Let me start out with the usual "Fuck Hasbro." It's implied, but as I'm about (gasp! shock! horror!) give praise to a Magic: The Gathering product, and especially since they've recently pissed people off more than usual (and the Pinkerton shit somehow didn't hurt them because big corporations truly are made of Teflon), I just feel I need to be upfront about it. Take basically all of this article with a preemptive but unstated "if Hasbro wasn't shit, then..." I guess.
Mystery Booster: Commander Edition saw a preview event happen at GenCon this past weekend, and it's probably about the exact thing I want in terms of an MTG Commander release. It's also an absolute cavalcade of things that will make Magic lore nerds and/or general oldheads pop - even with some stuff in there for the newcomers. Like, yeah, I find things like a legendary Uncle Istvan and a planeswalker card for Arzakon to be super cool, but more recent fans might get a kick out of Valko Indorian, a character from the material attached to the Beadle & Grimm's merchandise for Phyrexia: All Will Be One - by far one of the least expected characters to make a return. And sure, I feel a little disappointed in the recycled art for Selenia and Lyna, but this has happened before in Mystery Booster 2 for the reprints of some of the Weatherlight crew. There is precedent; it's just not been established as such for new cards ‘til now.
But none of that is what I want out of a Commander release. I mean, it kind of is for reasons I'll get to, but it's more because, thanks to the playtest cards, I feel there is an expectation of experimentalism in a Mystery Booster release, and that's where Commander-focused design should stay. I've written and thrown out various write-ups dunking on this before, so let's stick to the short version: I feel that designing cards for Commander violates the spirit of the format a little. In this, I mean I played Commander back when it was still called Elder Dragon Highlander, and back before Wizards released the Commander (later known as Commander 2011, but I believe that's colloquial) preconstructed decks.1 I went through the rite of passage known as “building a five-color goodstuff deck with Cromat as your general and whatever half-decent cards you had lying around.” And yes, back then they were called “generals.” I remember when Biorhythm was banned in EDH. And now it's on the Game Changer list instead. Alongside other cards that should probably be banned like Drannith Magistrate, The One Ring, Thassa's Oracle, and some others… and cards that shouldn't, like several tutors. I think Commander is at its best when nothing is designed around its existence and it's played by a couple of goofballs just cobbling together random jank they have in their collection, at most 80% of the way to the deck having a “point.” I suppose even if you banned all designed-for-Commander cards, though, you could never recreate the spirit of the EDH days, when there wasn't a true “metagame” as such.
However, even I know that there is a lot of space for interacting with Commander-exclusive elements and Commander as a format in general. However, I really think it needs to have a fairly restricted place to hang out.2 Here's where a Mystery Booster set comes to the rescue. I feel it is reasonable to assert that the Mystery Booster series is a place where experimentalism is ascendant, if often pretty silly. Even in the original - which could arguably be considered an innovator for its use of “pick-up reprints” and being oriented around being sort of a Chaos Draft simulator - there were playtest cards, which were a bit on the goofy side but nevertheless offered visions of a potential future of Magic. Mystery Booster 2 added non-playtest cards to paper Magic with the printing of some online-exclusive cards. All but three of them were printed as “acorn” (i.e. formerly silver-border until some fuckin' losers decided it was bad - though, the new version with the black bottom section does look a lot worse) reprints. Most of them may not have been tournament legal, but a few were, and this idea was a step toward what we would get with Mystery Booster: Commander Edition. Mystery Booster as a place for new cards for specialty purposes doesn't feel that unusual as a result.
Additionally, restricting all intentionally Commander-oriented design to a biannual Mystery Booster Commander Edition set would help fix a major problem where it seems like several sets now have a lot of legendary creatures simply because Commander needs them. For example, Edge of Eternities did not need two Alpharael cards. However, there are significantly more egregious cards out there, such as for characters that seem to have no lore at all. (Meanwhile, there are several lore characters that do not have cards yet, while Grizzlegom, an important character in the Invasion block novels, just got a card with MBCE. Over twenty-five years later. For a major character.) This would allow the design team to focus all of the space in a set on making things that work without having to shoehorn in extra legendary creature cards just to fill out a sheet. Yes, this does mean that my boy Ragost would get consigned to the sidelines, but that might be an acceptable cost, because I feel this version of events would make sets better. Tighter-designed, at bare minimum…
So you'd have a place like this which could serve as a good place to offload all your legendary creature designs that do not help the set design, and you could make absolutely sure that the entire set was designed around the “normal” game, with no compromises (I would also say that it would be a good idea to remove anything trying to push cards for any specific formats, but I don't know how much of a thing this is outside of Horizons sets, and even that might be a stretch to assert.). Now everyone wins, and you've confined Commander to a special bi-yearly release, with maybe an exception made for some Commander starter decks, for the same crowd they exist for now. After all, I've seen a lot of people complain about how much Commander ends up in regular Magic releases, and it's not just about legendary creatures. It also would, for people like me, keep up that spirit of discovery in the format by not having so many large re-releases that are so signposted. Would I still want a lot of reprints to keep stuff cheap? Yes, but that's what the pick-up reprints are for. I got the “World Shaper” precon recently and it kind of offends me how well-designed it is. If I don't have to pore over shoeboxes and Scryfall for hours to try and find what I need, what's even the point? Deckbuilding, theorycrafting, guesswork, and all-around fucking around and finding out are 90% of the fun of Commander.
In short, even aside from how much I love the new cards in Mystery Booster: Commander Edition, it's exactly the type of Commander release I want in Magic, and truth be told, it's the only one. Perhaps made regularly - I suggested every two years - but at least once. Now if they could just do something about the fucking distribution of these things...
1. ↑ Speaking of which, they used to be in these odd horizontal boxes, which I think the Universes Beyond ones do now - not the same shape, obviously, but whatever.
2. ↑ If I had my way, in addition to ending Universes Beyond, I would also ban all new cards included in Commander precons and other Commander-specific sets like Commander Masters from all non-Commander formats. They should put me in charge of Wizards of the Coast. And also give me Chris Cocks' disembodied tongue sealed in a resin cube.