the elemental love, but there's no time like the present.

What we have here is a severe case of getting stuck in cycles. You see, I love cycles. I love when WotC makes a card and after looking at it for awhile they decide to just go ahead and make four more, one for each color. And if we're playing five colors, we can't just have one part of a cycle when we can have all five. Because of this, we aren't just playing Commander MVP Vigor, we're playing all the one word named elemental incarnations. To go along with Vigor, we've also got Dread, Hostility, Guile, and Purity. It doesn't matter that we don't have any counterspells for Guile, he's part of the cycle, and thus we have to play him right along with his brethren. We can't leave a man behind, even if the "man" is actually a weird lizard dragon bug thing the size of the RenCen (REGIONAL REFERENCE).

That's not the only cycle we have either. I thought about going nuts and putting in as many cycles as I can find room for, including all ten Commands, all the Charms I could get my grubby hands on, and hell, maybe all the Gempalms too, like Gempalm Polluter. They like tribal. But I'm a reasonable man, so I restrained myself from jamming in all the Banners and Cluestones and Captains and Medallions and those oddly-costed Blade creatures like [[Bant Hushblade]]. Instead, I allowed myself only the cycles of lands that are both high-quality and not a million dollars each, like the Khans fetches and the Shocks.

We've also got another creature cycle too, namely the Forces. Some of you may call foul that I didn't actually include what to my knowledge is the original force, Dwarven Strike Force (and yes, I'm joking, I know the real "first Force" is Task Force). I'm fairly strict when it comes to defining what is truly a cycle, and if we consider Force of Nature part of the cycle I'm playing here, then where do we stop? Primeval Force? Force of Savagery? Phantasmal Forces?

No, for our purposes here I'm only doing the Forces that fit the bill most closely, and that bill is the whole "do something every upkeep" thing: Baleful Force, Verdant Force, Magmatic Force, Tidal Force, and Celestial Force. Sure, they're across several sets, but it's pretty clear they belong together. And I even threw in Regal Force, because I opened one in an Eternal Masters pack and I don't want to feel like I completely wasted 15 bucks.

The rest of the deck is pretty self-explanatory for a five color deck, and by that I mean it's really a green deck that splashes red, blue, white, and black. We have lots of land grabbing and mana fixing, as you'd expect, but since I admittedly went a bit overboard with the nonbasic land cycles. There are only a few basic lands to grab with Cultivate / Kodama's Reach, so be careful; otherwise, you'll suffer the very embarrassing "failed to find" shuffle of shame. To go along with all that green fetching and fixing, we've also got ways to do that same thing in our artifacts, with my favorite color fixer of all time, Coalition Relic, as well as its brother and less handsome lamp, the Chromatic Lantern.

Speaking of artifacts, since we're playing tribal, and the tribe happens to include a lot of giant creatures that cost a bunch of mana and colors, we get to play a few great cards that sadly don't see much action these days. Check out Belbe's Portal and Urza's Incubator, and while you're at it, try not to get creeped out when you realize that Urza was way into eugenics and was probably a bad tipper and mean to puppies too.

Next time we're going to take a good look at the spoilers and discuss some odds and ends, so we're not going to do a poll. But when the time comes, get your voting fingers ready, because I imagine with Eldritch Moon on the horizon, we're going to have a lot to talk about. See you later, alligators.

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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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