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Two weeks ago, I realized these Mom precons were no joke and there was more to them than we thought. With a surprising amount of depth, not to mention a few other surprises, I had to call an audible to expand this into a 3rd part. That’s good – depth is good. Let’s pick something with depth, say, the Seattle Kraken’s lineup. That is better than something with less depth, let’s say the Colorado Avalanche’s lineup. Is more depth better? We’ll find out later this week, I guess. My guess is, yes, in that particular narrow instance but also more broadly, depth is good. Let’s look at the numbers.

For reference, here is the shot from last week.

Sidar continues to climb. Last week I had to talk about how much each deck grew week to week to justify mainly focusing on Sidar because he was still in second place. The rest of the rankings look largely the same – I think it’s time to call it a Top 6. If you go to 7th and 8th, you get decks built half as much as Rashmi and Ragavan – I think only the top 6 here matter, sorry about picking a number that doesn’t cleanly divide into tournament brackets or whatever. This isn’t a tournament, it’s a lifelong fight for relevancy for these commanders in a world where calling MoM “the new set” isn’t accurate anymore. Let’s look at the 2 decks we haven’t.

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Welcome to March Madness, the only time of the year where you hear the word “Gonzaga” and it’s not the name of one of the 595 Legendary creatures introduced to the game in 2022 (I looked it up – it’s 347. I was barely exaggerating and I was trying to be as hyperbolic as possible). The March I am mad about is March of the Machine. We could talk about college basketball but I don’t know anything about it and Corbin Hosler does, and that’s two reasons not to talk about it right there.

Last week we talked about the two major decks from March so far, which is wild since the set is barely spoiled. Still, we have enough Legendary creatures for people to do quite a bit of brewing.

For reference, here was last week

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I’m back on my particular signature brand of BS for this week and it’s going to be a fun article to write. Finally, we get to write about cards I like to play. By that, of course I mean cards I want to put in decks. Notice I didn’t say “deck” because with the stupid, stupid, stupid, idiotic stupid poison counter theme in Phyrexia: All Will Be One (PAWBO for short), we have another theme that works hand in hand with it, enables other strategies (Planeswalkers) and is heavily in the best color combination (Simic). I am talking, of course, about Landfall Proliferate.

Proliferate is a big subtheme in PAWBO, but between the set which gave us a few Proliferate cards and the precons which seemed to ignore the main set in that regard, we have old cards and new cards that are both getting some new looks. While Ezuri is of course not the most popular commander in the set, I think it’s the best place to see the Proliferate cards that matter. Let’s take a look.

I really expected a reprinting of Inexorable Tide, but I think it might be a minute for a reprint. I also think if Inexorable Tide gets printed, it’s unlikely to be in a big set and that could hurt its upside. Also, this isn’t the first time we made money on this card.

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It’s a new year! New year, new me! Ish! Probably not that different! I don’t feel that different! And I took a few weeks off and got my head straight and finally offloaded some of my stress and now it’s back because we have Phyrexia: All Will Be One spoilers! It’s not a hard job but some days I feel like Lucille Ball watching those chocolates come down that conveyer belt and other days I feel like Lucille Ball watching those chocolates come down that conveyer belt but one of those chocolates is a card I want for a deck and I’m like “Oooo, a piece of candy” and that makes it all worth it! Let’s get up to some old tricks for a new year and look at the non-zero number of new decks we have to poke around at.

There isn’t a ton here, but these are all fairly interesting commanders. I don’t expect to see Elesh Norn remain the top commander in the set for lots and lots of reasons that you can skip reading if you know about but in case you’re not super familiar with EDH, Elesh Norn is White and that’s a bad choice. That said, I’m absolutely building a Seance deck with Elesh Norn and this sentence inspired this tweet.

Needless to say, I’m in a fantastic mood right now.

I’m building Norn as a Seance deck because I’m a nut, but how are other people building the deck? What cards should you buy? (The answer is Seance). I’m going to tell you because that’s sort of this column’s entire deal.

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