I think you *might* be looking to Boros a little too critically here, especially if you compare to some other 2-color combinations. Simic is the one that first came to mind for me, since I've always seen that pair as being "all over the place", and looking just at the top 12 commanders in that pairing you get a LOT of very different themes (lands matter, tokens, creatures matter, merfolk, power 2 or less matters, spellslinger). Though I agree I'd much rather have diversity in a color combination like in Boros or Simic than have a batch of incredibly one-note combinations like Orzhov or Golgari.
Specially, since its not the first time he complained about Boros being the same theme all the time. I am not a very Boros guy, but its good too see some variety in those colors and this new coming commander seems interesting to me.
I think a number of the examples in this video do show some similar themes among them. Granted, there are some odd-balls that don't really fit other Boros themes (e.g. Ferrous Rokiric, Zirda, Kayla bin-Kroog), but Boros has had more of a broadening of its themes. - Equipment: Akiri, Reyav, Tiana - Combat/Aggro: Aurelia, Adriana, Iroas, Winota - Artifacts: Osgir, Jor Kadeen, Alibou - Spells/Heroic: Feather, Anax and Cymede, Rem Karolus I think Azorius also had a similar broadening. I've heard a lot of criticisms because of the plethora of Stax/Tax and Blink commanders, but now it has some new vehicle options, more focus on artifact/enchantment synergies, and casting spells from other zones besides your hand.
The magic designers even mentioned something like what you're talking about. Maro said that Simic was +1 counters themed, but green blue had a lot more to it than just what simic does.
I kind of feel the opposite way about simic, simic is very much the "value" color pair simply due to the colors being ramp and draw, and it kind of sucks because it feels like almost every simic deck devolves into a homogenous value pile that any other simic deck could run. For the most part it has turned me away from using the color identity as a whole until Wilson and Sword Coast Sailor came out. It's surprising that, after all of these years, we have never had a Simic voltron commander until the pair opened the door to the idea. Green's access to auras/enchantments and blue's access to artifact tutors makes it feel like a dream waiting to happen, and we kind of got that with Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief but it felt like they were playing safe with the concept.
Yeah as much as i like playing golgari “abuse your graveyard” strategies it’s more unique stuff is way cooler. Stuff like beldros witherbloom and the “life/death” synergies are much more interesting
Exactly! White gets a lot of low cmc recursion, and red has wheel effects, so while it feels a little hokey to just staple them together I think it still works. It also dumps creatures on the board which is very Boros. The effect almost feels green because it reminds me of collected company but discard is very not green.
@@carloskarner7352 White/Red (Lorehold and Boros) Shares the thing to put many small sources of creatures on the Board. Look at the lorehold Elephant Legendarys. They are not just recursion, they are Boros like aggro too. Its not like Lorehold just wins with combos or spell damage. Its classical red/white go wide for creatures to win. And that lorehold different is just to rebuild a bit more from the grave instead of attack triggers like classical boros.
When I think of Boros I always think “Militaristic might”. So things like strength in numbers, equipment, enchantments, combat tricks, etc. I don’t think boros has deviated much from that idea. Queen Kayla just reads like a general recruiting for an army to me. Sounds like Boros.
I find this a really weird take. Almost every color combination has off theme commanders. It’s not like we expect everything in simic to be +1/+1 counters, right? The big complaint against boros has been that all their commanders were too on theme (equipment or combats) and that those themes were lame. This seems like a big step in the right direction to me. To put this another way, if this were Izzet everyone would be happy that we weren’t getting another slightly altered take on spell slinger. I don’t get why the response is different for boros.
Boros being an artifact thing kind of makes sense honestly. Red and white are both really good at artifacts by themselves so it would make sense that together they would be as well Edit to add: I have a general ferrous rokiric deck, and aside from wanting to cast multi color spells, it’s very much a “turn your creatures sideways and make them block” “math is for blockers” kind of deck.
I was just thinking that Boros might be my favorite color combination because you could do so many different cool things with it. I started like 2 months ago and the deck that got me into Magic was the Osgir precon, and I already have my own copy, a Hofri deck focus on stealing and sacking creatures and a Winota deck that cheats in humans, as they tend to do. I love it.
I remember my first commander, it was Gisela, Blade of Goldnight, and catching so many jokes because I was playing boros when everyone at my table was running "better" color combos. The jokes didn't last long when I started melting people in a single turn with Mob Rule or World at War.
Boros gets nothing but combat-based commanders for years: "Why can't boros do anything else besides turn creatures sideways???" Boros gets varied commanders that touch on multiple facets of the pairing's possible strategies beyond turning creatures sideways: "Why doesn't Boros have an identity anymore???"
I’ll take all over the place (with novel designs) over everything doing the same thing. I’m kind of glad that recursion has been explored more in Boris, because that has always been a thing in white and red. It’s only in recent years that it has been explored in its commanders.
As a boros player im really glad they are giving some diversity with the commanders and such. These weird archetypes i think come from white being the best or second-best in most archetypes except card draw and ramp. White is the 2nd best at reanimation, that's why there are so many boros commanders with reanimation effects. Same with token creation (best or 2nd best after green) , artifact creatures (best color is blue, 2nd best may be white?), equipment (white's the best at it) , planeswalkers (again, white is the best), etc. I think boros lately takes mainly white themes and adds red's impulsivity, fastness and flavor.
Squee Goblin Nabob is an autoinclude for the new commander. Basically says draw an extra card whenever you wheel with her. Don’t even have to resurrect Squee.
For me Boros does three things: 1) Creates a legion on the board to smack you with it. 2) Burns you and protects its stuff. 3) Uses a Voltron strategy with equipments mostly and maybe some auras. Maybe you put 10 humans in the battlefield with Winota or 10 artifact creatures with Alibou. The theme is still that you need a "legion" on the battlefield. Maybe you spellsling with low cmc spells to burn your opponents, or maybe you add a bunch of damage doublers and cast a huge nuke. You still want to burn your opponents. Maybe you use equipements to make your commander into a god or maybe your commanders supports things that have equipments on them. You still try to create Voltron. There is the occasional oddball, but with so many legendary creatures, after so many years, that's bound to happen, and not only in Boros. So I don't think that Boros lacks an identity. It just has weird ways to accomplish the same objective.
every two colour pair has a bunch of different themes? I don't think Boros is entirely out to lunch when compared to any other colour. The major shift you can attribute a lot of this to is Boros moving it's identity away from the combat step and towards the graveyard and artifacts.
This diversity is better for the game honestly. Why would you want to restrict a 2 color combination to such a narrow theme anyways? It just blocks creativity. As long as the theme of a commander matches up with the wide variety of themes within the colors it is made up of, it should be considered breaking color identity. Just think about it this way, simic is good at +1/+1 counters AND lands matter AND big creature ramp, but these are all accepted as on color for simic. And even if we wanted to stay with attacks matter for boros, a lot of the wacky commanders used as examples in this video still do this. Feather is basically just pump your guys over and over and attack. Winota literally has an attack trigger. And then they make stuff like the lorehold elder dragon who casts instants and sorceries, bit also only by attacking. So, overall, I'm glad they are branching out as it makes for a more diverse and interesting game.
I feel like the "every commander is completely unique and different and new" is now _the_ identity for Boros, and as a forever Boros player I very much like it. As you say multiple times, Boros was for the longest time only about attacking and aggro, with an occasional equipment subtheme (that also usually involved attacking); so for there to now be so many new and different Legends every set feels amazing. Being different every card can also be seen as a great strength, since you look at Boros and wonder "what amazing new weird commander will they come up with next?", whereas Golgari is always a graveyard Legend, Selesnya is always a go-wide, Azorius is always control, Simic is always the super boring "do something easy, draw a card and put a land out", etc.
I've had an Aurelia, the Warleader deck since she released in 2013. Before that Brion Stoutarm was my go-to deck (which back that was decently unique for a Boros commander), so I'm no stranger to Boros. I feel like exploring different things that the color combination can do is a very good thing for the game in general. Especially when it seemed like other color combinations were already exploring different themes. I remember when Kalemne was released, a lot of players were frustrated because it seemed like she was just "generic Boros commander #26." In my opinion, spicing up the color combo is a great thing!
interested to see your list if you have one, especially bcause there are so many removal pieces in 2022 magic. I tried aurelia before but was public enemy
I think there is a through line for Boros, but it's more tied to the psychology of the colors than the identity. Hear me out. Red and White are enemy colors, but they do mechanically similar things, albeit with different focus: both are great at removal, but R favors artifacts and direct damage, while W favors exile and enchantments. So between those, you have an identity that seeks to unify and strike out against anything it perceives as injust or counter to the freedoms they uphold. I think the core focus around artifacts (with different commanders favoring different types of artifacts, be they vehicles or equipment or...eggs?) makes sense, as that reads to me like W saying to R, "You know, you don't have to break everything unnatural. Here's a way to use it." R then turns around to tell W, "You're allowed to gather resources for just yourself, before you try to help others. You know that, right?" Does the color pair have it's weaknesses? Absolutely. But I think it's more cohesive, albeit flexible, than you're suggesting. Anyway, back to my Zirda deck. I'm trying to combine value artifacts and cycling for a very fast deck.
I'm Boros fan for a long time. I already have over 10 decks for this 2 color combination. For me this is best thing that I'm able play my favorite colors in so many different ways.
As someone who has been trying to make Commander Liara Portyr focus on stealing opponent’s cards I can’t agree more. The deck feels like it’s in two halves with red doing the steeling and white buffing the combat because there are only 2/3 boros cards that support her play style. I hope that these experimental commanders start to pick up popularity so they get some support later on down the line.
Might be a good thing that Boros is all over the place. Just take a look at Simic....+1/+1 counters and big creatures mostly if you ask me. With maybe a slight land-related theme with all dem land-matter commanders. I think it's a good thing that Boros is going ' wider' so to speak.
I think two-color combinations being pigeonholed into specific themes is a bad thing in general, so the more they move away from that, the better. I'd like to see it happen with other color combinations. Ravnica has too much influence on the game.
If you do a circle graph White and Red converge on: Combat tricks, equipment, going wide, white control, red damage, Angels and dragons, Goblins and humans, artifact sacrifice and recursion. I think Boros and Gruul are in the same boat but Gruul got a slam dunk with Raggadragga :P
Red and White have always been good at moving artifacts around, saccing them, discarding them and getting them back, there just was not a commander for it. Boros Eggs was even a modern deck at some point if I am not mistaken. Winota is just an attacky deck but actually in an interessting way where you have to think about your creature types. Heroic/prowess has always been a boros thing and feather was designed as a nod to that. Roderik and F&S are quite unique, Roderik always felt like a card designed for multicolored decks who happens to be multicolored because that gives him extra synergy in those decks and R/W just felt like the best fit for the charakter/mechanic. F&S on the other hand are just a homage to lightning helix, probably the most iconic boros magic card. Boros always had more stuff going on than just the equipment/attack stuff, there just were no commanders allowing you to do it.
Interesting reflection indeed. I am not sure though that the most popular commanders in any color combination are the best example of the color theme. After all people play commanders which are strong or interesting, so either that do a powerful theme very well or are actually different than most other commanders. Would be cool to look at this in more detail, actually. What are the color-pair key themes and compare them to what the top commanders are doing. Thanks for your videos, huge fan of your deckbuilding ideas.
Yea I mean you can find a pretty crazy variety of commanders even in mono color. It’s true that a lot of boros commanders have very different play styles but I think flavor-wise they still make sense.
I would say Kayla bin-Kroog is VERY boros. She wheels, and i think it is red that wheels the best, maybe not most but is is the color with wheel of fortune. And artifact recursion is found in boros newly and something it also has done before Osgir. And recurring a mass of small 1, 2 and 3 mana permanents certainly isn't black, rather wanting one big thing, but does fit well with other white cards such as Abiding Grace
Boros is a colour combination that still very rarely speaks to me, but I'm still appreciating the extra experimentation in the themes it's allowed to do. Magic's design feels like it has, in many ways, grown more stale over time, so it's very refreshing to see cards that support new possibilities or commanders that make themselves into unique build-arounds (very much looking at Ivy here). Some of my favourite archetypes are ones that bend into unusual colours (...mostly Black, tbh), since it gives you a chance to appreciate unique cards that normally don't get the light of day, such as Ghen giving us enchantments & especially auras/curses in Mardu of all colours.
I think a lot of these aren't as different as you're making them seem. The spirit tribal and multi color ones, those one are definitely out there, 100% agree. But the others are playing with the same themes as old ones, just in new ways. Osgir: how the hell did it take this long to get this effect in boros?!? Mono red AND white could already do this, how'd it take so long? Feather: in the end, this (usually) just plays out as an attacking deck, it just uses combat tricks, which are near universally garbage in edh, as its gimmick. Firesong and Sunspeaker: lightning helix, warleader's helix, balefire liege, ajani vengeant. Just a new spin on the effect. Winota: the human/non-human part is very unique, but really, it's just a combat/attack deck. So, new gimmick for combat. Depala: just an equipment commander, but with added vehicle AND tribal options! Alibou: again, just an attacking deck, with a focus on artifacts. With the neat trick of the artifacts not needing to be creatures, so bonus! Zabaz: never really had a modular commander before, but, especially in limited, if you're going to have an artifact aggro deck, what colors is it going to be? Following in Alibou's footsteps, reinforcing boros as a color that likes artifact creatures. Also again, how was this not already a thing? As for the queen, while the effect is new, it'a literally just combining wheeling (red) with reanimating cheap creatures/artifacts (white). Similar to FaS, just sticking something each color does together. Tl;dr, boros is getting a bunch of new ways to interact with the same things it always has, with some real curveballs thrown in for good measure.
So my ideas here are a couple things. First off, I feel that as commander has taken over the magic format, wotc has had to blur or redefine the color pie so that red and white colors can keep up with the card draw that has become so necessary in other colors. And even though Boros is known for attacking, attacking is less of an advantage for commander than it is in a 60 card format. So they have to branch out what boros does. But all these cards you mentioned don’t really fall outside the red and white shell. Firesong and sunspeaker focus on damage and life gain. Ferrous rokeric creates creature tokens that attack at what can be very explosive rates, artifact tokens no less and both red and white have synergy with artifacts. Same for osgir. White does recursion well so why shouldn’t boros? I feel like there was no reason to hold it to attacking only for so long. And the only thing that makes sense to me is the unplanned history of commander and how they are trying to incorporate it now.
Captain Lyra Portyr is a super underrated commander in my opinion. She’s currently my favorite deck, a colorless/eldrazi deck that impulse draws a lot and reduces the costs of spell as much as possible. Its pretty often that I hard cast Ulamog or Kozilek for 2 mana. Also, if you get the full trigger, any 3 mana or less mana rocks are just free.
I think the color pie made more sense earlier in the game when there were less cards and fewer sets. At this point, with 30 years worth of game history,, if they were following the color pie to the letter, they probably would have run out of design space a long time ago. And even early in the game history, there were deviations from what the colors were known for, Drop of Honey comes to mind. I think it's cool that Boros' identity is open ended. Like you said in your video, it's given players who enjoy red and white (myself included) more fun and interesting options. Great video!
I've been an artifact-heavy player since around Shards of Alara. While blue is my favorite color to play, I did note that artifact themes were a little too stuck in blue. But it feels weird that recently my collection went hardly much red to a ton of red. It was nice getting a commander that supports Modular (Zabaz), I still had a favorite deck of that to finally convert to commander. Some of the cards I can and can't choose feel weird. Cranial Plating and Skeleton Shard were some of my favorites alongside Modular, but they're black identity. Splashed some green for Soul's Might (X +1 counters equal to power, aka doubling), red for Dismantle (destroy artifact and transfer counters, effectively doubling on modular). Otherwise white and blue were the backbone, hitting all colors for that Sunburst (I'm sad that Zabaz kills Arcbound Wander, such an elegant card with only needing to say "Modular - Sunburst"). Modular creatures definitely want to be always attacking, and that side of Boros is still clear in its identity. But "wanting to die in combat" seems more Orzhov. Also I feel like they didn't want to run artifact themes in Izzet because of the spellslinger identity, but ... eventually they did. Still red. It feels like old artifact support is getting pushed out kinda hard. As far as the identity of Boros beyond always attacking, it seems to me like it like it has a huge presence with Double Strike, and perhaps Indestructible. Otherwise good access to more combat winning keywords. I don't know where they want direct effect damage in its identity; seems mixed between whether they want that a part of Boros or not.
i like to imagine boros as being a bit of a wild card color combination. there are just so many different ways of interpreting the two, and as enemies, they seem to do the opposite of each other. firesong and sunspeaker in particular show this aspect of their relationship. it perfectly encapsulates the two sides of war, the reason there *are* two gods of war in greek and roman mythology. when the two do work together, in particular for equpment/aura or artifact decks, they shift into a one-man-army kinda archetype. In the strixhaven boros archetype, they shifted into a more "thrill of possibility" style, where they were using the revival ability of white and the chaotic recycling nature of red. I actually like the feel of boros, where the two colors that make it up are like rivals. should you just deal as much damage as quickly as possible? buff and build your army? or are you risking it all on one creature to win it all? the two combine into risk and reward, the flames of life, and the flame that burns your hand, the blind rage of battle, and the cunning strategy of war. goddammit i geeked out over the one color combination I never play.
Thank god it isn't tied down to one identity or theme. That would be boring as hell. Boros, from Ravnica, does have an attacking theme. But not every set needs to be Ravnica, red/white is much more than Boros.
People who complain Boros is all over the place have no right complaining about Izzet being pretty much exclusively spellslinging. Boros has too much going on and Izzet has too little? What is the exact number of themes to make these people who complain no matter what happy?
I think it's great that Boros has branched out in recent years. It's not the only colour combination that has done this, and other combinations also have multiple different themes associated with them. As for that new Brothers' War spoiler, I can absolutely see that being in Boros colours. It's common to see commanders that do specific things for each colour they are. E.g. Firesong and Sunspeaker - the damage is red, the life gain is white. In this new commander's case, the wheeling is red, the artifact recursion is both red and white, and the creature recursion is white. Could also have been red/black, I suppose, but recurring things based on mana value is much more white than black.
Boros is attacking matters. RW is a lot more than that. Also, no one says this about GB. Golgari is graveyards matter, on tarkir it was large toughness, in scars it was poison, in innistrad it was delirium, on kaladesh it was +1 counters, on ixalan it was explore, strixhaven had life gain matters, modern horizons 2 had tokens matter. Does GOLGARI even have an IDENTITY? But for some reason people are obsessed with RW.
I think the issue is that wizards were going heavy down the equipment role for boros and there's only so many abilities you can do for that without just outright nullifying previous commanders, so now they're becoming somewhat if a miscellaneous category, and honestly I have no problem with that
isn't it weird that when Boros had the identity of being the attacking colours everyone complained that it was bad. Now it's branching out and people complain that it doesn't have an identity?
@@edhdeckbuilding just based on people I've spoken with before. The common theme seems to be Boros is now bad because it does too much but there's usually a commander in a different identy who does what ever the Boros commander wants to do but better. A common one is when I play my Alibou artifact storm deck I get asked why I don't just play Jhoira instead. But I think the new Boros identity is control through aggression. We all know how hard it can be to play against a Feather who is dropping a Chandra's ignition every turn, a firesong and sunspeaker who keeps wiping the board when things are starting to get out of hand and in Alibou you're going to be killing at least one creature/planeswalker every combat before you take into account things like strionic resonator, helm of the host or lithoform engine giving you even more triggers to kill your opponents key pieces
On the topic of Queen Kayla not feeling like a boros commander. Wheel effects are absolutely a red effect, discarding your hand and drawing that many certainly feels like it's on-color for a red commander. The other ability, reanimating creatures or artifacts with low mana value, is also well within boros identity and has been for quite some time, even without a good commander for it. Red has cards Goblin Welder and Goblin Engineer to represent its ability to reanimated artifact cards. There is even a mono-red commander, Daretti Scrap Savant, that fits within this theme quite well. Using his first ability to loot away artifacts before reanimating them. White also has a history of reanimating artifacts. Cards like Refurbish are a great example of this, additionally the focus on low mana value permanents is found with other cards like Sun Titan and Sevinne's Reclamation, which can both reanimate low mana value artifacts from your graveyard. This is in addition to white's ability to reanimate creatures, which it is well known for. Everything Queen Kayla does is perfectly within pie for boros, and I'm glad WotC is designing boros in new interesting ways.
I enjoy spellslinger and artifacts so General Ferrous Rockric is an awesome boros commander for me and it’s unique enough to not really come up often in pods I play with
My feather the redeemed is a pretty mean deck. it's a lot of cantrips and payoffs for those cantrips, but some of those payoffs can get out of hand, like Zada, Hedron Grinder, Mirror-Wing Dragon, storm-kiln artist let's you stack up treasure for a massive turn later on, young pyromancer gets you creatures for just playing your deck normally, and gives you a means of using indomitable creativity to nuke your tokens and turn them into things like Gisela and Rem Karolus. Angelfire Ignition is the best targeted spell to come out recently for feather. Feather is a lot of fun to pilot.
The real problem I see with the line of thinking is that Boros =/= Red/White. It's a good shorthand, sure, but the Boros Legion as the faction on Ravnica shouldn't define the color combination. Sure because we've been to Ravnica a few times it's influential, but the go wide/go hard/combat sweep sort of style can't define a whole color pairing. When it does, it's just really boring. As an easy comparison, look at Strixhaven's Schools vs Ravnica's Guilds. Lorehold had a much bigger recursion and artifact theme than Boros, and Red/White do artifacts and recursion well. Witherbloom is likes spreading out tokens, draining opponents and gaining life, things both colors already do well. Compare it to the Golgari who are all about recursion. It's been awhile since I looked... but I don't think that Witherbloom has much actual recursion at all, certainly not comparatively. Feel free correct me if I'm wrong. Silverquill has a big politics angle to it, but even without it, it's great at spreading counters, making inklings, and has more reactive spells. Sure Orzhov has a lot of tokens, but it is closer to Witherbloom, as it has a much higher focus on draining opponents/oppressing them. And then we got to Prismari and Quandrix. Prismari, like the Izzet, sling spells. Quandrix is more about making tokens than the Simic, but they both ramp and spread out those +1/+1 counters. They don't really have any different base to them than the others. Sure they do things their colors do, but they don't have the sort of different flair the other colleges do. You could slap most of those two schools' cards in their corresponding guild and vice versa, and not sure you'd notice the difference. Way less so with the other schools. And those three schools handled it in a great way. More versatility makes things more interesting, it's usually better to focus on the color pie and have them explored in different ways when interacting with another color. A big example is when Firesong and Sunspeaker is mentioned. Sure, the Mino-bros might not have much to do with Basandra or Osgir or Feather, but they are GREAT at embodying how Red and White can mix. All the spells having link, making everything effectively a Lightning Helix (which itself is a combination of Lightning Bolt and Healing Salve) is just on point. Plus whenever you gain life you get to Lightning Bolt someone? The Mino-bros are a great Red/White creature. Feather is in two of the colors with really the most beneficial and diverse buff spells/protection/combat tricks. Green does have a lot, but usually just making things big. Black is usually more double edged sword buffs or just murdering opponent's creatures so they don't mess with yours. Blue... doesn't have many. Usually evasion vs buffs. A Red/White creature than makes them all multi-use? Totally in theme for the colors. More of the color pairing commanders should try to experiment with the aspects of what their colors do vs the same things over and over.
3:30 That and that she is one of the cheapest and easiest commanders to build. Seriously, the day i made her i took me 3 weeks and less than $40 USD to get the cards and it took that much time not because no one had the cards i was looking for but because everyone had them in their house rotting doing nothing and i had to wait for them to find them in their bulk boxes.
I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m fully onboard with it. I already have a Feather deck that I love, a Koll combo deck, and a Zabaz 0 power tribal/modular deck. I never liked Boros because I hated their old flavor, but there are interesting and flexible commanders now, and I love it.
I feel like you can find a lot of variety in all 2 color combinations, though I agree that Boros has pivoted dramatically in recent years while the others are relatively unchanged
Queen Kayla makes sense to me. Discarding to draw cards is very red(Faithless Looting, the wheels, etc.) and artifacts are historically a white and blue thing. I think it makes sense but it definitely is a strange but powerful commander.
I think that the problem is pretty basic. The Central Theme of Boros (combat + equipment) has not changed but it doesn't work in commander so the boros commanders that become popular are the ones that stand out and do unusual things. If you ignored selesnya token commanders or izzet spellslinger commanders, those combos would seem to have pretty scattered identities as well.
Izzet still easily falls back on artifacts and tinkering, being the 2 primary artifact colors on the pie (though these days only green is slightly lagging behind on the amount of "artifact matters" cards). Selesnya can fall back on enchantress themes with no issue. Of course, there's less people playing artifacts in just 2 colors anymore, and generic value enchantress decks have been been overshadowed by token and tribal strategies in more recent years. Both those color pairs still have very strong identities. If you stripped graveyards from Golgari however, you basically uninvent the color combo and are left with sporadic weird things like Carth Superfriends.
Agreed, there's naturally some common sights like blink and... Birds, but you also don't see a lot of commanders really embody the two colors in the same way that Golgari or orzhov do. White tokens fuelling black sacrifice or black using the graveyard as a resource for Green's creatures.
Two things come to mind when talking about Azorius flying and blink. Apart from my own Noyan Dar deck (which was awefull) I have not really played against an azorius deck without those flying of blink being strongly represented.
My favorite Boros deck is my Mila/Lukka superfriends deck. There are so many planeswalker support cards in white, and red has some big mean Creatures. I always try to get Mila and Lukka out on the battlefield for a Flavor win.
for the spoiled card, the wheel portion feels red and the recur cheap artifacts feels both red (welder effects) and white (teshar stuff, sevinne's reclamation kind of stuff). tbh i wish other multicolor identities had this much variety. Simic has 90-some legends that all essentially do the same thing
@@TheRealRonShady1911 rn I run Rograhk Thrasios so I do hope they do. In rograhk thrasios I use rograhk as a body to manipulate and never as an attacker for damage output. So I figured I’d give it a whirl.
@@TheRealRonShady1911 I don’t think I’ll like anything as much as how subtlety powerful rograhk is just due to Fury storm + Gale’s redirection requiring 2+ commander casts to be an online threat combo. Never seen anyone else running it tho.
Honestly Kayla is a kind of commander I've been looking for for a while. Loot with red (wheel in this case), then get what you discarded back with white reanimation. I JUST built Alesha to make this, though...
So on the topic of Queen Kayla, Red has both Draw/Discard and Artifact recursion in its colour pie. Stuff Scrap Mastery, Trash for Treasure, & Goblin Welder really emphasize this. She’s definitely in the red part of the color pie, so the second color is likely either white or black. What cinches white is she also cares about small creatures imo. None of these new legends break the color pie, the problem with Boros was it’s very much stuck in the Ravnica concept of Boros where it should be viewed as combination of Red and White.
My consistent encounters with and feelings about Boros/Lorehold colored brews... ...is they're not usually interesting, or they seldom show up in the wild, unless the deck's player has a preference for niche builds, or just wants to drop a big 'ol honkin' Gisela on the field... ...where as I usually end up building decks which fill the various roles or themes outside of Boros, even if such means Jeskai, Mardu, or Naya. The only time I see myself brewing or considering to brew something in white-red, it involves Partner, Partner With (Sylvia//Korvath), or Choose a Background. I was going to build Feather, but then the first Commander Legends set came out. I already have a Ardenn//Rograkh auras + equipment brew, I lack the knights and dragons for Sylvia//Korvath, and I'm unsure what to brew from Baldur's Gate, though I know I definitely prefer a Choose a Background combination.
I'd say I can make a low to the ground vehicle recursion deck with the new Boros commander and running every artefact and vehicle commander relevant to the theme, with treasure generation to fuel the whole enterprise right now. the wheel engine is what was missing for keeping up card draw in the deck outside of exile matters.
What precisely do you want then? Would you prefer Boros to be more like Simic? Since all their Commanders as of late just Ramp and Draw? There is some connective tissue between the Legends you showed off. Cards that enable a go-wide, aggressive, combat-focused strategy, there's some that enable artifact-focused strategies as well. Sounds perfectly on-theme to me. And some that just provide you some protection and recursion so you aren't just out of the game when somebody resolves a board wipe. We should be exploring what these colors can do, we should be finding new design space, otherwise we're just going to see the same effects over and over potentially driven up by Power Creep, causing new cards to just usurp roles from older ones.
I wish they lean more into the lifelink theme. Its very attacky and life gainy at the same time. I've always wanted to see a lifelink tribal type commander and boros would be perfect for that.
I love variety and that sometimes we get commander that almost defy the color pie. I would love to have a Boros enchantress, but Boros is one of the color combinations that is not my jam so I am not in a hurry 😹
Boros leaning into artifacts makes sense; Red is, by far, the leading color for treasure (artifact) producers, white is the go--to color for equipment.
In hindsight, the turning point for Boros was the printing of *Feather the Redeemed.* She, Osigur, and Winota are each value engines unto themselves. Boros was starved for Noncombat Commaders until Feather proved the concept.
When you were listing off commanders that weren't similar to each other I just went "oh you're supposed to attack, oh you're supposed to attack, oh..." They all had attacking themes 😂
That's the red white color identity, attacking matters. It's a midground between red burn and go-wide white weenies. Maro said that its signature ability would be battle cry.
Yep, it is still the color of righteous fury. Do the new commanders give build variety? Yes. Is this the same in other color combo's? For the most part yes. I would like his take on Orzhov though. It is a popular color combination but to me it seems that 90% of Orzhov commanders do a pretty similar/boring(?) aristocrats thing with little true variation.
I think what's important is that many of these commanders encourage combat, but that doesn't mean you can't use them in unique ways. Plus, there's some sleeper partner pairs in Boros that let you do some fun stuff.
As for Queen Kayla, I would associate her with Izzet, rather than Dimir: draw-discard and artifact sinergies are very Red/Blue. So, with Red already having draw-discard sinergies and White being very recursion centric, it makes sense for her to be Boros
I think Boros kinda went Vorthos in their card designs. There's no central theme tying the Boros commanders together, but they are usually given two abilities, with each being a primary or secondary thing the red & white colors can do. Eg, Queen Kayla bin-Kroog has an ability that rummages (discards cards then draws cards) and returns artifacts/creatures from graveyard to the battlefield. Rummage is primarily a red ability while creature and artifact grave recursion are primarily a white ability. The thing is, these abilities make less sense when they're both on the same card. They're kinda *mashed* together.
I think it's a good thing the commanders are all over the place though. It brings varioty and keeps things from being stale. Boros still means equipment and combat to me though.
This is a very Boros flavored card, they nailed it with this. The discard effect is a red thing with many different cards, it’s one of their main themes is discard your hand and draw that many cards. White is great at recurring things with CMC 3 or less, think sun titan and sevinnes reclamation. I think the previous strategy they had for boros commanders was especially weak compared to commanders that by default are much stronger due to the colors strength like simic for example. They had to change up their strategy for boros because the colors are already weaker in commander than the rest and combat focused cards were not the way to go.
There’s this aspect in my head that Boros is the don’t count me out yet, underdog. Which kinda reflects both in the meta and gameplay. Getting back small things because they aren’t down for the count to me is the most red white thing a card could do.
I think it hasa common theme most of it, either it's some attack related theme either some recursion low cmc cards either any of the main monoW or monoR themes
To me Boros is all about prepping for war. Whether it's buffing with auras, spells, and equipments or creating troops with tokens or healing and fortifying with vigilance and lifeline effects.
I feel like the disparate themes isn't a bad thing so long as those themes get more support. I love Boros/Mardu, but I can't seem to find a commander or theme that I am particularly enthused by that has a good amount of support
For me boros standed a long time for being weak and still try to fight out. Esp cause alot of things that would help boros out, where unpopular, like stax, hatebears, boardwipes/hardcontroll. So the main way was being a stupidly overcosted card that has more cost on itself to equip things that get in responce destroyed. You could play boros another way, but that just means you do stuff every other combination does allready better. After years boros got at least support on what it allready does bad to not fall completely behind but every other idea they had for boros was thrown away like "hit yourself" or "burn + lifegain"(what btw is just an variant of drain). I would say boros itself never had an other identity next to equipment strats. I say that cause if we look only at boros cards themselfs they are mostly just weak, or too less represented strats. It will just be fine if we take mono white/red cards by themselfs that we see it does strong things, far stronger then most boros cards. But thats not boros per se, thats mono white combined with mono red. And im telling that, while containing 2 of them. One of them is brion that uses the low cost red cards that sac themselfs and the high costed white cards to oneshot. I had the hit yourself cards in but that was way too slow. Feather was the flicker deck that has only feather as a boros card. Again i tried other boros cards but outside of a tutorheavy deck this is just not close to other combinations.
7:09 idk what you're talking about here...bin-kroog is such a white-red card. Wheeling is totally a red ability, and returning permanents of specific mana value from graveyard to battlefield shows up almost exclusively in white, especially for artifacts...
I would say Boros is evolving rather quick. On top of focusing on combat through tokens and voltron, now you have boros artifacts, boros spell slinger/storm and boros staxx.
How is Queen Kayla NOT in flavour with Boros? Recursion is totally white (Against All Odds?), and draw/discard is very red (Faithless Looting? Thrill of Possibility? Cathartic Reunion?), also white plays a lot with artifacts so I think Queen Kayla is a quintessential Boros card! Other than that, I agree with you - Boros IS all over the place. And that's because white and red individually can do pretty much anything (bar tutoring and countering, to a certain degree, or milling). I like the idea of Boros being all over the place from a philosophical pov, it perfectly embodies the Boros mentality from Ravnica: powerful creatures/soldiers expressing sometimes conflicting individualities, selfless heroes serving a greater good, beacon of morality and (com)passion. It's like the MHA universe, the Justice League or any fictional alliance of superheroes - they are all different and adding something unique to the table. Unity in the scope, individuality in the means, this is very Boros in my opinion. Mechanically, this makes it hard to play as there's a lot of internal contradiction and sometimes lack of coordination - Civil War anyone?
The primary theme and identity of Boros is AGGRESSION. Aggression just happens to come in many different forms. It can be Go Wide aggro, it can be Go Tall aggro, it can be Additional Combats aggro. Boros is ANGRY. It is here to create creatures, make creatures big, spit out free creatures, and then punch you DIRECTLY IN THE TEETH with them. The subthemes for Boros is Artifacts, and caring about Specific Limitations. Caring specifically about low mana value, caring specifically about multicolor spells, etc.
One thing I notice is that whatever direction they are a lot commander centric, I like feather but the fact that the decks heavily relies on feather to be working has put me off building it, same goes for winota, kayla and Osgir
Multicolor creatures can represent any aspects of the color pie of its constituent parts. The joke of Boros was that it only did aggressive things (sometimes with equipment) instead of exploring different takes on the combo. No one bats an eye at the fact momir vig, experiment kraj and tatyova, Bentic druid are dissimilar.
![ปฏิเสธไม่ไหว (Crush on you) - LIPTA feat. No One Else [TEASER MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VC689EgdSIw/mqdefault.jpg)
Boros is an aggressive enigma, manufactured with mystery, forged in frustration…
I think you *might* be looking to Boros a little too critically here, especially if you compare to some other 2-color combinations. Simic is the one that first came to mind for me, since I've always seen that pair as being "all over the place", and looking just at the top 12 commanders in that pairing you get a LOT of very different themes (lands matter, tokens, creatures matter, merfolk, power 2 or less matters, spellslinger).
Though I agree I'd much rather have diversity in a color combination like in Boros or Simic than have a batch of incredibly one-note combinations like Orzhov or Golgari.
Specially, since its not the first time he complained about Boros being the same theme all the time. I am not a very Boros guy, but its good too see some variety in those colors and this new coming commander seems interesting to me.
I think a number of the examples in this video do show some similar themes among them. Granted, there are some odd-balls that don't really fit other Boros themes (e.g. Ferrous Rokiric, Zirda, Kayla bin-Kroog), but Boros has had more of a broadening of its themes.
- Equipment: Akiri, Reyav, Tiana
- Combat/Aggro: Aurelia, Adriana, Iroas, Winota
- Artifacts: Osgir, Jor Kadeen, Alibou
- Spells/Heroic: Feather, Anax and Cymede, Rem Karolus
I think Azorius also had a similar broadening. I've heard a lot of criticisms because of the plethora of Stax/Tax and Blink commanders, but now it has some new vehicle options, more focus on artifact/enchantment synergies, and casting spells from other zones besides your hand.
The magic designers even mentioned something like what you're talking about. Maro said that Simic was +1 counters themed, but green blue had a lot more to it than just what simic does.
I kind of feel the opposite way about simic, simic is very much the "value" color pair simply due to the colors being ramp and draw, and it kind of sucks because it feels like almost every simic deck devolves into a homogenous value pile that any other simic deck could run. For the most part it has turned me away from using the color identity as a whole until Wilson and Sword Coast Sailor came out. It's surprising that, after all of these years, we have never had a Simic voltron commander until the pair opened the door to the idea. Green's access to auras/enchantments and blue's access to artifact tutors makes it feel like a dream waiting to happen, and we kind of got that with Ivy, Gleeful Spellthief but it felt like they were playing safe with the concept.
Yeah as much as i like playing golgari “abuse your graveyard” strategies it’s more unique stuff is way cooler. Stuff like beldros witherbloom and the “life/death” synergies are much more interesting
i think Queen Kayla is a themed boros commander, because the discard/draw is in red, and the recusion of permanent CMC 3 or less is in white.
Exactly! White gets a lot of low cmc recursion, and red has wheel effects, so while it feels a little hokey to just staple them together I think it still works. It also dumps creatures on the board which is very Boros. The effect almost feels green because it reminds me of collected company but discard is very not green.
agree
i totaly agree to that!
No, she is a lorehold commander
@@carloskarner7352 White/Red (Lorehold and Boros) Shares the thing to put many small sources of creatures on the Board. Look at the lorehold Elephant Legendarys. They are not just recursion, they are Boros like aggro too. Its not like Lorehold just wins with combos or spell damage. Its classical red/white go wide for creatures to win. And that lorehold different is just to rebuild a bit more from the grave instead of attack triggers like classical boros.
When I think of Boros I always think “Militaristic might”. So things like strength in numbers, equipment, enchantments, combat tricks, etc. I don’t think boros has deviated much from that idea.
Queen Kayla just reads like a general recruiting for an army to me. Sounds like Boros.
I find this a really weird take. Almost every color combination has off theme commanders. It’s not like we expect everything in simic to be +1/+1 counters, right? The big complaint against boros has been that all their commanders were too on theme (equipment or combats) and that those themes were lame. This seems like a big step in the right direction to me.
To put this another way, if this were Izzet everyone would be happy that we weren’t getting another slightly altered take on spell slinger. I don’t get why the response is different for boros.
He has said in the vid that he isn’t saying this is a bad thing and agrees with you overall that it’s a step in the right direction.
Boros being an artifact thing kind of makes sense honestly. Red and white are both really good at artifacts by themselves so it would make sense that together they would be as well
Edit to add:
I have a general ferrous rokiric deck, and aside from wanting to cast multi color spells, it’s very much a “turn your creatures sideways and make them block” “math is for blockers” kind of deck.
even more so with equipment lately
I love the General he also saves me money on my car insurance lol
I was just thinking that Boros might be my favorite color combination because you could do so many different cool things with it. I started like 2 months ago and the deck that got me into Magic was the Osgir precon, and I already have my own copy, a Hofri deck focus on stealing and sacking creatures and a Winota deck that cheats in humans, as they tend to do.
I love it.
I remember my first commander, it was Gisela, Blade of Goldnight, and catching so many jokes because I was playing boros when everyone at my table was running "better" color combos.
The jokes didn't last long when I started melting people in a single turn with Mob Rule or World at War.
Boros gets nothing but combat-based commanders for years: "Why can't boros do anything else besides turn creatures sideways???"
Boros gets varied commanders that touch on multiple facets of the pairing's possible strategies beyond turning creatures sideways: "Why doesn't Boros have an identity anymore???"
I’ll take all over the place (with novel designs) over everything doing the same thing.
I’m kind of glad that recursion has been explored more in Boris, because that has always been a thing in white and red. It’s only in recent years that it has been explored in its commanders.
As a boros player im really glad they are giving some diversity with the commanders and such. These weird archetypes i think come from white being the best or second-best in most archetypes except card draw and ramp. White is the 2nd best at reanimation, that's why there are so many boros commanders with reanimation effects. Same with token creation (best or 2nd best after green) , artifact creatures (best color is blue, 2nd best may be white?), equipment (white's the best at it) , planeswalkers (again, white is the best), etc. I think boros lately takes mainly white themes and adds red's impulsivity, fastness and flavor.
Squee Goblin Nabob is an autoinclude for the new commander. Basically says draw an extra card whenever you wheel with her. Don’t even have to resurrect Squee.
For me Boros does three things:
1) Creates a legion on the board to smack you with it.
2) Burns you and protects its stuff.
3) Uses a Voltron strategy with equipments mostly and maybe some auras.
Maybe you put 10 humans in the battlefield with Winota or 10 artifact creatures with Alibou. The theme is still that you need a "legion" on the battlefield.
Maybe you spellsling with low cmc spells to burn your opponents, or maybe you add a bunch of damage doublers and cast a huge nuke. You still want to burn your opponents.
Maybe you use equipements to make your commander into a god or maybe your commanders supports things that have equipments on them. You still try to create Voltron.
There is the occasional oddball, but with so many legendary creatures, after so many years, that's bound to happen, and not only in Boros.
So I don't think that Boros lacks an identity. It just has weird ways to accomplish the same objective.
every two colour pair has a bunch of different themes? I don't think Boros is entirely out to lunch when compared to any other colour. The major shift you can attribute a lot of this to is Boros moving it's identity away from the combat step and towards the graveyard and artifacts.
This diversity is better for the game honestly. Why would you want to restrict a 2 color combination to such a narrow theme anyways? It just blocks creativity. As long as the theme of a commander matches up with the wide variety of themes within the colors it is made up of, it should be considered breaking color identity. Just think about it this way, simic is good at +1/+1 counters AND lands matter AND big creature ramp, but these are all accepted as on color for simic. And even if we wanted to stay with attacks matter for boros, a lot of the wacky commanders used as examples in this video still do this. Feather is basically just pump your guys over and over and attack. Winota literally has an attack trigger. And then they make stuff like the lorehold elder dragon who casts instants and sorceries, bit also only by attacking. So, overall, I'm glad they are branching out as it makes for a more diverse and interesting game.
I feel like the "every commander is completely unique and different and new" is now _the_ identity for Boros, and as a forever Boros player I very much like it.
As you say multiple times, Boros was for the longest time only about attacking and aggro, with an occasional equipment subtheme (that also usually involved attacking); so for there to now be so many new and different Legends every set feels amazing.
Being different every card can also be seen as a great strength, since you look at Boros and wonder "what amazing new weird commander will they come up with next?", whereas Golgari is always a graveyard Legend, Selesnya is always a go-wide, Azorius is always control, Simic is always the super boring "do something easy, draw a card and put a land out", etc.
I've had an Aurelia, the Warleader deck since she released in 2013. Before that Brion Stoutarm was my go-to deck (which back that was decently unique for a Boros commander), so I'm no stranger to Boros. I feel like exploring different things that the color combination can do is a very good thing for the game in general. Especially when it seemed like other color combinations were already exploring different themes. I remember when Kalemne was released, a lot of players were frustrated because it seemed like she was just "generic Boros commander #26." In my opinion, spicing up the color combo is a great thing!
interested to see your list if you have one, especially bcause there are so many removal pieces in 2022 magic. I tried aurelia before but was public enemy
I think there is a through line for Boros, but it's more tied to the psychology of the colors than the identity. Hear me out.
Red and White are enemy colors, but they do mechanically similar things, albeit with different focus: both are great at removal, but R favors artifacts and direct damage, while W favors exile and enchantments. So between those, you have an identity that seeks to unify and strike out against anything it perceives as injust or counter to the freedoms they uphold.
I think the core focus around artifacts (with different commanders favoring different types of artifacts, be they vehicles or equipment or...eggs?) makes sense, as that reads to me like W saying to R, "You know, you don't have to break everything unnatural. Here's a way to use it." R then turns around to tell W, "You're allowed to gather resources for just yourself, before you try to help others. You know that, right?"
Does the color pair have it's weaknesses? Absolutely. But I think it's more cohesive, albeit flexible, than you're suggesting.
Anyway, back to my Zirda deck. I'm trying to combine value artifacts and cycling for a very fast deck.
I'm Boros fan for a long time. I already have over 10 decks for this 2 color combination. For me this is best thing that I'm able play my favorite colors in so many different ways.
As someone who has been trying to make Commander Liara Portyr focus on stealing opponent’s cards I can’t agree more. The deck feels like it’s in two halves with red doing the steeling and white buffing the combat because there are only 2/3 boros cards that support her play style. I hope that these experimental commanders start to pick up popularity so they get some support later on down the line.
Might be a good thing that Boros is all over the place.
Just take a look at Simic....+1/+1 counters and big creatures mostly if you ask me. With maybe a slight land-related theme with all dem land-matter commanders.
I think it's a good thing that Boros is going ' wider' so to speak.
I think two-color combinations being pigeonholed into specific themes is a bad thing in general, so the more they move away from that, the better. I'd like to see it happen with other color combinations. Ravnica has too much influence on the game.
As much as I love Ravnica, I couldn’t agree more
Queen Kayla Bin-Kroog seems to be doing an aggro theme
If you do a circle graph White and Red converge on: Combat tricks, equipment, going wide, white control, red damage, Angels and dragons, Goblins and humans, artifact sacrifice and recursion.
I think Boros and Gruul are in the same boat but Gruul got a slam dunk with Raggadragga :P
Red and White have always been good at moving artifacts around, saccing them, discarding them and getting them back, there just was not a commander for it.
Boros Eggs was even a modern deck at some point if I am not mistaken.
Winota is just an attacky deck but actually in an interessting way where you have to think about your creature types.
Heroic/prowess has always been a boros thing and feather was designed as a nod to that.
Roderik and F&S are quite unique, Roderik always felt like a card designed for multicolored decks who happens to be multicolored because that gives him extra synergy in those decks and R/W just felt like the best fit for the charakter/mechanic.
F&S on the other hand are just a homage to lightning helix, probably the most iconic boros magic card.
Boros always had more stuff going on than just the equipment/attack stuff, there just were no commanders allowing you to do it.
Interesting reflection indeed. I am not sure though that the most popular commanders in any color combination are the best example of the color theme. After all people play commanders which are strong or interesting, so either that do a powerful theme very well or are actually different than most other commanders. Would be cool to look at this in more detail, actually. What are the color-pair key themes and compare them to what the top commanders are doing. Thanks for your videos, huge fan of your deckbuilding ideas.
Yea I mean you can find a pretty crazy variety of commanders even in mono color. It’s true that a lot of boros commanders have very different play styles but I think flavor-wise they still make sense.
I would say Kayla bin-Kroog is VERY boros.
She wheels, and i think it is red that wheels the best, maybe not most but is is the color with wheel of fortune. And artifact recursion is found in boros newly and something it also has done before Osgir. And recurring a mass of small 1, 2 and 3 mana permanents certainly isn't black, rather wanting one big thing, but does fit well with other white cards such as Abiding Grace
Boros is a colour combination that still very rarely speaks to me, but I'm still appreciating the extra experimentation in the themes it's allowed to do. Magic's design feels like it has, in many ways, grown more stale over time, so it's very refreshing to see cards that support new possibilities or commanders that make themselves into unique build-arounds (very much looking at Ivy here).
Some of my favourite archetypes are ones that bend into unusual colours (...mostly Black, tbh), since it gives you a chance to appreciate unique cards that normally don't get the light of day, such as Ghen giving us enchantments & especially auras/curses in Mardu of all colours.
I think a lot of these aren't as different as you're making them seem. The spirit tribal and multi color ones, those one are definitely out there, 100% agree. But the others are playing with the same themes as old ones, just in new ways.
Osgir: how the hell did it take this long to get this effect in boros?!? Mono red AND white could already do this, how'd it take so long?
Feather: in the end, this (usually) just plays out as an attacking deck, it just uses combat tricks, which are near universally garbage in edh, as its gimmick.
Firesong and Sunspeaker: lightning helix, warleader's helix, balefire liege, ajani vengeant. Just a new spin on the effect.
Winota: the human/non-human part is very unique, but really, it's just a combat/attack deck. So, new gimmick for combat.
Depala: just an equipment commander, but with added vehicle AND tribal options!
Alibou: again, just an attacking deck, with a focus on artifacts. With the neat trick of the artifacts not needing to be creatures, so bonus!
Zabaz: never really had a modular commander before, but, especially in limited, if you're going to have an artifact aggro deck, what colors is it going to be? Following in Alibou's footsteps, reinforcing boros as a color that likes artifact creatures. Also again, how was this not already a thing?
As for the queen, while the effect is new, it'a literally just combining wheeling (red) with reanimating cheap creatures/artifacts (white). Similar to FaS, just sticking something each color does together.
Tl;dr, boros is getting a bunch of new ways to interact with the same things it always has, with some real curveballs thrown in for good measure.
So my ideas here are a couple things. First off, I feel that as commander has taken over the magic format, wotc has had to blur or redefine the color pie so that red and white colors can keep up with the card draw that has become so necessary in other colors. And even though Boros is known for attacking, attacking is less of an advantage for commander than it is in a 60 card format. So they have to branch out what boros does. But all these cards you mentioned don’t really fall outside the red and white shell. Firesong and sunspeaker focus on damage and life gain. Ferrous rokeric creates creature tokens that attack at what can be very explosive rates, artifact tokens no less and both red and white have synergy with artifacts. Same for osgir. White does recursion well so why shouldn’t boros? I feel like there was no reason to hold it to attacking only for so long. And the only thing that makes sense to me is the unplanned history of commander and how they are trying to incorporate it now.
Captain Lyra Portyr is a super underrated commander in my opinion. She’s currently my favorite deck, a colorless/eldrazi deck that impulse draws a lot and reduces the costs of spell as much as possible. Its pretty often that I hard cast Ulamog or Kozilek for 2 mana. Also, if you get the full trigger, any 3 mana or less mana rocks are just free.
Boros is the color combo of aggression and combat strategy. It has subthemes of equipment, buffing, and artifacts in general.
Wow. Thanks
I think the color pie made more sense earlier in the game when there were less cards and fewer sets. At this point, with 30 years worth of game history,, if they were following the color pie to the letter, they probably would have run out of design space a long time ago. And even early in the game history, there were deviations from what the colors were known for, Drop of Honey comes to mind. I think it's cool that Boros' identity is open ended. Like you said in your video, it's given players who enjoy red and white (myself included) more fun and interesting options. Great video!
I've been an artifact-heavy player since around Shards of Alara. While blue is my favorite color to play, I did note that artifact themes were a little too stuck in blue. But it feels weird that recently my collection went hardly much red to a ton of red. It was nice getting a commander that supports Modular (Zabaz), I still had a favorite deck of that to finally convert to commander.
Some of the cards I can and can't choose feel weird. Cranial Plating and Skeleton Shard were some of my favorites alongside Modular, but they're black identity. Splashed some green for Soul's Might (X +1 counters equal to power, aka doubling), red for Dismantle (destroy artifact and transfer counters, effectively doubling on modular). Otherwise white and blue were the backbone, hitting all colors for that Sunburst (I'm sad that Zabaz kills Arcbound Wander, such an elegant card with only needing to say "Modular - Sunburst").
Modular creatures definitely want to be always attacking, and that side of Boros is still clear in its identity. But "wanting to die in combat" seems more Orzhov. Also I feel like they didn't want to run artifact themes in Izzet because of the spellslinger identity, but ... eventually they did. Still red. It feels like old artifact support is getting pushed out kinda hard.
As far as the identity of Boros beyond always attacking, it seems to me like it like it has a huge presence with Double Strike, and perhaps Indestructible. Otherwise good access to more combat winning keywords. I don't know where they want direct effect damage in its identity; seems mixed between whether they want that a part of Boros or not.
They have individuality in common. Seems red/white to me
i like to imagine boros as being a bit of a wild card color combination. there are just so many different ways of interpreting the two, and as enemies, they seem to do the opposite of each other. firesong and sunspeaker in particular show this aspect of their relationship. it perfectly encapsulates the two sides of war, the reason there *are* two gods of war in greek and roman mythology. when the two do work together, in particular for equpment/aura or artifact decks, they shift into a one-man-army kinda archetype.
In the strixhaven boros archetype, they shifted into a more "thrill of possibility" style, where they were using the revival ability of white and the chaotic recycling nature of red.
I actually like the feel of boros, where the two colors that make it up are like rivals. should you just deal as much damage as quickly as possible? buff and build your army? or are you risking it all on one creature to win it all? the two combine into risk and reward, the flames of life, and the flame that burns your hand, the blind rage of battle, and the cunning strategy of war.
goddammit i geeked out over the one color combination I never play.
Thank god it isn't tied down to one identity or theme. That would be boring as hell.
Boros, from Ravnica, does have an attacking theme. But not every set needs to be Ravnica, red/white is much more than Boros.
People who complain Boros is all over the place have no right complaining about Izzet being pretty much exclusively spellslinging.
Boros has too much going on and Izzet has too little? What is the exact number of themes to make these people who complain no matter what happy?
I think it's great that Boros has branched out in recent years. It's not the only colour combination that has done this, and other combinations also have multiple different themes associated with them.
As for that new Brothers' War spoiler, I can absolutely see that being in Boros colours. It's common to see commanders that do specific things for each colour they are. E.g. Firesong and Sunspeaker - the damage is red, the life gain is white. In this new commander's case, the wheeling is red, the artifact recursion is both red and white, and the creature recursion is white. Could also have been red/black, I suppose, but recurring things based on mana value is much more white than black.
Boros is attacking matters. RW is a lot more than that.
Also, no one says this about GB. Golgari is graveyards matter, on tarkir it was large toughness, in scars it was poison, in innistrad it was delirium, on kaladesh it was +1 counters, on ixalan it was explore, strixhaven had life gain matters, modern horizons 2 had tokens matter. Does GOLGARI even have an IDENTITY?
But for some reason people are obsessed with RW.
I think the issue is that wizards were going heavy down the equipment role for boros and there's only so many abilities you can do for that without just outright nullifying previous commanders, so now they're becoming somewhat if a miscellaneous category, and honestly I have no problem with that
If boros' identity seems confusing, then I wonder what you think of Grixis
Dimir has the draw-discard theme. The discard-draw theme is red
isn't it weird that when Boros had the identity of being the attacking colours everyone complained that it was bad. Now it's branching out and people complain that it doesn't have an identity?
who's complaining?
@@edhdeckbuilding just based on people I've spoken with before. The common theme seems to be Boros is now bad because it does too much but there's usually a commander in a different identy who does what ever the Boros commander wants to do but better. A common one is when I play my Alibou artifact storm deck I get asked why I don't just play Jhoira instead. But I think the new Boros identity is control through aggression. We all know how hard it can be to play against a Feather who is dropping a Chandra's ignition every turn, a firesong and sunspeaker who keeps wiping the board when things are starting to get out of hand and in Alibou you're going to be killing at least one creature/planeswalker every combat before you take into account things like strionic resonator, helm of the host or lithoform engine giving you even more triggers to kill your opponents key pieces
On the topic of Queen Kayla not feeling like a boros commander.
Wheel effects are absolutely a red effect, discarding your hand and drawing that many certainly feels like it's on-color for a red commander.
The other ability, reanimating creatures or artifacts with low mana value, is also well within boros identity and has been for quite some time, even without a good commander for it.
Red has cards Goblin Welder and Goblin Engineer to represent its ability to reanimated artifact cards. There is even a mono-red commander, Daretti Scrap Savant, that fits within this theme quite well. Using his first ability to loot away artifacts before reanimating them.
White also has a history of reanimating artifacts. Cards like Refurbish are a great example of this, additionally the focus on low mana value permanents is found with other cards like Sun Titan and Sevinne's Reclamation, which can both reanimate low mana value artifacts from your graveyard. This is in addition to white's ability to reanimate creatures, which it is well known for.
Everything Queen Kayla does is perfectly within pie for boros, and I'm glad WotC is designing boros in new interesting ways.
I enjoy spellslinger and artifacts so General Ferrous Rockric is an awesome boros commander for me and it’s unique enough to not really come up often in pods I play with
My feather the redeemed is a pretty mean deck. it's a lot of cantrips and payoffs for those cantrips, but some of those payoffs can get out of hand, like Zada, Hedron Grinder, Mirror-Wing Dragon, storm-kiln artist let's you stack up treasure for a massive turn later on, young pyromancer gets you creatures for just playing your deck normally, and gives you a means of using indomitable creativity to nuke your tokens and turn them into things like Gisela and Rem Karolus. Angelfire Ignition is the best targeted spell to come out recently for feather. Feather is a lot of fun to pilot.
The real problem I see with the line of thinking is that Boros =/= Red/White.
It's a good shorthand, sure, but the Boros Legion as the faction on Ravnica shouldn't define the color combination. Sure because we've been to Ravnica a few times it's influential, but the go wide/go hard/combat sweep sort of style can't define a whole color pairing. When it does, it's just really boring.
As an easy comparison, look at Strixhaven's Schools vs Ravnica's Guilds. Lorehold had a much bigger recursion and artifact theme than Boros, and Red/White do artifacts and recursion well. Witherbloom is likes spreading out tokens, draining opponents and gaining life, things both colors already do well. Compare it to the Golgari who are all about recursion. It's been awhile since I looked... but I don't think that Witherbloom has much actual recursion at all, certainly not comparatively. Feel free correct me if I'm wrong. Silverquill has a big politics angle to it, but even without it, it's great at spreading counters, making inklings, and has more reactive spells. Sure Orzhov has a lot of tokens, but it is closer to Witherbloom, as it has a much higher focus on draining opponents/oppressing them.
And then we got to Prismari and Quandrix. Prismari, like the Izzet, sling spells. Quandrix is more about making tokens than the Simic, but they both ramp and spread out those +1/+1 counters. They don't really have any different base to them than the others. Sure they do things their colors do, but they don't have the sort of different flair the other colleges do. You could slap most of those two schools' cards in their corresponding guild and vice versa, and not sure you'd notice the difference. Way less so with the other schools.
And those three schools handled it in a great way. More versatility makes things more interesting, it's usually better to focus on the color pie and have them explored in different ways when interacting with another color. A big example is when Firesong and Sunspeaker is mentioned. Sure, the Mino-bros might not have much to do with Basandra or Osgir or Feather, but they are GREAT at embodying how Red and White can mix. All the spells having link, making everything effectively a Lightning Helix (which itself is a combination of Lightning Bolt and Healing Salve) is just on point. Plus whenever you gain life you get to Lightning Bolt someone? The Mino-bros are a great Red/White creature. Feather is in two of the colors with really the most beneficial and diverse buff spells/protection/combat tricks. Green does have a lot, but usually just making things big. Black is usually more double edged sword buffs or just murdering opponent's creatures so they don't mess with yours. Blue... doesn't have many. Usually evasion vs buffs. A Red/White creature than makes them all multi-use? Totally in theme for the colors. More of the color pairing commanders should try to experiment with the aspects of what their colors do vs the same things over and over.
3:30 That and that she is one of the cheapest and easiest commanders to build. Seriously, the day i made her i took me 3 weeks and less than $40 USD to get the cards and it took that much time not because no one had the cards i was looking for but because everyone had them in their house rotting doing nothing and i had to wait for them to find them in their bulk boxes.
I don’t know what’s happening, but I’m fully onboard with it. I already have a Feather deck that I love, a Koll combo deck, and a Zabaz 0 power tribal/modular deck. I never liked Boros because I hated their old flavor, but there are interesting and flexible commanders now, and I love it.
I feel like you can find a lot of variety in all 2 color combinations, though I agree that Boros has pivoted dramatically in recent years while the others are relatively unchanged
Queen Kayla makes sense to me. Discarding to draw cards is very red(Faithless Looting, the wheels, etc.) and artifacts are historically a white and blue thing. I think it makes sense but it definitely is a strange but powerful commander.
I think that the problem is pretty basic. The Central Theme of Boros (combat + equipment) has not changed but it doesn't work in commander so the boros commanders that become popular are the ones that stand out and do unusual things. If you ignored selesnya token commanders or izzet spellslinger commanders, those combos would seem to have pretty scattered identities as well.
Izzet still easily falls back on artifacts and tinkering, being the 2 primary artifact colors on the pie (though these days only green is slightly lagging behind on the amount of "artifact matters" cards). Selesnya can fall back on enchantress themes with no issue. Of course, there's less people playing artifacts in just 2 colors anymore, and generic value enchantress decks have been been overshadowed by token and tribal strategies in more recent years. Both those color pairs still have very strong identities. If you stripped graveyards from Golgari however, you basically uninvent the color combo and are left with sporadic weird things like Carth Superfriends.
I feel like Azorius has way less of an identity than Boros. Just look at their top 10 commanders, that's actually all over the place.
Agreed, there's naturally some common sights like blink and... Birds, but you also don't see a lot of commanders really embody the two colors in the same way that Golgari or orzhov do. White tokens fuelling black sacrifice or black using the graveyard as a resource for Green's creatures.
Two things come to mind when talking about Azorius flying and blink. Apart from my own Noyan Dar deck (which was awefull) I have not really played against an azorius deck without those flying of blink being strongly represented.
My favorite Boros deck is my Mila/Lukka superfriends deck. There are so many planeswalker support cards in white, and red has some big mean Creatures. I always try to get Mila and Lukka out on the battlefield for a Flavor win.
for the spoiled card, the wheel portion feels red and the recur cheap artifacts feels both red (welder effects) and white (teshar stuff, sevinne's reclamation kind of stuff). tbh i wish other multicolor identities had this much variety. Simic has 90-some legends that all essentially do the same thing
I’m actually making a rograhk and Dog deck. T1 2 commander creatures in play every game. Both of them are obviously good voltron candidates.
As someone that runs this Deck they seriously fuck
@@TheRealRonShady1911 rn I run Rograhk Thrasios so I do hope they do. In rograhk thrasios I use rograhk as a body to manipulate and never as an attacker for damage output. So I figured I’d give it a whirl.
@@TheRealRonShady1911 I don’t think I’ll like anything as much as how subtlety powerful rograhk is just due to Fury storm + Gale’s redirection requiring 2+ commander casts to be an online threat combo. Never seen anyone else running it tho.
Jeska Thrice reborn is the ultimate threat in that deck it makes combat damage triple
Honestly Kayla is a kind of commander I've been looking for for a while. Loot with red (wheel in this case), then get what you discarded back with white reanimation. I JUST built Alesha to make this, though...
So on the topic of Queen Kayla, Red has both Draw/Discard and Artifact recursion in its colour pie. Stuff Scrap Mastery, Trash for Treasure, & Goblin Welder really emphasize this. She’s definitely in the red part of the color pie, so the second color is likely either white or black. What cinches white is she also cares about small creatures imo. None of these new legends break the color pie, the problem with Boros was it’s very much stuck in the Ravnica concept of Boros where it should be viewed as combination of Red and White.
My consistent encounters with and feelings about Boros/Lorehold colored brews...
...is they're not usually interesting, or they seldom show up in the wild, unless the deck's player has a preference for niche builds, or just wants to drop a big 'ol honkin' Gisela on the field... ...where as I usually end up building decks which fill the various roles or themes outside of Boros, even if such means Jeskai, Mardu, or Naya.
The only time I see myself brewing or considering to brew something in white-red, it involves Partner, Partner With (Sylvia//Korvath), or Choose a Background.
I was going to build Feather, but then the first Commander Legends set came out. I already have a Ardenn//Rograkh auras + equipment brew, I lack the knights and dragons for Sylvia//Korvath, and I'm unsure what to brew from Baldur's Gate, though I know I definitely prefer a Choose a Background combination.
I appreciate the way your brain works. Really interesting observations here!
I came here for the deck building, leaving for the opinions. They are just clouds. Maybe stop yelling at them.
I'd say I can make a low to the ground vehicle recursion deck with the new Boros commander and running every artefact and vehicle commander relevant to the theme, with treasure generation to fuel the whole enterprise right now.
the wheel engine is what was missing for keeping up card draw in the deck outside of exile matters.
What about Ardenn and Rograkh? Great commander combo for a boros equipment deck, one of my favs.
I think the heroic theme from WAR definitely fits with the old-fashioning attacking theme.
What precisely do you want then? Would you prefer Boros to be more like Simic? Since all their Commanders as of late just Ramp and Draw?
There is some connective tissue between the Legends you showed off. Cards that enable a go-wide, aggressive, combat-focused strategy, there's some that enable artifact-focused strategies as well. Sounds perfectly on-theme to me. And some that just provide you some protection and recursion so you aren't just out of the game when somebody resolves a board wipe.
We should be exploring what these colors can do, we should be finding new design space, otherwise we're just going to see the same effects over and over potentially driven up by Power Creep, causing new cards to just usurp roles from older ones.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Captain Rex Nebula, who is wildly different from all the others mentioned.
I wish they lean more into the lifelink theme. Its very attacky and life gainy at the same time. I've always wanted to see a lifelink tribal type commander and boros would be perfect for that.
I always thought of Boros as: unified/enduring/aggression with a side of artifacts
And here I was thinking of making a General Ferrous Rokiric deck.
I love variety and that sometimes we get commander that almost defy the color pie. I would love to have a Boros enchantress, but Boros is one of the color combinations that is not my jam so I am not in a hurry 😹
Boros leaning into artifacts makes sense; Red is, by far, the leading color for treasure (artifact) producers, white is the go--to color for equipment.
In hindsight, the turning point for Boros was the printing of *Feather the Redeemed.* She, Osigur, and Winota are each value engines unto themselves. Boros was starved for Noncombat Commaders until Feather proved the concept.
I feel like the card master warcraft and iroas god of victory perfectly sum up what boros is about, sort of like this strategic combat thing.
When you were listing off commanders that weren't similar to each other I just went "oh you're supposed to attack, oh you're supposed to attack, oh..." They all had attacking themes 😂
That's the red white color identity, attacking matters. It's a midground between red burn and go-wide white weenies. Maro said that its signature ability would be battle cry.
Yep, it is still the color of righteous fury. Do the new commanders give build variety? Yes. Is this the same in other color combo's? For the most part yes.
I would like his take on Orzhov though. It is a popular color combination but to me it seems that 90% of Orzhov commanders do a pretty similar/boring(?) aristocrats thing with little true variation.
I think what's important is that many of these commanders encourage combat, but that doesn't mean you can't use them in unique ways. Plus, there's some sleeper partner pairs in Boros that let you do some fun stuff.
As for Queen Kayla, I would associate her with Izzet, rather than Dimir: draw-discard and artifact sinergies are very Red/Blue.
So, with Red already having draw-discard sinergies and White being very recursion centric, it makes sense for her to be Boros
I think Boros kinda went Vorthos in their card designs.
There's no central theme tying the Boros commanders together, but they are usually given two abilities, with each being a primary or secondary thing the red & white colors can do.
Eg, Queen Kayla bin-Kroog has an ability that rummages (discards cards then draws cards) and returns artifacts/creatures from graveyard to the battlefield. Rummage is primarily a red ability while creature and artifact grave recursion are primarily a white ability.
The thing is, these abilities make less sense when they're both on the same card. They're kinda *mashed* together.
I think it's a good thing the commanders are all over the place though. It brings varioty and keeps things from being stale. Boros still means equipment and combat to me though.
what is the least popular two colour combo?
Boros' theme is controlled chaos I would say
This is a very Boros flavored card, they nailed it with this.
The discard effect is a red thing with many different cards, it’s one of their main themes is discard your hand and draw that many cards.
White is great at recurring things with CMC 3 or less, think sun titan and sevinnes reclamation.
I think the previous strategy they had for boros commanders was especially weak compared to commanders that by default are much stronger due to the colors strength like simic for example. They had to change up their strategy for boros because the colors are already weaker in commander than the rest and combat focused cards were not the way to go.
There’s this aspect in my head that Boros is the don’t count me out yet, underdog. Which kinda reflects both in the meta and gameplay. Getting back small things because they aren’t down for the count to me is the most red white thing a card could do.
I think it hasa common theme most of it, either it's some attack related theme either some recursion low cmc cards either any of the main monoW or monoR themes
To me Boros is all about prepping for war. Whether it's buffing with auras, spells, and equipments or creating troops with tokens or healing and fortifying with vigilance and lifeline effects.
Boros focuses on artifacts: equipment, dwarves, vehicles, sunforger
I feel like the disparate themes isn't a bad thing so long as those themes get more support. I love Boros/Mardu, but I can't seem to find a commander or theme that I am particularly enthused by that has a good amount of support
For me boros standed a long time for being weak and still try to fight out.
Esp cause alot of things that would help boros out, where unpopular, like stax, hatebears, boardwipes/hardcontroll.
So the main way was being a stupidly overcosted card that has more cost on itself to equip things that get in responce destroyed.
You could play boros another way, but that just means you do stuff every other combination does allready better.
After years boros got at least support on what it allready does bad to not fall completely behind but every other idea they had for boros was thrown away like "hit yourself" or "burn + lifegain"(what btw is just an variant of drain).
I would say boros itself never had an other identity next to equipment strats. I say that cause if we look only at boros cards themselfs they are mostly just weak, or too less represented strats. It will just be fine if we take mono white/red cards by themselfs that we see it does strong things, far stronger then most boros cards. But thats not boros per se, thats mono white combined with mono red.
And im telling that, while containing 2 of them.
One of them is brion that uses the low cost red cards that sac themselfs and the high costed white cards to oneshot.
I had the hit yourself cards in but that was way too slow.
Feather was the flicker deck that has only feather as a boros card.
Again i tried other boros cards but outside of a tutorheavy deck this is just not close to other combinations.
Boros! Do something different!
*Boros does something different"
No! That's [theme]! Try again!
7:09 idk what you're talking about here...bin-kroog is such a white-red card. Wheeling is totally a red ability, and returning permanents of specific mana value from graveyard to battlefield shows up almost exclusively in white, especially for artifacts...
dimir? seems more like an izzet thing. red for artifacts/impulse draw. Blue for draw effects.
I would say Boros is evolving rather quick. On top of focusing on combat through tokens and voltron, now you have boros artifacts, boros spell slinger/storm and boros staxx.
Theme: Create a lot of value for cheap, but without big combos of many cards.
How is Queen Kayla NOT in flavour with Boros? Recursion is totally white (Against All Odds?), and draw/discard is very red (Faithless Looting? Thrill of Possibility? Cathartic Reunion?), also white plays a lot with artifacts so I think Queen Kayla is a quintessential Boros card!
Other than that, I agree with you - Boros IS all over the place. And that's because white and red individually can do pretty much anything (bar tutoring and countering, to a certain degree, or milling). I like the idea of Boros being all over the place from a philosophical pov, it perfectly embodies the Boros mentality from Ravnica: powerful creatures/soldiers expressing sometimes conflicting individualities, selfless heroes serving a greater good, beacon of morality and (com)passion. It's like the MHA universe, the Justice League or any fictional alliance of superheroes - they are all different and adding something unique to the table. Unity in the scope, individuality in the means, this is very Boros in my opinion.
Mechanically, this makes it hard to play as there's a lot of internal contradiction and sometimes lack of coordination - Civil War anyone?
Wow, queen Kayla goes right into my quintorius deck
The primary theme and identity of Boros is AGGRESSION. Aggression just happens to come in many different forms. It can be Go Wide aggro, it can be Go Tall aggro, it can be Additional Combats aggro. Boros is ANGRY. It is here to create creatures, make creatures big, spit out free creatures, and then punch you DIRECTLY IN THE TEETH with them.
The subthemes for Boros is Artifacts, and caring about Specific Limitations. Caring specifically about low mana value, caring specifically about multicolor spells, etc.
One thing I notice is that whatever direction they are a lot commander centric, I like feather but the fact that the decks heavily relies on feather to be working has put me off building it, same goes for winota, kayla and Osgir
I personally would have guessed Kayla as red blue I don't really see black being more fitting.
Boros = protection, advantage, removal, aggression and extra turns
Multicolor creatures can represent any aspects of the color pie of its constituent parts. The joke of Boros was that it only did aggressive things (sometimes with equipment) instead of exploring different takes on the combo.
No one bats an eye at the fact momir vig, experiment kraj and tatyova, Bentic druid are dissimilar.