Like London buses, you wait three years for a new Eminence Commander, and then two come along at once. The Magic: The Gathering previews for Reality Fracture are coming to a close with the reveal of the Multiverse Reforged Commander precon, and in it, we can see The Ur-Sphinx, which is a mirror of The Ur-Dragon, the second most popular Commander of all time.
This card won't quite be as huge as The Ur-Dragon, mainly because the Sphinx-type creatures aren't nearly as prominent as Dragons, but it's curious to see that two new Eminence Commanders will be released in 2026, when the last was in 2023, and the other four were all in 2017. It's a powerful feature that has come under some criticism at times, so let's look at this new card and see how powerful it will be.
Eminence isn't a mechanic that is used too often. I've personally spoken to Gavin Verhey about it after he revealed that Heroes in a Half Shell, the backup Commander for the TMNT deck, was designed with it in mind during parts of development.
In our conversation, he mentioned that if he were to bring Eminence back, he would do it with a creature type that is way less scarce than Vampires and Dragons. As popular as Edgar Markov and The Ur-Dragon are, they are also very broken given how powerful decks can be when built around them.
There are technically six Eminence Commanders right now, but one, Oloro, Ageless Ascetic, was released before the mechanic officially had a name.
So, with that in mind, The Ur-Sphinx is the perfect card to get the Eminence treatment, and something tells me when Gavin and I were speaking at the MTG pop-up experience in London earlier this year, it must have taken a ton of restraint not to hint that a new Eminence card was on the way. Funnily enough, when he gave an example of a creature type that he would use for a future Eminence card, he said "elephants" to get across the point that it would need to be a creature type that is tiers below Vampires and Dragons.
Eminence is a powerful Magic mechanic because it allows a Commander to impact the game while they are still in the Command Zone. For Edgar Markov, he creates Vampire tokens. The Ur-Dragon passively reduces the cost of other Dragon creatures, and The Ur-Sphinx will do the same for Sphinx-type creatures.
These cards also have abilities that kick into play when they are on the battlefield. Keeping The Ur-Sphinx as an example, this card states that whenever one or more Sphinxes you control attack, each player mills that many cards. For each player, you may then cast a card from the milled cards without paying its mana cost. This is extremely powerful, but with The Ur-Sphinx costing nine mana to cast (6C, 1W, 1U, 1B), you aren't going to have many chances to get it on the board.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.thegamer.com/mtg-ur-sphinx-eminence-commander/
