The Brothers’ War Predictions
If you’ve been following the Magic story over the years, you’re likely aware of the significance of the conflict between Urza and his brother Mishra and its impact on later events on the plane of Dominaria and even throughout the Multiverse.
After nearly 3 decades, we’re finally going to witness the events surrounding this siblings’ quarrel in The Brothers’ War. Antiquities showed us fragments of this story through the lens of artifacts and history uncovered by archaeologists and historians, but this is the first time that we’ll witness these events unfold in a Magic set.
The Brothers’ War (BRO) is slated for release on November 18, alongside a pair of Commander precons themed around Urza and Mishra. The initial look at the set has given us a lot to talk about with exciting new preview cards, returning mechanics, and the promise of popular and important characters from the story of this epic conflict showing up on cards of their own! In this article, we (Chief, Who Really Wanted a Mishra’s Land Subtype and Exxaxl, Retro Baleful Strix Stan) will share what we already know and give our predictions about this set.
What do we already know?
There are plenty of important things to check out if you want to stay on top of preview season and keep track of preview cards, story updates, and more. Fortunately, Wizards has provided a schedule that shows us what to look out for leading up to the set's release:
30th Anniversary Kickoff Stream: October 4
Building Worlds Panel: October 20
The Brothers' War Story: October 20–26
Debut Video and Previews Begin: October 27
The Brothers' War Magic 30 Previews: October 28–30
The Brothers' War Previews Continue: October 31–November 4
WPN Game Store Prerelease Events: November 11–17
MTG Arena and Magic Online Release: November 15
The Brothers' War Global Release: November 18
WPN Game Store Commander Party Events: December 16–18
It is worth noting that we’re once again seeing the in-person prerelease events take place before those on MTG Arena. This is a continuation of the decision to alternate the prerelease schedule with each new set. In case you missed it, you can watch the 30th Anniversary Kickoff Stream from October 4th here on YouTube. While this information is all worth knowing, it probably isn’t quite as exciting as looking at new Magic cards. Let’s take a quick look at what we’ve already seen.
We couldn’t possibly get a set like this one without seeing Urza and Mishra. They’re shown here at the height of their powers. The meld mechanic is making a return as well, in order to showcase the transformations that each of the brothers underwent during the conflict.
Urza, Lord Protector can meld with The Mightstone and the Weakstone to become Urza, Planeswalker and Mishra, Claimed by Gix can meld with Phyrexian Dragon Engine to become Mishra, Lost to Phyrexia. These powerful card designs make use of the expanded space on a melded permanent to offer more planeswalker abilities and modes than we’ve ever seen on other Magic cards! It’s been confirmed that there will be one more pair of meld cards in the set, but that’s all that we know so far.
Queen Kayla bin-Kroog was Urza’s wife and the ruler of the empire of Yotia, one of the nations that this conflict was centered around. She will appear in the main set and will also have a Retro variant with exclusive art that is available as the Bundle Promo. She has a very unique design for a Boros commander. We’re very excited to see what she can do as a commander or in the 99 of other decks.
Mishra’s Foundry is a new man-land that has more than a passing resemblance with older cards such as Mishra’s Factory and Urza’s Factory. This land will be available in the main set and will also have a Retro Foil variant that is available as a Buy-a-Box Promo. Sadly, we didn’t get a Mishra's land type to go with the Urza's type.
Recruitment Officer is an uncommon that allows you to gain some card advantage by digging for other small creatures in your library. This likely signals support for a mono-white archetype built around small creatures. This card will appear in the main set and also as a promo card with exclusive artwork and the Game Day frame.
Surge Engine is an artifact creature that allows you to pay mana over time in order to upgrade it from a defender into a large attacker that can even draw you some cards! Dominaria United had a lot of defender support, so maybe we’ll be seeing more in this set. This card will appear in the main set and also as a promo card with exclusive artwork and the Game Day frame.
You'll be able to see more preview cards from this set here as they are released. This gallery also has images of all of the cool basic lands we’ll see in the set. I definitely recommend checking them out if you're on the hunt for cool new lands for your Commander decks!
This set also features a special selection of cards released as the Retro Frame Artifacts series. These cards will appear in Draft, Set, and Collector Boosters. They’re not Standard-legal, but they will be playable during drafts of the set. Classic artifacts such as Wurmcoil Engine are available in two different non-foil versions. The alternate Schematics versions of the cards will also be available as a highly limited Double Rainbow foil that will feature a numbered collector stamp. You can find more information about these cards here.
The Brothers’ Commander (BRC) will consist of 2 preconstructed decks released alongside the main set. You’ll be able to choose from Urza’s Iron Alliance and Mishra’s Burnished Banner. This is the first time that the central characters of a Standard set have also appeared as the face commanders for the adjacent Commander decks.
Urza, Chief Artificer and Mishra, Eminent One will be the face commanders for these decks. While these younger versions of the brothers aren’t as flashy as their main set counterparts, they definitely look like fun commanders for casual play. It seems likely that both of these decks will be based heavily around artifact synergies if these commanders are any indication.
In order to help set these precons apart from other past Commander releases, every single card in these decks will appear in the Retro style. This means that classic cards such as Sol Ring will appear once again in this frame style while also allowing newer cards such as Command Tower to get new and unique variants. While we haven’t seen them yet, it has been confirmed that even the new cards will feature this treatment.
Not digging the Retro card style? Extended versions of some cards from these decks will be available in Collector Boosters. It seems likely that these slots will be reserved for new cards as opposed to reprints.
Outside of preview cards, we also know that some major characters will be showing up in this set because they’ve been showcased through art releases. These characters include Teferi and Saheeli, who are using temporal magic to search the past for secrets to help save the future from New Phyrexia, and classic characters such as Gix, Ashnod, and Hurkyl. It was confirmed that the design team worked hard to include as many characters from the story of The Brothers’ War in the set as they possibly could.
Finally, we also know that the remaining 4 painlands that did not appear in Dominaria United will be in this set! This is down to some of them depicting locations that no longer exist in the Dominaria of the present day. Okay, let’s move on to our predictions!
Before we dive into our predictions, let’s take a quick look at how we did with our predictions for Dominaria United:
Chief:
A mono-color cycle of characteristic or iconic creature types at Rare or Mythic Rare: ✅(Valiant Veteran, Vodalian Hexcatcher, Shadow-Rite Priest, Rundvet Hordemaster, and Leaf-Crowned Visionary make up the cycle.)
Allied color painland reprints in Standard: ✅(All 10 painlands are being reprinted. 6 were in Dominaria United and 4 will be in The Brothers’ War.)
Danitha Capashen returning in Dominaria United Jumpstart: ½(While Danitha, Benalia’s Hope is part of Dominaria United, she wasn’t a Jumpstart card. So close.)
Dakkon Blackblade returning as a planeswalker for Legends Retold: ❌(This was my coolest prediction, but Sivitri, Dragon Master was the Legends Retold planeswalker.)
A new 5-color sorcery or instant spell in the Painbow Commander precon: ✅(Iridian Maelstrom and Unite the Coalition are both in the precon, so I was right twice!)
Exxaxl:
Dedicated triple-pip cards: ❌(This would have been an awesome way to incentivize playing less colors, but it was not to be this time.)
The historic mechanic will come back: ❌(While there is plenty of artifact and legendary support, historic is notably absent from Dominaria United.)
New Weatherlight-adjacent cards: ✅(Between Weatherlight Compleated and a host of returning legendary characters, this prediction was on the mark!)
An updated Roghahh of Kher Keep in Legends Retold: ✅(Rohgahh, Kher Keep Overlord is awesome. Now they just need to keep the kobolds coming.)
Jared is going to be weird: ✅(Jared Carthalion is pretty weird. Who would have guessed that he’d make Kavu tokens? This entire deck was definitely not what I expected when they said ‘5 color precon’.)
Wow, we actually didn’t do too badly this time around. That’s a relief! Let’s hope that our predictions for BRO are at least this good. Speaking of…
Chief:
I’ve been waiting for this set for a very, very long time. You can’t even imagine how excited I was when it was announced. I adore the old sets from the early days of Dominaria. So much of Magic’s history is tied up in those classic cards. I’ve really loved all of the recent cards that pay homage to the early days of Magic and I can only assume that we’ll be treated to even more during this exciting preview season.
This has the potential to easily be my favorite set released since the 1990s. I really hope that my expectations are met, even if my predictions don’t come true. Now that my intense fanboying about the set is out of the way, let’s go over my predictions!
1. A unique meld card that isn’t a creature or planeswalker:
I’m predicting that the final pair of meld cards will combine into something that is neither a creature nor a planeswalker. While we’ve never seen a design like this before, we’ve also never seen a meld planeswalker until this set. Wizards has been pretty adventurous when it comes to the combinations of card types that they’ve included on double-sided cards over the past few years, so I really hope that they do something interesting again here. The expanded text box on meld cards allows for some very unique design space.
I’m not really sure what to expect out of the final pair of meld cards. We could see a saga with several chapters or maybe an artifact that has a variety of different abilities. While I’m usually not one for fitting the maximum amount of text possible on every new Magic card, I’m definitely willing to make an exception for unique cases such as meld cards that should be extremely powerful and should be able to do a lot of different things to really encapsulate that they’re more than the sum of their parts.
2. A vision of Gix informed by the past:
We’ve already seen the art for Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor. I’m expecting him to have abilities that reference his earlier cards such as Claws of Gix and Ring of Gix. I find it very unlikely that he would be another mono-color Phyrexian praetor, so I’m expecting him to be Dimir based on these abilities and the color of cards associated with him in more recent sets. He might even have the demon creature type as well, since he’s historically been referred to as a Phyrexian demon.
I definitely hope that Gix doesn’t mirror the design of the current Phyrexian praetors. They have a lot to work with that doesn’t require them to retread that design space. If they don’t want to reference cards that mention him in their names, there are a lot of other options. Cards like Oppression, Duress, and Bereavement are all associated with Gix and they open the door for a commander based around discard. I suppose that we’ll just have to wait and see what Gix is all about.
3. Tawnos doing Tawnos things:
It seems likely that we’ll see a new card for Tawnos in this set. While his previous card from Commander 2018 was an Izzet commander focused on copying abilities of artifacts, I’m wondering if we may see a very different Tawnos that pays homage to classic cards like Tawnos’s Coffin and Candelabra of Tawnos this time around. Wizards has focused heavily on referencing classic cards in recent years and these are surely the most well-known cards associated with Tawnos.
If Tawnos does wind up emulating some of his old creations, it seems likely that he’d land in a different color identity than Izzet. After all, Magus of the Candelabra fits firmly in green and cards that do similar things to Tawnos’s Coffin tend to be in white’s color pie these days. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what they do with Tawnos, because he has a the potential to be a really interesting commander based on these classic artifacts.
4. The obligatory mono-white prediction:
Given recent design conventions for white and the presence of Recruitment Officer at uncommon in the main set, I’m expecting to see a mono-white commander that interacts with creatures of lower mana value or power and toughness. They’ve been working on giving white better synergies and payoffs for Commander. Small creatures are a staple part of white’s strategies, so a payoff for focusing on them would be great to have in the command zone.
Cards such as Mentor of the Meek, Ranger-Captain of Eos, and Recruiter of the Guard are among my favorite designs in mono-white and I’m always hoping to see more synergies that reward you for going wide and sticking to small creatures to get the job done. Outside of card advantage, I would love to see a commander design that gives flash to your smaller creatures or provides them unique benefits during combat. Even if this prediction doesn’t come true right now, I’m sure that something is in the pipeline.
5. A Retro take on a modern classic:
The Retro Frame Artifacts series is a great place to reprint powerful artifacts that will be synergistic with the draft environment for BRO while not having to worry about their impact on Standard. I’m expecting to see a reprint of Walking Ballista in this series, because it’s one of the most popular artifact creatures of all time. It would also look quite nice alongside my recently purchased Antiquities Triskelion in my Heliod, Sun-Crowned deck!
I play a lot of artifacts in most of my decks, and this one is no exception. There are tons of artifacts that I’ve love to see reprinted in this series, but Walking Ballista is definitely my most wanted artifact in a retro frame. The presence of these reprints in packs has only added to my excitement for this set. I’ve always loved Antiquities and other classic sets focused around powerful artifacts and I love that Wizards has been bringing back Retro frames as another option to help people personalize their favorite decks.
Exxaxl:
I’ll preface my predictions with this: I’m having a lot of issues focusing on trying to make ‘educated guesses’ here. I was making a road trip through Sweden for nearly a month and while I was gone, the Warhammer 40,000 precons and the entire set of Unfinity got previewed while I barely had a chance to process Dominaria United right before I left.
I got back home and was trying to catch up on all of that while BRO previews were about to start. I didn’t have time to go pull up wiki pages in regards to The Brothers War comic and/or relevant characters and mechanics I could tie into this article. My predictions are going to be made from an ‘I wish/hope for’ perspective more than a ‘this is likely to happen’ point of view. With that, most of my predictions will be about the new EDH precons rather than the main set.
1. A healthy amount of color in the Commander decks:
It’s very likely the precons will have desired old border staples that can go in many decks. Cards like Solemn Simulacrum, Meteor Golem, and Steel Overseer see enough play to be EDH relevant and I’m sure many players would welcome a Retro frame printing of one or several of these.
I’m very interested to see what the color balance of the precons is going to look like. A lot of desired Retro frame cards will be colorless so they can be put into more EDH decks, but they’re having to design two three-color decks here, and I’m hoping ‘shove a lot of colorless things in them’ is not their go to design choice to make it easier to fit more reprints and I’m hoping that this doesn’t cause them to skimp on adequate color-fixing.
2. An Urza’s Guilt reprint in the Commander precons:
It’d only be natural for BRO to try and fit in as many cards as they could that reference Urza and/or Mishra in the flavor text. I first started playing during the Masques block and got very hooked to the game during the Invasion block so I would be very happy seeing Urza’s Guilt reprinted either in the Standard set or a precon, especially because it works well in a multiplayer setting.
Ever since I started playing Magic I was drawn to blue black colors for deck-building and we now have both precons with access to blue and black. Urza’s Guilt got printed once during Planeshift, and it’s not an expensive card, but from a flavor point of view, it does kind of tell you how The Brothers’ War eventually ended. A card that draws everyone at the table 2 cards then makes everyone discard 3 and lose 4 life feels like it does quite a lot for 4 mana in current day Magic still. Even when we have access to many wheels in those colors at the moment, discarding your entire hand to draw a new one is not always something you wish to do to yourself or your opponents.
3. A solid new journeyman artifact ramp card for Commander:
I’m expecting a brand new artifact ramp card that will be a staple for EDH—not quite as powerful as Arcane Signet—more something along the lines of Thran Dynamo or Chromatic Lantern. A 3- to 4-drop that will color-fix you with an upside. Something to run next to Commander’s Sphere and Hedron Archive. Not an auto include everywhere, but a playable card for sure in the less competitive EDH environments. It’s important to me that not every new ‘staple’ is fast, best in slot, or broken. To quote Gavin Verhey in our first AMA:
“Every time you make a card like an Arcane Signet - which I now believe is a mistake, we should not have made Arcane Signet - it just makes the number of choices you get to make when you make your deck go down by 1.”
That’s exactly what I want the new artifact ramp card to be. Functional, but not mandatory to run in your deck. Almost everyone is already guilty of starting their deck with only needing 96 cards to think about since you have to add your commander, Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, and Command Tower in most cases.
4. Amulet of Vigor in the Retro Frame Artifacts series:
I kind of want to put at least one Retro Frame Artifact prediction in my 5 guesses so I’m hoping for an Amulet of Vigor to find its way into the set. Shout-out to my two friends who play Amulet Titan in Modern—I hope you get to bling out your decks. I don’t know what a Schematics printing of Amulet of Vigor would look like, but I can imagine the art would look amazing in the Retro frame.
5. Ashnod, Flesh Mechanist:
I was beyond excited to see this card appear as an art preview in the Weekly MTG stream. Gavin already mentioned wanting to make her card in his ‘21 Legends that Were Cut from Commander Legends’ episode of Good Morning Magic. I am really rooting for the card to be color-shifted to Dimir over Rakdos like they originally intended. If this card ends up being Rakdos instead I might have my first permanent EDH deck—a deck I don’t pull apart after playing it 10 times, which I do way too often—with red in its color identity.
A quick note from Chief: This playtest card was first seen in an episode of Good Morning Magic. You can find the full episode here. It shows 21 interesting playtest commanders that didn’t make it into the final Commander Legends set.
The playtest card from Commander Legends was named Ashnod, the Uncaring, as you can see here. I believe this card would be way too strong for Standard so here’s my prediction for what Ashnod will look like in this set:
Ashnod, Flesh Mechanist - 2{B}{R}
Legendary Creature - Human Artificer
{T}, Sacrifice another creature: Add {C}{C} to your mana pool.
Whenever you sacrifice a nonartifact creature, you may pay {2}. If you do, put a number of +1/+1 counters on another target nonartifact creature you control equal to the sacrificed creature’s power. That creature becomes an artifact and a transmogrant in addition to its other types.
One of Ashnod’s crowning achievements was the creation of transmogrants, turning humans into obedient living artifact warriors to help serve her master Mishra. Requiring Ashnod to tap limits the shenanigans that she can get up to, but still allows her to do something interesting and flavorful.
This concludes our predictions for The Brothers’ War. Do you have any predictions of your own? Let us know on Twitter! We’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to check out more PlayEDH content, you can find more articles here or tune into the PlayEDH Radio 903.1 podcast here.
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