The Brothers' War - Commander Awards

From : #BeatTheBuylist - 03/01/2023

And here we are again, awards season at BTBL! Spoilers for Phyrexia: All Will Be One are complete, and it's almost release time - so lets have a look how the legendary creatures of the previous set Brothers' War are doing in Commander, in the Brothers' War Commander awards!

1. Most popular commander
2. Most expensive Commander to build
3. Most salt inducing commander

Most Popular Brothers' War Commanders

The first interesting thing to note is that this set appears to be very underbuilt compared to it's predecessors Dominaria United and Streets of New Capenna - Even taking into account the time in days between release and article (75, 64 and a whopping 120 days respectively) - Brothers' War is underbuilt - not a single deck has cracked 2000 builds, where the most popular commanders from the previous sets Jodah The Unifier and Giada, Font of Hope had both cracked 3000 and 2000 by this time. That said, we're looking at the RELATIVE popularity within the set here, so lets crack right on!

No surprise that the title characters Urza, Lord Protector // Urza, Planeswalker and Mishra, Claimed by Gix // Mishra, Lost to Phyrexia are in the top 3, with Urza, Lord Protector // Urza, Planeswalker slightly more popular. Both have a fairly interesting alternative minigame - actually pull off a meld, which with a 100 card deck, can be pretty tough - You'll need to find the other half of the meld, and then in the case of Urza, pay 7 mana, or with Mishra, attack in with both at the same time. Super satisfying to pull off the first time, but probably not competitive build arounds!

In second and 5th place, WotC have simply stuck a well known card onto another effect - Myrel, Shield of Argive is a Grand Abolisher but with added soldier tribal tokens, and Liberator, Urza's Battlethopter is a Vedalken Orrery with counters as a reward for playing ever more expensive spells...Is this progress? I'm not sure...

Most Expensive Brothers' War Commanders

The number we're looking at here is the 75% quartile - 25% of decks for a commander are built to be more expensive than this price (so 75% are less expensive)

Also shown on the chart is the 90% quartile - so only 10% of decks are built to be more expensive than this - if the 90% marker lies outside the thin line, it is classed as an outlier to the data - an unusually high value compared to the rest, which could suggest some cEDH viablility, if that's your jam

Urza, Lord Protector // Urza, Planeswalker tops the list again - there's nothing here that sticks out except the usual fast mana, then blue white staples. It does look quite fun though, lots of combat damage, drawing cards, amassing a wide board of small flyers

Queen Kayla bin-Kroog at a high budget is a grindy stax deck - slow down your opponents until you can assemble the Heliod, Sun-Crowned and Walking Ballista combo - lots of resilience here, as Kayla lets you bring back all those nasty stax pieces if they get destroyed

Mishra, Claimed by Gix // Mishra, Lost to Phyrexia looks like a super fun build - pure Rakdos chaos. Death, Destruction and Devotion, what's not to love?!

Most Salt-Inducing Brothers' War Commander

Using the EDHRec salt scores to rank our SNC Commanders, (Basically, this means the most maddening decks to play against - depending on what type of person you are, that might just mean the most fun to play)

Of course, the colour of salt tops the list - on average, not particularly salty, but the salt build is basically counterspell tribal.

The two standouts for "could be a reasonable and friendly deck, but if you want to build a salty version and break life long friendships..." are Urza, Lord Protector // Urza, Planeswalker and Queen Kayla bin-Kroog are your commanders!

Urza, Lord Protector // Urza, Planeswalker mixes Stax, combos AND counters for maximum...err...fun?

Queen Kayla bin-Kroog can rebuild a board at any time, the amount of redundancy and resiliance in this deck is insane - it doesnt matter what your opponents do, even exile effects with Dauthi Voidwalker and the like - Kayla doesnt care if a card is in graveyard, exile or any other zone, it's coming back!

Wrap up

Thanks again for reading - what other subjects would you like to look at? Let me know on social media (click the icons at the bottom of the page) or comment below!.

Shout out to EDHRec - thanks for the data, you guys are AMAZING!