Personally, I dislike the join forces cards and the other pure multiplayer cards like death by dragons. I like my cards to have subtler multiplayer applications (liliana’s spectre, syphon soul). Regardless, the introduction of 15 new legendary creatures was far more important to the format than the other commander-specific creations. This was a huge bump in playable generals for the various enemy colour pairs and especially enemy colour shards, but was it all good for the format?
By my estimation of the 15 new generals Wizards introduced, half were good and half were bad, with 3 being very well designed and 4 being terrible for EDH games everywhere.
The Very Good
While too much random is incredibly annoying (grip of chaos, confusion in the ranks), a little bit can be a lot of fun. Capricious efreet is a card I often want to play, but just ends up cut because there are better removal options available. I find Tariel is in the sweet spot of a “little bit” of random. He’s a fun card because the randomness isn’t a nuisance, in fact it keeps the usual nuisance of monitoring graveyards (teneb, mimeoplasm) under control since you usually can’t guarantee what you’ll get with his ability. He also leaves the deck up to the builder, as there is nothing he needs to work. Just run a little removal you should be playing anyways, and voila - business.
I like cheap generals and I’ve always liked whirling dervish. The drawback for dervish (and slith for that matter) is that it takes too long for the +1+1 counters to matter in a 40 life format. By the time your little horseman gets to 5/5 it ends up getting outclassed or swept off the battlefield. Skullbriar solves this problem by retaining his counters, which also means he scales well when re-cast from the command zone. Haste is also a fantastic general ability, and actually pretty rare for both black and green creatures. I really like this guy as a black/green general.
Another example of the “little bit of random” being fun. A 7/7 stays relevant through an EDH game, and is actually in the sweet spot of 3-shotting someone with general damage like the original elder dragons. Obviously that’s offset by not picking your target, so all around a pretty fair general - also a lot of fun to say “its not my fault!” whenever you whack someone for 7.
The Okay
Basandra is neat because her two abilities work reasonably well on their own, but can also be built around in your deck. On the downside the no-casting-during-combat abilitiy is probably more annoying than it is fun, while on the upside who doesn’t love nettling imp? She suffers because I’ve found red/white as a colour combination is quite boring no matter what you do, but I have no problem with the card per-se.
I feel like there are probably degenerate combos possible with Damia, but I like to instead think of her as an incentive to play lots of cheap crap spells and dump your hand over and over again. At 7 mana he’s a rough cast and will rarely survive the round to net you cards but if she does you’ve got the business. To the extent she’s used to play large quantities of cheap cards, I like it. To the extent she’s used to fuel degenerate combos, I hate it.
This is some interesting design space if nothing else. I don’t see anything degenerate or overpowered, just a strange combination of damage and card draw that always makes you question if the payoff is worth the drawback. Definitely more interesting than Tibor and Lumia as a r/u general, and less degenerate than #1 Niv-Mizzet.
Again, interesting design space for players. He’s an alternative to pheldagriff for group-hug players, and an interesting political card for those wanting to dabble more heavily in that area of multiplayer. I think most would agree he’s an overcosted card with an overcosted/marginal ability, but still has a niche in EDH.
The Bad
We’re lucky this guy isn’t blue, because with any decent self-mill he’d be unbearably annoying. Even in his colours he offers a tremendous amount of synergy and the potential for degenerate recursion cycles. He’s not in the awful category because his graveyard shenanigans are restricted to the owners graveyard, but he’s not good either because free cards from the yard just enables too many stupid possibilities (hi eternal witness).
Kaalia’s problem is that she is just too damn boring. Your deck design options go down the toilet as you just end up playing the usual cast of EDH-proven dragons, demons, and angels, with an uninspired mix of mana artifacts, removal spells, and maybe some evasion equipment. What makes EDH tribal decks neat is that they usually have to be creative to be viable in multiplayer; Kaalia’s tribe is basically the best EDH creatures there are, so there’s no creativity or further synergy required.
Like Kaalia, Animar suffers from my-deck-built-itself syndrome. Add lots of creatures including fatties that benefit from cost reduction and stir. Like Kaalia, Animar asks you to overextend; unlike Kaalia, Animar becomes exponentially worse each time you have to re-cast him. Since his power lies in you having played a lot of spells, he is pretty weak on the 2nd and 3rd re-casts as he hits the table as a 1/1. Animar is the double whammy of being a boring and bad general (although to give him his due he can take a massive dump on black/white decks if they don’t resolve a wrath).
Edric looks interesting, but falls into a group-hug trap of mass card draw. The problem with everyone drawing oodles of cards is that means everyone has virtually unlimited threats and answers, so none of them end up mattering. People running out of threats or answers is generally what defines a game of magic - all players having limitless resources means someone needs to combo out or have a truly un-answerable win condition to bring the game to a close. I don’t like 3 hour marathon games so I don’t like this sort of environment. I even play an edric deck (extreme aggro to offset the stalemate possibility) and I’d rather the card was never printed.
The Absolutely Terrible
The ultimate nuisance general. I do not like this card at all, and hate playing against it. Where Tariel is on the good side of graveyard shenanigans, mimeoplasm is miles away on the bad. Blue gives it access to cheap mill/looter effects like windfall so that when it comes out its almost always a 10/10 or bigger with some ETB effect or a combination of haste/shroud/flying/trample that make it a nightmare to deal with. Its nice that it exiles fatties from graveyards so others can’t do shenanigans, but that doesn’t come close to offsetting this card’s “answer-me-or-die” impact on the game.
Vish Kal is a card that just has way too much going for it. Both abilities costing no mana is absurd, as is having both flying and lifelink paired with a massive self-pump ability. He basically gives all of your creatures “fling for free” while making it very unlikely you will lose to normal combat damage due to massive lifegain. You can easily 2-shot someone with general damage by saccing a creature or two to pump him. But the ultimate coup-de-grace is that he is immune to tuck spells and theft, a power previously reserved for atogatog. His only drawbacks are being in a fairly lousy colour pair and costing 7 mana to get started, which are nothing compared to his benefits. Compare this guy to ghost council of orzhova and you can see how easy it is for wizards to go too far with their new legendary commander creatures.
I really wanted to like Riku. He was a big reason I bought the mirror mastery precon, but he’s just not fun. You either get away with your doubling and run away with the game, or riku gets wiped away immediately everytime and you struggle to do anything meaningful. The doubling creature effect is also a nuisance as you end up with all kinds of tokens on the board and having to remember what they are. He’s close to the answer-me-or-die general type, although it is somewhat reliant on what’s in your hand. Definitely unfun to play against, and a bit too powerful to really enjoy piloting.
Ghave himself isn’t really that bad, it’s more the deck he needs you to make. To be at all effective he needs you to play cards that make tokens, and token decks are almost as annoying as graveyard-abuse decks. A field full of dice and face down cards that are bears, saprolings, soldiers, myrs, and god-knows-what-else is just plain annoying to look at. At least he doesn’t include red, which would enable threaten+sac combos, and his skills cost mana unlike vish kal’s. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because mass tokens alone is enough of a nuisance to give him 2 thumbs down.
Macaroni or Cheese?
Wizards split these guys 50/50 between mac and cheese, which isn’t bad considering how it could have gone. Sadly it looks like this might be the best they could do, as their next gogo gadget commander looks to leave mimeoplasm and vish kal in the dust for retardedness:
Double cascade, 7/5 haste giving all creatures (that you’ll likely cascade into) haste? hurr durr... this will be the #1 legitimizer of people playing and tutoring for their spell crumples. Also note there is nothing legendary about this card except that by being legendary it will fetch a far higher price. The bar just went a lot lower for wizards.
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