Evaluating the Avatar: the Last Airbender Scene Box Cards for Commander

Avatar: the Last Airbender releases on November 21st. Alongside the release of typical products like Collector and Play Boosters, Avatar also has two scene boxes. We also saw these released alongside Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle Earth, and the Avatar iteration of these boxes follows that same structure.

Each of them contains six exclusive foil and borderless Magic cards that can be displayed together to recreate an important scene from the Avatar franchise. They also include an easel to display them on. These two scene boxes depict the Black Sun Invasion and Tea Time at the Jasmine Dragon. 

While the primary draw of these boxes is their aesthetic appeal, the fact that these boxes also contain cards you can’t find anywhere else also makes them worth picking up if you’re more interested in sleeving these cards up than putting them on display. These cards are only eternal-legal, but that means you can play them in Commander.

In this article, I’m going to evaluate the 12 Avatar Scene Box cards for the Commander format. Let’s start with the cards from The Black Sun Invasion.

APPA, THE VIGILANT

Appa is not the most efficiently costed Flyer we’ve ever seen, but if you have an Ally deck there’s a good chance your board is loaded up with them. When that’s the case, Appa’s “enters” trigger can have a massive and immediate impact on the board, one capable of allowing you to knock one or more players out of the game. 

The knock against Appa is that most Ally decks aren’t super interested in having a 7-drop, but if you’re using General Tazri as your Commander, Appa is potentially a good creature to tutor up to put an end to the game.

KATARA’S REVERSAL

I think this is the most exciting card from either of these scene boxes. After all, it’s Rewind on steroids. That powerful counterspell already sees considerable play, and Katara’s Reversal puts it to shame. Not only can it counter up to four spells to Rewind’s lowly one, it can also untap artifacts as well as lands and counter abilities. 

One of the things that makes Rewind great is that it’s kind of free. You do need the 4 mana up front, but because it untaps those lands, you can still do stuff with your mana during that turn. Rewind always gets extra interesting in decks where you can actually net mana by casting it, like by untapping a land that produces multiple mana.

Katara’s Reversal can do that and more, as untapping your mana rocks is even more likely to result in you netting mana than untapping your lands is. Plus, the fact it can just rip up to four spells/abilities off of the stack means you can also produce absolute blowouts with it.

It gets all the more interesting when you use a Commander who guarantees you will net mana – like Hinata or Eluge.

FIRE NATION TURRET

+2/+0 and Firebending 2 isn’t exactly a buff that is worth playing a three man artifact, but Fire Nation Turret becomes interesting because it’s also a great place to sink all that extra mana. Still, fifty charge counters in a ton, and Fire Nation Turret isn’t a full-on alternate win condition. 50 damage is usually enough to do the job, but it’s not automatic.

But if you’re a Red deck that’s really good at generating lots of mana – maybe your Commander is Electro, Assaulting Battery or Neheb, the Eternal, Fire Nation Turret will be doing 50 damage pretty often.

SWAMPBENDERS

Swampbenders will always be a fairly large creature, especially because it looks at Swamps everywhere on the battlefield. It only makes the lands you control into Swamps though, so your opponents have to be playing Black – or someone has to have Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth in play – for it to be absolutely massive. Beyond its significant bulk, Swampbenders is also just a good way to make your mana a lot better in a Black/Green deck.

SOKKA’S CHARGE

Like Appa, Sokka’s Charge is a very nice addition to Ally decks. The combination of double strike and lifelink allows you to simultaneously pressure your opponent in a big way, while also making your life total insurmountably high. Basically, if your board has even a few allies on it, it becomes very difficult for your opponents to race you. 

Keep in mind the buff is only on your turn though. If you’re the beat down that’s not a huge limitation, but the card would be significantly better if it did offer the buff at all times, as it would make it pretty impossible for your opponents to attack you, too.

EARTHSHAPE

Earthshape is like Teferi’s Protection at home. Protection is the sixth most heavily played White card on all of EDHRec, so even being a less good version of that card is very high praise. While Protection is undoubtedly stronger, I make the comparison because in the right deck, Earthshape can have a comparable effect.

While your permanents don’t get phased out, which is definitely a better form of protection, you can use Earthshape to give all of your creatures indestructible and hexproof until end of turn. The creatures do have to be small enough of course, but many White decks are already interested in small low-to-the-ground creatures anyway.

There are also a couple of things that make Earthshape better than Protection. For one thing, Earthshape adds a new body to the board, and for another, your indestructible creatures can still do combat damage and absolutely wreck your opponent’s creatures in combat. It also doesn’t exile, so you can recur it every turn if you want to.

If you’re using a commander who likes creatures with lower power – like Delney – Earthshape is going to be a card well worth picking up.

Now let’s take a look at the Tea at the Jasmine Dragon Scene Box.

MAI AND ZUKO

Firebending and Flash combine quite well together, because it largely removes the downside of Firebending – that you can only use that mana during combat. Normally that would mean you can only use that mana for Instants and activated abilities, but Mai and Zuko add two more card types to the list.

Their ability to produce mana should not be underestimated, as you don’t normally get such a cheap Commander who can make so much mana (Rofellos is banned, after all). If you think about them as a mana rock of sorts, I think you’ll see just how much of an advantage this pair can give you.

You do need to attack with this mana rock, and ideally have it survive so you can keep gaining access to their mana – and those are very real hurdles – but I don’t think they’re impossible to clear.

AANG AND KATARA

It’s not always easy to make sure that your artifacts and creatures are tapped, but when they are, Aang and Katara can build a massive army in a hurry. It’s only a slight stretch to compare them to Krenko, Mob Boss – because like him, they give you a repeatable way to grow your board exponentially.

While attacking with your creatures or using artifact abilities is certainly the most natural way to get them to maximize their token-making potential, you can also combine them with mechanics that give you additional ways to tap your creatures. Just within Avatar there’s Waterbending, but Convoke gives you another excellent way to set them up.

There are also individual cards that can really turn them into an engine – like Glare of Subdual and Opposition. Those two cards are not only great getting your creatures tapped, they also give you something powerful to do with all those extra creature tokens, as you can use those Enchantments to start tapping down your opponents stuff, and things can snowball from there.

TOPH, GREATEST EARTHBENDER

For me, one of the most exciting things about Avatar: the Last Airbender is the significant support for land animation in the form of Earthbending. It’s a design space that hasn’t been explored all that much, and I think Toph immediately asserts herself as the best land creature Commander.

She can animate lands all on her own with Earthbend, and the size of the land she animates scales as the game goes on. And that’s extra scary when your land creatures also come packing double strike.

You can combine Toph with other powerful land creature payoffs like Blossoming Tortoise and Sylvan Advocate and there are also plenty of other powerful land animation spells out there to really get the most out of her. Playing her alongside mass land animation like Sylvan Awakening or Rude Awakening can especially make things ugly for your opponent.

SOKKA AND SUKI

There are a lot of potential ally Commanders out there, but Sokka and Suki is the only one that is super into Equipment, giving them a different playstyle than their compatriots. They help you go incredibly wide while also giving you free Equips. This means that you’re really going to want to lean in on Equipment that is usually hard to equip but have incredibly powerful effects.

Argentum Armor offers a massive buff and can obliterate opposing permanents, and if you put Helm of the Host on Sokka and Suki, things can get even more out of hand more quickly since you’ll start getting even more Allies and even more Equip triggers.

In addition to letting you cheat on expensive Equip costs, there are also some other sweet things that Sokka and Suki enable. For example, one usually likes to put Swiftfoot Boots on their Commander, right? Well, they can make sure they’re protected the turn they come down by attaching it to themselves. 

And if you run Skullclamp, you can make it so every Equipment you play basically says “Draw two cards,” by attaching it to every 1/1 Ally that you make.

MOMO’S HEIST

One of the best things to do with a Threaten-like effect is sacrifice the permanent you steal. So, it’s great that Momo’s Heist already has that built in. As such, it’s sort of like an Artifact removal spell that gives you a turn to make use of it. And I don’t know about you, stealing my opponent’s permanent before getting rid of it feels a heck of a lot sweeter, especially when it’s something incredibly strong, like The One Ring.

UNCLE’S MUSINGS

If you’re using a 5-color Commander, Uncle’s Musings can be incredibly strong. After all, you’ll be able to spend 4 mana to get five permanents back from the graveyard. That’s the kind of value that can really shift the game in your favor. It’s probably not quite worth it in decks that are only 3 or 4 colors though, as there are better recursive spells out there when you’re not maximizing Converges.

END STEP

The Avatar scene boxes not only look great, they also come packing some powerful cards that are worth considering for your Commander decks. What do you think is the most exciting card for Commander players in the scene boxes? Let me know over on X or Bluesky.