Chain of Commander Masters

Welcome to Commander Masters card preview season. Today, I'm going to walk you through the set's design, introduce you to all the designers that worked on it, and show off a preview card.

Masters of Masters

As with any design, I'd like to begin by introducing the designers who made the product. As with all my intros, I'm having the lead of the design teams introduce their own people. Gavin was the lead for the vision design of the main set and the Commander decks. Bryan Hawley was the lead for set design of the main set, and Corey Bowen was the lead for set design of the Commander decks.

Master the Possibilities

A Commander Masters set is not a new idea. When we first came up with the idea of Modern Masters over a decade ago, it only took a minute to apply it to other formats. The real challenge was getting it on the schedule. I interviewed Gavin Verhey as part of writing this article (as I said above, he was the vision design lead for the set), and he told me he'd been trying to get this product made for many years. He originally pitched it as a "Multiplayer Masters" set that would reprint cards from past multiplayer products, things like Conspiracy and Conspiracy: Take the Crown, in addition to cards from premier sets that played well in multiplayer.

What finally got the ball rolling was the popularity of the Commander format and the need for reprints specifically for it. Generally, powerful cards tend to be popular in multiple formats and are much easier to get into reprint products. However, some of Commander's needs are very focused and can't easily find slots in the places we most often do reprints. By making a Commander Masters set, we'd have a home for those cards.

The two big things you have to do in a Masters product is pick reprints that players want and make for a fun Limited environment. The latter is the harder task. Commander Masters had an additional hoop—it had to be a Commander Draft product, something we've done twice before with Commander Legends and Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate.

Here are the lessons we've learned from doing it twice:

Lesson #1 – You need a lot of cards.

Commander Draft allows you to have multiples of cards, but to feel like Commander, you don't want the format dictated by playing lots of the same card. The nature of a Commander Draft set is that it needs a lot of variety to allow players to draft around all the different legendary creatures. Finally, there are a lot of cards to reprint, so you want a lot of slots. In Commander Legends, there were 451 cards (130 commons, 135 uncommons, 135 rares, 35 mythic rares, 15 basic lands, and The Prismatic Piper). This is significantly bigger than an average draft set. March of the Machine, in contrast, had 281 cards in the main set. It has an additional 106 cards on the bonus sheet (something most sets don't have). That comes out to 387 cards total, more than 60 cards less than the total number of cards in Commander Masters.

Lesson #2 – You need a lot of legendary creatures.

To play Commander, you must have a commander. We can tweak some of the rules in Limited, but the commander rule is so core to the experience of Commander that we felt it was mandatory. To do this in a draft, you must give players a lot of commander options. If players only ever get one or two choices for their commander, that'd remove their sense of agency. The key to solving this is to have a lot of legendary creatures. Of the 451 cards in the set, 119 of them are legendary creatures (55 uncommon, 48 rare, 15 mythic rare, and The Prismatic Piper). The as-fan is close to three (meaning on average, you will open three legendary creatures in a Commander Masters booster). There are three colorless legendary creatures (although one has a five-color color identity), 83 monocolor legendary creatures, and 32 multicolor (two-, three-, and five-color) legendary creatures.

Lesson #3 – You need a way to shift colors.

This was the big lesson from the Commander Legends sets. If you make the players choose their commander early and then just spend the rest of the draft picking colors from that card's color identity, you can get "on rails" quick. That is, you can get in a position where you don't have many options. One of the cool things about Booster Draft is that you can adjust on the fly as you start seeing what's coming to you. For Commander Draft to draft well, there must be some mechanism that allows some amount of shifting.

In Commander Legends, that something was the partner mechanic. While it worked great in Draft, it caused some issues in Constructed Commander. When we were designing Battle for Baldur's Gate, we knew that we had to find a different answer. That answer ended up being Backgrounds, enchantments that you could pair with certain monocolor legendary creatures to have a more nuanced color identity and mechanical theme.

We didn't have the luxury of designing new cards for Commander Masters Draft Boosters. All the cards in a Masters set are reprints. The team investigated reprinting partner and Background cards, but it made the set feel too much like the previous Commander Draft sets. Next, the Vision Design team tried upping the volume of legendary creatures. You could be a bit pickier with which ones you wanted to be your commander because there were so many. Playtesting showed that players still picked their commander early and drafted around it.

The solution to the problem didn't lie with the cards but rather the rules. Commander Limited works a bit differently than regular Limited. Above, for example, I talked about how Commander Draft doesn't have a Singleton rule, but it also changes how cards are picked. This was inspired by how Double Masters solved its draft problems by allowing players to draft two cards for their first pick out of each booster.

Here's the rule they came up with, similar to an existing mechanic popular among Commander Cube players. In Commander Masters, all cards that could normally be your commander with one or less colors in their color identity are treated as if they have partner in Limited. This one rule made a world of difference. It allowed players to draft a commander early but adapt their draft as they see what colors are open. As with Commander Legends, The Prismatic Piper was added in case you don't find a legendary creature in your second color. It's a legendary creature you're allowed to add to any deck. As you will see when we get to set design, this was key to making everything work.

Gavin also oversaw choosing the four Commander decks for Commander Masters. Normally, Commander decks tied to a product release have themes that are extensions of the product. Gavin and his Vision Design team had a different idea. What if they used this as an opportunity to make some decks that the players have been clamoring for but haven't had a place in the release schedule?

Two other decisions I should address before getting to the decks. It was decided that these decks would have ten new card designs each. While Masters sets are generally reprint-only sets, they felt the Commander decks needed the tool of new card designs to push the themes in new directions. Also, having decks tied to specific products can often limit what characters the decks have access to. Commander Masters would allow the design teams access to whatever characters they wanted.

Deck 1: Colorless Eldrazi

One of the decks that players have been wanting for a long time is a deck with a colorless color identity. In fact, it was one of the runner-up themes for Commander (2017 Edition). Commander Masters has two legendary Eldrazi, but there simply weren't enough colorless cards to make drafting such a deck viable; however, Gavin and the design team wanted such a dream to exist somewhere. There are a lot of challenges with designing a colorless deck due to less card options. In addition, there aren't a lot of colorless instants, so it's tricky giving the deck enough ways to be reactive. In the end, they chose to make the deck more about playing giant colorless spells rather than specifically referencing Eldrazi.

Deck 2: Five-Color Sliver

This was another long-requested theme by the players and another runner-up theme for Commander (2017 Edition). The challenge with making a Sliver deck is that there are several five-color legendary Slivers that already exist, some of which are quite powerful. This deck needed to be something that didn't just do what Sliver decks could already do. The design team had to find ways to make the deck push in different directions and give Sliver players tools to venture down new paths. The deck has a cycle of monocolor Slivers with new designs and some other cards that play well in any typal deck. (Typal meaning "a theme caring about a particular creature type.")

Deck 3: White-Black-Green Enchantress Deck

Enchantments is another popular theme in Commander, but most of the decks are green-white. This was an opportunity to add another color, black, which is the third color in interacting with enchantments. The goal of designing this deck was to make a deck that played with enchantments in a different way. Adding in black allowed the deck to interact more with the graveyard. The key to differentiating this deck from the various green-white ones was to make it more about playing bigger, more expensive enchantments rather than a lot of cheap ones.

Deck 4: White-Blue-Red Planeswalkers

The first three deck themes came quickly. They were tapping into popular player requests. It took longer to find a theme for this last deck. The Vision Design team tried a white-black-red "give opponents bad stuff" deck, but it ended up feeling more mean than fun. They also explored a green-blue-red energy deck. In the end, they decided to go with a planeswalker theme that would be harder to build elsewhere. Having many Planeswalkers lose their sparks in March of the Machine: The Aftermath would make such a theme trickier thematically in other products. The deck was built with a bunch of planeswalker cards that could be your Commander (which allowed us to make some new planeswalkers playable as commander designs) with a "pillow fort" theme. It also allowed Corey to make use of Commodore Guff, a character he designed a card for in a product that did not see print.

Duel Masters

When Gavin and his team finished the vision for the set, they passed the file along to Bryan Hawley and his Set Design team. (As you can see above in the bios, there was a lot of overlap between the two teams.) Set Design had a bunch of challenges to face.

Challenge #1 – The set is much bigger than a normal draft set.

As I explained above, the needs of Commander Draft pushed up the number of cards in the file. This had a huge impact on the Set Design team as they balanced the set. Where a change would normally require changing one or two cards in a normal draft set, in Commander Legends, it could take four to eight. It also means many of the metrics that we've established don't work as cleanly and cut down on the shortcuts the Set Design team can use to balance a draft.

Challenge #2 – Multiplayer draft gets bogged down easier.

The dynamics of a four-person multiplayer game increase the possibility of the game getting bogged down, as everything isn't zero-sum. This means the design team had to increase the amount of mass removal and cards that could help end the game. This tends to push up the average power level of cards. Luckily, the rule that legendary creatures with a color identity of one or less gained partner ended up helping significantly, as it raised the average power level of decks. Commander draft decks tend to be on a power level higher than the average preconstructed Commander deck. This took a lot of pressure off set design and play design.

Challenge #3 – Players want to draft around their legendary creatures.

Adding commanders to a draft heavily influences how the set is drafted. Players tend to take at least one legendary creature early and then draft around it. This means that there must be a lot of open-ended themes to allow all the different legendary creatures to be viable. We don't want any of the legendary creatures to be "traps," that is, cards that hint at a theme you could draft but simply isn't available in the set. Except for the two Eldrazi, Bryan felt every legendary creature was viable to draft around, although he pointed out some are a lot harder to draft around than others. The impact of this on the draft is huge. It changes how you group colors, how you connect themes, and how you design individual cards. It adds several things you must care about over and above all the other things you need to watch out for when making a draft set.

Challenge #4 – Archetypes don't work as well in multiplayer drafts.

Normally, in a draft set, our default is ten two-color draft archetypes. Each one can have a very focused theme that players can draft around. The desire to draft around legendary creatures and the need to make them all viable pushes the design away from tight archetypes and instead toward looser themes, what Bryan called synergy clusters. Here are the ten two-color synergy clusters for Commander Masters and their play speeds:

White-Blue: Artifacts (medium)
Blue-Black: Reanimator (slow)
Black-Red: Sacrifice/combo (medium)
Red-Green: Power matters (slow)
Green-White: Counters/go wide (fast)
White-Black: Sacrifice tokens (fast)
Blue-Red: Spells (medium)
Black-Green: Tokens (slow)
Red-White: Equipment (medium)
Green-Blue: Ramp (slow)

The result of all this work is a unique drafting experience, one I hope you all get to try.

Before I wrap up for the day, I have a preview card to show you.

That's all the time we have for today. I hope you enjoyed learning about the design of Commander Masters. If you have any questions or comments about this column or the set itself, you can email me or contact me through my social media accounts (Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok).

Join me next week for some card-by-card design stories from Commander Masters.

Until then, may you partner some monocolor creatures.