Commander Blasters

## Summary

Commander Blasters is a preconstructed set of Commander decks, released after Commander: Last Tower, following Eldritch Sun.

It featured five commanders, each of a different number of colors.

## Themes/Mechanics

Via the Play to Odds deck, Commander Blasters was the first set to introduce the Seep and Slap strategy. Effectively, this strategy consists of focusing all of your gameplay efforts onto one player, ignoring your other two opponents as much as possible, then finishing the game with either a life total matching effect, or an ability that causes you to win the game whenever a creature you control causes an opponent to lose the game.

Tokens, and a lot of them became a massive theme of the set, specifically decks trying to use the highest variety of tokens and types as possible.

Stall was introduced as a strategy, based off the anti-cEDH rule of Commander: Last Tower. With no logistics to worry about, just stalling out a game so long that an opponent gets bored or has to leave became a viable strategy.

Dice and Coins were both popular themes, and though both had appeared before, they were mixed to great effect for the first time with this set. While not a leader of any of the decks, Krark, Lucky Seven was introduced in the Day's Glass deck, and became one of the most popular commanders of all time.

Game Restarts and Subgames both made a return, after a more than decade long hiatus.

While it technically existed before, Commander Blasters truly introduced the Kingbreaker strategy for the first time. The idea of the strategy, based off of "Kingmaker" group hug decks, is to play a version of group hug that heavily favors only one of your opponents, letting that opponent take out your other two, then cleaning up the game with a commander or wincon strategy that typically is only good against one player, not three.

## Rule Changes

While technically the rule against competitive commander was technically implemented with the release of Commander: Last Tower, it truly made its impact in Commander Blasters, with the Stall strategy only existing in EDH because it couldn't possibly interfere with tournament logistics.

The cards The Countdown Is at One, Enter the Dungeon and Tug of War were each made legal in Commander for the first time. However, a ruling was officially made regarding subgames, where the stakes of a subgame would apply to each other active subgame and the primary game. For example, if losing a sub-sub game would cause a player to lose half their life total in the subgame, those stakes would carry over and they would also lose half their life total in the primary game. This did lead to situations where the primary game could be won or lost while a subgame was still occurring.

## Popular Cards

Krark, Lucky Seven is one of the most popular commanders of all time.

## Associated Events

In a mockery of the critics, Wizards held the Friday Magic event, a livestreamed game of four players each using the Day's Glass precon against each other, to show the longest game possible with the new Stall strategy.

## Critical Reception

Commander Blasters did not have any competitive critics to critique it, but went down as a rather divisive set, with many playgroups having soft or hard bans on the precons, and other holding special nights where they were allowed.

Ultimately, they were embraced by the community as a novelty, meant to be played in fun, uber-casual, Rule 0 heavy games, like a format such as Planechase.

## Trivia

Wizards of the Coast had a class-action lawsuit launched against them for the deck Strip City allegedly being inappropriate.