Most Exciting cEDH MTG Cards from Modern Horizons 3 (So Far)

What’s on the horizon for competitive Commander?

Modern Horizons 3 spoiler season is officially underway. While we’ve seen some of the set already, something about seeing new card images from everyone makes the upcoming set feel way more real. I’ve had quite a bit of time to think about some of these cards though so let’s get into my favorite cards that have been shown off one day into spoiler season!

Flusterstorm Buy-A-Box Reprint

Flusterstorm

Iconic Masters, Rare

A quick aside here more than anything else, but I am excited to have yet another Flusterstorm reprint. It’s in the range of cEDH staples that always manages to creep up in price, especially for the blingy versions. Granted, once again, it’s just a Buy-A-Box promo for some reason, but it’s a dang fine nice looking one. I love foil retro border cards a whole lot (even if the new ones aren’t as good as the old ones). If it isn’t too expensive (one can hope), I’ll be trying to pick one up for myself! Unfortunately, I would guess that it will be quite pricey while also not bringing down the price of other copies. Still nice to have, though!

Fetchland Reprints in Modern Horizons 3

Market Price: $12.22

Market Price: $12.90

Market Price: $11.77

Market Price: $13.42

Market Price: $10.15

Another quick aside, but this time for a meaningful reprint. Lands are one of the most important parts of a cEDH deck and of those, fetches are probably the most pivotal. Fetches give meaningful mana flexibility to all Magic formats they’re legal in and competitive Commander is no exception. This ally-colored cycle has managed to stay below egregious prices, never quite reaching the high of their enemy counterparts, but their first meaningful reprint since Zendikar Rising Expeditions (which did more for the supply than most people think) and the second since 2014’s Khans of Tarkir. Rather than older resupplies of fetches, this should help keep their price on the lower end, increasing accessibility to them for players all over!

Basking Broodscale

Modern Horizons 3, Common

Another set, another Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth enabled Protean Hulk line is here with the printing of Basking Broodscale. Together with the aforementioned set’s Rosie Cotton of South Lane, Basking Broodscale will make you infinite colorless mana, infinite tokens and also get you as many enters the battlefield triggers as you could want. How you kill from here is up to you, whether that be Impact Tremors, a sacrifice-based outlet or just drawing your deck with Thrasios, Triton Hero (who is often found in the command zone of Hulk decks anyways). This is fun to have and fun to consider – however, I think this is still a bit down the priority list of Hulk combo possibilities. We already have plenty of piles that win the game on their own that are more resilient. However, if Thassa’s Oracle ever gets banned one day, or you end up wanting to play a sans-blue Hulk deck, this card gives another option for winning the game and that is always neat.

Volatile Stormdrake

Modern Horizons 3, Rare

One of several “fixed” powerful cards in the set, Volatile Stormdrake does a very strong Gilded Drake impression, especially in competitive Commander. Assuming we don’t have other Energy creators in our deck, Volatile Stormdrake will always be able to steal us a creature with mana value four or less. This, at least in my mind, covers the bases for almost all meaningful creatures in the format, save Dargo, the Shipwrecker. While it can’t steal everything, it does also have a small upside. Regardless of the mana value of the creature you’re trying to steal, you don’t have to pay Energy, meaning that if you’d rather not have an opponent’s creature on the field at all, you have the option of refusing to pay and sacrificing the stolen card on the spot. While I can’t come up with many reasons that you would want or need to do this, it is the kind of upside that comes up as great in the most unexpected times. All in all, I think Volatile Stormdrake will not only be a great budget replacement for the Reserved List-bound card, it will be one of the first cards of that description that might as well be the same thing. Bonus points for “hexproof from activated and triggered abilities” having to be here to get around ward. I hope to see something similar from Wizards in the future, utilizing interesting mechanics and new designs to get around the Reserved List and also to “fix” older, powerful cards.

Chthonian Nightmare

Modern Horizons 3, Rare

Speak of the devil! Chthonian Nightmare is a “fixed” Recurring Nightmare that will still win you the game on the spot with a Dockside Extortionist and a stiff breeze. To more specifically walk you through it, you need this card, a Dockside that makes at least three Treasures, and… that’s it! Yep! Since sacrificing a creature is a part of the cost of activating Chthonian Nightmare, you can get Extortionist into your graveyard before you need to declare a target for the ability, letting you then reanimate our favorite Goblin to create enough Treasures to recast Nightmare and then some.

This is one of the first cards from the set that truly excited me, as it adds another interesting, easy to achieve and largely creature-based way to win the game to the cEDH format. Of course, one could say that it doesn’t really count as that new or innovative if it includes Dockside Extortionist but who cares. That’s new enough for me. Heck, it’ll probably be really good with Dargo too, but that’s nothing new for good cards that sacrifice creatures either. What I’m really interested in seeing if the Rules Committee is interesting in banning cards that are more or less functional copies of existing cards on the banlist… at least to an extent. Chthonian Nightmare is, at least, much more safe thanks to the Energy requirements, keeping you away from being able to reanimate to your heart’s content.

Null Elemental Blast

Modern Horizons 3, Uncommon

I just think this card is neat. A reference to the Blue and Red blast of times past, Null Elemental Blast could have niche applications in lower color cEDH decks. Colorless mana is often a dime a dozen in this format and having it when you need it is trivial. There are a few multicolor spells running around the format, but as I quickly learned while researching for my article Top 5 Best Multicolor MTG Cards in cEDH, those spells are few and far between. Most of them are Commanders like the two-color partners or standalone options such as Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy and Winota, Joiner of Forces. People have done more to get less results in cEDH while focusing on hating out commanders, so maybe there is a future for this card to randomly snipe off random Tymnas and the like with your extra mana. Doesn’t seem like the worst, but doesn’t seem like the best either. I’ll try it in a deck or two and I’ll appreciate the reference to some of the most iconic interactive spells in history if I ever get the chance to cast it.

Flare of Denial

Modern Horizons 3, Rare

I’m sure this is a take that will come back to bite me some day, but I’m not actually too sure on this one for cEDH! Having to sacrifice a non-token blue creature is a big cost that non-Thrasios and non-Kraum decks will often have difficulty trying to pay. Especially as cards like Faerie Mastermind and similar have fallen out of favor, the average three or four-color cEDH deck has very few blue creatures contained within outside of the likes of Thassa’s Oracle. Much like many people’s propensity to try to stuff triple-pip spells into their five-color decks (see: me trying to cast Necropotence in Najeela), people are going to try to stuff this into decks it never belongs just because it has the chance to be free. Before going over the moon about this blue Flare, bump up that blue creature count majorly or else you’ll just be better off registering plain-old Counterspell. The top deck where I can easily see this being the most effective, though, is in Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy. As a more creature-focused option, it will have random blue creatures laying around that it’s able and willing to sacrifice in a time of need. But otherwise… I consider the jury to be out and welcome to be proven wrong.

Flare of Duplication

Modern Horizons 3, Rare

Yeesh. Now this is a free spell I can get behind. Unlike Flare of Denial, there are several much more notable, much more attractive-to-sacrifice non-token red creature notables in cEDH – the top three being Dargo, Dockside and also… Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh. Rograkh-led decks are where I fully anticipate this card to shrine brightest, especially since those lists are already built around maximizing their value from having a free Commander. There may be some deckbuilding tension at some point between effects that are maximized by sacirificing him, sure, but in a 100-card singleton format, that limit will be difficult to determine and it feels that we aren’t quite there yet. Rog decks getting one more piece of free interaction they can freely run compared to other similarly powered decks seems like a huge power-up from this set – especially since it looks like this may be the most strictly playable card we’re seeing coming down the pipeline – and I expect these decks to start winning marginally more in the future with this addition! Past Rog, like I already said, there are just plain more red creature playables sifting around, especially ones that you don’t need to keep around. Heck, even creature-based combo decks (Temur Pirates, my beloved) end up with stuff like Imperial Recruiter languishing around in play that can easily be sacrificed to save a combo win or similar. Flare of Duplication is the obvious winner of this set so far and honestly, I hope it isn’t toppled. I’m not interested in seeing anything better than another free Redirect!

cEDH Horizons This is Not

Looking back on the last few Modern Horizons sets, I am always surprised by how little they have impacted cEDH in the grand scheme of things. Sure, they’ve given us huge playables like Esper Sentinel and Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, but our format is still one dominated by cards that came out around the same time as MH1 and before it. Since then, we still have yet to get anything else to shake up the format beyond the obviously incredibly influential Commander Legends, which did give us the monocolored partners and Jeweled Lotus. The weird effect that MH sets have, though, is that rather than being something more like Commander Legends, which seemed to be more of a rising tides lifting all boats situation, it instead manages to give incredibly powerful cards to already powerful archetypes. Modern Horizons, with its Dockside and Rograkh-incentivizing cards, doesn’t yet seem to be any change from that norm. But! There is plenty of set left to talk about and we shall do so in due time. Until then!