Commander Review: Modern Horizons 2 | Part 1 | White, Blue
Modern Horizons 2 has just been fully previewed so now it's time for me to go over the entire set and highlight the cards that I think are most noteworthy for us Commander players! Let's get started!
WHITE
Abiding Grace
Abiding Grace is a very narrow yet powerful value engine in decks looking to sacrifice 1-drops for value: think cards like Spore Frog, Viscera Seer, and Shadowborn Apostle. Being able to return one of these creatures on each of your turns is incredibly powerful. It's also great in any White Weenie deck that's running 6+ 1-drop creatures, which White specializes in: classics like Weathered Wayfarer, Soul's Attendant, Mother of Runes, and most recently Esper Sentinel come to mind, and if you have a critical mass of these then cards like Abiding Grace and Ranger of Eos become very strong.
Blacksmith's Skill
Blacksmith's Skill takes the crown for best instant target protection spell ever printed. Unlike previous contendors like Karametra's Blessing, Sheltering Light, or Faith's Shield, Skill grants any permanent hexproof and indestructible with no strings attached. So if you're looking to protect an important creature like a commander, this is one of your best options. Decks that love targeted instant speed tricks, like Feather, the Redeemed, just got a new staple!
Constable of the Realm
Constable of the Realm is basically an Admonition Angel for +1/+1 Counter decks: while triggering Landfall is easier than adding counters in a format where fetchlands are legal, Constable can trigger itself once thanks to renown, which is sweet. It's a slow card and will be a magnet for removal if you're exiling stuff your opponents want back, but in a dedicated +1/+1 Counter deck it's a solid way to slow down opponents, plus you can even exile your own stuff to re-use ETB triggers or protect from a future board wipe.
Esper Sentinel
All the people saying that Rhystic Study should've been a White card, well, here you go! This is one of the most powerful White cards printed in years and is going to be an instant staple in higher-power White decks everywhere. Yeah, that's a lot of hype, but it's true.
Esper Sentinel sits somewhere between a Mystic Remora and a Rhystic Study: like Remora, it triggers only off noncreature spells and it's a 1-drop, but like Study, the tax is only 1 mana (baseline) and you don't have to deal with a cumulative upkeep. It also only triggers off the first noncreature spell each turn, not all of them, so it's less effective against decks that want to chain together tons of spells.
Is Sentinel better than the Blue enchantments it's based off? No. But that's irrelevant. It's a White card, not a Blue one, and White desperately needs more ways to generate card draw, which this card does amazingly well. Drop this down early / midgame when your opponents do not have the extra mana to pay the tax and you either set them behind or get to draw cards; either way it's a huge win. Its baseline power drops off lategame once everyone has more mana, but at that point most decks should be able to pump up the Sentinel's power to make the tax unpayable. White excels at ways to pump Sentinel with equipment (Sword of Fire and Ice) or anthems (Cathars' Crusade) or counters (Breena, the Demagogue), and just boosting Sentinel's power to 3 or 4 makes it super relevant all the way to the endgame.
Not only that, but Sentinel is a 1-drop creature so it's easily tutored (Ranger of Eos) and reanimated (Sun Titan), plus it's even an Artifact which opens up even MORE synergies (Breya, Etherium Shaper). Being an artifact creature does mean it's more vulnerable to removal than an enchantment, but it also opens up far more synergy potential too, so it's a good tradeoff.
So yeah, Esper Sentinel is being hyped up to the moon right now, and I bet some of you readers are already sick of it, but the truth is that it's really that good.
Late of Dinner
WOTC casually prints one of the best White reanimation spells at common over here with a fun goofy flavor that I appreciate. It's basically a slightly upgraded Resurrection that produces a Food token, which will be fairly insignificant unless your deck synergizes with Food some way, but it's still sweet to get. Late to Dinner goes into the exact same decks as Resurrection does, which is the few non-Black Reanimate decks out there since Black has much better options like Reanimate, but one of my favorite recent decks, Niambi, Esteemed Speaker, will love it!
It's also okay in decks more interested in the Food token part, though most Food decks are Jund-flavored, so I'm not sure what home a White Food deck would be.
Nykthos Paragon
One of the best finishers in Lifegain decks has been the classic Archangel of Thune. Now we've got an extra option with Nykthos Paragon, which performs a similar role but does so differently: it can only trigger once per turn, but it can potentially add far more counters to your creatures if your gaining tons of life in one go (e.g. Beacon of Immortality) rather than in small repeatable increments (Soul Warden).
Whether or not Paragon is better than Archangel depends on the deck, but most often you'll be happy running both of them now in the same deck. It's also an Enchantment which isn't totally irrelevant, especially since Enchantress has Lifegain overlap too (Sythis, Harvest's Hand).
Out of Time
This is one of the most interesting "board wipes" ever printed and way stronger than people are giving it credit. It's one mana cheaper than the gold standard for unconditional creature wipes, Wrath of God, but this one's temporary and ... weird. You aren't destroying any creatures, you're phasing them, and the creatures phase back in once the enchantment leaves the battlefield, which is either until the enchantment is removed or until you sacrifice it due to vanishing.
I've seen a lot of people dismissing this card right off the bat because it's only a "temporary" creature wipe, but that misses a lot of the details that make this card great. First off, phasing creatures is a lot more powerful of an answer than destroying them since it gets around indestructible and denies any graveyard recursion (Meren of Clan Nel Toth weeps in the corner). Second, the vanishing clause it going to last a LONG time: if you phase out just 5 creatures, for example, Out of Time is sticking around for five turn cycles, which is eternity in Commander.
EDIT: Also phasing out commanders denies them the ability to go to the command zone and being recast! Very powerful against decks that are reliant on their commanders to function.
So basically if you want your phased creatures back, you'll have to remove the enchantment. And yes, that does mean Out of Time is a temporary solution, but on the other hand ... this is a 3 mana "board wipe" on an enchantment! That means you can blink it easily, and recur it easily with cards like Sun Titan! There's a lot more synergy potential here.
I'd consider Out of Time one of the best "board wipe" options in White, though how good it is depends on what you're looking for. It's going to be an all-star in Enchantress decks, Blink decks, and beyond.
Resurgent Belief
Replenish is unfortunately on the reserved list, but a nerfed replacement is fine by me. Resurgent Belief is an easy staple in Enchantress decks: telegraphing a mass reanimation spell two turns in advance isn't ideal, since it's bound to draw hate and your opponents will tutor up GY removal if they can, but the reward definitely outweighs the risk here. It's about as good as Open the Vaults in my opinion, which I consider a staple as well (just pair it with GY hate to be safe). I'll happily jam this version in all my Enchantress decks as well.
Scour the Desert
Another staple for Bird Tribal? Is the flying menace not strong enough???
Real talk though, this card is fine. Birds are all about numbers, and if you can get 4+ tokens off Scour the Desert then it's worth it. The trick will be finding enough Birds with big butts to pull it off.
Sanctifier en-Vec
Too narrow for my tastes, but if you're in a meta terrorized by Black / Red Graveyard decks and are desperate for answers, Sanctifier en-Vec is a solid way to cut them off from their graveyard strategies.
Search the Premises
Search the Premises is the latest variant on Ghostly Prison and it's ... okay. Like Prison, it's going to do a good job at deterring opponents from "poking" you for free damage, since randomly hitting you for a couple damage is often not worth letting you draw a card (though you gotta spend 2 mana to get that card). But unlike Prison, Search does nothing to stop your opponents from alpha striking you: who cares if you're making 10 Clue tokens if you're dead? This is the same criticism I had for Cunning Rhetoric and no less true now.
Personally, I'd only run Search the Premises in a Clue Tribal deck as a flavorful Prison. Sure, it's still not great even there (I doubt you'll make many Clues off it), but it's fine and on-theme.
Serra's Emissary
Serra's Emissary is a weird one. This is a seven mana 7/7 flyer that gives you and your creatures protection from a chosen card type -- not a color, a card type. Most often the best choice is creature, so your creatures can't be blocked and you can't take damage from attacks.
That's pretty sweet I guess, but seven mana is an awful lot, and if we're looking at top-end curves this is competing with another angel: Avacyn, Angel of Hope. Giving all your permanents indestructible is a massive upgrade most of the time, as it protects you not just from creatures but also wraths as well. It's well worth the extra mana (or no mana difference if you reanimate it).
If you're running a Reanimator deck and are in the market for another big top-end Angel to cheat out, then I can see picking up Serra's Emissary alongside Avacyn. I'm eager to put it in Niambi, Esteemed Speaker, for example. If you want to straight cast a big top-end and that you have limited slots for, I'd stick with Avacyn instead.
Solitude
WOTC has finally done it: they made the White card the best of a cycle!
Solitude is utterly insane: it's Swords to Plowshares on a stick! Hardcasting this totally reasonable -- it's a better Noxious Gearhulk thanks to flash and lower cmc, and the Gearhulk sees tons of play -- but casting this for free? Bananas!
White is also a primary Blink color so it's one of the best colors to abuse Solitude for extra value thanks to Ephemerate and whatnot. It's amazing in any White-heavy decks but Blink decks in particular are creaming themselves right now. What. A. Card!
Timeless Dragon
When I first started playing Commander back in 2011, one of the first cards I added to my Zedruu deck was Eternal Dragon: it was neat mana-fixing early on, snagging my Plateau or whatever, and later on it was a resilient beater. It didn't last long before I cut it for being too much mana.
Timeless Dragon is a modern upgrade to that old classic and is tremendously better thanks to its cheaper cost and Eternalize ability, making it a slam-dunk in Populate decks! Ghired, Conclave Exile and Trostani, Selesnya's Voice decks will LOVE a 4/4 flying token to copy a bunch of times, while also mana-fixing in the process.
BLUE
Dress Down
Dress Down is a super interesting card that I'm glad exists. At its most basic level, this is an enchantment you can flash in to deny ETB or LTB triggers (e.g. Greenwarden of Murasa), or strip useful abilities of creatures like indestructible and hexproof so they become vulnerable to removal. It's essentially an instant-speed, single-turn Humility trick, and that's really cool to me.
I feel like there has to be some even nastier things you can do with this, but I'm not sure what. Unfortunately (or thankfully) its sacrifice trigger happens each end step, so you can't counter the trigger one time via Sundial of the Infinite or Stifle and have a permanent Humility on the battlefield, but I'm sure there's some powerful commanders out there that have a nasty drawback that you can play around with this.
I expect this card will be too cute for most decks to run over a standard counterspell, but at the very least I think Dress Down is a great inclusion in Enchantress or decks that use its ability to benefit their own commander. I love it!
Hard Evidence
It's a 1-drop that makes a Crab and investigates. This makes it a staple in both Crab Tribal and Clue Tribal. Is it super powerful? No, but it's good enough in those specific archetypes, and most importantly it's adorable.
Inevitable Betrayal
Bribery used to be a Commander staple back in the day but it's fallen out of favor in recent times outside of Steal Your Stuff decks. Inevitable Betrayal is a nerfed Bribery which isn't too appealing in most decks, but still good enough in dedicated Steal Your Stuff lists. It's best in decks that can get around its cost like As Foretold and cascade decks like Yidris, Maelstrom Wielder.
Fractured Sanity
Fractured Sanity is one of the most efficient multiplayer mill cards we've seen, which has to amount for something. It's far from Maddening Cacophony and doesn't outright win you game when paired with Bruvac the Grandiloquent, but if you're looking for unconditional mill, this works in a pinch.
Junk Winder
Wow, Junk Winder is an oppressively good card in all sorts of Token decks! Thank goodness it doesn't affect lands or else it would be completely miserable, but even without that it's super annoying when paired with some of the best token generators in the format, like Smothering Tithe, Tireless Tracker, and Felidar Retreat. I expect this to see a ton of play in Blue Token decks like Orvar, the All-Form, Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer, and Alela, Artful Provocateur.
Mental Journey
Even though this is a random draft common it's honestly pretty good in budget Commander decks. Cycle it early for a land, draw three cards at instant speed later on, both costs are reasonable. It's a solid filler for a budget Spellslinger deck or Cycling deck.
Parcel Myr
Not great but adorable. Staple in Clue Tribal. Yes, the bar is low.
Rise and Shine
Rise and Shine is one of my favorite cards from the set. This is the perfect finisher for a bunch of Artifact decks, but most notable Artifact Token decks! Turn all your artifact tokens -- Clues, Treasure, Food -- into 4/4's and swing for the win! As a huge Clue fan, this is the finisher I've been waiting for. I can't wait to jam this in Lonis, Cryptozoologist.
Scuttletide
Finally, some good Crab Tribal support! Or, well, it's decent, at least! Scuttletide is a discard outlet for Madness and Graveyard decks, which it does an ... okay job. But Crab Tribal! That's pretty neat!
Steelfin Whale
There's a ton of combo potential with this random common. Just off the top of my head without any research there's Steelfin Whale + Retraction Helix + Ornithopter + Altar of the Brood = mill out all of your opponents. I'm sure there's better ones out there too. Seems like I great card to jam into specific Artifact decks.
Step Through
Step Through is one of the best cards that I'll never cast; it's all about that Wizardcycling, baby! Instant speed Wizard tutoring for two mana is insane for Wizard Tribal deck. Jam it in all your Wizard decks, like Inalla, Archmage Ritualist.
Subtlety
Subtlety is like a Remand except instead of drawing you a card you're essentially denying your opponent a card since it goes back to the top/bottom of their library instead of hand. It's also limited to creatures / planeswalkers, but since creatures are the most common nonland card in the format (and everyone starts with one in their command zone) you shouldn't be hurting for good targets. You also get around "can't be countered" spells since you're not countering them, just bouncing them.
Stick that on to a 4 mana (or 0 mana) 3/3 flash flyer that you can blink in response to creature / planeswalker spells for extra value (Ghostly Flicker) and you've got a nasty good card that is strong in any Blue-heavy deck and absurd in Blink decks. I expect it to be an allstar in Blink like Brago, King Eternal and Elemental decks like Horde of Notions.
Suspend
Suspend is pretty cool, but oddly enough Blue has not one but two 1-drop instant speed removal spells that I'd consider better at most power levels: Rapid Hybridization and Pongify. Suspend does exile though, and two turns is still a long time, so I could be wrong here.
Svyelun of Sea and Sky
Svyelun of Sea and Sky is a solid addition to Merfolk Tribal: it draws cards, it protect your Merfolk a little, and it's hard to remove, all good for 3 mana. It doesn't really inspire any particular builds to me, it's just generic good for Merfolk. I prefer it in the 99 rather than the commander.
Thought Monitor
Thoughtcast is already a solid card in Artifact decks, so a lovechild of it and Mulldrifter seems pretty decent to me too. It works best when paired with Padeem, Consul of Innovation, making sure you always have the highest cmc artifact.
Part 2 Tomorrow: Black, Red!
Thanks for reading and check back again tomorrow for Part 2!
