Summary
After the record-smashing success of Final Fantasy,Magic: The Gatheringis all-in on Universes Beyond, with a huge stream of crossovers coming down the pipe. One worth being excited for, though, is the three-drop Secret Lair crossover with Sega’s blue blue, Sonic the Hedgehog.
One drop, Friends & Foes, brings Sonic, his pals, and Dr. Eggman to the game as mechanically unique legendary creatures you can build your next Commander deck around. But which of these commanders are Sonic Adventure 2 and worth playing, and which ones are more Lost World?
6Dr. Eggman
Cracks Under Pressure
Although constantly being foiled by a hedgehog, Dr. Eggman isn’t an incompetent villain. He converted most of Mobius into factories, turned its denizens into robots, and even blew up most of the moon. You don’t get the funds to build an interstellar amusement park without being good at your job, at least.
And yet, his card is a bit pants. It brings back the villainous choice mechanic from theDoctor Who Commander decks, and has your opponents discard a card or let you put a Robot, Construct, or Vehicle onto the battlefield. Those three card types that absolutely have tons of support and aren’t largely considered the dregs of the artifact decks.
What’s worse is just how easy it is for your opponents to shut you down. Discarding a cards isn’t a big deal, especially for graveyard decks, and if an opponent has no cards in hand they can simply decide to discard and fail to, preventing you from getting any value out of it. This is too easy to work around to truly reflect the Eggman’s evil genius.
5Miles “Tails” Prower
Spinning His Wheels
Wizards has been pushingVehicleshard, with sets like Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty and Aetherdrift full of them, and Edge of Eternities updated Commander rules to let you run them as the face of your deck. Despite that, they’ve never really had the chance to thrive: the cost of getting them into play and then crewing them is too great, and the payoffs for doing it are often too low.
Tails doesn’t really do enough to make Vehicles viable. There are more than enough flying Vehicles to trigger card draw, but only a few of them are any good, like Skysovereign, Weatherlight, or Parhelion II. Giving Vehicles flying counters also doesn’t have enough of an impact to be worth building around, especially when there are more flexible artifact and flying-matters commanders in the same colours already available.
4Sonic The Hedgehog
Endless Possibilities
Haste-matters is a theme Magic hasn’t fully explored, with only a few commanders like Goro-Goro and Satoru giving you payoffs for hitting with a creature the same turn it enters. And then Sonic came along and delivered a much-needed spindash to the archetype, breaking it wide open.
Both haste and flash traditionally only mattered the turn the creature entered, but Sonic can buff them up with a +1/+1 counter each time he attacks, and then makes tapped Treasures whenever he or any other creature with flash or haste takes damage. Of course, this means you’re going to want your creatures to take damage but not die, which can be a difficult balance to maintain.
With this in mind, you’re going to want to build Sonic with a bit of a butts-matter subtheme, ensuring your creatures have higher toughness than strength. Then you can use cards like Wave of Reckoning and Solar Blaze to have them all deal damage to themselves and make you a hoard of Treasure tokens.
3Amy Rose
Too Slow For Sonic
Amy takes her iconic Piko Piko Hammer and smashes it into your opponents' faces with a rather excellentvoltron commander. Whenever she attacks, you can attach an equipment to her for free, then buff another creature by her power. With that, the play is simple: make Amy massive, but make something else unblockable to dish out the damage.
Throw cards like Assassin’s Regalia in there to equip to another creature, before loading Amy up on every kind of Colossus Hammer, Caduceus, Blackblade Reforged, and Commander’s Plate you may get your hands on. The only downside is Amy can only buff a single creature, and not herself, making her limited in a way we don’t tend to see on good Voltron commanders.
Regardless of the small weakness, Amy easily sits up there with cards like Ardenn, Intrepid Archaeologist; Bruenor Battlehammer, or Syr Gwyn as an excellent Equipment commander, and will likely pop up in more than a few voltron builds as a result.
2Knuckles The Echidna
Hellglide Tyrant
Alternate win conditions are often quite powerful in Commander, and one of the best is Hellkite Tyrant. With it, having 20 or moreartifactsin your upkeep will win you the game outright. Wiuth the fear Hellkite Tyrant elicits, allowing Knuckles to sit in the command zone until he basically does the same thing is a terrifying thing to drop on a table.
Of course, Knuckles needs you to have ten more artifacts, but that’s hardly difficult. Brass’s Bounty, Academy Manufactor, Ancient Copper Dragon, Storm-Kiln Artist, and Descent Into Avernus are all easy ways to make Treasure tokens. Or you could just drop a Mycosynth Lattice to make everything an artifact (including your lands) and win that way instead.
The big difficulty is going to be keeping Knuckles in play until your upkeep, as this is a highly telegraphed way of winning. Fortunately, there are more than enough artifacts that give hexproof, shroud, and indestructible, giving you a shot at winning.
1Shadow The Hedgehog
The Ultimate Life Form
Lots of people like to point at lots of cards and say they’re competitively viable. They’re usually not, but Shadow the Hedgehog might be one of the rare few that actually has a chance to roll with the big dogs at a cEDH table.
The first few lines of text are almost completely pointless. Drawing cards when creatures with flash or haste die is decent, especially if you’re making hasty tokens that sacrifice at the end of turn with something like Reflection of Kiki-Jiki, but it pales in comparison to the last ability.
With Shadow and enough mana rocks to cast spells, all your spells have split second. When they’re cast, the stack effectively locks up, preventing your opponents from casting spells or using activated abilities to respond. Any spell you cast is nearly guaranteed to resolve, giving you ample time to combo off to a victory. We’ve never seen a card give carte-blanche split second before, and we’ve likely not even begun to scratch the surface on what degenerate nonsense Shadow can enable.
