#commander edition

Rulebreaker? Sure, it's fine. I'm not too thrilled about it, 6 out of 8 of them are the most boring of designs, 1 has already been a mess, and the last one is a fun gimmick that'll generate a ton of online lists, a hundredth that amount of paper decks, and then those decks will be played one game out of fifty because it's mostly just a novelty. Or get scrapped.

"Play cards of every color that do this" isn't all that new. With all basic manabases for other colors (and a bunch of rainbow lands), you end up only playing the very best options of those other colors, because they're the ones that will be worth the inconsistency in the manabase. If they flip the game when you cast them. But those are already the same cards that see play in decks with that theme (or other themes) and those colors. So rulebreaker doesn't add much.

Tolabow is the same thing, but one step down for balance reason. It ends up being nothing special. If I wanted a spellslinger commander in blue I could add another color of spells to, I can already do that. I have access to any number of partner commanders. And if I used partners instead, I get another card in my command zone. AND potentially an additional color! Add to that the confusion of Tolabow functioning incredibly unintuitively and then receiving a day zero errata and you've got a formula for something that hurts more than it helps. Cute otter though.

Whtz is good and fun. They're the only one of these that feels like it has a good mechanical reason to exist, to me. However, I do think their popularity so far is way, way, way, way past anything reasonable. It's a fun novelty, but it's just that. And building a deck in paper with all the additional logistics of a 250 card deck box and all the sleeves and the cost of all the extra cards I expect will keep a lot of people from committing to the bit... Or to play the deck once they assembled it.

Overall though, I can't get past the distribution method. Mystery Booster is NOT a place for new legal cards in any format. This turns these new cards from a 7 out of 10 with bonus points for novelty into a 2 or 3. As far as I'm concerned with building decks, these cards do not exist, because I cannot get them in a reasonable manner. Non-exclusive reprints with treatments exclusive to collector booster 2 have fetched well north of $100. These are twice as common, but they're exclusive mechanical designs. They will be prohibitively expensive as singles. Festival in a box is not an option because the way they're sold currently is predatory bundles that sometimes get scalped and nothing else. Conventions happen regularly in one country in the world, and semi regularly in two continents out of half a dozen. So I'll never play against these except if I go to an actual magiccon at some point maybe. And I'll never play with these because I won't be able to get them. So they functionally don't exist.