EIGHTY-ONE HANDS, NINETY-NINE CARDS

There is no featured artist here in the usual sense, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of small lie this magazine exists to avoid. Eighty-one artists painted the ninety-nine cards counted in this deck, across sixty-six different sets. The leader is Steven Belledin with five cards — five percent of the list — and second place is four.

That number is the story. A five-colour singleton toolbox is the most artistically dispersed thing you can build in Commander: thirty-nine lands drawn from every fixing cycle printed in twenty years, thirty-four legendary permanents pulled one at a time out of whichever set happened to print a two-colour body at mana value two. Nobody bought a box that landed on this deck. It was assembled one card at a time by somebody counting colours, and the art follows the counting.

Belledin's five are worth a look precisely because we are not going to claim they mean anything. Exotic Orchard, Forest, Loran of the Third Path, Mikaeus, the Lunarch and Mox Amber — and three of those five are load-bearing in ways this issue has already explained. Mox Amber and Mikaeus are two of the three cards a cold-start Sisay can legally find at power 2, and Loran is the only artifact and enchantment answer in the deck stapled to a legendary body, which makes it the only one she can fetch. One artist happens to sit on the bottom rung of the ladder and on the deck's single tutorable answer. That is a coincidence, and coincidences are more fun when you say so.

One counting note, because it is the whole reason this department is honest. Ninety-nine cards, one hundred copies: the only card in the deck with a quantity above one is a basic Plains. Nils Hamm painted Bloom Tender and that Plains, which is two cards and three copies — and we count him as a two. Per card, never per copy. In a deck like this one the difference is a single basic land; in a deck with twenty-two of them it is the difference between a fact and a flattering lie.