Titania’s Command – The Brother’s War
Date Reviewed: January 3, 2023
Ratings:
Constructed: 3.50
Casual: 4.38
Limited: 4.00
Multiplayer: 3.50
Commander [EDH]: 3.88
Ratings are based on a 1 to 5 scale. 1 is bad. 3 is average. 5 is great.
Reviews Below:
Titania represents Argoth, and I suspect that some people have historically seen Argoth as peripheral to the Brothers’ War; the stage, if you like, for the final, climactic act of the war. But as you might know by now, I don’t believe in great man theory, and Argoth had its own interests and its own life apart from the brothers and their struggle. Titania and the other denizens of Argoth represent the constancy of nature, but of course constancy in the way humans use that term does not actually exist in nature. This is not to say that any of them would have welcomed the brothers’ invasions of the island and the Golgothian Sylex, but change might eventually have come in some other way – and in The Brothers’ War, the form of constancy that exists in nature is depicted in one of my favorite cards from the set, Fade from History.
Titania’s Command, in turn, represents nature’s subtlety. Just as (to reference yet another famous green card) you find little plants growing on buildings, a card like this can hit your opponent from surprising angles and win in times and places they don’t expect. For example, you wouldn’t pay six mana just to exile someone’s graveyard, but paying six mana to do that when they were trying to use it and get creatures to pressure them with is better. You wouldn’t often need two extra lands if you had six mana, but perhaps you want to cast multiple spells next turn and can use two extra lands plus some creatures to enhance with them. And if I’ve been playing Commands correctly all these years, you do the actions in the order they’re written on the card, which means you can just summon two bears and enhance them immediately; not to mention whatever else gets a counter too – that combination is often way more than a vanilla 8/8 in two parts, as people sometimes put it. That’s not even all the possible combinations, and there’s other situations those combinations can cover beyond these.
Constructed: 4
Casual: 4.5
Limited: 3.5
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 4
While flexibility is always useful to have in a card, flexibility starts becoming less of a concern on a six-mana sorcery, because those need to do a lot in order to justify their use. That said, Titania’s Command does pretty nifty things in all. Graveyard hate with a minor upside, unconditional land tutoring, and bodies are useful, and the “worst-case scenario” of this card, so to speak, is making two 4/4 tokens. 6 mana for 8 power isn’t so bad, but it’s still a bit on the steep end.
That said, green is the color most suited to ramping into such massive spells, and if you do get to six mana, this can give you the extra grease in the engines (by tutoring out lands to finish your combo, or by just bulking up your board) or thwart your opponent long enough to get going. I think this may be a card that plays better than it looks at first, so I’m probably a bit too cautious in my evaluation, but this is still a lot of mana for what you’re getting.
Constructed: 3 (it has promise, if green is powerful or the decks this enables are powerful)
Casual: 4.25
Limited: 4.5
Multiplayer: 3.5
Commander [EDH]: 3.75 (may be a bit pricey, but you should get your mana’s worth)
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