Mountain Landscape with River Valley and the Prophet Hosea by Gillis van Coninxloo (1585). Ondu Giant by Igor Kieryluk.
2016 brought us a new twist on Commander - Partners.
If you are a regular reader of Commanderruminations, you know that I have a Tana & Sidar deck which I just love. Its explosive early game and consistent board presence went a long way towards my winning our EDH League's January points title. If nobody has answers early on, the deck can get out of control really quickly. I have yet to go infinite with Tana, Breath of Fury and a haste enabler, but the deck is fantastic and has had me thinking a lot about Partners, or if you prefer... ruminating.
While I never got so far as to chew my cud, I did get to thinking about the various legendary cards that feature actual pairs of creatures on them.
They are like partners but ones that have been joined into a single card, but not like the recent "merge" mechanic.
One thing Wizards of the Coast never seems to do is recycle exactly the same twist they give to a Commander product. They did planeswalker commanders once. They did experience counter commanders once. Thus far it seems unlikely that a new Commander product is ever going to just rehash either of those old mechanics without a major twist to make it fresh and new. That's probably a good thing, but it means that no matter how much we want more partners, we likely won't be seeing them anytime soon. Partners may not come back again, but today's Commanderruminations post is one in which I'm going to ruminate about what might be.
I'm going to give you a glimpse into a possible future.
I'm going to tell you all about how a new twist on Partners will make for an amazing Commander 2020 release!
Back to the Future We will be bringing back Partners in my alternate future, but giving that popular old mechanic a twist. Partners will have a new keyword - bloodbond. If that sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of "soulbond". In Avacyn Restored Wizards created creatures with the ability to bond to another creature. If this is making you itchy, you may be having flashbacks to Deadeye Navigator running away with games by allowing a player to flicker creatures to make infinite mana, draw their whole deck, remove your entire boardstate and win in any of a number of ways.
On entering the battlefield you can pair the creature with soulbond with another creature that is not yet paired. The two remain bonded for the time they are on the battlefield together. There were lots of evergreen keyword enablers with soulbond, but none of them ever quite had the impact that Deadeye Navigator had on the game.
With that as our inspiration, everything that follows is just my imagination running wild...
Welcome to the year 2020 Welcome to the year 2020. Not only do we now have flying cars, laser guns and vacation resorts on Mars, we also have a shiny new set of Commander decks soon to be released in November, so get ready to teleport on down to your local game store to spend a few rubles on a new deck! The 2020 Commander decks will include legendary creatures with the Partner mechanic you know and love from the old 2016 Commander product. Wizards of the Coast doesn't like to repeat themselves, so these partners will have a twist - all of these partners will all have a new keyword!
Bloodbond
If a creature has the keyword "Bloodbond", it has the ability to be bonded to one other specific card. This can be done when either one enters the battlefield. When you bloodbond two legendary partners together you remove both cards from the battlefield and replace them with a single card that represents the two creatures together. This action does not trigger an additional enter-the-battlefield effect over and above the second partner being played and allowing you to trigger the bloodbond. Triggering bloodbond is a state based action and can be responded to. If the partner entering the battlefield is unable to find the partner you want to bloodbond it with, it remains on the field and is simply unable to change into the "combined" card. The partners are not returned to the command zone until the bloodbonded card leaves play, as they are being represented by the combined card. Any time the bloodbonded card would change zones, it would be replaced by the partners, but if they both enter the battlefield at the same time, bloodbond may be triggered again. A caveat to the legendary rule will prevent a single partner from being on the battlefield with its bloodbonded "combined" card.
Remember Kyanaios & Tiro of Meletis?
Imagine if you had two cards - one for Kyanaios and one for Tiro.
Each would be a 1/4 and somehow their abilities would be split between the two separate legendary creatures. The card "Kyanaios & Tiro" would be kept outside the game and you would start with the two partner cards - Kyanaios and Tiro - in the command zone. If one was on the battlefield and the other entered, you could trigger bloodbond and replace them with the single combined Kyanaios & Tiro commander that was originally released back in 2016.
That, in a nutshell, is how Bloodbond works. When the partners bond, the two separate partner cards can be removed and replaced by another card from outside the game which represents the pair on a single card. This extra card does not count against your 100 card deck, as it is outside the game until the creatures are bonded. The bloodbond mechanic may give the bonded card an extra ability that it would not normally have. The partner cards cannot coexist with the bonded card, as a special caveat to the legendary rule will be applied to these particular combinations of legendary creatures. Something old, something new... One of the things Wizards does really well is bring old cards into new sets in interesting ways. This release will be no exception. We will have old favorites come back into our commander decks under the new bloodbond mechanic. Commander 2020 decks will be in allied colors, so we're looking at decks in Azorious (white/blue), Dimir (blue/black), Rakdos (black/red), Gruul (red/green), and Selesnya (green/white). Partner commanders in this set will mostly be siblings or individuals with so close a connection that they have as strong a bond as a pair of siblings might have.
There are old legendary pairs that might seem like good choices for this new mechanic - Pia & Kiran, Anax & Cymede and Tibor & Lumia come to mind but none of them are in allied colors and none of them are siblings. The next time this partner mechanic gets paraded out, we may go with another twist similar to bloodbond but for lovers called "soulmate". Some of these pairings might make for interesting partner commanders, but let's get back to 2020 and our current set of new legendaries.
Gruul (Red/Green)
Mina and Denn are a pair of elves who are featured in the story Reclamation, by Mel Li.
They are siblings, and should be familiar to you from the card released in Oath of the Gatewatch.
I took apart a Borborygmos Enraged deck a while back, as 8 cmc was too much for him to be playable in my current meta. Recently I built a Mina and Denn deck and threw in a bunch of landfall stuff. It's actually quite playable and can be very explosive.
We are going back to Mina and Denn's lore for some of our inspiration for these cards. Sadly, I was unable to find any new Mina & Denn art, so I set up the cards you see below using the art from the Oath of the Gatewatch card.
The two partners split out the original abilities from the old card, but with Denn in red, first strike seemed more appropriate than trample. When the come together, you get double-strike instead of first strike and you get a bonus if you bloodbonded the combined card rather than just playing it as your commander or from your hand.
The goal is to have two viable, though not overpowered partners and a viable, higher-costed, higher-powered combined card with an incentive to use the bloodbond mechanic. Dimir (Blue/Black)
Moving into Dimir we have another old card that helped to inspire the Bloodbond mechanic.
Gisa and Geralf are brother and sister necromancers who for many years would wage battle with each other across the moors of Innistrad.
In the Eldritch Moon set, we saw them both combined on a single card - Gisa and Geralf.
With this as our inspiration, I tried to create two cards with interesting, useful and appropriate abilities that would capture the flavor of each of these iconic characters. I was able to find artwork on deviantart by the talented homoseptimus, and below is what I was able to come up with.
The "combined" card had so much text that I had to drop the font size down. I'm not sure if these are overpowered or not. Given that throwing this together over the course of maybe 5 days, I expect there will be lots of constructive criticism thrown my way, and probably not much in the way of job offers from Wizards of the Coast.
Azorius (White/Blue)
Finding our way around the color wheel, our next combination is blue and white. Our inspiration in the "azorius" colors actually comes from the card "Dragon-style Twins", which is in red and was released in Khans of Tarkhir.
Meet Kela and Dar Chesnal.
Kela and Dar were born hours apart, and served the Jeskai clan as arbiters, meting out justice as the Arbiter of Innocence and the Arbiter of Guilt. Their story can be read in The Chensal Twins, by Kimberly J. Kreines.
Jeskia is a three-color grouping, but to fit into this set we are placing Dar and Kela into white and blue. This is not only convenient for us, it also represents Dar and Kela's movement past the conflict they went through and into their current positions as seasoned Arbiters for the Jeskai clan.
White is the color of exiling creatures and blue is the color most commonly associated with bouncing a creature to its owner's hand, so those two abilities made sense to assign to each of our Arbiters. Exile implies a harsh sentence and as such, was assigned to the Arbiter of Guilt. Returning to the owner's hand is often a good thing, and since we only have one other option, that ability was assigned to the Arbiter of Innocence. In retrospect having Kela give a creature hexproof might have been a good fit as well.
Rakdos (Black/Red)
Liliana Vess and Chandra Nalaar have long been planeswalkers, but this Commander release sees them in dire straits, having lost their spark. Only by working together can they possibly hope to learn who is responsible for their current situation. Only together can they hope to find their planeswalker spark once again.
The inspiration for the choice of Lili and Chandra is of course the Kaladesh reprint of Diabolic Tutor. I don't think I've ever seen a reprint with artwork I liked so much, where I also really, really loved the original artwork. You can see both below.
Something about those smiles...
I was unable to find a pair of siblings in the world of Magic that could easily be slotted into our red/black deck so even though Liliana and Chandra are NOT siblings, I decided to go with Chandra and Liliana. They aren't sisters, but in our imaginary retelling they have both lost their planeswalker sparks and have grown closer than ever in a united effort to find out what transpired and of course, to get their sparks back.
This particular set of partners was a challenge, as I wanted to find a way to bring both of their talents together into the bloodbonded card. Again, it might be a little too powerful, but I'll leave that for you to decide - hopefully in comments in reddit or on facebook after you read this blog post in its entirety! Selesnya (Green/White)
Guess which planeswalker actually does have a sibling?
If you guessed Ajani, you'd be right. His brother Jazal actually appeared in the Commander 2014 set, and can be seen below.
If our story for Commander 2020 involves planeswalkers losing their spark, it makes sense to throw Ajani into the action, so this set brings us Ajani and Jazal to round out our color wheel by representing green and white. Ajanni has had green, white and red in his color identity in the past, but we have only ever seen Jazal in white, so Ajani will be in green this time around.
I was able to find artwork from the comic Flight of the White Cat that featured art by the talented Greg Staples, so in this set you actually have new art that's never been on a card before, and that matches in style across all thee cards.
Both Ajani and Jazal are diminished, reduced to a paltry 2/2 in stature, but when combined they are back at their normal 4/4. The need to have our partners all be modest in size outweighed the desire to have our cat warrior brothers put at a more impactful 3/3 or even 4/4 to start.
Join the Conversation
Wiser, or at least better-informed minds than I have provided some great feedback. Folks have made suggestions on which cards need better balancing, and have made really minor criticisms like how Jazal might not be a good choice because... apparently he might just be dead.
Yeah - I somehow missed that in my week of brainstorming and research. That's a little embarassing, but mostly this was an exercise in brainstorming new ideas. I promise, Mark Rosewater - if I were being paid, I'd really, really try to get these minor details right!
Anyways, I'd love to hear your thoughts - join in on the conversation on our reddit thread at the link below: https://www.reddit.com/r/EDH/comments/5w9up5/commanderruminations_imagining_a_new_twist_on_the/ Final Thoughts
While that sums up the five new "bloodbond" partner sets I'm imagining for a 2020 Commander Set, there is always more fun to be had.
Anyone familiar with EDH has to have seen the partner mechanic and imagined all the broken combinations a truly deranged game designer might think up. I considered writing up a list of utterly broken commander pairings that only a truly degenerate mind could think up. Unfortunately, once I thought of Heartless Hidetsugu and Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon, nothing else really matched up to that level of sheer brokenness.
I also considered writing up a list of possible "lover" themed partners that could combine using "bloodbond" into a single card, but once I got past Pia & Kira Nalaar, Anax & Cymede and Kynaios & Tiro, I wasn't really sure where to go and how to get color pairings that make sense. My grasp of MTG lore is not exactly a strong suit, but I definitely invite my readers to brainstorm a theoretical 2024 Commander set with another return to the Partner / Bloodbond keywords with a focus on lovers rather than siblings. Yes, MTG fan-fiction authors - that includes you!
I would definitely love to see how you might see these partners paired up with existing Commander 2016 partners. I know I'd be sorely tempted to build a Sidar Kondo / Jazal deck designed to ramp and then hit for a ton of damage after blocks. Are there any that would be truly broken and degenerate when combined together?
This week's post was a lot more work than I initially imagined it would be, but it was also a lot of fun. We all like to put on the "card designer" hat every once in a while, and even if my costing and power levels weren't what a WotC design would find balanced, it was a fun thought experiment and I enjoyed it a lot.
Thank you for reading and I'll see you next week!