Hello and welcome back. We have new TNMT spoilers to address, but among them is the singular commander deck coming out with the set. It happens to be five colored, which isn’t much of a surprise considering you’d want a way to represent the entire team of turtles and their maybe conflicting dynamics in a single deck.
The deck got me thinking about five colored commander decks, those legends that lead them, and how five color commanders have been designed. From Cromat to whatever the new five color legend will be in the Lorwyn Eclipsed precon, there is a decent history of legendary design and five color design in general. So, let’s explore.
THE FIRST FIVE COLOR LEGEND
As far as I can find, and I may be wrong, the first five colored legend we received was from Stronghold in the form of Sliver Queen, even predating Cromat, Atogatog and Karona. This sliver, as opposed to most slivers, doesn’t specifically care about Slivers themselves but makes slivers as a hive queen would.
As we go along from this point the variance in five color legends follows along some familiar and well tread paths. There are a few standouts from these and a bunch that have overlap with other areas. Sliver Queen could best be sorted into the “Typal” category since the card doesn’t do much else but give you a reason to collect and use all your slivers in a commander deck and produce slivers for example. It could also be something I would consider a “big bad” legend.
While five colors commanders have (thankfully) become more narrow as time has gone on, there are those still able to generate huge amounts of value or just be a pile of good stuff if you want like Kenrith the Returned King.
Still there can still be a lot of overlap between the categories I’m about to describe, but I think five color commanders almost all fall into these four main categories.
BIG BAD LEGENDS
Early in the designs of more contemporary five color legends, we had a few that kind of just did stuff on their own. Child of Alara and Progenitus just do their own thing, and you build your deck behind them. Cromat is an older example of this, and a deck I had built in my earlier years of Commander. These are probably the commanders who most inspired the good stuff piles of yesteryear but they wouldn’t be the last.
More modern designs like Garth One-Eyed and O-Kagachi might be considered to fall in this category, but those legends have a little leeway to focus into other areas depending on how the deck is built and what definition you might consider for ‘value’.
VALUE LEGENDS
Speaking of, let us resurrect an old popular and despised legend that is still the epitome of the value legends: Golos. Golos did “everything”, getting you a land to fix your mana to help pay for the commander tax and his ability, giving you free casts off the top cards of your deck. Playing your whole deck was not impossible, and building only a decent mana base was necessary. It became such an issue Golos was eventually banned from the format which caused some derision because at the time it was also the most popular commander according to EDHRec. It was the best choice of Commander for nearly any strategy.
There are other legends that come closer than some to meeting the same-ish value. Codie, Vociferous Codex and Ramos Dragon Engine are other colorless value engines that give you varying but possibly powerful levels of value. Omnath, Locus of All and Esika God of the Tree (or more accurately Prismatic Bridge) give value in other ways and you can put a lot of different stuff in their decks, with Esika and Codie being more restrictive than Ramos and Omnath.
Some are wide open though. Jodah, Archmage Eternal lets you cheat on costs for anything and Jegantha pays for itself in one turn in the right deck.
TYPAL LEGENDS
Here we have probably the most popular type of five colored legend: the typal legend. From Karona (technically) to Ulalek, Fused Atrocity, there are many legends that care about the type of something, usually creatures.
Easy ones to think of here are Jodah the Unifier, The Ur-Dragon, and Tiamat. Popular and powerful, most of these commanders bring value with synergies and enable the strategy to move more efficiently towards the end game.
Basically the strategy is a more restrictive value based around a card type to get the most value out of the deck. Scion of the Ur-Dragon was one such early legend, with others like Marina Vendrell, Tom Bombadil and Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin being more contemporary and restrictive ones. If you really want to go all in on restrictions, Urtet, Remanat of Memnarch and Avatar Aang are only going to get some beginning support from sets and maybe sporadic or never again support.
These legends enable and often are a payoff to whatever your deck wants to be doing or let you cheat on costs or some other benefit that might be innate to the type of card you’re using. Often these are some of the most powerful decks to construct with varying degrees of resilience.
BUFFING LEGENDS
These legends are here for one thing only: get the team going. In the same vein as some of the typal legends like Najeela and Jodah, these are a bit more restrictive in that they don’t enable you getting the things you’re buffing as much as having the team swing and survive or overwhelm.
While Najeela could fit here, other legends like the new Heroes in a Half Shell from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Commander does similar things as does the much more narrow Kyodai, Soul of Kamigawa (still upset with that design). In fact, Kyodai barely makes the list here since it only buffs itself and makes one other creature indestructible, barely scraping out Big Bad five color legends territory.
Cosmic Spiderman is also a good example and also crosses into typal territory, wanting you to play spider typal to get the full benefit as often as possible.
FLAVOR LEGENDS
I decided to put some legends that stand out here, even though a lot of them can have overlap with the other categories. Things like Cromat which could be considered value or the many renditions of the five color Niv-Mizzets.
The Nivs are especially centric to this category, where they actually are on flavor for either representing the guilds or some Izzet mechanic that was featured, Niv being the prior leader of the guild. Terra, Magical Adept and The Wandering Minstrel might also be, though I admit I’m not familiar with Final Fantasy very much at all.
Leonardo the Balance is another creature that hits on flavor, at least from the card design perspective. He’s the central rock for his brothers, so he has the five color identity to help tie them together.
Leonardo also covers flavor in a different way, much like some other commanders like Jenson Carthalion or General Tazri. Much in the way they tie things together mechanically or for a set, White by far has the most single colored five colors commanders. That is, a card that costs only White and generic mana to cast but has a five color commander identity. It seems that for flavor, at least for the moment, community, order, and structure allow best for these types of legends.
Summon the Painbow
There is a lot of cross over for some five color legends among these categories, but I think most fit one over another. The designs tend to fit nicely within them in my opinion, but I think over time we’ll see different combinations and more bleeding over. Maybe a new distinct category might spring up. We do have Lorwyn Eclipse coming and I would assume five color reanimator for elementals is on the way.
By the way, I’d pick up a few cards from the old set of Lorwyn, Shadowmoor, Morningtide or Eventide if you think you’ll need ‘em. No telling what they may or may not reprint from that slower, less opened time of Magic sets.
Until next time, stay brilliant and multicolored.
