You care about what happens to them whereas there weren’t any characters that you could apply that same feeling to before. It’s one of the smartest things Wizards has done over the years and has made the game better for veterans and new players alike. As you can see from the above posters and products, planeswalkers have changed promotional material significantly. They became the people you can walk alongside through the multiverse, discovering amazing new worlds, creatures, people, and civilizations. They became guides and even friends with familiar faces and features you can identify and connect with. Yes, you should expect to see at least one planeswalker every set.
Unless you have a card that gives creatures haste, like Fires of Yavimaya, of course. Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools has the partner keyword, so don’t worry about it being mono-colored. It also starts with lots of loyalty and can immediately generate some blockers for your board, so it’s going to be extremely hard to get rid of once it hits the battlefield. White and blue scry like no other color combination, which makes this a great mechanic for a spell-based Azorius Commander deck. Scrying is often used anyway in powerful cantrips or huge sphinx creatures, so it’s a natural fit into the archetype. The extort ability remains on Sorin of House Markov and on the flip side, Sorin, Ravenous Neonate which is a really strong ability.
More recently, the March of the Machine set and the Aftermath set nerfed Planeswalkers like never before, “demoting” them into legendary creatures. This happened to characters like Sarkhan Vol and Nissa Revane, and it might happen again. This hints that creatures and Planeswalkers, as cards and as characters, are converging more than ever. Again, there is no limit to the number of planeswalkers in your commander deck.
Commodore Guff Promises A New Era of Commander Planeswalkers
If I were you, I’d build the entire deck around this excellent Mardu commander‘s ultimate using proliferate synergies and the like. The only reason you’d want to run a commander with less overall power is if it offers unique synergies, but Jared Carthalion doesn’t even offer that. Sorry, but this planeswalker commander just isn’t interesting enough for me. Jared Carthalion isn’t the worst card in the world, but the competition for 5-color commanders is steep.
Planeswalker interaction
As far as mono-green commanders go, Freyalise, Llanowar’s Fury isn’t the best. Locking yourself into only one or two colors is a bad idea unless you commander is powerful enough to justify it. Its second ability provides board interaction, which I like, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to offer other than that.
Yu-Gi-Oh has had many iconic anime, and some of the game’s best decks get their start on TV. Planeswalker Points were a points reward system used by Wizards of the Coast in the 2010s to encourage people to play more in-person Magic. You received points for participating in tournaments and for winning matches. This essentially traps a planeswalker on a plane and has major implications. Yes, if you have turned your planeswalker into a creature, and it came into your control the same turn, then it will need haste to tap and attack, since it is sick from summoning.
That’s already the case with cards like Commodore Guff and Estrid, the Masked, and the game could stand to have more Planeswalkers like that. In recent MtG sets, the line between legendary creatures and Planeswalkers has become more blurred than ever, though this process started even further back. The Magic Origins set featured six legendary creatures that could transform into Planeswalker cards, and many versions of Gideon Jura could temporarily become a creature and fight directly.
Modern Horizons 3 brings a heaping helping of exciting new cards to Modern. Rekindle your love for classic reprints including allied fetch lands and discover new power-packed cards like double-sided Planeswalkers you’re sure to flip for. Ready to play right out of the box, each deck contains 3 foil Legendary Creature cards. Aminatou’s ultimate is really interesting, and once in a blue moon, you might be able to manipulate the board to a state where you can steal something really good while giving your opponent next to nothing. Mostly though, you’ll be using Aminatou’s -1 power, as early and often as you can.
Unless you’re in some kind of official sanctioned event, adherence to the Commander rules is only necessary insofaras you and your friends find it fun. If you and your friends want to allow Planeswalkers as commanders, by all means, talk about it and create such a rule between yourselves, and then make a deck with a Planeswalker as a commander. Would you have believed that there are about 300 different planeswalker cards? Now you know about them and can wonder at all the work that has gone into them all the way from the creation of this card type nearly 20 years ago. Maybe one day WotC will invite planeswalkers as a Special Guest to a Magic event near you. Next, you can craft planeswalker cards (any card, really) using wildcards.
It’s a little disappointing that the first card for a character who literally rewrites history in the lore ended up being so flat and narrow. Despite being pretty cool and unique, Guff doesn’t make the superfriends Commander strategy any more or less reliable than it was before. The planeswalker half is in a poor position of having an extremely threatening ultimate, so players are incentivized to get rid of it, but having fairly weak alternate abilities outside the ultimate. It is a one-day event where players are immersed in a story affected by their in-game choices. If you’ve picked your commander and aren’t sure what to do next, check out our guide to how to build an MTG Commander deck for some tips.
“Rule Zero”
This card is playable at six mana, unlike other cards on the list. Everything this card does makes you able to look away from its mana cost and sleeve it up at the head of a deck. It can impact the board in a big way without knocking out all of its own loyalty, which is huge for a commander that would cost eight mana to cast a second time. Making three tokens means this card is already hard to kill, a built-in Wrath means this card is even harder to kill, and giving your creatures a power boost and flying means your opponents are easier to kill. A Dimir planeswalker for five mana, Tasha, the Witch Queen is a great option for any player looking to build a deck based around playing their opponent’s spells.
That said, its partner mechanic is even more important here than it is with Jeska, as sacrificing a cheap commander can give you even more cards with its +1 ability. People are doing their thing, and most people’s thing is either a huge culmination into something so big that most planeswalkers couldn’t hold a candle to it. This is like any form of Voltron, or anything that goes wide at lower power levels. They could be playing too many combos, or have overall velocity at higher power levels, or be cEDH as a whole. Additionally, I think the little interaction that people do play is so powerful, that you can reliably ignore most planeswalkers in favor of more mtg decks threatening action, or run them over anyway while protecting their primary threat.
No, once your creature attacks a planeswalker, you cannot direct the damage to the player. On the defensive side, no, you cannot save a planeswalker by accepting damage to your life total instead. One unique interaction is the great Questing Beast which can deal bonus damage to a planeswalker if it hits a player. Note that you and your opponent can both have Nissa, Steward of Elements in play, but you and your opponent cannot have more than one of them on your respective sides of the battlefield. There can be more than one that exists on the battlefield if they’re controlled by different players. If you were to steal your opponent’s Nissa, you would again have to pick which one to keep and the other would go to the graveyard.