What is the Reserved List?
First introduced in 1996, the Reserved List is a list of Magic cards that Wizards of the Coast has explicitly promised not to reprint in paper form, with the goal of preserving stability within the secondary market and protecting the interests of collectors. At the time of writing, the list accounts for roughly 700 cards originally printed between Alpha and Urza’s Legacy.
The quality and power of the cards included in the Reserved List varies greatly, from all-time classics like Ancestral Recall to niche gems like Dwarven Armorer. Whether they are powerful Vintage staples or borderline playable Creatures, neither these, nor any functional reprint can be issued in any future paper-based set.
Because of this self-imposed contract, not only are Reserved List cards retaining most of their value, but they are often increasing steadily in price. Most of the original Dual Lands are currently priced in the hundreds of dollars, while the coveted Power Nine can occasionally reach six-figure price tags.
While this can contribute to turn Legacy and Vintage into very inaccessible formats, some level of repercussion is also perceived in Commander. Players hoping to acquire an Underground Sea would be faced with a 300 $ price tag, while Timetwister demands at least 2000 $. Other famous cards, like Mox Sapphire, have been banned altogether since the very birth of the format.
In our latest article on Mana rocks I advanced the hypothesis that the original Moxen cycle would be relatively acceptable, power-wise, in Commander. They would definitely be powerful cards, but their power level, in my opinion, would not be excessive in a format where Mana Crypt is legal and Sol Ring is simply ubiquitous.
The real problem would not be the power of the cards themselves, but their availability. With most Commander players unwilling to spend thousands of dollars for a Mox Sapphire , making it suddenly legal would be little more than a publicity stunt in most playgroups. And with Wizards of the Coast having no chance to reprint any of the original Moxen, their availability can only decrease over time.
The Battlebond Precedence
Battlebond has proven that, taking full advantage of the multiplayer nature of Two Headed Giant, pseudo-Dual Lands can be easily reprinted in non-Standard legal sets. As a result, Commander and casual players can be provided with new, quasi-Reserved List powerful cards, while other Eternal formats remain virtually unscathed. Morphic Pool, for example, plays almost like Underground Sea in Commander, while Legacy and Vintage hardly even noticed.
Prior to the Battlebond Lands, Command Tower was the gold standard for extremely powerful Commander cards that, by design, could not really be played elsewhere.
This, I think, is a design space largely worth exploring for future non-Standard legal sets. In our latest Article on Mana rocks we already toyed with the idea of Commander legal Moxen. But, personally, I wanted to push the discussion even further.
A few weeks ago, I asked the Commander community on Twitter what they thought about a Commander legal Black Lotus and the response was surprisingly balanced.
Black Lotus in Commander?
While some immediately argued that the card was simply too powerful for the format, other raised concerns not towards the card’s power, but towards its potential abuse in a format that already encourages recursion. If Black Lotus is mostly a one-shot Mana boost in Vintage, Commander would lend itself to cycling the card over and over, likely generating consistent Mana advantage over the course of the game.
But what if we could fix this? What if we could introduce a Commander version of Black Lotus that could not be continuously recurred, but that functioned as the card was likely intended to play in the early days of Magic?
To be completely honest, I think it could also be possible to envision a less powerful version of the card that only generated colourless Mana, but this would make it harder to code it into a Commander-specific restriction.
So, would this Ephemeral Lotus be too good for Commander purposes?
As it is, the card compares quite favourably with Dark Ritual, playing as a free Sorcery speed version of the same card, with an increased output colour flexibility. To put things into perspective, at the time of writing Dark Ritual is played in a little over 15’000 decks on EDHRec.com, while Gilded Lotus, with the same Mana output, but a permanent nature and an increased Mana cost, is played in almost 50’000 decks.
Personally, this leads me to believe that a slightly adjusted Black Lotus, like the proposed Ephemeral Lotus from above, would be a powerful, but fairly acceptable card in Commander.
The real issue with a card like that, in my opinion, would not be its power level, as the card is not too far from the permanent value generated by cards like Mana Crypt and Sol Ring. The problem, I think, would be the impact a critical mass of Vintage-esque cards could have on the format. If the five Moxen and a Black Lotus would individually be fine, compared to the existing Mana rocks of the format, the problem would rise with all of these Reserved List-esque cards becoming legal alongside the existing Mana rocks of the format.
In other words, if the occasional turn 1 Sol Ring can be easily overcome in a multiplayer format, the consistency and redundancy provided by Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Mox Diamond, Mox Opal, Chrome Mox, a Commander legal version of the five original Moxen and Ephemeral Lotus would probably affect negatively the quality of the format. It would not be in the individual cards, but in the sheer number of options a deck could end up having on turn 1, even as a one-shot boost.
If consistent and redundant fast Mana is the problem, we can set aside any attempt at revisiting the most egregious Mana rocks in the Revised List and turn our attention to other cards that could indeed be pseudo-reprinted, provided they are carefully adapted.
Playing it safe: the Magus Treatment
Bazaar of Baghdad is currently legal in Commander, but its thousand-dollar price tag has largely prevented it from showing up in most playgroups. Any attempt at reprinting a close equivalent of the card would risk shaking the fundamentals of the Vintage format, where Bazaar of Baghdad is a key component of Dredge and Survival of the Fittest decks.
The safe solution Wizards of the Coast has already experimented with is to reissue the card’s effect by stapling it onto a creature. This slows down its activation and makes it more vulnerable to opponents’ removals.
Not only is Magus of the Bazaar a safe card to be printed in Eternal formats, but its power is so contained that it ends up seeing only fringe play in Commander, with EDHRec.com reporting the card in a little over 500 decks.
Applying the Magus treatment to Reserved list cards is a good starting point to increase availability of powerful effects in Commander, without risking major shakeups in competitive Eternal formats. Not only that, but Commander lends itself particularly well to importing these iconic effects on Creatures, especially if they are Legendary.
Just to start with an example, a card I would personally love to see brought into Commander is Drop of Honey, a sideboard staple in many Legacy Lands decks. Currently priced around 700 $, the card is largely beyond most Commander’s player reach, showing up in only 64 decks on EDHRec.com.
Nevertheless, I think a greater and more reliable presence of a board-impacting effect like Drop of Honey’s would be great in Commander, encouraging aggressive strategies focused on large Creatures. So, what if the effect was reprinted in the form of a Legendary Creature, too vulnerable and expensive to break Legacy and in a colour combination that is not within Legacy Land’s traditional scope?
Quite intuitively, this Magus treatment lends itself to revisiting many more powerful effects. If we look away from the most expensive cards on the Reserved List, we can find a lot of Commander legal gems that, however, Wizards cannot reprint in any future preconstructed deck. As a result, their availability for the average Commander player is very limited.
Transmute Artifact, for instance, comes with an almost 100 $ price tag and, as a result, sees play in only a little over 2’000 EDHRec.com decks. On top of being an interesting design, the recent printing of Prime Speaker Vannifar is a nice confirmation that Wizards of the Coast is not afraid to reissue powerful tutoring effects on Legendary Creatures. Sure, constant deck shuffling can be a pain in Commander games, but the card’s effect is not as unmanageable as one may think.
For simpler designs, static effects like City of Solitude could be thrown in the mix as well. Compared to other cards on the Reserved List, City of Solitude is relatively cheap, costing in the range of the ten dollars and currently seeing play in almost 1’300 decks on EDHRec.com. The card is a powerful staple in many Cubes, occasionally shutting down entire strategies and potentially serving as a nice form of protection in Green decks. It even sees play in Legacy Enchantress deck, where its card type synergies effectively with Argothian Enchantress’ namesake effect.
Applying the Battlebond Treatment to the Reserved List
The Magus treatment is an easy way to approach and rethink Reserved List effects, turning them into printable cards in Eternal format. However, when simply stapling existing effects on a Magi card is not a viable option, a lot of nuance comes into play.
I already mentioned how I think the Battlebond Lands are an extremely good example of adaptation of an existing design to take advantage of the very characteristics of a format. A lot more can be done with the core aspects of Commander, once we have realized it lays its foundations in being:
- A multiplayer format
- A singleton format
- A format with mandatory Commanders and a command zone
- A format with players starting at 40 life points
- A format with implicit colour restrictions
Morphic Pool is a card that plays amazingly based on the first aspects of the format. While not specifically printed for Commander, Guardian Project also applies perfectly to the format, thanks to the second principle. The already mentioned Command Tower largely benefits from the third principle, as it explicitly takes advantage of the existence of Commanders to build on existing mechanics, such as Mana generation.
On the opposite site of the spectrum, Serra Ascendant and Felidar Sovereign suffer from the repercussions of the fourth principle. With an inflated starting life total, not everything translates smoothly to Commander as a format.
Playing with these core aspects ensures that a lot of design space can be expanded upon, creating and finetuning cards with an implicit guarantee that they are not going to wreck other formats. In essence, sky is the limit.
Magic: the Managing 