by Ed Fortune
One of the best ways to get into Magic The Gathering is via the Commander pre-built decks. Commander is a format of Magic the Gathering where it’s not just one against one – multiple players compete against each other. It’s a highly social way to play the game, and buying a pre-constructed deck is an easy way to get into the game without overthinking it. This is where Legends Legacy and Painbow come in, they’re ready to play out of the box. We’ll take a further look at both these decks in a moment, let’s quickly establish what both Dominara and Magic actually are.
Dominara United is a range of cards that mark the start of Magic The Gathering’s current epic storyline, which is a tale of dimension-traversing heroes coming together to face a growing force of evil known as Phyrexia, which is sort of the like the Borg from Star Trek but more haunted and genuinely creepier.
And, just in case you’re new to Magic The Gathering: This is a card game in which the player builds a deck of special cards. Each of the cards either contains a spell (often one that summons a monster) or is a land card. There are five colours of lands, each with its own theme. Different spells require different colours, so you may want to build a deck with one colour spells and lands for simplicity. The aim of the game is to use all your spell cards to knock the opponent’s life score down from 40 (or 20) down to 0.
Painbow is a pretty ridiculous setup for a deck because it uses all five colours. This is tricky to pull off if you’re just buying cards from boosters, but Painbow has been built and tested by the people who make the game, so the question is, did they do a good job?
Weirdly yes; the land cards include cards like Command Tower, Terramorphic Expanse, and Exotic Orchard, but also stuff such as Sandsteppe Citadel, and Mountain Valley Prairie Stream. Or, to put it another way, we get land cards that can either generate multiple colours or allow you to search through your deck for more of the sort of land card you need. This requires a bit of shuffling and reading the rules on the cards, but it’s a really useful set of lands and almost makes it worth picking up for this deck for the lands alone. (Especially if you have, say, the Tiamat cards from the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms card set). It’s a great engine for multi-colour decks.
Painbow’s commander card is Jared Carthalion. He requires all colours to summon and can spawn creatures that also made of all the colour, he has a good buff and can be used to bring powerful creatures back into play. The rest of the cards are a big mix of very powerful monsters, some foot soldiers and some weird effects that can be used to wipe the board out. This is a deck that causes absolute chaos with your friends.
Legends Legacy is, as the name suggests, a deck all about legendary creatures. It’s a red, black, and white deck, which means it packs a punch with high-damage creatures but is decently defensive. The commander card (the key card in the deck) is Dihada, Binder of Wills, who’s very good at wrangling monsters and making them strong. It’s full of monsters and buffs, with Dihada herself making your big legendary monsters and heroes really powerful, so they smack the heck out of other cards on the deck. Thematically this is more like assembling a team of super-heroes that are constantly doing fantastic things. It’s great fun to play with in Commander because you’re using a low number of creatures that are constantly coming back from the dead stronger and with grudge to bear.
Overall, both these decks are worth picking up for the value of the cards in them alone and powerful additions to your deck box.
