Battle for Baldur's Gate: The Tribal Evaluation

By: Kumagoro42, Gianluca Aicardi
Jun 29 2022 11:02am

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BATTLE FOR BALDUR'S GATE

With Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate, we see Magic return to the Dungeons & Dragons universe after last year's Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. Specifically depicting the besieged city of Baldur's Gate during the Time of Troubles, the set is also a follow-up to 2020's Commander Legends – therefore it's a very large set meant to be drafted (with two picks per pack) and then built for the Commander format. Just like with The Prismatic Piper in the previous set, a color-customizable always-available replacement commander is provided, in order to ease the deckbuilding process. This time it's called Faceless One and uses the new Background rules, which allow to start a legendary enchantment in the command zone if our commander has the "choose a Background" ability (this mechanic is intended mimic character creation in D&D).

Since Faceless One has the ability to pick a Background, but it's also a Background itself, during drafts players can select up to two copies of it as joint commanders, assigning different colors to them. Alternatively, they could use Faceless One as the Background of another commander, or as the deck's commander paired with a different Background. Since Background is an enchantment subtype, Faceless One has no creature type.

Given the sheer size of Battle for Baldur's Gate, which also includes four accompanying preconstructed Commander decks, the number of affected tribes is large, even more so than with the previous Commander Legends set (79 vs. 69). Some unusually high concentrations directly arise from the D&D setting, especially Dragon, which includes the Draconic humanoids. The set introduces to the D&D sub-world a few of the flavor-appropriate mechanics that were left out of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, most notably Adventure (from Throne of Eldraine) and party (from Zendikar Rising). The latter causes an enhanced focus on its relevant tribes, namely Cleric, Rogue, Warrior and Wizard. All the D&D-specific subtypes (Beholder, Gnoll, Halfling, Tiefling) make a reappearance, as well as flavorful classes like Bard and Ranger. New creature subtypes include Gith and Walrus, while Calculating Lich gets its first reprint after the little-known introduction in Game Night 2019 (the other four creatures of that cycle are still waiting for a reprint).

Let's have a look at the new creatures and their tribes. The tribes are presented alphabetically, and you'll find a hypertextual list at the end.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Since Battle for Baldur's Gate will not be distributed in its entirety on Magic Online, we don't know yet which of the new cards will be included in Treasure Chests over time. The first 120, added on June 15, are listed here (the list erroneously includes Battle Display and Heart's Desire, the Adventure sides of the reprinted Embereth Shieldbreaker and Lovestruck Beast, respectively). 74 of these are creatures. In light of this, the tribal totals below are not updated, they just reflect the state of the tribes before the set's release.

Infodump

Cards: 366 (+285 in the Commander decks)
New cards: 304 (+40 in the Commander decks)
New creatures: 177 (+23 in the Commander decks)
Reprinted cards: 62 (+245 in the Commander decks)
Reprinted creatures: 11 (+110 in the Commander decks)
New Legendary creatures: 58 (+8 in the Commander decks)
New Snow creatures: 0
New artifact creatures: 8
New enchantment creatures: 1
Triple-subtype creatures: 11 (+1 in the Commander decks)
Creature types affected: 79
Tribes with more than 5 additions: Dragon (+47), Human (+37), Rogue (+17), Elf (+15), Warrior (+13), Wizard (+13), Cleric (+11), Horror (+11), Druid (+9), Shaman (+9), Ranger (+8), Tiefling (+8)

Angel: +3