I've never had personal attachment to Baldurs Gate, but i love how much people are excited about the references and call backs to the games. I enjoyed watching PK get super excited about something that makes him happy. Thanks Vince
If they released this set exactly 1 year later, it'd be way more praised. It's a shame because people are loving it in retrospect after they've played Baldur's Gate 3 and are familiar with the characters. But when the set came out, no one knew who the fuck Karlach or Lae'zel were. As someone playing through Baldur's Gate 3 right now, it's so cool seeing characters like Nine-Fingers Keene in game and being like "oh hey, I've seen them on a Magic card!"
You forget a lot of the hate was the fact that it was priced like a masters set or the commander legends 1 set that had amazing reprints. This was more equivalent to what happened with commander masters and wilds of eldrane. Lacklustre reprints for the price followed up by a standard set with most of the reprints included in what was a better marketed product. Also boulders gate came out just before modern horizons 2 not double masters. So it was a set that was effectively priced the same as mh2 that had less packs per box and worse perceived card value In reprints compared to mh2
This set introduced my favourite commander and deck I've ever built, best-girl, Karlach I was absolutely elated when not only was Karlach in BG3 as a main character, but she was also my favourite character by far!
Absolutely adore this set, we got into magic this year and I used it to teach my commander people how to draft. It is also the first set I ever drafted.Drafted it many times and it's a hoot, even with three people. My wife is currently building a Gorion deck, and we probably will be drafting CLB soon. It keeps surprising you every time and is incredibly immersive.
Revisiting this set after playing BG3 is so much fun. I loved the AFR too. I don't play DND, but they feel more Magic than recent Magic sets. No gimmick like most of MTG has become: "Wizarding School", "Murder Mystery", "the Wild West", "Horror House", and so on. Just classic fantasy with a rich lore and interesting characters. I would love a third DND but it doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
It really did fly under the radar as a set which is a shame. Wish there were more initiative cards in some of the colors. I recently put together a new Dimir deck with Safana and Clan Crafter with the theme being dungeon delving for ancient magical artifacts (just spooky artifact shit from Magic's history I've played with over the years like Time Sieve, KCI, Wurmcoil, Helm of Obedience, etc.) that's trying to get the initiative and then use the advantage generated from the Undercity and Safana's passive treasure generation to churn through my deck looking for my bomb artifacts. Clan Crafter turns any clues I might pop for draw into a Clue+ by adding the counter in addition to the draw for the same cost and Menace is a slept on form of evasion. She regularly gets in to steal the initiative back if someone actually goes in at me. Abdel is nuts for an uncommon. I run a copy in both my Thalisse and God-Eternal Oketra decks. He's especially mean in Oketra because so much of the deck is cheap ETB creatures whose only purpose was to be cast and replace themselves with lands or draw.
Love Vince’s content when he is excited and loving something. Also totally agree this set rocks. Had a Karlach deck before the release of BG3 and it was so much fun trying to get one turn kills with commander damage.
Halsin and Jaheira have become bonkers amid the constant proliferation of clues/foods. I'm running them as a duo in my Rocco, Street Chef deck and it's always sweet to spend half of your irrelevant tokens to turn the other half into whole bears.
Sarevok's Tome is absolute gas. The only thing keeping me from playing it in more decks is some people's negative reaction to the Initiative. Ramps and fixes your mana, introduces something to incentivize combat, and provides a mana outlet? Amazing.
This set was absolutely soul-crushing to open packs for, because it felt like you NEEDED to hit an Ancient Dragon or Battlebond lands to recoup any value - that said, this set is also an absolute banger in a vacuum, the sheer amount of Commander + Background combinations is absurd and got my head spinning almost as much as the Dr WHO set. BUTT-KICKING FOR JUSTICE!!
Since coming back to magic in late 2019, Battle for Baldur’s Gate has been my favorite draft experience. It was so much fun and there was so much variety! I’ve ended up building multiple background commander decks and I use lots of the cards from the set in the 99 of most of my decks.
I don't have time to watch this right now because its 2 am and I am going to bed, but I just want to say I am struggling to find commons form this set I desperately need for my commander decks because of how little this set was opened. This set would have been a much better seller if it had been timed to release with BG3 with all of its overlap.
I really enjoyed your enthusiasm for this set! I've been a fan since it came out too (I bought nearly the whole set in singles AND a box to draft--I never do that!!) and even though I don't play video games, the D&D flavor sings to me. You did a great job highlighting and filling in my missing knowledge from the video games, thank you. I would love to watch your videos waxing lyrical about other sets you love, especially because I'm not too familiar with the ones you mentioned. You are a very abdle guide
I love how when BG3 released all the cards for the various companions went up in price, especially Karlach. Not so much that they're inaccessible, but enough to show that people were buying the cards because they played the game and connected with the characters, which is always wonderful to see
I've delved so deeply into the Baldur's Gate set... ...and it helped finish my mono-green dungeons and it helped boost my Izzet dice rolls (which still needs help). My top favorite deck of 2022 was Alora (Merry Thief)//Tavern Brawler adventures, which got even more adventures and goodies with Wilds of Eldraine. This set has fixed problems I've had with Izzet, taking advantage of the Background mechanic, and it has allowed me to further indulge different Rakdos ideas, especially with a second dungeon deck... with Safana (Calimport Cutthroat)//Guild Artisan at the helm. Also with this set, I FINALLY felt like I hit a eureka moment with Golgari, when I went with Viconia (Drow Apostate)//Raised by Giants elves and Durnan of the Yawning Portal//Criminal Past 63 creatures.
I love Abdel, I think he is very very powerful too. What I ended up doing was creating a base white package of 50 cards, then 4 sets of 48 cards associated with each of 4 different colored backgrounds that you shuffle in to the base after choosing what background you want to use.
@@getaloadofthisguycam I don't, but I can start working on it to share it. It's by no means a tuned deck, as I use what I have over buying missing pieces online, and I purposefully left out some combos to aim at a specific power level.
I love deep gnome terramancer from the party time precon, i play it in all my white decks. It ramps you any plains whenever an opponent has a land enters that wasn’t played including sacing a fetch!
Cracked a box with some friends in janurary and played sealed. We had a blast and the value was fantastic! :) Some of them had not played magic but loved BG3, so it was a cool entry point for them. Some of them now started playing commander with us.
As an old D&D and MTG fan, I loved listening to you talk about cool stuff in this set. it's fun, and I like it. I wouldn't mind seeing more of this. It's always more fun to hear people talking about things they love than things they're upset about.
Vince, this video has altered the course of a whole day for me! I have long wanted to build a skeleton EDH deck, hampered by the fact that (a) skeletons are garbage; (b) no skeleton legendary does anything for skeletons. But I love my skele-bois, and you brought my attention to Gut, True Soul Zealot, a card that had escaped my notice while I was drafting this set. So thanks to you, I slapped Agent of the Iron Throne onto Gut, and spent the better part of the day digging through boxes for cards for the 98. So thanks, but also I meant to do some actual work today!
I love Background Commanders, my Erinis, Gloom Stalker deck is my pet project - it's set up as a Modular deck with a background of each color kind of like you were talking about doing with Abdel. Highly recommend giving it a shot! :)
I absolutely loved this set, I even started collecting every sourcebook art in a binder because of my love for dnd. Hands down my favourite set in recent times and I will continue to build commander decks using the cards for many years to come.
A new Conspiracy or Battlebond set would be awesome but the appeal of those sets was they were normal booster pricing and there's no way WotC is doing that again imo.
I recently got a draft box so I could draft it with my partner since we've both gotten really into BG3 and the limited environment is superb. Backgrounds work so well for a commander draft. I'd also like to point out that I was able to get my box for under a hundred USD with shipping. It's still such a sleeper set that its price hasn't creeped up at all. Highly, highly, highly recommend grabbing yourself a set or draft box if you enjoyed the game or you're looking for something to spice up commander night with your friends.
I'd like to also shout out the Art Cards from boosters that have a little condensed 'flash card' version of the monster stat block from the Manual. Lovely, lovely touch. I collected all of them with one-of-each of the flavour text basic lands as a kind of self contained prompt/hook box for tabletop/RPG adventures This set was amazing.
As a newer player everything I heard about this set was that it’s disappointing, but not necessarily bad or terrible. I was thinking about if this set would get a reappraisal over time.
Navigation Orb I think is underrated. Sure a 5 mana explosive vegetation isn't exactly something that's going to make anyone go crazy... but I would still run this as a ramp option in non-green decks since it is land-based ramp, and my friends run a lot of artifact removal. And obvious synergies with artifact decks which can recur it for additional ramp.
I definitely agree with Baldus Gate being the line from which white becomes so much better, it just has SO many useufl cards, and sets the tone going forward for the positive changes to white as a colour. Plus it has 2 Boros commanders that actually provide meaningful card advantage
I drafted this set when it came out and ended up in a Mardu pile with Jan Jansen as the commander. I had so much fun with it that I built a full size commander deck around him, and to this day he’s one of my favorite commanders ever. It’s such a shame that this set wasn’t well received because it has consistently impressed me with how fun the card designs are.
I loved the Baldur's Gate set and the games! The first two are some of my favourite games of all time, I was very happy I was able to make my favourite character from BG1 into a commander deck, Alora, Merry Thief with Criminal Past. What a cool set it was
I love this set. I designed 32 non-land card mini decks with 18 card land bases for a few of these in a few colors to make draftable 100 card commander decks. Everyone goes around and picks the commander then goes around and chooses a background. Its a quick draft with 5 creatures and 5 background mini decks. Total of 25 possible decks from only 500 cards. I really want to do this with the whole set but i dont think i could make that many 50 card mini decks and have a small pool of overlap. And the other issue is that its mostly choose a color tap lands for fixing.
You talked about how Backgrounds improved on the dual-commander format compared to Partner, but it also buffed Partner commanders outside of using them as Backgrounds. Getting a whole suite of new enchantments that buff both your Partner commanders to put in the 98 is just a pretty frustrating (and hopefully unintentional) outcome from such an original mechanic.
This was really the first set I got into magic with. I’ve built 7 commander decks from it and have been high on a lot of the cards. Some noticeable reprints you missed at the uncommon level which were amazing were nature’s lore and deadly dispute. I will also argue to the end of days that Wyrms Crossing Patrol is an incredible card in a lot of commander decks that care about tokens. So many of the commanders are so fun. My favorite might be Safana Calimport Cutthroat and Dungron Delver but Gut True Soul Zealot and Inspiring leader is functional Boros aggro in commander with hitting for 12 on turn 4 plus a fun home for prized statute and nimblewright schematic a couple of favorite commons in the set. I could talk about my love for this set for hours.
This set is some of the most fun I've had playing Magic. My wife and I played through multiple boxes of this set. I have four commander decks with cards from this set as commanders (minsc/boo, gorion, neera, and myrkul). It was mechanically solid and the flavor was absolutely on point. This set is criminally underrated. It didn't help the set's popularity that Arena did it pretty dirty with the moronic specialize mechanic and identical art on mechanically different cards, etc.
I loved this set, building Abdel/Candlekeep Sage as a PDH deck sold me on that format, and when I’m building in it I always look heavily to cards from Baldur’s Gate. I’m thinking of building Rilsa Rael just to mess with the initiative mechanic more.
Partner > Choose a Background (ugh); the big issue is that you if you draft W, U, & B Partners you have 3 color options, but if you draft a W guy with U & B backgrounds, you only have two color options. The Mix & Match of monocolored Partners in CL1 was great. Frankly, I still hope we'll get more mono colored Partners because they really do open up deck building options. (Jumpstart Commander anyone?)
Genuinely upsetting that people never gave this set a chance when it first dropped. I love this set so much I put together a set cube for it because of how Fun it is to draft. Not to mention how many sleeper hits there are in the set, Candlekeep Inspiration is the Overrun effect Talrand always wanted
This set was one of my favorite draft formats. I drafted it at least three times which is a lot for me. I normal no not enjoy drafting. The commander decks were awesome and I am still finding cool things to do with the backgrounds!!
Ascend from avernus has been my favorite white card since this set dropped. Super under rated especially if you're playing a series of low cmc creatures. 4 mana return all 1 cmc from grave to play? 5 mana return all 1 and 2? Hell yeah. And hits planeswalkers too just so much value
I'm gonna forget to finish watching the video later so I don't know if you addressed these same points later in your talk. Sorry. The set was extremely fun to draft. My favorite set by far for draft. My main gripes were pretty minor. The background mechanic could have worked with partners with no real affect on game balance. The initiative mechanic was great for forcing interaction but the mechanic adding time to every turn made the games last the same amount of time. I much preferred monarch to accomplish the same goal. In my drafts I did feel that any time I wasn't drafting b/r treasures or r/g big stuff I was making an error. Luckily both of those decks are fun. A lot of the legends in this set either had unique mechanics that felt useless or generic mechanics that felt like the original partners where you're using them for the color combination. The backgrounds were much better designed than the legends in my opinion.
I am really glad I was not plugged into the set preview hype machine around this set, because I might have gotten discouraged about it, instead of buying a box for my birthday to play sealed and winston draft with my spouse. It was really fun to play in limited and a lot of the cards were certified bangers.
I really enjoyed this video PK, would like to see more retrospectives like this, because there is too much release to keep up with! although perhaps the BG3 factor is too large for this to work easily for other sets.
I think the biggest problem with this set was the "Commander Legends" tag that was attatched to it. It didn't live up to what people expected from a Commander Legends product, and having Double Masters release right after it with all the commander cards in it instead of the "Commander-focused product" (for a ridiculous price), just a double whammy. I love D&D, and having D&D sets in Magic is a great thing for me. I hope they make more. I want Ravenloft, Dark Suns, Dragonlance, bring it all.
I loved the set enough to buy a draft booster box and start up my own draft at my LGS. It was a damn good time in general, but honestly I just wanted more people to experience the cool card designs that Baldur's Gate brought to the proverbial table and I was willing to pay to make that happen. No regrets whatsoever. Well, I do kinda regret pulling the green elder dragon in my third draft pack, heh.
This is tbh one of my favorite sets of all time, whenever I was at a convention I would haggle for them to stupidly low prices, I’m talking like $75 USD. It is the best set to just draft a deck and have fun playing magic, it’s at the point that I’m considering making a cube of it it’s that good!
I recently got back into magic. And being a DND fan while looking for new edh commanders I ended up getting a couple boxes of this set and was very satisfied. Since then I haven't bought much from new sets, they just don't hold up the same.
Biggest downside to the drafting experience was Initiative. Unless everyone had their own Undercity and marker, you had to pass around a single undercity with everyone's marker on their current room when they gained the initiative. I solved this by custom printing the oversized Undercity card that came in bundles onto a fridge magnet and use pushpin magnets on that to mark everyone's room without worrying about placement getting lost.
Jon Irenicus was voiced by the late David Warner. Also, I'd love to see a video going into even deeper into each legend in the set like you did for Adventure in the Forgotten Realms! I can't find anything on Cadira, and I support bun violence.
Commander Legends 2 was one of the best set designs during that time and still better than the sets that we have today. The problem was the mythics that had a lower pull rate to match like 7-8 years ago. The amount of boosters per box were also lowered for whatever reason, but also the price was expensive and was normal with Commander Legends. Draft Commander experience was also amazing and had a lot of fun building it. It was destroyed because the comparison with OG commander legends with better cards in general & AFR's disaster set & with a complete shut down with Double Masters 2022 being released right after.
I think another problem is (according to the professor) the packs’ rarity was skewed so you were less likely to pull rare or valuable cards as in other sets.
I expect cards from this set to be discovered to be powerful in certain decks for years to come cause so many people dismissed the set without reading any of the cards
I adored OG Commander Legends, and I do find Baldur's Gate superior in several ways. I like that the A+B nature of Commander + Background made for more challenging than the interchangeability of partners. White feels much stronger. The Initiative plays better than Monarch because it can stack better. The flavour of the cards is on point. I want to build a commander cube one day, and while I was tempted to do it with OG CL ... I think I'd rather make a Baldur's Gate set cube.
the backlash and hate this set got was 100% a product of everyone from the community to content creators calling it "Commander legends 2" for no reason which set certain expectations the set was never trying to meet and wotc never implied it would. everyone expected 200 reprints from a plane-specific set which NEVER happens, it wasn't a masters set with characters from all over magic's multiverse. and it was a crossover set on top of that so why would wotc fill out 70% of the set with reprints?
WOTC absolutely implied that it was that the moment they named it "Commander Legends." It's their fault for doing that whether or not the community read more into that choice than they did. They could have easily named it something else that still indicated it was a Commander set.
@@drpibisback7680 no, they didn't. it was a commander draft set just like the first commander legends, that's why it was called commander legends: battle for baldur's gate. why would you assume "commander legends" means "contains reprints" and not literally anything related to the actual structure and mechanics of the set and format? why not also assume because it was the second DnD set it was a follow-up to AFR and that it would be almost all original cards for that reason? masters sets aren't set on specific planes and don't use guest IP, these two things alone should have completely ruled out the possibility of it being a masters set. why would they bother doing a DnD crossover if more than half the cards are reprints? everything about the set very clearly stated "not a masters set" but the community and content creators kept slapping that "2" on the end which set all these expectations for the set it transparently wasn't ever designed to meet. it was never going to have dockside extortionist or cyclonic rift or whatever high-power rerpints everyone assumed it would have based on the name they made up.
I convinced my playgroup to draft this set, got a full art ancient silver dragon out of it which was pretty cool, though I got targeted really hard because playing a W/B full initiative deck
Personally I just live this set because it allowed me to build my worst/most fun deck ever: an all backgrounds deck for which the commanders are chosen at random by my opponents each game. It's so bad but so much fun.
Had this come out *AFTER* the release of the game we would have definitely played it more.
I 100% agree. They should have waited
the set release was scheduled for around when bg3 was scheduled to be out, but gane delays did their thing
You ma'am are correct.
Same goes for the D&D movie. It would have crushed the box office.
I've never had personal attachment to Baldurs Gate, but i love how much people are excited about the references and call backs to the games. I enjoyed watching PK get super excited about something that makes him happy. Thanks Vince
I keep buying 2-3 Balders Gate boosters each month because they are full of useful cards and fun to open with Choose a Background/ Background.
If they released this set exactly 1 year later, it'd be way more praised. It's a shame because people are loving it in retrospect after they've played Baldur's Gate 3 and are familiar with the characters. But when the set came out, no one knew who the fuck Karlach or Lae'zel were. As someone playing through Baldur's Gate 3 right now, it's so cool seeing characters like Nine-Fingers Keene in game and being like "oh hey, I've seen them on a Magic card!"
You forget a lot of the hate was the fact that it was priced like a masters set or the commander legends 1 set that had amazing reprints. This was more equivalent to what happened with commander masters and wilds of eldrane. Lacklustre reprints for the price followed up by a standard set with most of the reprints included in what was a better marketed product. Also boulders gate came out just before modern horizons 2 not double masters. So it was a set that was effectively priced the same as mh2 that had less packs per box and worse perceived card value In reprints compared to mh2
This set introduced my favourite commander and deck I've ever built, best-girl, Karlach
I was absolutely elated when not only was Karlach in BG3 as a main character, but she was also my favourite character by far!
Absolutely adore this set, we got into magic this year and I used it to teach my commander people how to draft. It is also the first set I ever drafted.Drafted it many times and it's a hoot, even with three people. My wife is currently building a Gorion deck, and we probably will be drafting CLB soon. It keeps surprising you every time and is incredibly immersive.
Revisiting this set after playing BG3 is so much fun. I loved the AFR too. I don't play DND, but they feel more Magic than recent Magic sets. No gimmick like most of MTG has become: "Wizarding School", "Murder Mystery", "the Wild West", "Horror House", and so on. Just classic fantasy with a rich lore and interesting characters. I would love a third DND but it doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
well strixhaven is also a DND set lol so...
@@alovely4478 Strixhaven was made for Magic, then got a DND supplement later.
It really did fly under the radar as a set which is a shame. Wish there were more initiative cards in some of the colors. I recently put together a new Dimir deck with Safana and Clan Crafter with the theme being dungeon delving for ancient magical artifacts (just spooky artifact shit from Magic's history I've played with over the years like Time Sieve, KCI, Wurmcoil, Helm of Obedience, etc.) that's trying to get the initiative and then use the advantage generated from the Undercity and Safana's passive treasure generation to churn through my deck looking for my bomb artifacts. Clan Crafter turns any clues I might pop for draw into a Clue+ by adding the counter in addition to the draw for the same cost and Menace is a slept on form of evasion. She regularly gets in to steal the initiative back if someone actually goes in at me.
Abdel is nuts for an uncommon. I run a copy in both my Thalisse and God-Eternal Oketra decks. He's especially mean in Oketra because so much of the deck is cheap ETB creatures whose only purpose was to be cast and replace themselves with lands or draw.
I've been so in love with Your Temple Is Under Attack every since it dropped, it is so flexible and efficient, what a awesome card
Love Vince’s content when he is excited and loving something. Also totally agree this set rocks. Had a Karlach deck before the release of BG3 and it was so much fun trying to get one turn kills with commander damage.
Halsin and Jaheira have become bonkers amid the constant proliferation of clues/foods. I'm running them as a duo in my Rocco, Street Chef deck and it's always sweet to spend half of your irrelevant tokens to turn the other half into whole bears.
Jaheira is such a great card.
Sarevok's Tome is absolute gas. The only thing keeping me from playing it in more decks is some people's negative reaction to the Initiative. Ramps and fixes your mana, introduces something to incentivize combat, and provides a mana outlet? Amazing.
This set was absolutely soul-crushing to open packs for, because it felt like you NEEDED to hit an Ancient Dragon or Battlebond lands to recoup any value - that said, this set is also an absolute banger in a vacuum, the sheer amount of Commander + Background combinations is absurd and got my head spinning almost as much as the Dr WHO set.
BUTT-KICKING FOR JUSTICE!!
Since coming back to magic in late 2019, Battle for Baldur’s Gate has been my favorite draft experience. It was so much fun and there was so much variety! I’ve ended up building multiple background commander decks and I use lots of the cards from the set in the 99 of most of my decks.
I don't have time to watch this right now because its 2 am and I am going to bed, but I just want to say I am struggling to find commons form this set I desperately need for my commander decks because of how little this set was opened. This set would have been a much better seller if it had been timed to release with BG3 with all of its overlap.
I had the same problem of finding commons a few months back!
I really enjoyed your enthusiasm for this set! I've been a fan since it came out too (I bought nearly the whole set in singles AND a box to draft--I never do that!!) and even though I don't play video games, the D&D flavor sings to me. You did a great job highlighting and filling in my missing knowledge from the video games, thank you. I would love to watch your videos waxing lyrical about other sets you love, especially because I'm not too familiar with the ones you mentioned. You are a very abdle guide
I love how when BG3 released all the cards for the various companions went up in price, especially Karlach. Not so much that they're inaccessible, but enough to show that people were buying the cards because they played the game and connected with the characters, which is always wonderful to see
I've delved so deeply into the Baldur's Gate set...
...and it helped finish my mono-green dungeons and it helped boost my Izzet dice rolls (which still needs help).
My top favorite deck of 2022 was Alora (Merry Thief)//Tavern Brawler adventures, which got even more adventures and goodies with Wilds of Eldraine.
This set has fixed problems I've had with Izzet, taking advantage of the Background mechanic, and it has allowed me to further indulge different Rakdos ideas, especially with a second dungeon deck... with Safana (Calimport Cutthroat)//Guild Artisan at the helm.
Also with this set, I FINALLY felt like I hit a eureka moment with Golgari, when I went with Viconia (Drow Apostate)//Raised by Giants elves and Durnan of the Yawning Portal//Criminal Past 63 creatures.
I love Abdel, I think he is very very powerful too. What I ended up doing was creating a base white package of 50 cards, then 4 sets of 48 cards associated with each of 4 different colored backgrounds that you shuffle in to the base after choosing what background you want to use.
do you have the lists online? i’d love to check it out!
@@getaloadofthisguycam I don't, but I can start working on it to share it.
It's by no means a tuned deck, as I use what I have over buying missing pieces online, and I purposefully left out some combos to aim at a specific power level.
I love deep gnome terramancer from the party time precon, i play it in all my white decks. It ramps you any plains whenever an opponent has a land enters that wasn’t played including sacing a fetch!
Cracked a box with some friends in janurary and played sealed. We had a blast and the value was fantastic! :)
Some of them had not played magic but loved BG3, so it was a cool entry point for them. Some of them now started playing commander with us.
Ngl, loved this vid because you just genuinely love this set so much.
I enjoyed the positive vibe. Please do more.
This video was a banger, Kenobi
As an old D&D and MTG fan, I loved listening to you talk about cool stuff in this set. it's fun, and I like it. I wouldn't mind seeing more of this. It's always more fun to hear people talking about things they love than things they're upset about.
Vince, this video has altered the course of a whole day for me! I have long wanted to build a skeleton EDH deck, hampered by the fact that (a) skeletons are garbage; (b) no skeleton legendary does anything for skeletons. But I love my skele-bois, and you brought my attention to Gut, True Soul Zealot, a card that had escaped my notice while I was drafting this set. So thanks to you, I slapped Agent of the Iron Throne onto Gut, and spent the better part of the day digging through boxes for cards for the 98. So thanks, but also I meant to do some actual work today!
The draft was fun. The backgrounds were great. The big dice dragons are cool!
I'm glad to see this set getting some love. Drafting this when it first came out is what really got me back into magic.
I love Background Commanders, my Erinis, Gloom Stalker deck is my pet project - it's set up as a Modular deck with a background of each color kind of like you were talking about doing with Abdel. Highly recommend giving it a shot! :)
I absolutely loved this set, I even started collecting every sourcebook art in a binder because of my love for dnd. Hands down my favourite set in recent times and I will continue to build commander decks using the cards for many years to come.
Baldurs gate was very fun drafting with my friends. Love supplemental draft sets, would really love to see conspiracy 3.
A new Conspiracy or Battlebond set would be awesome but the appeal of those sets was they were normal booster pricing and there's no way WotC is doing that again imo.
I recently got a draft box so I could draft it with my partner since we've both gotten really into BG3 and the limited environment is superb. Backgrounds work so well for a commander draft. I'd also like to point out that I was able to get my box for under a hundred USD with shipping. It's still such a sleeper set that its price hasn't creeped up at all. Highly, highly, highly recommend grabbing yourself a set or draft box if you enjoyed the game or you're looking for something to spice up commander night with your friends.
Loved this vid Vince! part deck tech, part set retrospective…awesome format!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I'd like to also shout out the Art Cards from boosters that have a little condensed 'flash card' version of the monster stat block from the Manual. Lovely, lovely touch. I collected all of them with one-of-each of the flavour text basic lands as a kind of self contained prompt/hook box for tabletop/RPG adventures
This set was amazing.
I have loved this set a lot! It was one of my first boxes that I got after getting back into mtg in 2023.
Just had the chance to draft this set a couple weekends ago, and it was so much fun!
Glad you enjoy it!
I agree whole-heartedly! This is the most fun I've had drafting, hands down.
I loved this video, Vince--please do more like it!
White Plume Adventurer, the single commander card that made mono white into a vintage top tier deck. Busted card tbf.
There are way more cool cards from this set than I realised! Awesome video thanks PK
Glad you enjoyed!
As a newer player everything I heard about this set was that it’s disappointing, but not necessarily bad or terrible. I was thinking about if this set would get a reappraisal over time.
Navigation Orb I think is underrated. Sure a 5 mana explosive vegetation isn't exactly something that's going to make anyone go crazy... but I would still run this as a ramp option in non-green decks since it is land-based ramp, and my friends run a lot of artifact removal.
And obvious synergies with artifact decks which can recur it for additional ramp.
I definitely agree with Baldus Gate being the line from which white becomes so much better, it just has SO many useufl cards, and sets the tone going forward for the positive changes to white as a colour. Plus it has 2 Boros commanders that actually provide meaningful card advantage
I drafted this set when it came out and ended up in a Mardu pile with Jan Jansen as the commander. I had so much fun with it that I built a full size commander deck around him, and to this day he’s one of my favorite commanders ever. It’s such a shame that this set wasn’t well received because it has consistently impressed me with how fun the card designs are.
I loved the Baldur's Gate set and the games! The first two are some of my favourite games of all time, I was very happy I was able to make my favourite character from BG1 into a commander deck, Alora, Merry Thief with Criminal Past. What a cool set it was
Never played BG before this set, but loved it when it came out. Love it even more now because of BG3. Really good video!
Hey, thanks!
Watching this video based on an in-person rec at MagicCon and really digging it. :)
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Was it my recommendation?
@@PleasantKenobi Straight from the co-host of Dies To Removal podcast!
I love this set. I designed 32 non-land card mini decks with 18 card land bases for a few of these in a few colors to make draftable 100 card commander decks. Everyone goes around and picks the commander then goes around and chooses a background. Its a quick draft with 5 creatures and 5 background mini decks. Total of 25 possible decks from only 500 cards. I really want to do this with the whole set but i dont think i could make that many 50 card mini decks and have a small pool of overlap. And the other issue is that its mostly choose a color tap lands for fixing.
You talked about how Backgrounds improved on the dual-commander format compared to Partner, but it also buffed Partner commanders outside of using them as Backgrounds. Getting a whole suite of new enchantments that buff both your Partner commanders to put in the 98 is just a pretty frustrating (and hopefully unintentional) outcome from such an original mechanic.
This was really the first set I got into magic with. I’ve built 7 commander decks from it and have been high on a lot of the cards. Some noticeable reprints you missed at the uncommon level which were amazing were nature’s lore and deadly dispute. I will also argue to the end of days that Wyrms Crossing Patrol is an incredible card in a lot of commander decks that care about tokens. So many of the commanders are so fun. My favorite might be Safana Calimport Cutthroat and Dungron Delver but Gut True Soul Zealot and Inspiring leader is functional Boros aggro in commander with hitting for 12 on turn 4 plus a fun home for prized statute and nimblewright schematic a couple of favorite commons in the set. I could talk about my love for this set for hours.
You can even get gross with Gruel control erinis gloomstalker and street urchin for deathtouch pings sacrificing artifact lands
I have 4 background decks and love them all
This is such a fun format! I need to get hold of another box soon
This set is some of the most fun I've had playing Magic. My wife and I played through multiple boxes of this set. I have four commander decks with cards from this set as commanders (minsc/boo, gorion, neera, and myrkul). It was mechanically solid and the flavor was absolutely on point. This set is criminally underrated.
It didn't help the set's popularity that Arena did it pretty dirty with the moronic specialize mechanic and identical art on mechanically different cards, etc.
Wrong double masters, that one had dockside, imp seal, wrenn and six
I loved this set, building Abdel/Candlekeep Sage as a PDH deck sold me on that format, and when I’m building in it I always look heavily to cards from Baldur’s Gate. I’m thinking of building Rilsa Rael just to mess with the initiative mechanic more.
Partner > Choose a Background (ugh); the big issue is that you if you draft W, U, & B Partners you have 3 color options, but if you draft a W guy with U & B backgrounds, you only have two color options. The Mix & Match of monocolored Partners in CL1 was great. Frankly, I still hope we'll get more mono colored Partners because they really do open up deck building options. (Jumpstart Commander anyone?)
I have a Vhal + Raised by Giants simic deck. It's a blast to play, so I'm really happy about CLB. Plus I use a lot of the backgrounds in other decks
I love this set and I am very happy it's so underrated. Because I want the full set
I actually loved drafting this enough that I made a 3-2-1-1 cube of the set. :D
I don’t play MtG anymore yet I enjoyed the D&D references and just the feel of it into more art. Yes do a video on Futuresight or that entire block
I love Displacer Kitten in Gyruda for Brawl on Arena. Getting multiple Gyruda triggers is always great.
Love this set. Wish I got to do more then two drafts of it. Jan Janson treasure was one of the most memorable decks I’ve ever drafted.
I run the red/black/white ancient dragons in my Kaalia deck and absolutely love them.
Even at release this set was full of secret bangers
I'd love to see you do one of these styles of videos for Future Sight. What a cool set
Genuinely upsetting that people never gave this set a chance when it first dropped. I love this set so much I put together a set cube for it because of how Fun it is to draft. Not to mention how many sleeper hits there are in the set, Candlekeep Inspiration is the Overrun effect Talrand always wanted
This set was one of my favorite draft formats. I drafted it at least three times which is a lot for me. I normal no not enjoy drafting. The commander decks were awesome and I am still finding cool things to do with the backgrounds!!
Ascend from avernus has been my favorite white card since this set dropped. Super under rated especially if you're playing a series of low cmc creatures. 4 mana return all 1 cmc from grave to play? 5 mana return all 1 and 2? Hell yeah. And hits planeswalkers too just so much value
Yes, please, more of these.
Scryfall calls them 'battlebond lands'.
I'm gonna forget to finish watching the video later so I don't know if you addressed these same points later in your talk. Sorry.
The set was extremely fun to draft. My favorite set by far for draft. My main gripes were pretty minor. The background mechanic could have worked with partners with no real affect on game balance. The initiative mechanic was great for forcing interaction but the mechanic adding time to every turn made the games last the same amount of time. I much preferred monarch to accomplish the same goal. In my drafts I did feel that any time I wasn't drafting b/r treasures or r/g big stuff I was making an error. Luckily both of those decks are fun.
A lot of the legends in this set either had unique mechanics that felt useless or generic mechanics that felt like the original partners where you're using them for the color combination. The backgrounds were much better designed than the legends in my opinion.
I remember this set, I played the prerelease in Berlin! It was awesome! Kinda tricky with rudimentary German skills, but it was a fun time.
I am really glad I was not plugged into the set preview hype machine around this set, because I might have gotten discouraged about it, instead of buying a box for my birthday to play sealed and winston draft with my spouse. It was really fun to play in limited and a lot of the cards were certified bangers.
I really enjoyed this video PK, would like to see more retrospectives like this, because there is too much release to keep up with! although perhaps the BG3 factor is too large for this to work easily for other sets.
I think the biggest problem with this set was the "Commander Legends" tag that was attatched to it. It didn't live up to what people expected from a Commander Legends product, and having Double Masters release right after it with all the commander cards in it instead of the "Commander-focused product" (for a ridiculous price), just a double whammy.
I love D&D, and having D&D sets in Magic is a great thing for me. I hope they make more. I want Ravenloft, Dark Suns, Dragonlance, bring it all.
I loved the set enough to buy a draft booster box and start up my own draft at my LGS. It was a damn good time in general, but honestly I just wanted more people to experience the cool card designs that Baldur's Gate brought to the proverbial table and I was willing to pay to make that happen. No regrets whatsoever.
Well, I do kinda regret pulling the green elder dragon in my third draft pack, heh.
This is tbh one of my favorite sets of all time, whenever I was at a convention I would haggle for them to stupidly low prices, I’m talking like $75 USD. It is the best set to just draft a deck and have fun playing magic, it’s at the point that I’m considering making a cube of it it’s that good!
I recently got back into magic. And being a DND fan while looking for new edh commanders I ended up getting a couple boxes of this set and was very satisfied. Since then I haven't bought much from new sets, they just don't hold up the same.
I call them "Tango lands' Cause you need two opponents and it takes two to tango!
If you know you know ;p
BFZ lands are already called Tango lands. :p
I was drafting this twice a week when it came out, super fun limited set. Anyone who skipped it missed out imo.
My first mtg purchase was the exit from exile deck from this set. Still love this set
You're looking at double masters not double masters 2
Drafted a box with 3 friends and we had a lot of fun, too bad the boxes were really expensive when they came out.
Great beard! I couldn't agree more amazing set. And for awhile it was pretty cheap (except ancient dragons). Really captures good flavor and gameplay.
Biggest downside to the drafting experience was Initiative. Unless everyone had their own Undercity and marker, you had to pass around a single undercity with everyone's marker on their current room when they gained the initiative.
I solved this by custom printing the oversized Undercity card that came in bundles onto a fridge magnet and use pushpin magnets on that to mark everyone's room without worrying about placement getting lost.
Jon Irenicus was voiced by the late David Warner. Also, I'd love to see a video going into even deeper into each legend in the set like you did for Adventure in the Forgotten Realms! I can't find anything on Cadira, and I support bun violence.
this... made me want to buy more of the set lol, sealed stuff is actually pretty good prices still
I was playing bg3 earlier today AND I JUST RECOGNIZED THE SCENE FROM THE INITIATIVE KEYART. what. I’ve been there.
Commander Legends 2 was one of the best set designs during that time and still better than the sets that we have today.
The problem was the mythics that had a lower pull rate to match like 7-8 years ago. The amount of boosters per box were also lowered for whatever reason, but also the price was expensive and was normal with Commander Legends.
Draft Commander experience was also amazing and had a lot of fun building it. It was destroyed because the comparison with OG commander legends with better cards in general & AFR's disaster set & with a complete shut down with Double Masters 2022 being released right after.
I did two drafts of this set and had a blast each time.
Mystified by the negative reputation this set suffers from; it’s a favorite of mine, too. Hope you do more videos like this!
I think another problem is (according to the professor) the packs’ rarity was skewed so you were less likely to pull rare or valuable cards as in other sets.
Always nice to have a gushy happy video :)
From AFR rather than this set but god I love the Class mechanic in that, they feel very well thought out and have appropriate powers and flavour.
I expect cards from this set to be discovered to be powerful in certain decks for years to come cause so many people dismissed the set without reading any of the cards
I adored OG Commander Legends, and I do find Baldur's Gate superior in several ways. I like that the A+B nature of Commander + Background made for more challenging than the interchangeability of partners. White feels much stronger. The Initiative plays better than Monarch because it can stack better. The flavour of the cards is on point. I want to build a commander cube one day, and while I was tempted to do it with OG CL ... I think I'd rather make a Baldur's Gate set cube.
Battle for baulders gate is tied for my favorite set with aether revolt.
Holy moly I'm proxying that arena tasha for the "steal your stuff" deck I'm making. Great Planeswalker for that deck
Have fun!
I really liked the set when it came out. Jan Janssen is still one of my favorite commanders ever and he deserves more credit!
the backlash and hate this set got was 100% a product of everyone from the community to content creators calling it "Commander legends 2" for no reason which set certain expectations the set was never trying to meet and wotc never implied it would. everyone expected 200 reprints from a plane-specific set which NEVER happens, it wasn't a masters set with characters from all over magic's multiverse. and it was a crossover set on top of that so why would wotc fill out 70% of the set with reprints?
WOTC absolutely implied that it was that the moment they named it "Commander Legends." It's their fault for doing that whether or not the community read more into that choice than they did. They could have easily named it something else that still indicated it was a Commander set.
@@drpibisback7680 no, they didn't. it was a commander draft set just like the first commander legends, that's why it was called commander legends: battle for baldur's gate. why would you assume "commander legends" means "contains reprints" and not literally anything related to the actual structure and mechanics of the set and format? why not also assume because it was the second DnD set it was a follow-up to AFR and that it would be almost all original cards for that reason?
masters sets aren't set on specific planes and don't use guest IP, these two things alone should have completely ruled out the possibility of it being a masters set. why would they bother doing a DnD crossover if more than half the cards are reprints? everything about the set very clearly stated "not a masters set" but the community and content creators kept slapping that "2" on the end which set all these expectations for the set it transparently wasn't ever designed to meet. it was never going to have dockside extortionist or cyclonic rift or whatever high-power rerpints everyone assumed it would have based on the name they made up.
I convinced my playgroup to draft this set, got a full art ancient silver dragon out of it which was pretty cool, though I got targeted really hard because playing a W/B full initiative deck
Personally I just live this set because it allowed me to build my worst/most fun deck ever: an all backgrounds deck for which the commanders are chosen at random by my opponents each game. It's so bad but so much fun.