Ryan continues this week’s Commander series, investigating the financials of the latest release. Today he tackles the green, artifact, and land cards!

With CawBlade in its recent incarnations gone the metagame is seemingly wide open.  Any number of archetypes can claim to be the new top dog, and the viability of many cards goes up without the fear of a Jace making them irrelevant or a turn three Batterskull attacking too quickly for them to come online.  Until some tournament results come in to fill in the gaps any talk about the new metagame will be little more than an educated guess, but we can still know questions need to be answered.

Last week I played in a standard tournament for four [card]Jace, the Mind Sculptor[/card]s. I played SparkBlade, a list very similar to the one in my last article.

With the exception of Splinter-Twin, however, the new metagame is very similar to the metagame before rotation.  Edgar Flores won the first SCG Open with NPH legal with a UW CawBlade list that looked very similar to the pre-rotation lists. In this metagame there are a number of cards that are being underplayed, in my opinion, and here are the top 5.

We’ve had 2 weeks of Opens to see the impact New Phyrexia has had on the Standard and Legacy tournament scenes. I’m going to focus on Standard, since the Grand Prix this weekend is Legacy, and will almost certainly have more players than the SCG Open series gets. Waiting on that will give us a bit of a better view on the format. However, for Standard, there’s no reason to wait, especially since the format hasn’t really undergone much of a change.

Neale takes a reader’s Rafiq deck from common to commanding for head’s up play, and challenges you to do it better. Think you can handle the firepower?

What makes a Group Hug deck tick? Which cards and effects are the most vital? And, if desired, how do you go about winning? Robert has all this, and more!

With a tale of two Commander decks, Neale shares everything that’s right and wrong in Commander!