Commander 2017 Card Image Gallery

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Terentius

Guest
Lots of great cards, new and reprints, as to be expected. I'm thinking the Vampire deck would be the strongest, and I would have guessed that before looking at the lists as well. Hungry Lynx is hilarious, and I love that the same guy and his stupid face show up on all the Curse cards.
 

Oversoul

The Tentacled One
Like everyone else on the planet, I think that decks focused on creature types are a fun and cool part of the game. Personally, I'm not so interested in the fusion of Commander and tribal synergies. I like both separately, but don't see much appeal in combining them. However, I'm in the minority here and I think "more tribal stuff" was a popular request for commander products. The goofy cat/everything hybrid stuff is very stupid and, as far as I'm concerned, cannot go away soon enough. We need to kill this crap dead before all griffins become "Creature — Cat Bird" and all manticores become "Creature — Cat Scorpion." But overall, these decks look good and I'm glad that they found a way to make a five-color Commander precon.

I have this vain hope that they'll take a break from these decks and maybe change things up next year. Commander's Arsenal was awesome, but people aren't asking for more because they tend not to have even seen it. How many people besides me even managed to pick up a copy of it? Ten? Twelve? :p But seriously, Commander as a format is getting overloaded with the annual introduction of special cards and mechanics built around it. The whole idea originally was to take cards that were designed with an entirely different mode of play in mind (mostly 40-card Limited decks and 60-card Constructed decks). So Commander was an alternative way to play with the same cards you could play anyway. But the cards in the precons are often very good in Commander specifically, and that messes with the format. Individually, the special mechanics aren't bad for Commander, but they keep piling on in a kind of power creep year after year, and I wish they'd stop. I know it's not going to happen. These things are easily the best precons that WotC put out anymore, they actually play well, and they sell like hotcakes.
 

Melkor

Well-known member
I enjoy that these decks exist, and that they are more willing to take chances with new cards and reprints then they are in Standard legal sets. I'm also somewhat uneasy about them designing cards more specifically for Commander. My favorite part of discovering the format is that it opened up deck building to a lot of cards that I thought I would never get to use. The more they design specifically for it, the more the format will get optimized and they'll start squeezing out the otherwise "bad" cards that I can plausibly play again.
 
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