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Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate release is right around the corner. We have all the cards previewed and Prerelease is coming up this weekend. There’s some very cool mechanics that are being introduced, one of which being Backgrounds. Since it’s new, it’s opened up a ton of possibilities, but one came up that wasn’t quite as obvious.
Backgrounds
So what are backgrounds? They are Legendary Enchantments that can be in your command zone. The “Choose a Background” mechanic is a riff on the Partner Mechanic. This augments your deck’s overall color identity, and gives you a powerful effect that you can call up at a moment’s notice.
But that being said, you can play these in your deck as well as normal enchantments. Now commanders can have varying levels of importance in decks, some only being used for their colors, but most being used for their effects. But with this Build a Bear strat, we can try to get full value out of our commander.
Build-A-Bear
This whole idea of a Build-A-Bear came from a reddit post that showed an example of what your commander would look like if you had all of the Backgrounds in play.
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That’s a pretty crazy list of abilities. Now we want to do this with a 5 color commander so you can get in all of these backgrounds. There’s around 30 of them in all, so that’s a healthy chunk of your deck gone. But how are we filling out the rest of the deck?
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Filling out the deck
I think the easiest way to fill out the rest of this deck is to go full blown enchantress and pillowfort. This keeps us safe from attacks, and lets us draw extra cards when we play enchantments.
We’re go also want a critical mass of enchantments / enchantment creatures. Shrines are a great option for this. We’ll also want some ways to find our enchantments like Idyllic Tutor, Demonic Tutor and Vampiric Tutor. We should also include some other instant / sorcery protection. Great choices for this are Cyclonic Rift and Teferi’s Protection.
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Overall, this is a very cool strategy to try and build. You could use a bunch of different commanders for this kind of thing, but I think the one I’d go for is Go-Shintai of Life’s Origin. It’s an enchantment creature, creates them as well, and has the ability to bring back enchantments from the graveyard to play.