Throne of Eldraine – Wilds of Eldraine
Date Reviewed: October 6, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 1.33
Casual: 4.5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.13
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
This card’s choose-a-color mechanic and its art seem like it’s looking for an endorsement of one of Eldraine’s courts, perhaps deciding which court the High King comes from or something along those lines. I feel like that could have been an interesting sub-game or spinoff from Magic, just based around that; but things like that don’t really seem to be in the cards at the moment (pardon the pun).
Once you do make that endorsement, of course, you get a pretty big advantage, albeit one late in the game. That makes the card more or less built for Commander, and it definitely shines most in monocolored decks. I feel like that might have some refreshing novelty for some Commander players, since so many of the cards for that format are multicolored legends or multicolored big spells. This, in turn, puts some cards you don’t often see back on the menu: think of Corrupt, Armored Ascension, Earth Servant, and the like. Those aren’t the kind of card we usually think of as being among the format’s powerhouses, but they’re a unique angle that perhaps deserves more exploration.
Constructed: 1.5
Casual: 4
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4
This card is from the Commander subset of Wilds of Eldraine, and its scores will reflect this (no Limited, legal only in Legacy and Vintage).
Joining the ranks of “cards who share names with sets”, Throne of Eldraine sort of hearkens back to the adamant mechanic of the titular set a reward specifically for decks with one color. And Throne of Eldraine, here, is just that: a better Gilded Lotus for mono-colored decks with the upside of being able to draw cards off of it in a pinch. By its nature, this is a fairly restrictive card; since you lock in the color on entry, and it only reacts with that color from there, this can be a bit fiddly outside of mono-colored monstrosities. But in those, this will shine pretty brightly. Its limitations make it pretty dead on arrival even in the artifact-heavy Legacy and Vintage decks, but not every card can shine in every format, right?
Constructed: 1.25 (Gilded Lotus doesn’t see Legacy play; I doubt this will)
Casual: 5
Limited: N/A
Multiplayer: 4
Commander [EDH]: 4.25
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