Lets get back to the basics! Some classic old school MTG lore brought to a new card in Commander Legends. Don't forget to share this video with your Commander playgroup!
The rules for this set aren't fully released as far as I know, but with his ultimate ability all that happens is you get the creatures on your battlefield. They just act like normal creatures or planeswalker a for you. "Partner" only matters at the beginning of the game when you pick your commander, otherwise you cannot partner commanders mid game, from your deck or someone else's.
If not for your explaining he's an older walker i wouldve though he was just MTG's version of ursala the sea witch heck his abilities follow the theme of ursala's contracts sacrafice X to get Y and then take it all
Fun Fact: if you use Szats -10 while he has exactly 10 loyalty, you will return to the command zone before the ability resolved and you would get him back under your control along with all the other commanders.
He technically didn't need to. The only reason he needed Szat to betray them was so Urza could sacrifice Szat to fuel his mega nukes while having a "moral pretext". Urza really is just another bad guy, when you think about it...
@@---rm8do I think nobody is denying, that Urza was not the typical good guy and made some pretty controversial decisions in his life. But that also makes him an interesting character in my eyes.
Urza was not a popular dude, even amongst other planeswalkers. His obsession with stopping the phyrexian threat through any means possible made the others very, very wary of trusting him, because they knew he viewed them not as allies but as tools.
Important footnote not mentioned in the video is that he did not randomly plainswalk when his spark ignited because he could not. All plainswalkers were trapped on Dominaria at the time. Dominaria was a shard split off from the rest of the multiverse from the end of Antiquities through Alliances.
In regards to your question, you only gain control over everyone else's commander, they would not become your commander, its much like the difference between controlling a permanent and owning one.
Just an addition I thought about during your comment on Urza at the end. You mention that it speaks to his character that he is willing to sacrifice even allies to achieve his goals ( igniting the soul bombs, in this case ). However, I actually think this details something deeper because I don't think that was a "normal" Urza personality trait---At least not one that didn't start to manifest until later as the war with the Phyrexians grew. Previous stories of Urza show him trying to save others, for example Serra's realm. Urza, at this point, where he assembles the titans, had started changing though. Immediately after this moment in the story Urza surrenders himself to Yawgmoth after being tempted; now forced to battle Gerrard to see who would be Yawgmoth's new champion. Even in this moment we're offered insight into why: He became obsessed/fascinated by Phyrexia ( Literally even commenting on how an artificial plane was exciting to study and the entirety of Phyrexia's goals of "living metal/machines" was becoming his goal too. )...And what's one trait that we know Phyrexia well for?....Sacrifice as cost of betterment/improvement---The ends always justify the means. I feel like willingess to sacrifice even his closest friends and bitter enemies was foreshadowing to Urza giving into Phyrexia in the end ( which he did ). It also closes a full circle on the Brother's War---Where Urza witnessed his brother become obsessed & manipulated with/by Phyrexia as well.
If you actually read the cards, the bombs that Urza was using, they needed a planeswalker spark in order to power them and used Tevesh Szat's spark to power them!
@@ZanZerejin look winning with tevesh szat is interesting but he's probably just better added into superfriends, but the fact wizards finaly realized planswalkers need to have ults designed arround doubling season is probaby why he started at 4 making him pretty lame by himself no matter what
Yeah key wording is "If the sacrificed permanent was "a" Commander", making his ending ability and his second work well together if your not winning at that point, fish for answers with other people commanders, making the meta to target the partner mechanic.
I am pretty sure that his sister wasn't killed by the Ebon hand, but rather by Farrel, the leader of the Farrelites. As the evil cleric was madly in love with her and couldn't handle her rejecting him. The Ebon Hand was actually pretty neutral in the Sarpadian wars until they got attacked. But that is kinda besides the point. Tev completely lost it when his sister got murdered and decided to take it out on all of Sarpadia. Had he not intervened, there might have been survivors of the various Sarpadian Empires other than the Merfolk (who had the good sense to get the heck out of there.), he started by dropping the entire orc army on an Icatian city and went on from there. By the time he was done, there were only Brassclaw Orcs, Thrull, and Thallids left, and the Orcs were rapidly going extinct.
Okay so how this plain Walker works is that if you do manage to get his Ultimate Off. You have a window of opportunity before he is vulnerable where someone could play a counterspell or play heroic intervention or Tiffer protection. If it does manage to go off anything that it doesn't have an immunity to his ability you, will be able tosteal your opponents Commanders. However it appears that he cannot Target them while your commanders are in the graveyard or they are exiled which means that his ability can be shut down if your deck revolves around you doing that.
I'll put him in my walker deck, but honestly his ultimate is so very hard to achieve, even with doubling season in play you can't ult him straight away like other walkers. I suppose if he was your commander you could get the chain veil and doubling season out, then you could cast and ult in the same turn.
Nice. Definitely pair him with leshrac. Those 2 are crazy when it comes to schemes. Leshrac is definitely black red. He doesn't chanel black magic... black magic seeks him.
1:52 Oh my #''#! I own one magic comic and it's the one where his sister is murdered and he transforms. I never thought that would be relevant to modern magic. I just bought it on ebay for the booster, years before I actually started playing.
I love the card itself. But flavorwise it makes no sense that 2 of his abilities are to create or conscript minions, when all he wanted was to be alone.
As far as function, the most useful ability will probably end up being the card draw in edh. The ultimate is cool, but most commanders work best in the context of their own decks.
im realy glad to see tevesh szat around ! .. sometimes wizards pulls the right strings in terms of bringing charackters back.. but they dont get the actuall card right.. most of the time. as with jeska . jeska she is one of those charackters i really appreatice and hoped maybe some day . wizards makes a good (better) card for her.. but then.. oops. this shitty planeswalker stuff happens..the new kamahl is maybe fine. in the 99.. so maybe that wasnt tooo bad after all but 8cmc ???. was that really necessary??? but man those should have been better cards... dont missunderstand .. i think tevesh szat is a good card as a planeswalker with some nice abilities and he got the way better card then jeska and kamahl ... and sry chaos always wins ! and for kamahl .. would have been to hard to pull of gruul colours ? to have both aspects of his story ? that would have been nice as a commander card doing a mixture of both prior versions... and yes i see that jeska works good with tevesh szat but thats just it.. Belbe on the hand. i think she got an amazing card!
@@AetherHub also while you control opponents commanders....commander damage is tied to the actual card so you can commander damage a player out of the game using an opponents commander....you can even eliminate a player with commander damage from their own commander
Sheoldred: My my what do we have here? Tevesh: soo ...much noise make it stop please.... Sheoldred: Ah fret not for you wish is just one bath in oil away then you can bring blissful silence to others with ease It would serprise me if he popped up on new phyrexia bathed in the oil and became a black phyrexian or heck if a strain of his body ending up on karns shoe and left on phyrexia
honestly i like the card design, i just don't like partner and i don't like wizards inserting text on cards that allows them to violate the rules of commander. the line "can be your commander" just seems gross to me. it's like they think commander belongs to them and they can just make exceptions to its rules on a whim. and partner is exactly the same thing except it's a keyword ability. but its "reminder text" is essentially nothing but an exception to the rules of commander. it has no meaning in any other format except commander and other derivative formats. i get that this is fun and makes the format more diverse, and it's not intrinsically bad to change the rules of commander. and by this point i get that these things have already long since been accepted. people just tolerate this kind of meddling. but it's not just that i think it's sort of invasive and gross, i also think it's indicative of the design philosophy behind these commander sets and other multiplayer-oriented sets. it feels like top-down design. like they decided they were gonna make planeswalker commanders and then set out to design cards that fit that design, and cards that would slot neatly into a deck with them. same with partner. instead of just designing cards and letting players decide what to do with them, it more and more feels like they're designing and selling prepackaged archetypes. i would have no problem with a playgroup deciding to allow certain planeswalkers as commanders or allowing players to use a combination of 2 commanders from a specific list. but i don't like how wizards does this itself, because it strongly encourages them to design decks or archetypes around these central cards, which naturally causes power creep in the worst variety, like it's power creep along very specific, narrow axes. when you set out to make 5 prebuilt decks, for example, and you want the cards within to actually be better than just playable, you're making specific archetypes more powerful from the top down. it reminds me of yu-gi-oh more than anything. there's often a lot of variety, especially across time but even within a single metagame. but there's very little creativity. you can pick one of a number of intentionally-designed and supported archetypes, but you can't just sit down and look at the metagame and the entire card pool and construct a competitive deck from scratch based on your own insights. you could try, but then you're up against people who are playing decks with 20 cards that specifically refer to each other, cards that were designed by konami from the top down to synergize with each other. they pick an archetype and they think of what could fit within it and then design a card like that. it's way beyond just narrow tribal creature synergies, or the broad archetypes in magic. so you will find a shit ton of cards with card text that literally name other specific cards by name. it's absurd. and yet that's exactly what you see in magic nowadays. it's not just with the partner mechanic, but with prebuilt decks in general. even the standard-legal prebuilt decks have a shit ton of cards that specifically tutor up a planeswalker or something. thankfully they offset that lameness by making the cards ridiculously weak. but that overall philosophy has seeped into how they build all the commander-specific cards. and it's not that i'm salty about the power level. the partner mechanic is definitely pretty popular in competitive edh but planeswalker commanders are usually pretty rare sights. the thing that bothers me is how these new commander sets affect casual play. these enticing new eternal-exclusive legendaries and their pre-planned archetypes encourage people to play into the pre-planned metagame that wizards had in mind when they were designing and playtesting the set. that's what really bothers me. they're adding cards to the card pool, yet somehow managing to narrow the casual metagame. i see fewer creative decks and a lot more decks that closely correspond to whatever wizards was planning. which sucks some fun out of the game for me. if i wanted to play a game where the entire experience was planned and configured in advance, i'd just play one of a million video games with that exact design philosophy. the thing that makes magic so fun is that it's NOT planned in advance. it's that you build your own deck and it's a form of self-expression. obviously there are plenty of magic formats where almost nobody plays their own deck. but commander from the very beginning was supposed to be THAT format. its rules and philosophy are designed to offset the natural propensity to hyper-optimize decks into narrow corners. one of the primary goals of making an independent format like commander is to create an avenue for self-expression, with very broad constraints on what is possible. so whether the cards are unusually strong or not, wizards' commander sets consistently feel like a total misunderstanding of the spirit of commander. i know it might sound like i'm taking the game too seriously. but it's not like i wander around shouting my grievances into the void. i'm only putting this to words now because it happened to come to mind and i thought i could articulate it. i'm not trying to guard the sanctity of commander or anything. it's just a pattern i've noticed that kind of bothers me, because it's inescapable. people think it's only about power level. that you just organize your playgroup around not playing overly competitive cards, or whatever. but that's not really the case. even in casual playgroups people still use these pre-canned strategies, because wizards has designed these archetypes at all different power levels. actually most of the canned archetypes are not even competitive. if you really want to make a competitive edh deck, you're better off just using your commander as a backup value engine, and filling your 99 with individually strong cards and a few "i win" combos you can tutor up. i think wizard's design philosophy for commander sets is more harmful to casual play than it is to competitive play. because the archetypes they're preparing are not competitive, they're actually pretty janky. but they're ATTRACTIVE jank. they're the fun kind of jank. they keep making these cards that seem really appealing, that do quirky things and seem to fit nicely into some particular synergy that's very satisfying to pull off. they're exactly the kind of jank that people want to play in casual commander. in fact i'd be so happy with them if they weren't so fucking obviously pre-planned. i wish they would do these commander sets more often as just regular sets rather than prebuilt decks. but honestly at this point i don't even know if that'd fix it. it seems like with the new standard-legal sets, the same problem is cropping up. like they're designing for archetypes rather than just designing. even though they're not pre-organized into decks, you get the feeling like they were designed for specific archetypes. i guess for regular sets that might just be a consequence of the game's age, and trying to maintain longstanding themes and color/tribe/plane flavors and stuff. but in the commander sets it's really obscene. anyway it seems like these archetypes they keep printing every couple years are mostly targeted at casual commander based on their design, and that's ultimately where i end up seeing them. i don't play many competitive edh games but i do surf cedh and edhrec and moxfield every now and then, and i rarely ever see these cards make a splash in the competitive scene. but i see these canned decks in casual games all the time. don't get me wrong, it's good that new players are able to start off with a prebuilt deck. i don't mind if they bring EXACTLY the prebuilt deck, not at all. but i would vastly prefer if wizards would instead design the set as a SET FIRST, and THEN organize cards from *multiple* sets into prebuilt decks. i wish wizards would sell actually viable prebuilt decks too. like instead of selling prebuilt decks composed entirely of cards from a single set (essentially on par with a draft deck) they should just sell sets and then sell prebuilt decks that contain cards from multiple sets. that should be part of their strategy for reprints, in my opinion. for example, if players want fetchlands, sell a series of prebuilt 2-color decks that have 4 fetchlands. or, knowing wizards, more likely 2 fetchlands per deck lol. but that way players can more reliably target copies of reprints they really badly want. i get that will never happen for many reasons. but it would be so much better if it did.
Why do you keep pronouncing Szat like it has the letter v in it? Is sz pronounced sv in another language like how the card Jokulhaups is pronounced like a y instead of a j?
Lets get back to the basics! Some classic old school MTG lore brought to a new card in Commander Legends. Don't forget to share this video with your Commander playgroup!
This was sick. Great work my dude!
The rules for this set aren't fully released as far as I know, but with his ultimate ability all that happens is you get the creatures on your battlefield. They just act like normal creatures or planeswalker a for you. "Partner" only matters at the beginning of the game when you pick your commander, otherwise you cannot partner commanders mid game, from your deck or someone else's.
If not for your explaining he's an older walker i wouldve though he was just MTG's version of ursala the sea witch heck his abilities follow the theme of ursala's contracts sacrafice X to get Y and then take it all
Fun Fact: if you use Szats -10 while he has exactly 10 loyalty, you will return to the command zone before the ability resolved and you would get him back under your control along with all the other commanders.
Wow that’s actually amazing. I’m used to just killing my Planeswalker off for its ultimate lol
And thus he's ready conveniently to backstab one of your new allies.
"Did I know Szat would betray us?" Urza asked quizzically. "I was counting on it."
- Confound flavortext
He technically didn't need to. The only reason he needed Szat to betray them was so Urza could sacrifice Szat to fuel his mega nukes while having a "moral pretext". Urza really is just another bad guy, when you think about it...
@@---rm8do I think nobody is denying, that Urza was not the typical good guy and made some pretty controversial decisions in his life. But that also makes him an interesting character in my eyes.
Urza was not a popular dude, even amongst other planeswalkers. His obsession with stopping the phyrexian threat through any means possible made the others very, very wary of trusting him, because they knew he viewed them not as allies but as tools.
Urza is the greatest character in Magic history, he is so grey his tears are ashes
Important footnote not mentioned in the video is that he did not randomly plainswalk when his spark ignited because he could not. All plainswalkers were trapped on Dominaria at the time. Dominaria was a shard split off from the rest of the multiverse from the end of Antiquities through Alliances.
I'm going to add him to my Yawgmoth deck. Proliferate to ult
That would be nasty. Mostly because proliferate scares me lol
Exactly.
In regards to your question, you only gain control over everyone else's commander, they would not become your commander, its much like the difference between controlling a permanent and owning one.
Hello Tevesh. Mother Atraxa is glad to welcome you in your new home.
Yay!! I’m so happy your doing content
love this content especially as a commander player.
Love this! Fun, positive look at a sweet new commander Legends card!
Just an addition I thought about during your comment on Urza at the end. You mention that it speaks to his character that he is willing to sacrifice even allies to achieve his goals ( igniting the soul bombs, in this case ). However, I actually think this details something deeper because I don't think that was a "normal" Urza personality trait---At least not one that didn't start to manifest until later as the war with the Phyrexians grew. Previous stories of Urza show him trying to save others, for example Serra's realm. Urza, at this point, where he assembles the titans, had started changing though. Immediately after this moment in the story Urza surrenders himself to Yawgmoth after being tempted; now forced to battle Gerrard to see who would be Yawgmoth's new champion. Even in this moment we're offered insight into why: He became obsessed/fascinated by Phyrexia ( Literally even commenting on how an artificial plane was exciting to study and the entirety of Phyrexia's goals of "living metal/machines" was becoming his goal too. )...And what's one trait that we know Phyrexia well for?....Sacrifice as cost of betterment/improvement---The ends always justify the means.
I feel like willingess to sacrifice even his closest friends and bitter enemies was foreshadowing to Urza giving into Phyrexia in the end ( which he did ). It also closes a full circle on the Brother's War---Where Urza witnessed his brother become obsessed & manipulated with/by Phyrexia as well.
Awesome video. Thank you for making this :)
Glad you enjoyed it :)
If you actually read the cards, the bombs that Urza was using, they needed a planeswalker spark in order to power them and used Tevesh Szat's spark to power them!
I’m so hyped for this. Oathbreaker phyrexian walker for days!
I like all the people freaking out about his -10... it’s a -10 in a 4 player format... if they get to that, they were already going to win...
Exactly why I don’t freak out at it. It is insane as unlikely as it is
@@AetherHub proliferate, and cards like clock spinning.
Its not that hard to get him up to -10. Doubling season and some proliferate triggers and he is there.
@@ZanZerejin Yeah and it's not that hard to win on turn 4 either..............
@@ZanZerejin look winning with tevesh szat is interesting but he's probably just better added into superfriends, but the fact wizards finaly realized planswalkers need to have ults designed arround doubling season is probaby why he started at 4 making him pretty lame by himself no matter what
I've never heard anyone say "Tev" before in my life unless they're explicitly talking about my brother Tev; until today.
Yeah key wording is "If the sacrificed permanent was "a" Commander", making his ending ability and his second work well together if your not winning at that point, fish for answers with other people commanders, making the meta to target the partner mechanic.
This guy is gonna be my new commander baby with kydele 😁
Dude he is so much fun. Needs some time to pull off that nasty ultimate. But all the card draw 🤤
Oh man imagine if urza did have partner
Here lies Commander as we would know it
Honestly, Irma doesn’t need partner he’s throng enough, so I’d say fortunately he doesn’t have it from a game perspective at least.
Great video love this lore it really does help with the cards and knowing as much as I can about this wonderful game and universe
Glad you enjoyed it :)
I am pretty sure that his sister wasn't killed by the Ebon hand, but rather by Farrel, the leader of the Farrelites. As the evil cleric was madly in love with her and couldn't handle her rejecting him. The Ebon Hand was actually pretty neutral in the Sarpadian wars until they got attacked.
But that is kinda besides the point. Tev completely lost it when his sister got murdered and decided to take it out on all of Sarpadia. Had he not intervened, there might have been survivors of the various Sarpadian Empires other than the Merfolk (who had the good sense to get the heck out of there.), he started by dropping the entire orc army on an Icatian city and went on from there. By the time he was done, there were only Brassclaw Orcs, Thrull, and Thallids left, and the Orcs were rapidly going extinct.
An enlightened centrist becomes a nihilist villian? Surprisingly timely.
🤣😂🤣
who are you talking about, maybe I am just being dumb, but I really could not understand lol
Okay so how this plain Walker works is that if you do manage to get his Ultimate Off. You have a window of opportunity before he is vulnerable where someone could play a counterspell or play heroic intervention or Tiffer protection. If it does manage to go off anything that it doesn't have an immunity to his ability you, will be able tosteal your opponents Commanders. However it appears that he cannot Target them while your commanders are in the graveyard or they are exiled which means that his ability can be shut down if your deck revolves around you doing that.
He doesnt target at all so Heroic Intervention does nothin
@@zavano92 that is true. Thanks I missed read it l.
Is this foreshadowing an episode about the nine titans? I mean now we have 4 of them, Urza, Freyalese, Windgrace, and Szat
Didn't tevesh have something to do with the death of chromium with they were figuring out how to end the ice age?
I'll put him in my walker deck, but honestly his ultimate is so very hard to achieve, even with doubling season in play you can't ult him straight away like other walkers. I suppose if he was your commander you could get the chain veil and doubling season out, then you could cast and ult in the same turn.
Nice. Definitely pair him with leshrac. Those 2 are crazy when it comes to schemes. Leshrac is definitely black red. He doesn't chanel black magic... black magic seeks him.
Playing against Superfriends Atraxa? At the cost of BB and elder spell you get to ult him pretty darn quick.
Tevesh and our Kobold hero together.
Haha I need to make a video on Kobold Boy.
@@AetherHub Thank you 🙏
Did I know he was going to betray us? I was counting on it. -Urza
Jeska the planes walker is actually a really good partner
I need to take a look at her new card again!
@@AetherHub well with the +1 you can sac her and she gets loyalty for the amount of times a commander has been cast under your control
Tevesh would be great in nevinyrral deck. Wipe the board(of creatures and commanders), create blockers, ultimate +1 nevin for card draw.
I was going to order 2 boxes then I got tempted and bought 1 more box from my LGS to support them.
Solid move brother
I somehow was the first to like. I love your content!!
and first comment, thanks for the support buddy
I feel similar
I want one. I dont even have a deck planned to play him in...:p
Man, I haven't seen this guy since mtg battlemage
Throwback
The perfect partner would be the bant commander that you tap down to steal a creature imho. Tap her, steal someone else’s commander sac them repeat.
1:52 Oh my #''#!
I own one magic comic and it's the one where his sister is murdered and he transforms.
I never thought that would be relevant to modern magic.
I just bought it on ebay for the booster, years before I actually started playing.
Dude that’s awesome. I wish o had some of the old comics
I haven't seen Tevesh Szat since I played magic the gathering battle mage on PS1 lol
Who were the nine titan
I think Kitty Windu and Frey would be awesome partners considering....
Can you partner him with a legendary creature with partner because the kobold seems fun and cheap
This makes me wanna look up is you have a lord wind grace video
Edit
I know what I watching next!!!
I love the card itself. But flavorwise it makes no sense that 2 of his abilities are to create or conscript minions, when all he wanted was to be alone.
Watch near the end of the video. It’s tied in same way to his lore, but yes not directly to his character, just his story
I hope Leshrac gets a Partner card too. Then I can play Tevesh and Leshrac, add Lim Dul, and play Old Magic Baddie tribal.
As far as function, the most useful ability will probably end up being the card draw in edh. The ultimate is cool, but most commanders work best in the context of their own decks.
Draw is always super useful. 10 will be hard to get too no doubt, but I want to see my opponents suffer at least once to it lol
What a great card
im realy glad to see tevesh szat around ! .. sometimes wizards pulls the right strings in terms of bringing charackters back.. but they dont get the actuall card right.. most of the time. as with jeska . jeska she is one of those charackters i really appreatice and hoped maybe some day . wizards makes a good (better) card for her.. but then.. oops. this shitty planeswalker stuff happens..the new kamahl is maybe fine. in the 99.. so maybe that wasnt tooo bad after all but 8cmc ???. was that really necessary??? but man those should have been better cards... dont missunderstand .. i think tevesh szat is a good card as a planeswalker with some nice abilities and he got the way better card then jeska and kamahl ... and sry chaos always wins ! and for kamahl .. would have been to hard to pull of gruul colours ? to have both aspects of his story ? that would have been nice as a commander card doing a mixture of both prior versions... and yes i see that jeska works good with tevesh szat but thats just it.. Belbe on the hand. i think she got an amazing card!
9:41 they become yours until they are removed from your battlefield. You cannot change your designated commander during a game....
Thanks for the info. Still stealing and saccing opponents commanders sounds crazy
@@AetherHub also while you control opponents commanders....commander damage is tied to the actual card so you can commander damage a player out of the game using an opponents commander....you can even eliminate a player with commander damage from their own commander
Krank it up with UG. And u have a nice Sultai nightmare on your hand
Watch the price of homeward path jump as people prep for Tevash
Sheoldred: My my what do we have here?
Tevesh: soo ...much noise make it stop please....
Sheoldred: Ah fret not for you wish is just one bath in oil away then you can bring blissful silence to others with ease
It would serprise me if he popped up on new phyrexia bathed in the oil and became a black phyrexian or heck if a strain of his body ending up on karns shoe and left on phyrexia
I preferred his armor form then the naked one we have right now.
Would Nicol Bolas be a good partner?
I always thought Szat was a creature like Hypnox.
I remember the comics he was a bad ass!
Okay I know there may not be an answer here but WHAT IS HE...?
Did you just say that Urza, Lord High Artificer *unfortunately* doesn't have partner?? Isn't that card broken enough already???
Flavor wise* it doesn’t have Partner for a reason... lol
GODDAMMIT!!
Close though. Appreciate the comment either way!
Playing this dude in ayara
He looks like the jeepers creepers demon
He is a doo doo head. Was powerful af b4 the mending though.
You ain’t lying.
Under rated horror film. But also yes lol
"Unfortunately Urza doesn't have partner"... I'm sorry, what?
I was watching the commander legends ad, I tried to hit full screen, but I hit skip ad
F-MEGA
his partner is Jeska, Thrice reborn
exactly.
honestly i like the card design, i just don't like partner and i don't like wizards inserting text on cards that allows them to violate the rules of commander. the line "can be your commander" just seems gross to me. it's like they think commander belongs to them and they can just make exceptions to its rules on a whim. and partner is exactly the same thing except it's a keyword ability. but its "reminder text" is essentially nothing but an exception to the rules of commander. it has no meaning in any other format except commander and other derivative formats. i get that this is fun and makes the format more diverse, and it's not intrinsically bad to change the rules of commander. and by this point i get that these things have already long since been accepted. people just tolerate this kind of meddling. but it's not just that i think it's sort of invasive and gross, i also think it's indicative of the design philosophy behind these commander sets and other multiplayer-oriented sets. it feels like top-down design. like they decided they were gonna make planeswalker commanders and then set out to design cards that fit that design, and cards that would slot neatly into a deck with them. same with partner. instead of just designing cards and letting players decide what to do with them, it more and more feels like they're designing and selling prepackaged archetypes. i would have no problem with a playgroup deciding to allow certain planeswalkers as commanders or allowing players to use a combination of 2 commanders from a specific list.
but i don't like how wizards does this itself, because it strongly encourages them to design decks or archetypes around these central cards, which naturally causes power creep in the worst variety, like it's power creep along very specific, narrow axes. when you set out to make 5 prebuilt decks, for example, and you want the cards within to actually be better than just playable, you're making specific archetypes more powerful from the top down. it reminds me of yu-gi-oh more than anything. there's often a lot of variety, especially across time but even within a single metagame. but there's very little creativity. you can pick one of a number of intentionally-designed and supported archetypes, but you can't just sit down and look at the metagame and the entire card pool and construct a competitive deck from scratch based on your own insights. you could try, but then you're up against people who are playing decks with 20 cards that specifically refer to each other, cards that were designed by konami from the top down to synergize with each other. they pick an archetype and they think of what could fit within it and then design a card like that. it's way beyond just narrow tribal creature synergies, or the broad archetypes in magic. so you will find a shit ton of cards with card text that literally name other specific cards by name. it's absurd. and yet that's exactly what you see in magic nowadays. it's not just with the partner mechanic, but with prebuilt decks in general. even the standard-legal prebuilt decks have a shit ton of cards that specifically tutor up a planeswalker or something. thankfully they offset that lameness by making the cards ridiculously weak. but that overall philosophy has seeped into how they build all the commander-specific cards.
and it's not that i'm salty about the power level. the partner mechanic is definitely pretty popular in competitive edh but planeswalker commanders are usually pretty rare sights. the thing that bothers me is how these new commander sets affect casual play. these enticing new eternal-exclusive legendaries and their pre-planned archetypes encourage people to play into the pre-planned metagame that wizards had in mind when they were designing and playtesting the set. that's what really bothers me. they're adding cards to the card pool, yet somehow managing to narrow the casual metagame. i see fewer creative decks and a lot more decks that closely correspond to whatever wizards was planning. which sucks some fun out of the game for me. if i wanted to play a game where the entire experience was planned and configured in advance, i'd just play one of a million video games with that exact design philosophy. the thing that makes magic so fun is that it's NOT planned in advance. it's that you build your own deck and it's a form of self-expression. obviously there are plenty of magic formats where almost nobody plays their own deck. but commander from the very beginning was supposed to be THAT format. its rules and philosophy are designed to offset the natural propensity to hyper-optimize decks into narrow corners. one of the primary goals of making an independent format like commander is to create an avenue for self-expression, with very broad constraints on what is possible. so whether the cards are unusually strong or not, wizards' commander sets consistently feel like a total misunderstanding of the spirit of commander.
i know it might sound like i'm taking the game too seriously. but it's not like i wander around shouting my grievances into the void. i'm only putting this to words now because it happened to come to mind and i thought i could articulate it. i'm not trying to guard the sanctity of commander or anything. it's just a pattern i've noticed that kind of bothers me, because it's inescapable. people think it's only about power level. that you just organize your playgroup around not playing overly competitive cards, or whatever. but that's not really the case. even in casual playgroups people still use these pre-canned strategies, because wizards has designed these archetypes at all different power levels. actually most of the canned archetypes are not even competitive. if you really want to make a competitive edh deck, you're better off just using your commander as a backup value engine, and filling your 99 with individually strong cards and a few "i win" combos you can tutor up. i think wizard's design philosophy for commander sets is more harmful to casual play than it is to competitive play. because the archetypes they're preparing are not competitive, they're actually pretty janky. but they're ATTRACTIVE jank. they're the fun kind of jank. they keep making these cards that seem really appealing, that do quirky things and seem to fit nicely into some particular synergy that's very satisfying to pull off. they're exactly the kind of jank that people want to play in casual commander.
in fact i'd be so happy with them if they weren't so fucking obviously pre-planned. i wish they would do these commander sets more often as just regular sets rather than prebuilt decks. but honestly at this point i don't even know if that'd fix it. it seems like with the new standard-legal sets, the same problem is cropping up. like they're designing for archetypes rather than just designing. even though they're not pre-organized into decks, you get the feeling like they were designed for specific archetypes. i guess for regular sets that might just be a consequence of the game's age, and trying to maintain longstanding themes and color/tribe/plane flavors and stuff. but in the commander sets it's really obscene. anyway it seems like these archetypes they keep printing every couple years are mostly targeted at casual commander based on their design, and that's ultimately where i end up seeing them. i don't play many competitive edh games but i do surf cedh and edhrec and moxfield every now and then, and i rarely ever see these cards make a splash in the competitive scene. but i see these canned decks in casual games all the time.
don't get me wrong, it's good that new players are able to start off with a prebuilt deck. i don't mind if they bring EXACTLY the prebuilt deck, not at all. but i would vastly prefer if wizards would instead design the set as a SET FIRST, and THEN organize cards from *multiple* sets into prebuilt decks. i wish wizards would sell actually viable prebuilt decks too. like instead of selling prebuilt decks composed entirely of cards from a single set (essentially on par with a draft deck) they should just sell sets and then sell prebuilt decks that contain cards from multiple sets. that should be part of their strategy for reprints, in my opinion. for example, if players want fetchlands, sell a series of prebuilt 2-color decks that have 4 fetchlands. or, knowing wizards, more likely 2 fetchlands per deck lol. but that way players can more reliably target copies of reprints they really badly want. i get that will never happen for many reasons. but it would be so much better if it did.
I think he kind of looks eldrazi ish
Those tentacles are pretty sus
Demondrazi
Ello
Why do you keep pronouncing Szat like it has the letter v in it? Is sz pronounced sv in another language like how the card Jokulhaups is pronounced like a y instead of a j?
Yeess, firs one!!
Shouldn't he be legendary planeswalker - tevesh, mtg epic fail
Sorin markov is legendary planeswalker - sorin, not markov
I'm glad this is not a sjw planeswalker
A what ?