Over the past few sets, Magic players have grown conscious of a developing trend: cards clearly designed for Commander being printed in non-Commander products. Outlaws of Thunder Junction was a particularly egregious example of this, but even Modern Horizons 3 was no exception. We all made the ‘Commander Horizons 3’ joke at one point during preview season. So far Bloomburrow looks set to keep this fire burning, with a range of viable tri-color Commanders being printed directly into the main set.
Wick, The Whorled Mind
The first of these we’ll discuss today is Wick, the Whorled Mind. Although you only need black mana to cast this card, it has an activated ability that uses blue and red as well. This means you can run it as a blue/black/red, or Grixis, Commander. Wick is a bit of a typal bridge card. It’s a Rat itself and cares about you playing other Rats, but it also makes and buffs Snail tokens, so it’s a mixed bag.
Snails aren’t a focus type in Bloomburrow. In fact, they’re barely a type at all. The only other Snail printed in Magic prior to this was Skullcap Snail in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan. That’s not a problem for Wick though. He makes a Snail, or buffs the one you have, whenever a Rat enters under your control. There are plenty of ways to get a large number of Rat tokens out at once, meaning you can easily generate a huge Snail. Song of Totentanz is a great pick for this, and Standard-legal to boot.
Once you’ve stacked up your Snail, you can sacrifice it to Wick’s ability. This will deal damage to each of your opponents, and draw you cards, equal to the final power of the Snail in question. If you’ve really gone crazy with the Rats, this can actually end the game on the spot. In most cases, however, it’ll be a handy reload with a nice bit of burn damage tacked on. Bear in mind that this ability only cares about the Snail’s power, so if you buff it up in other ways you can get a lot of potential value here.
Helga, Skittish Seer
Next on our rundown of tri-color Commanders spoiled recently for Bloomburrow, we have Helga, Skittish Seer. This is a classic value Commander. In the right deck, it gives you card draw, lifegain, power scaling, and mana ramp, all in one neat three-mana package. Not bad at all.
‘The right deck’ in this case is a deck playing mostly creatures that cost four or more mana. This is a tricky restriction in Standard and the like, but in Commander, it may as well not exist. It’s trivial to stuff your 99 with big value creatures, and therefore very easy to reap the various rewards that Helga offers. Getting to draw cards and ramp mana regularly is what wins games of Commander, and Helga does both of those things.
Like Wick above, Helga also has an ability that cares about her power. Her mana-making scales based on her power, which increases as you play big creatures. You can even speed up the process by using pump spells or Auras, if you want. For example, Giant Growth becomes a green Dark Ritual when applied to Helga.
Note that this ability can only make mana of a single color, so you’ll want to include plenty of mono-color options in your huge creature suite. Or just keep things simple and stick to colorless Eldrazi Titans. Either works.
Baylen, The Haymaker
Finally, let’s take a look at Baylen, the Haymaker. Excellent pun name aside, this looks like a very fun, very flexible addition to the tri-color Commanders of Bloomburrow. Baylen has three activated abilities, all of which ask you to tap tokens you control. You can tap two to generate one mana, tap three to draw a card, or tap four to give Baylen three +1/+1 counters and Trample temporarily.
That’s a ton of flexibility, especially since all three abilities can be used at instant speed without tapping Baylen itself. This means you can get stuck in as soon as Baylen comes down. In Standard, Baylen is clearly meant to serve as a payoff for those generating boards full of Rabbit tokens. In Commander, however, it’s much more likely to enable degenerate lines with Food and Treasure tokens.
As artifacts, these are much trickier to remove than creatures. They’re also laughably easy to generate these days, where it feels like every other card makes one or the other. Like Helga, this is a Commander that can easily make mana and draw cards, which can put you in a position to combo off very early in the game. And don’t even get us started on Unwinding Clock. If your opponents let that resolve while you have Baylen out, they may as well concede on the spot.
Though Helga and Wick are powerful in their own way, Baylen appears to be the best of these new Commanders by a fair margin. Drawing cards and making mana every turn, for free in most cases, is a huge deal. This may have been a fair card before the Food-and-Treasures era, but now it’s a terrifying force of nature.
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