My first thought about Atraxa was that her Proliferate would be good for fuelling cards like Smokestack and Tangle Wire, but I'm not sure how well she would work as a stax commander due to the heavy mana requirements to cast her potentially hurting her consistency and the speed that she can hit the board.

I honestly don't think any of partner cards are going to be all that competitive. If you're building around synergy between the two I think having to cast two creatures instead of one is a big drawback. But I could be very wrong I'd have to play with them to really know I guess.

If you're relying on partnering that is. Kydele does seem powerful on her own.

I'll probably build Kydele as just combo, and maybe Silas as her partner. Black will provide tutors and recursion, and allow for Entomb Mantle > Silas > Return Mantle > Kydele lines that seem promising. But still, Kydele would be a great commander on her own, but the fact that you can add some extra colors and support on makes the deck even better.

Anyone else feel like these partners are complete cop outs?

IMO it's BS.

This is a public service announcement to let everyone know that with the addition of the partner mechanic there are a total of 45 potential combinations between commanders with partners.

With the inclusion of the 4 colored commanders, as well as the option of running just a single partner commander, that means that this commander set is going to give us a grand total of 60 new potential commander decks.

In other words, we have our work cut out for us.

Also, Atraxa is now the de-facto general for Superfriends, and Silas seems really neat to me for an artifact recursion deck that runs similarly to a less stax-y Brago.

This set is going to be fun to evaluate.

Can we just go ahead and mark anything with the R/W guy as Tier 4 right now? Lol

@ Ohthenoises

I do. It's neat to see the format grow in new ways, but allowing you to use two commanders to make your colour combination feels really out of flavour with the format. I will give WotC that, mechanically, the Partner ability is an interesting "outside of the box" solution that they came up with considering the limited design space that they were probably struggling with for 4 colour commanders. Still, I would have preferred for them to have tried going for some hybrid mana options.

They really need to start finding something new to do with WR Commanders though. Is Boros really such a limiting colour combination that all they can come up with is various beatstick legendary creatures for use as commanders?

sonnet666: I was thinking along the same lines. I am very glad she isn't tied to an inherently busted strategy like fast combo.

If Wizards wanted to make a semi competant red white General all they would have to do is make an aggresively costed creature that draws Cards whenever a piece of equipment comes into play. It would not be broken at all and it would allow people to punish ad nauseam decks

Or just any form of card advantage in the command zone. Then red/white could actually play to its strengths and hate on mana bases and spellslinging decks without having to play janky as hell draw engines. The other thing is why do all the boros commanders have to be 4 or 5 drops? There is no good ramp in red/white that doesn't cost card advantage. Why not a 2 drop?

Technically feldon can be card advantage from the command zone so I'd even take that type of ability.

feldon is also mono red and not boros like he was talking about. mono red has good commanders in Feldon of the Third Path and Daretti, Scrap Savant while the others tend to be fairly janky but fun...whoops forgot about Purphoros, God of the Forge as a good one.

So I was thinking...in a Grixis Storm deck, Sol'kanar the Swamp King syngergizes pretty well with Aetherflux Reservoir. He's not nearly as good as Jeleva, not even close, but maybe for this reason he could move out of tier 5? The other tier 4 Grixis commanders are Thraximundar, Tetsuo Umezawa, Gwendlyn Di Corci, and Garza Zol, Plague Queen. Assuming either combo (e.g. Jeleva, Nekusar, etc.) or midrange (e.g. Sedris, Marchesa, etc.) are the ideal archetypes for Grixis, Thrax is a solid midrange commander, but the other three in the tier aren't good at supporting either of those. So even though Sol'Kanar is quite bad, I think that if you are going for an Aetherflux Reservoir combo finish, he could be decent enough at getting your life total higher to merit moving out of garbage tier.

Well, since no one posted this list, Food Chain Tazri, here ya go since it was asked for.

I don't know how competitive the list will be, but I'm going to be trying to optimize Atraxa superfriends in the near future. It probably won't be the best Atraxa build but it should be a fun project.

I'm currently in the process of trying to merge hermit druid atraxa and superfriends atraxa. as soon as I take out the last 13 cards I'll post the list for people to judge mercilessly (please judge the list mercilessly but fairly)

@Coinman1863: It's already posted. Check the list description under the "Tier 1 Lists" subheader.

Atraxa can move aside because Breya, Etherium Shaper is here and she is the real deal

Atraxa can move aside because Breya, Etherium Shaper is here and she is the real deal

you can respectfully keep breya. ill sit here with atraxa and odric. Breya appears to me (initially) as a slightly worse sharuum. Yes breya has many combos, does not convince me to try her over sharuum. This may change later but at the moment my hype is still on atraxa

Oh they printed what should have been the boros commander: Tymna the weaver. Seriously how perfect would that be for Boros (sans the life loss thing)?

Breya flat out wins the game with deadeye navigator combo. She seems really broken

seems good as boros IMO tends to run out of cards after a wrath (or 7) fairly quickly. Also I'm gonna sit here festering over which green deck gets the oath. Seems like a fun inclusion.

Can we talk about Reyhan + Skullbriar for a minute? Or Ghave?