#atarka's command

Atarka's Command

Atarka's Command

Atarka's Command

Yes, I do play Magic: The Gathering, and if you’re wondering my play style, please reference the video provided to you above.

No.

Aggravation Rating: 8/10

Y’know this is actually the first card in a while that has really irked me in the past. Atarka’s Command has led to no end of pain for me because of how far it lets the modern burn deck reach.

The burn deck in any format is identified by a few things. It does a lot of damage very quickly, it runs out of cards very fast, and in general almost all of its cards say “deal damage” in some form or another unless they’re lands. These decks are far from overpowered because of that second point. Usually the idea of a burn deck is to kill you before the lack of card advantage becomes relevant. As such almost every card in the deck will be dedicated to doing as much damage for as little mana as possible, hence the suite of creatures which deal damage over time and the multiple variations of Lightning Bolt that find their way into the deck. But Atarka’s Command is a card that really pushed the modern version of the burn deck from being mono red splashing for a couple sideboard cards into the Naya variant that is most dominant today. Why is this? Well, it mainly has to do with two things: versatility and reach. And holy CRAP are these two things annoying to play against.

First, versatility. This is a common theme among commands because that’s how they’re designed; they’re meant to provide a lot of options. Atarka’s Command annoys me in this aspect for two reasons: first, I think the design of this card is honestly a little bit narrow and unexciting. Yes, it’s a two mana command that was designed to be aggressive. That limits its options a little bit. But you have two modes which can literally only be pointed at your face, one that more often than not will do the same, and one that may as well not be on the card because of how incredibly irrelevant and out of line from the others it is. Personal gripes with the card. The real problem is that the card provides burn with two very powerful options. Either it can act as a better Skullcrack (a card that seemed like a kinda reluctant addition to the deck that was meant to beat life gain strategies more effectively but which was pretty mana inefficient), or it can provide an insane amount of burst damage in certain situations.

And that burst damage is what really irks me about this card. Let me put it this way: I have died from 14 life while playing against this card. This card generated effectively 8 damage in that situation. What I’m saying is this card has an ENORMOUS potential power cap which can lead to insane damage swings, and one of the most annoying things in Magic is that feeling of “I was doing fine and then I died out of nowhere.” It makes you go from feeling like you had a chance in the game, a good fighting chance, to suddenly realizing you’ve completely lost the game. It’s a really crappy feeling, going from okay to dead from one card being cast, and Atarka’s Command really leads to that situation very effectively. What’s worse is that the card has a lot of that aspect of “of course they have it” that Lightning Bolt has (as I mentioned in my review of Bolt), where if you’re dead to only Atarka’s Command it seems disproportionately likely that your opponent has Atarka’s Command in hand.

This is all only considering how annoying the card is in the modern burn deck, where the reach the anthem effect provides is practically never relevant and one mode is equally inconsequential. This is a card that is used in a very, VERY narrow range of its possible uses, but which manages to become very annoying no matter what. The thing that annoys me a lot about this card is that it’s basically the epitome of a “go for the face” card, and cards like that tend to find their way into decks that fully subscribe to that policy. These decks are annoying because they lead to short games in which you feel powerless and which don’t really feel like playing Magic, where unfair results seem to be commonplace even though they’re aggro decks and not combo decks.

All that being said Atarka’s Command has a few downsides. First and foremost, it’s rather narrow for a command like I mentioned earlier. While that “go for the face” style is super powerful if your opponent is in an aggressive position, it’s far less impressive if you’ve stabilized and are fighting your way back in the game, at which point Atarka’s Command just becomes a Lightning Bolt that can’t impact the board and costs 2 mana. In addition that kind of lack of synergy I mentioned earlier kinda makes the card quite a bit worse; it’s essentially a command with three modes instead of four, which removes quite a bit of possible avenues (seriously that put a land card into play effect is just horrible. I can’t emphasize enough how badly that goes with the other abilities. This wasn’t even printed in a set with landfall, what was it for???).