Magic Con Philadelphia kicked off a massive number of new announcements. Between spoilers for the upcoming core set and the new Commander Masters set announced yesterday, an overwhelming number of new products have been introduced in just a few days. Each of the products announced also has some preconstructed Commander decks announced alongside them. While we don’t know too much about the decks besides the colors and names associated, it’s easy to miss the details of all the items announced over the past few days. Let’s recap what we know about the new preconstructed decks announced since Magic Con Philadelphia.
Planechase Returns!
While we already discussed at length in a previous article, the return of Planechase with the new preconstructed Commander decks appearing in March of the Machine has many fans incredibly excited. To recap, Planechase was a sort of game add-on offering for multiplayer games that was released fourteen years ago. An additional deck is introduced into the game with a planar die. This deck features a bunch of oversized ‘Plane’ cards (representing the worlds we visit in MTG sets) that affect the entire game state. The Planar die has four blank faces and two faces with designs on them that interact with the Planechase cards. If the ‘Planeswalker’ symbol is rolled, the currently active Plane gets placed at the bottom of the Planechase deck, and a new Plane is flipped. The other symbol, named ‘chaos,’ triggers a latent ability on the active Plane.
In terms of rolling the Planar die, players can decide whether or not they want to during their main phase. The first die roll each turn is free. Technically, players can roll the Planar die as many times as they want, but each roll will cost one more colorless mana to execute than the previous one. You can read more about the community reaction to the return of this add-on here.
March of the Machine
Planechase’s return will be heralded alongside a whopping five new Commander preconstructed decks. Among these are an Orzhov deck named Growing Threat, an Esper deck named Calvary Charge, a Naya deck named Call for Backup, a Jeskai deck named Divine Convocation, and a Temur deck named Tinker Time. Since these particular Commander preconstructed decks also feature new cards for the Planechase add-on, the contents of these Commander decks vary a bit from what we’re used to. Here’s what to expect if you’re planning on opening one of these preconstructed Commander decks for yourself:
- 100-card ready-to-play March of the Machine Commander Deck with 2 Traditional Foil Legendary cards and 98 nonfoil cards
- 10 Planechase cards and 1 planar die to trigger unique abilities and jump across the Multiverse
- 2-card Collector Booster Sample Pack—contains 2 special treatment cards from the March of the Machine main set, including 1 Rare or Mythic Rare and at least 1 Traditional Foil card
- Deck introduces 10 never-before-seen MTG cards to Commander
- Accessories—1 Foil-Etched Display Commander, 10 double-sided tokens, Life Tracker, and deck box
Notably included, which is not mentioned in this description from Amazon.com, is that five of the ten Planechase cards offered in these Commander decks are entirely new, while the other five are reprinted.
Tales of Middle-Earth
Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth has been one of the most anticipated sets amongst MTG players. Announced two years past, this thrilling straight-to-Modern draft-ready set takes the exciting world created in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series and places it in the world of Magic: the Gathering. In the weekly MTG event that occurred yesterday, as of the writing of this article, Blake Rasmussen gave viewers a preview of the product spread to expect when this set releases in June of this year. Among those are five new Commander preconstructed decks that we do not yet know anything about.
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Commander Masters
If these ten new preconstructed Commander decks weren’t enough, Wizards of the Coast also announced a set entirely dedicated to the Commander format. Commander Masters is a new Masters set entirely dedicated to the Commander format. Previews for this set started strong right out of the gate, spoiling reprints for Jeweled Lotus, The Ur-Dragon, and Capture of Jingzhou, which all have incredibly expensive secondary market prices at the time of writing this article.
Since this is an entire set dedicated to Commander, it makes sense that a series of preconstructed Commander decks are also being released alongside this product. Like the March of the Machine Commander decks, we have a little information about what these products are going to look like. The most crucial information is that these decks will introduce ten new cards.
Starting things off is the new Jeskai-colored Planeswalker Party EDH preconstructed deck. In the words of Blake Rasmussen, this deck will “of course, focus on Planeswalkers.”
The first of the four preconstructed decks featured for the first time yesterday was the Eldrazi Unbound colorless preconstructed deck. This is the first colorless preconstructed Commander deck we’ve ever seen, and understandably, players are excited. While we have yet to see what cards are getting reprinted as a part of this Commander deck, I can easily foresee powerful colorless support cards that don’t get reprinted getting a boost in price as players look to upgrade this deck.
Enduring Enchantments is “an Abzan flavored enchantments deck” that looks to take some inspiration from Theros drawing from the starry sky art seen.
The final deck list introduces yet another Commander favorite to the preconstructed lineup: Sliver tribal. There are a ton of super expensive cards that have been reprinted time and time again that fit into this archetype. Expect to see Sliver cards that aren’t getting reprinted as a part of Commander Masters to see a massive price spike as players accumulate Sliver cards to upgrade this precon.
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