It’s time to strap in and go to warp speed: it’s the Edge of Eternities Commander Set Review. It’s time to figure out what’s hot, but this time… in SPAAAAACE!
Edge of Eternities prereleases run July 25 through July 31, with the set releasing August 1 – and it’s looking to be a banger.
You can find other recent set reviews here:
Card Kingdom’s set review only cares about broadly relevant cards, because we want to maximize the usefulness of the cards in your collection. While cards like Beyond the Quiet might look cute for getting rid of Spacecraft, it’s far from the best boardwipe you’d pick in the format these days. Likewise, Lightstall Inquisitor looks pretty interesting, I’ll admit, but beyond Giada decks, it doesn’t have a home in Commander. That’s the vibe. Got it? Great.
Ad astra per aspera.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES SET REVIEW: WHITE
Astelli Reclaimer isn’t the kind of white reanimator card I usually get excited about – I love the ones that help me ramp lands. That said, if you look at this one as a two-time recursion piece for Enchantress or Artifacts decks (or even Superfriends decks) that leaves behind a creature to wield said permanents (or protect them), then this becomes a more interesting card.
Cosmogrand Zenith is everything tokens decks and Humans decks want. It’s a three drop with a big butt that either makes your board wider or taller – whichever is best in the situation you’re in. It’s hard not to want to slot this into half a dozen decks – especially the ones with Elspeth, Storm Slayer and Forth Eorlingas.
Speaking of Elspeth, here’s another five mana token doubler in white to choose from. The Warp cost means you can deploy it when you want to have a big turn, enabling your impatience to get to higher mana totals, you big goopy brained goblin gamer, you.
Flying and lifelink is a pushed keyword pair on a permanent this strong.
Haliya, Guided by Light is a strong Soul Sister effect that we’re excited to build. She’s also semi decent in the 99 as a little top-up draw, as a treat.
Hardlight Containment isn’t Sheltered by Ghosts, but it is a way to keep removal off the back of your low-drop engine pieces or artifact creature Commanders while pressuring the early plays of opposing decks. Sniping mana rocks or draw engines with this is a big tempo play, especially as the ward will stop them curving out while trying to claw back their mana.
Much more effective, though, is Pinnacle Starcage. This is a fantastic early-game wipe that I kinda prefer to a card like Out of Time. If your meta has a lot of low to the ground decks, this could be great – it even has a late game mana sink.
The Seriema is one of the better Spacecraft in the set. It’s a three mana tutor, which has immediate impact, and once stationed, it becomes a sizeable body to attack with, while offering safe passage for you other main characters. It fits nicely into builds like Adeline that want to fish out cards like Myrel or Boromir, or even in Giada Angels, where the counters can buff Angels large enough to Station quickly.
Sunstar Chaplain is decent Cleric, but it’s not really destined for those decks. It’s wanting to fit in the UW decks that grow tall and tap stuff down. It could also find a way into GW counters decks that tap dorks, and Bant decks obviously.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES SET REVIEW: BLUE
I love a good Fact or Fiction analog, and I also love when cards are Dig Through Time adjacent. Consult the Star Charts helps us dig through… space, instead. At home in UG decks where it’ll comfortably dig you to what you need.
Mm’menon, the Right Hand is a great Urza stand in for lower Bracket play. Check out our ideas on how to build him.
Moonlit Meditation is a hell of a card. UW tokens strategies are going to love this, especially if they can skirt the legend rule. There are countless fun things you can do with this, and it’s a good job it’s restricted to creatures and artifacts that you control. What are we copying here?
Starfield Vocalist is an EtB doubler in mono-blue. Should you want to “pop-off” sooner, you can warp it for some double-up action, as a treat. If you care about this effect, you probably want this card.
Starwinder is an insanely cool card, from art to form and function. It’ll draw you countless cards, and is playable outside of sea-creature decks, too. Warp is a very powerful mechanic. It gives you value and puts a card on lay-away for after the next boardwipe.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES SET REVIEW: BLACK
Clerics love to mess with life totals. Alpharael has to survive around the table, but given you are playing in black and with Clerics, you can probably reanimate him during someone else’s turn to help keep him in play. Pairs well with a nice Wound Reflection.
Chorale of the Void is sweet for Enchantress brews, and paying two mana for this on a Killian seems like quite the deal. I also really like it for decks like Isshin or that regularly take extra combats, as it helps to squeeze ever more value out of attacking.
Elegy Acolyte is a nice option for those who don’t want to play reanimator or aristocrats, and would rather curve out and go wider. That said, it does fit well into an aristocrats build, especially with the Void trigger.
Requiem Monolith is a strange one. It will excel in some decks more than others, that much is true, but where it’ll shine the most is in builds that want to do fight spells and deathtouch, or mess with dealing damage and using damage redirect effects.
Sothera is an interesting way to make edict-heavy decks propel their gameplan forward faster. It’s also a way to give you repeatable wraths if you have a sac outlet and a wide enough board. It’s a very cool design, and one that I think gets around the usual protection spells really well.
Xu-Ifit, Osteoharmonist is a repeatable reanimate effect, with one very important downside: the creature comes back with no abilities. Still, a simple tap cost and no mana required, and ways to buff vanilla creatures or flicker them to reset them, means that this Wizard has some intriguing lines of play.
Zero Point Ballad is a nice flexible wrath if your meta has a lot of low to the ground creatures. While it never reaches the ceiling of Toxic Deluge or Damn, it does give you a reanimate if you put seven mana into it, which makes for some nice late-game value, and makes it attractive for X-spell and big mana decks.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES SET REVIEW: RED
People love a good Brash Taunter, and damage redirects are a really fun gameplay mechanic to play with. Pain for All primarily helps you to close games; in the same way you add Kazuul’s Fury as an MDFC to decks that have big Voltron bodies or arbitrarily large creatures, you play Pain for All as a way to help you kill people quicker. And then, if you run damage wraths? You laugh, casting Blasphemous Act.
Tannuk, Steadfast Second is a steadfast first in my book. This is going to be one of the more popular Commanders from the set, and whether you’re blitzing warping Spine of Ish Sah, Balefire Dragon or Blightsteel Colossus, you’re having a great time. Check out more ideas in our article.
Terminal Velocity is a great use of six mana. You get to “sneak” in an artifact or creature, and then when it eventually leaves play, it acts as a board wipe equal to its mana value. For big stompy decks that make a lot of mana, this is a wild 2-for-1, especially as you can really customize how much damage you’re dealing.
The capitalist war machine churns on, and Weapons Manufacturing is here to provide munitions for war. Whether your war is using magic cards or your war is one of proxy, this handy enchantment will churn out extra permanents to sacrifice that progress the game on their way out.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES SET REVIEW: GREEN
This is nice. Many counters decks are in green, and most of those decks like to ramp out extra lands. This helps you do both parts of your gameplan, and if you’re deeper on fetchlands and other landfall synergies, it can really start to pop off.
Frenzied Baloth is wild for just two mana. While it does have haste itself, you’re rarely slamming this in unless its to take out a Planeswalker. You’re playing this to stop damage prevention and to stop counterspells. It curves well into a Henzie or Helga, if your mana base is good enough.
Icetill Explorer kinda does it all for lands-matters builds. You get the Exploration and the Ramunap Excavator sandwiched together into one bug-snack, but with the added sauce of milling a card on landfall to help you hit those extra land drops. This card is very cool, and I would quite like to play it.
Loading Zone gets a shout here for a few reasons. The first is that its a huge synergy card for Stationing, which means you want it in any deck that goes deep on Station. The second is that as a token doubler, you can warp it in for one mana and take a big turn. That might be what breaks this card in counters decks, even with all of the other versions of this effect available.
We only just got Tifa in Final Fantasy, but now we have another landfall power doubler. This one can double anyone’s power, though, which makes it a little more versatile. If you’re in for Tifa you’re in for this, too.
A card I like quite a bit more, though, is Ouroboroid. While your oboroid might be impressive, Ouroboroid is better. It gets out of hand very, very quickly. It’s just so many counters. I’m slamming this in counters decks for sure.
Just as I’m slamming Terrasymbiosis. This is probably one of the strongest card draw spells that counters decks have gotten for quite some time. You can wait for the optimal moment that you slam on a bunch of counters from Master Biomancer or similar effect.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES: MULTICOLOR
Biotech Specialist is a solid ramp option for decks like Meria, Scholar of Antiquity or Roxanne, Starfall Savant. It also fits into treasure focused builds, and can turn a Scrap Mastery into a fair bit of burn damage.
Dyadrine, Synthesis Amalgam is a fine option for Selesyna counters if you’re bored of Unicorns and ethereal ladies. It has trample for starters, meaning Commander damage is on the table. It also has a reasonable and finite amount of card draw, which makes it attractive in its own way for those not wanting to run Commanders that are cracked in half.
Infinite Guideline Station is your five color spacecraft from the set. It’s mostly decent, and works as a reliable card draw engine once you get it Stationed. Outside of the command zone, it can be decent in decks like Jenson Carthalion, Druid Exile.
Mutinous Massacre is half a wrath and half an insurrection, and there will be times when it does a fat lot of nothing. But if you build your deck correctly, it can absolutely win you games in a similar way to Taunt from the Ramparts. Obosh as partner decks are very interested in this, I’ll tell you that much.
Pinnacle Emissary being warpable means it can be both a token generating engine when trying to “storm off” in some decks, but also just be a serviceable token generator otherwise. Is it better than Third Path Iconoclast? Eh, sometimes.
Sami, Wildcat Captain is one of the strongest Commanders in the set. With the right set up, you can basically “choose your win condition”. Whether its a big X spell like Crackle with Power or Forth Eorlingas, a bevy of ordinarily expensive artifacts like Wurmcoil Engine and Darksteel Reactor, or just suiting Sami up with spendy Voltron Equipment. The best Sami decks are going to end up somewhere in between.
Giving UB mill decks a wrath that forwards their game plan is huge. It’s a little spendy at seven mana, but considering you’re getting a free “half-mill” stapled to it – which, with the right synergies, can turn into a full-mill – means it’s more than a fair asking price.
Mill seems to be getting hooked up with more ways to close a game, doesn’t it? Perhaps the incremental mill isn’t fast enough anymore. Either way, Space-Time Anomaly is excellent, and is a brand spanking new win condition for the Hope Estheim deck from Final Fantasy.
EDGE OF ETERNITIES SET REVIEW: ARTIFACTS AND LANDS
Dawnsire, Sunstar Dreadnought is a fun one to mess around with. At Station 10, it basically nukes a creature from orbit. At Station 20, it’s a regular old Marit Lage size threat. Where it’ll be most fun is when you can point the trigger at a Brash Taunter or Wrathful Red Dragon. Be ready!
The Dominion Bracelet is surprisingly easy to pull off (heh) in a Voltron deck or a deck with a commander with high power like Ghalta. It’s not the most pro-social card, but it’s also one that I think is mostly reasonable as a way for these decks to try and take a win against control decks that seem to have hands full of answers. You can take their turn, get all their creatures tapped, spend their removal, tap all of their lands, and otherwise mess with them to leave the way open for your win.
The Endstone is excellent in decks like Sami or in decks that want to use the graveyard to get artifacts into play cheap. It’s even better with Goblin Welder and co, who can scrap it before the end step trigger and bring it back again next turn. It’s not universally good, but it’s good in enough decks that it’s still a good pickup.
The Eternity Elevator is one that can get out of hand pretty quickly. It costs one more than Thran Dynamo, yes, but it also lets you eventually get access to ludicrous amounts of extra mana, more than you could ever dream of having access to. I’m really excited to test this card out.
Extinguisher Battleship is perfectly poised to make an impact in colorless big mana decks. It’s a mini boardwipe that also vindicates a noncreature permanent on entry. It’s also trivial to Station, just needing 5 charge counters, at which point you have a 10/10 flampler.
Anticausal Vestige is a brand new Eldrazi, and it’s a pretty good one. It has a sizeable body, and it basically lets you cheat permanents into play around counterspells and without spending extra mana, if you pay the Warp cost when you have a lot of lands. Might be good in haste decks like both versions of Samut, or as a blitzer in Henzie.
The fact Tezzeret amasses Loyalty so quickly and easily is what makes him so enticing. He’s not the most ridiculous walker, but having a walker at all that is hard to kill with combat damage can be good in and of itself.
The white Planet is one of the better ones. White decks can reliably pump out extra tokens to Station with and not fear being cracked back at. And despite me being sad that this isn’t Serra’s Sanctum, making copies is fun, and powerful.
The other one I’m very happy to play is Susur Secundi, Void Altar. Being able to sacrifice the big creature you Stationed it with to get a massive hand refill is very, very efficient for just three effective mana and two life.
END STEP
We started at one Edge of Eternity, and have now reached the opposite Edge. I hope you managed to hold on in our journey, and discover the treasure awaiting in the cosmos. Let us know what you’re brewing.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.