Jake's Product Reviews and speculation.

It's been a while since my last post, which seems the norm anymore. I think that may be alright. There are a few things I'd like to talk about today. All my attention (well 99%) in Magic: the Gathering has been allocated towards casual magic. I have been collecting and playing the planeswalker precon decks, am looking forward to the next archenemy set, and have some thoughts about where I'd go if I were doing the next commander set.

Planeswalker Decks

First, let's talk about the planeswalker decks. I've had a love for precons for as long as I've been playing magic. My first tournament deck was a modified precon from Ursa's Saga. I have almost every duel deck, every commander deck, and now every intro deck. All of these decks are still in their original form and often played against each other.

The intro decks, of which there used to be 4-5 of, have been replaced by two planeswalker decks each set. So far 6 have been released, each one focused on a planeswalker and contains a theme specific to the set. Each of these decks contain a few casual focused cards that are unique to their deck for example they all have a card that does something that is moderately effective and lets you go find your planeswalker (in library or graveyard). Also the planeswalkers are unique to this product.

When played together as a stand alone product (right out of the box no edits) this product is quite fun to play. The decks are fairly well balanced to be played against each other, and most of the time they play smoothly (good curve, good creature to spell ratio, etc). They do a great job of highlighting a theme of the set with each focusing on a mechanic and the planeswalker also enhancing that mechanic somehow. I've also had some good success as using them as teaching tools for new players learning magic.

While these are great for a standalone set, not many people play them that way (to my knowledge). Where these decks really shine is by being a perfect stepping stone for a new player or returning player trying to start building towards a standard tournament worthy deck (FNM level of course). I feel I could buy two Gideon decks and mash them together and do fairly well at FNM. The decks have 2 of a lot of cards I would want 4 of to play at that level. These would still leave room for a lot of growth from more competitive cards of the same style.Maybe I'll try this sometime soon...

Archenemy: Nicol Bolas

I feel wizards really hit a home run with the.Planeswalker Decks product line. I just wish they would have continued their success with Archenemy. I still plan to purchase it and play it right out of the box at least a few times, but I'm not sure it's playable out of the box as a stand alone product. I hope I'm wrong and will be back here in a few weeks eating my words, I really do...

I'll start with the positives of the product. The flavor is great: three members of the gatewatch face off against the great one Nicol Bolas. The Vorthos level of this product is off the charts. Green, White, and Red heroes facing off against the Red, Blue, and Black villain rings true. Playing this along side the set where Nicol Bolas leads to some tie in to the current storyline as well.  The value is also pretty high compared to the cost of the product.

The packaging of this product looks spot on. I didn't mention it above, but the boxes for new preconstructed product are large enough to fit the decks in with sleeves. This is a huge change to how things were done in the past, and I'm 100% loving it. Some people have complained that the cardboard doesn't hold up, but almost all my duel decks are still in their original boxes and hold up pretty well. In addition to this archenemy comes with a cool countdown life counter and the box itself looks stronger than ones in the past.

The flavor is great, the packaging is great, so what are my issues? First the decks seem really imbalanced. I've seen half a dozen videos of people playing Archenemy and Bolas has won every game. This is a versus product and I feel that if the main factor on who is going to win is who gets to play as Bolas, there is something wrong. Also, many of the games that were played it seemed like the Gatewatch never had a chance. I hope I'm wrong and the statistics are more like a 60/40, but as it's looking right now the imbalance makes it completely unplayable.

Balance isn't the only issue though; why does wizards of the coast hate green? Two of the Gatewatch decks are Mono Color, which fits the mono color planeswalkers, but suddenly the iconic green planeswalker has moved into blue? The last mono green planeswalker became black, now this one is turning blue. Nissa is wizards worst designed planeswalker and they don't seem to know where to take her. She was a racial supremacist at first, then she shifted without explanation to an elemental focus, and now she is stepping on Kiora's toes. I hope this is a signal that Garruk will find himself free of his curse soon and regain his spot as the iconic green planeswalker.

The worst part of this color bleed is that most casual green players (Timmy's) hate blue. This product is geared at those casual players. The red player will love slinging around mono red burn spells and fast creatures, the white player will enjoy trying to control combat, the green player does not want to play with islands... For example my wife loves green. She will probably refuse to play or begrudgingly play the green/blue deck. She also hates red, so this leaves her with only the white deck to play.

Next, why are there no new cards? If the planeswalker decks have shown us anything, this is the perfect place to make some new planeswalkers and some cards to support them. A new splashy Nicol Bolas with a card to support him would have sold the product on its own. It wouldn't need to be constructed playable. This was a completely missed opportunity.

Lastly, how do I build onto this product? There are only 3 members of the gatewatch, where are the other 2? If I were designing this product (I can dream right), I would have followed suit with the planeswalker decks. I would have a new planeswalker for each deck and 2 unique cards that support each of the planeswalkers. Each planeswalker deck would be built to the same power level as the standard planeswalker decks then the archenemy deck built to fight against the power of three of those decks. This way if a player doesn't like one of the decks that came with the set, they could pick up one of the standard planeswalker decks and play it without worrying about power level. Going forward, this would bring a living card game feel to our favorite collectible card game.

I'll still purchase the Archenemy box set as I think it is a solid product for the price. The scheme decks alone would probably make them worth purchasing. I think it will take a lot of work to get it to where I want it as a stand alone product though. Overall, having only looked at the spoilers and seen others play it over a few videos, I'd give the product a 6/10 star rating. It looks good, but it could have been so much better.

Commander 2017

Those are my reviews of current products, now it's time for baseless for what's to come in commander 2017. Commander product is my favorite product all year. I have all 25 decks made packaged together and when my group plays multiplayer magic this is generally what we reach for. Also, I love tribal magic!

This year it has been revealed as the year of tribal commander. Each of the precons will be based on a tribe and so far only the dragon tribe has been revealed. They have also dropped this product down from 5 decks to 4 decks as color pie isn't a factor. So, what will the tribes of the other 3 decks be?

I hope they wont be goblins, zombies, soldiers, merfolk, elves, wizards, etc. These tribes are all overdone and not nearly as cool as dragons. Also these are mostly color limited. I think each deck will be 5 color. This will help in the overlap of cards being in more than one deck, which has been done in every commander product so far. So, what would be a tribe that can face off against dragons?

My top bet is a human tribal deck. It's full of flavor having 3 big monster deck and one deck based on humans banding together to hold them off. Humans also run the gambit of the color pie. There are a lot of human matters cards in magic already.

Slivers seem very likely to me. Slivers are a very popular tribe with casual players, probably the only true rival in popularity to dragons themselves. If they are worried about selling the product, slivers will sell. I don't think that slivers will be beneficial to commander as a whole though. There are already 4 sliver commanders available. Then again there is a lot of room in the non 5 color area with some legendary slivers that are only 3 color. With room for 14 new cards in each deck there is some design room here.

Elementals are obvious if I'm right about them all being 5 color. There are big splashy elementals of every color, and they even have a single strong commander option (similar to dragon's single current option). Elementals run really well across the mana curve and lead themselves for a strong "enter the battlefield" subtheme.

If I had to guess, based on my own speculation, I would think the decks will be dragons, elementals, slivers, and humans. My alternatives are spirits and a profession like wizards or knights instead of humans.

Speaking of knights, there are a few picks I would rather have than the ones I mentioned and knights are at the top of the list. Knights are also 5 color so that would work. However I really want to see some knights that are specific colors most notably a black and white legendary knight. There is also a lot of tribal support out there for knights.

The likelihood of werewolves is 0.001%, but I'd love for them to fix werewolves in commander. They have outright stated that they wont print double sided cards in a set like this, but they have changed their mind before and we can always have hope...

Ninjas would also be pretty awesome. As with werewolves, this wouldn't be for a 5 color deck, but giving the 2 color Ninja deck a proper commander would be awesome (ninjitsu that works from the command zone for him only?). Then again they could do this almost as easily in the human deck I mentioned above. The black/white knight I've been begging for could be there too...

Well, that's it for my unsolicited reviews and baseless speculation for the future. Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about any of these subjects in the comments section.