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Following @GavinVerhey's thread about White in Commander Legends, here are a few things I want to say about it in this set. It's pretty long, so grab a chair.
First of all, to add what he said about Hullbreacher not being White. I agree with this. Does it make Hullbreacher better than Smothering Tithe? In some cases, yes, but not all. There's some overlap but these cards also service different functionalities.
To illustrate how taxing can have a different effect from theft, consider this:
Hullbreacher is a card that is designed to convert someone's greed into your own advantage, whereas effects like Smothering Tithe look to force someone into a situation they don't want to be in.
Hullbreacher is a card that is designed to convert someone's greed into your own advantage, whereas effects like Smothering Tithe look to force someone into a situation they don't want to be in.
In the case of Winter Orb effects like Hokori, or even Stasis, Hullbreacher does nothing, whereas Smothering Tithe formulates a strong lock/parity breaker
This isn't to say Hullbreacher can't be abused in its own way, but if you notice, the cards that abuse Hullbreacher happen to be in its own colors and not White.
The efficacy of Taxes comes in situations where your opponents are cornered where any choice is bad. In a game of Chess where each player gets the same amount of actions (i.e., Rule of Law), White is the better player. Flavor-wise, this is why White is the tactician's color.
This being said, it's very hard for people to make these cognitive associations to White. For example take a look at a card like Trinisphere.
It's very hard for some players to think how to work around with Trinisphere. Trinisphere blocks a player's ability to effectively cast free counterspells, cascade free spells, or cheat with cards like As Foretold.
Meanwhile, cards like Sevinne's Reclamation and Sun Titan easily circumvent Trinisphere. With Rule of Law out, it becomes even more apparent how White bullies the board against other colors.
Your Sun Titan is picking up cards like Ranger-Captain of Eos, Peacekeeper, Selfless Spirit, or even a Strip Mine without you having to cast your one spell from Rule of Law, demonstrates how you're prepared to play this supposedly symmetrical effect better than your opponent.
Meanwhile, your opponent is looking at their Ritual effects as dead cards.
Cards like Mana Crypt, Grim Monolith, Sol Ring, or even Carpet of Flowers are strictly worse to cast. These cards make the next card easier to cast, but if they're the only card you cast for a turn, you're essentially getting time walked.
Meanwhile, the player with Sun Titan or even Silent Sentinel repeatedly just sacs Aura of Silence or Seal of Cleansing to blow them up while still casting other threats and developing their board.
But this isn't just solely to brag about how good Sun Titan is or Rule of Law. This is just an example illustrating how unintuitive it may be in formulating a connection or synergy between these two cards, and assessing cards in White.
I wrote an article a couple months ago for @dicecitygamesdc that talks about player heuristics ( https://medium.com/@manager_85022/inverse-advantage-and-stax-in-commander-4a6ca780caa7), and to showcase this, here's a game scenario I encountered a while back to highlight how tunnel visioned players could be when they rely on heuristics:
You're playing a Kykar deck and your commander is out on the battlefield. Earlier in the game, you exiled a player's Demonic Consultation with a Spell Queller. Later on, your opponent has a Lavinia out along with their Commander (Najeela). They had just casted a Thassa's Oracle.
With its ETB trigger on the stack, they cast a Swords to Plowshares, targeting your Spell Queller. Your opponent currently has 3 mana open with three other cards in hand.
You have only one land untapped and it's a Command Tower. In your hand, are these four cards: Swan Song, Sudden Shock, Force of Will, and a Deflecting Swat. Which spell do you cast?
You cast Sudden Shock. You put Sudden Shock on the stack targeting Lavinia, then pay its cost by sacrificing your Spell Queller. Since Queller left the battlefield as Sudden Shock was placed on the stack, its leaves the battlefield trigger gets put on the stack over Sudden Shock.
Once the trigger resolves, your opponent may choose to cast their Demonic Consultation, but Sudden Shock's split second clause prevents them from doing so.
In effect, Demonic Consultation remains forever exiled and you can now free-cast a Deflecting Swat redirecting their Swords to your opponents' Commander while holding a Force of Will up.
This line of play is not intuitive. When players see "Split Second", they think, "oh this spell can't be countered" (which is also a false assumption given the existence of cards like Chalice of the Void and Counterbalance).
Because players fixate their mindset to this idea, they fail to see this card being utilized as anything other than "an uncounterable shock".
And this is how myopic players tend to be when it comes to new cards being printed in design.
I see this same narrow-minded thinking when it comes to White cards and their application and I think it's partly because new players are introduced to the format in a time where there are literally tutorial videos that tell players, "here are staples you need to play."
There are videos that literally instruct you the number of lands you need for a 40 card deck, how many creatures you ought to run. New Players are brought into the game today where mana-screw/flooding are mitigated by high-value cards because producing "high value" is exciting.
Synergy, if not made obvious, is not understood. Two cards must share a singular noun nowadays for players to make this connection while subtle interactions are possibly too subtle.
It almost takes a pro player or a deck with a performance that challenges the mode of conventional thinking like D&T, Stax, or Heliod, to convince players these White cards do not suck.
Even then, once these cards are established, players are stuck in this new hegemony of what they expect White cards should be.
If it doesn't confine to their view of Sram, Teshar, Heliod, Thalia, or Rule of Law, it's not good, and that's a shame given the fact that some of those very same cards were doubted or cast aside when they were introduced.
So when WotC said there would be powerful White cards in Commander Legends, my disappointment wasn't with the White cards printed, nor did it stem from some belief White was "robbed" of having cards like Opposition Agent or Hullbreacher. Rather, my concerns were the following:
1. The existence of Hullbreacher and Opposition Agent creates an escalation of hate effects. If White got its own version of these cards, how much worse would it be and would this move the game to a bad direction like how Green did with recent Standard?
2. "Powerful" can be interpreted in multiple ways. Jeweled Lotus is powerful in that it's a pushed accelerant/ritual effect, but Opposition Agent is powerful because it warps the meta.
2. (cont.) White cards like the new Akroma are "powerful" because its impact is high, but in comparison to other cards printed in other colors, "powerful" means something different here.
2. (cont.) Going forward, we ought to understand what WotC means by "powerful" and there needs to be consistency between what players understand and what WotC advertises. I don't know how you bridge that gap given all I said about the subtlety of White's design.
My thoughts about White in this set overall is that I enjoy a lot of the White cards being printed. I don't see many of them being played in cEDH, but that doesn't mean I don't think these cards aren't powerful in their own right. Commander is first defined as a casual format.
By casual Commander standards, these cards are valuable in White and hold their own presence on the battlefield.
But once again, how they synergize and perform, I think, is subtle for most players and they will not fathom how good these cards are in their meta until someone shows up with an actual deck to prove them otherwise.
I have full faith that @GavinVerhey, @SixthComma, and the rest of WotC are on the track of making "strong" White cards. I just worry how these White cards will impact the future of our game.
I don't like the way WotC is currently adjusting their dials or swinging the pendulum. The pendulum was swung too far with Green. It was swung too far with Blue in the past.
I recall about a decade ago reading an article from MaRo about how Green will get its day and look where we are now. This type of design philosophy and players' perception/assessment of cards is perilous.
I think when White was conceived back in the early days, there was something beautiful in the making here that approached playing a card game differently than how we understood by the fundamentals of card advantage.
This isn't just some mechanical issue with White, I honestly believe it's how players can fathom the kind of game that White plays and brings to the table, and the kind of game that designers want to bring.
How do we even begin to bridge the gap and show players that there's more depth, more power beyond free-casting spells and aggregating resources?
