Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate preview season is in full swing and there are some fantastic cards that have been revealed so far. Since it’s a commander focused set, there’s going to be a bunch of new Legends for us to use as commanders. Today, we have a brand new commander with a theme that hasn’t been seen before! With this card, you’ll become the most powerful All Seeing Wizard at the table!
Elminster
Going by only his name, Elminster makes his way to Magic! Elminster is the “Gandalf of the Forgotten Realms”, as a WotC put it. This was a character that was asked for a ton when Adventures in the Forgotten Realms was released, so Wizards is doing right by players for adding him to the game! He’s a 5 mana planeswalker that can be your commander, which is very cool.
His passive ability reduces the cost of the next spell that you cast after you scry. The reduction is equal to the number of cards you looked at while you were scrying. That’s a very powerful effect, and he’s got some wicked activated abilities to go with it. His +1 is a Serum Visions, which gives us a cost reduction of 2 on our next spell. His -3 has us exile the top card of our library, and then create 1/1 Faerie Dragon’s equal to the cost of the spell.
The idea of this deck is to have consistent ways to Scry a lot of cards, and big cost spells to either cast on the cheap, or to turn into a bunch of little creatures to attack our opponents. Let’s look at these strategies individually.
Scry Away
First up, we want to have a bunch of ways to scry cards outside of Elminster’s ability. There are some cards that will give us consistent scry potential.
To start off, we have a bunch of permanents that allow us to scry with a high degree of consistency and often times, we’re scrying more than 1. These effects are either free, or cheap. In the case of Jace’s Sanctum, it also gives us a static mana cost reduction for our instants and sorceries.
While these are great, there is one spell that is absolutely crucial to have in this deck, and that’s Mystic Speculation.
Mystic Speculation is a 1 mana sorcery that allows us to scry 3, but it has a buy back cost of 2. Letting us dig 3 deep is really strong and allowing us to buy it back gives us a very consistent source of scry. The mana reduction ends up being a wash normally. But if we can reduce the cost to cast this spell by at least 2 through scrying or some other means, we can turn that into a positive.
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Big Spells
The second half of this situation is having some large spells to cast with a cost reduction or to turn into Dragons. Let’s talk about some options for that plan.
Since we’re going to be making a bunch of tokens, Alrund’s Epiphany and Emeria’s Call help further that plan. Additionally, Hour of Reckoning can be 3 sided boardwipe, taking out all of our opponent’s creatures, while keeping our tokens in play.
Sea Gate Restoration can draw us a bunch of cards to cast. We can even do some tricky stuff with Emergency Powers and Narset, Parter of Veils. If we can stall out the game long enough,
Omniscience
Omniscience
You may cast spells from your hand without paying their mana costs.
will let us go off, and churn through our deck. There’s plenty of ways to win the game off Omniscience, such as
Laboratory Maniac
Laboratory Maniac
If you would draw a card while your library has no cards in it, you win the game instead.
or
Thassa’s Oracle
Thassa’s Oracle
When this creature enters, look at the top X cards of your library, where X is your devotion to blue. Put up to one of them on top of your library and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order. If X is greater than or equal to the number of cards in your library, you win the game. (Each {U} in the mana costs of permanents you control counts toward your devotion to blue.)
.
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Filling out the Deck
The rest of the deck should have more scry and draw spells, counter magic, and ways to bolster our creatures.
Cards like
Cathar’s Crusade
Cathar’s Crusade
Whenever a creature you control enters, put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.
and Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite do a lot of work for us by making our little dragons into big ones very quickly.
Cards like
Teferi’s Protection
Teferi’s Protection
Until your next turn, your life total can't change and you gain protection from everything. All permanents you control phase out. (While they're phased out, they're treated as though they don't exist. They phase in before you untap during your untap step.)
Exile Teferi's Protection.
and Unbreakable Formation are also great ways to help protect our tokens from combat or removal and can help swing the game in our favor.
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Elminster is a really unique and interesting commander. We haven’t really seen a deck like this really before, so it’ll be awesome to see how people build him and other cards that are used in the deck.