Welcome to Throne of Eldraine® preview week at Good Gamery! Our preview card today is a little different than the others we’ve shown so far. You see, while we built Throne of Eldraine® around a “classic fairy tales” theme, we pretty quickly discovered that there just aren’t enough public-domain fairy tales out there to fill an entire Magic® set. We considered a lot of possible solutions to this problem – printing a smaller-than-usual set, reprinting most of Homelands®, giving cards alternate art and frames so they’d take up two slots, and so on. And while we did end up doing all those things, they just weren’t enough. It seemed like we’d have to go back to the drawing board until Jeremy Jarvis, our Franchise Creative Director, had an idea – what if we made up our OWN fairy tales? It sounded crazy at the time, but the more we thought about it, the more we liked it. And since none of Jeremy’s subordinates had any other ideas after that, that’s what we ended up doing! Without further ado, here’s today’s preview card: Field of the Dwarves.

The full context for this card can be found in the Magic: The Gathering®: Throne of Eldraine®: The Myths®: Part IV ebook (available for only $19.99 on September 4th), but here’s a quick summary if you want to save your money for Collector Boosters®. A human princess gets exiled by her evil stepmother, meets some dwarves, goes to sleep for a while, and then lives happily ever after. Great stuff! We’re really happy with how the story turned out, and we can’t wait to enforce our intellectual property rights if anyone else tries to infringe on them by stealing our copyrighted storyline. Remember, folks, an “homage” isn’t an innocent act like firing a union organizer or selling lawn darts that end up killing children. It’s theft from a corporation, which is a sin.

Anyway, that’s enough flavor – let’s talk about the card!

If you’re like me, the first thing you thought when you saw this card was, “Wow, this is going to be great in Commander.” And it’s true – Field of the Dwarves fits right into all sorts of existing Commander decks, like Dwarves, Dwarf Humans, Snow Dwarves, Snow Changelings, and even Snow Human Dwarf Changelings – not that that last deck needs any help! We tried to keep the power level low enough that the Commander Committee wouldn’t have to issue an emergency ban, while still making it good enough to see a lot of play in all sorts of decks. I think we’ve done a pretty good job threading that needle, but just in case, you’d better buy Throne of Eldraine® Collector Boosters® until you find a Field of the Dwarves, so you can play it before the ban.

But Commander isn’t the only format where we’re expecting Field of the Dwarves to shine! The Modern players among you are probably already salivating over the obvious combo: with a Mass Polymorph and a deck full of dwarves, you can get seven or more Humans off a single Field of the Dwarves, and the second Mass Polymorph gets you a full fourteen! Here’s a decklist that’s been tearing up the Future Future League:

lands (24) 4 Snow-Covered Island 4 Snow-Covered Plains 4 Hallowed Fountain 4 Glacial Fortress 4 Flooded Strand 4 Field of the Dwarves spells (8) 4 Mass Polymorph 4 Faithless Looting dwarves (32) 1 Amoeboid Changeling 1 Mothdust Changeling 1 Shapesharer 1 Turtleshell Changeling 1 Duergar Assailant 1 Duergar Hedge-Mage 1 Duergar Mine-Captain 1 Aerial Responder 1 Aethergeode Miner 1 Aether Inspector 1 Aethershield Artificer 1 Airdrop Aeronauts 1 Audacious Infiltrator 1 Avian Changeling 1 Aviary Mechanic 1 Bastion Enforcer 1 Changeling Hero 1 Changeling Sentinel 1 Countless Gears Renegade 1 Deadeye Harpooner 1 Dwarven Priest 1 Fairgrounds Warden 1 Gearshift Ace 1 Glint-Sleeve Artisan 1 Master Trinketeer 1 Mirror Entity 1 Ninth Bridge Patrol 1 Restoration Specialist 1 Solemn Recruit 1 Sram, Senior Edificer 1 Toolcraft Exemplar 1 Visionary Augmenter

The gameplan is pretty simple here. First, you play a lot of Dwarves with different names (not a hard thing to do with this deck!). Then, you cast Mass Polymorph. Finally, you win the game with an unanswerable horde of Dwarves and Humans. Of course, it’s possible that dedicated brewers outside the Future Future League can find a few ways to improve this list, but it’s already more than powerful enough to beat all the decks we tested it against – Suicide Minions, Harmless Offering/Lich’s Mastery, Jund, and even Millstone Hogaak! Look out, metagame!

With only one hundred and eight Dwarves in the set, Field of the Dwarves isn’t quite as strong in Standard as it is in Modern. That’s okay, though – this set’s got plenty of other goodies for Standard that we think you’ll love. I can’t tell you about any of them just yet, but let’s just say that we THOUGHT we’d LACE the set with some cards that would really make a big splash in Standard.

That’s all the space I’ve got for today, so until next time, may all your Humans be immune to Dead of Winter!