Commander Masters Introduces A New Draft Rule

The first wave of spoilers for the Commander Masters Set is here! In this week's Weekly MTG program, developers Gavin Verhey and Blake Rasmussen gathered around the table to tell us a bit about the next MTG set this year and mention a few of the mechanics and goals for this Commander-focused set.

The Commander Masters Set will focus on reprints of the main staples in the format, plus a few extra gems, but it will also feature new ways to play Commander and enjoy the product in its entirety. One of these ways is a Commander-style of Draft, something that has previously been explored in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate.

As players will be required to build around their Commander and draft cards with their color identity, this can end up becoming a challenging task for players who end up with monocolor Commanders or colorless Commanders. To solve this issue, the new Draft rule for this set was introduced:

"One of the unique challenges for Commander Masters, is we can’t make new cards for it, so how are we gonna do that? We tried a few things, we came up a really cool Draft-specific rule. In Commander Masters Limited, and only Commander Masters Limited, you can use any two mono, or zero, colored Legends as though they had Partner" - Gavin Verhey

The "Partner" mechanic was introduced in Commander 2016, and it allows for players to have 2 Commanders in their deck, along with a few additional features. Colorless and monocolored Commanders will be able to be paired up with another Commander in order to give players more space when drafting the Commander Master set in Limited.

Furthermore, the Draft Archetypes have been teased in the broadcast as well! Here are all the Draft archetypes confirmed to be in Commander Masters:

> UW Artifacts

> UB Reanimator

> BR Sacrifice

> RG Power Matters

> GW Go-Wide

> WB Token Sacrifice

> BG Slow Tokens (with a Saproling Subtheme)

> UG Ramp

> UR Spells

> RW Equipment

This means that these archetypes were heavily supported in this set in terms of the cards reprinted.

A series of card reprints were also confirmed and shown: