“You are a Planeswalker” the introduction to Magic: the Gathering exclaims. You’re a powerful, one-in-millions mage who has the whole multiverse at your fingertips. It would make sense there are a lot more walkers like Tamiyo, the Moon Sage, who use the whole worldhopping ability for little more than science and discovery. Yet, all this space doesn’t seem enough, and most Planeswalkers seem to be at each other’s throat the whole time. Sometimes, Planeswalkers team up to help each other out against particularly large threats, like the Eldrazi, or Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker. But who is crazy enough to team up with Garruk, Apex Predator, who’se whole raison d’etre seems to be killing all the other Planeswalkers?

Like Karn Liberated, he’s among the most expensive Planeswalkers you can hire. But once you get him into play, you do get a lot of options. It’s the second Planeswalker after Jace, the Mind Sculptor who has four abilities. Two of those are +1 abilities, even though one of them requires another Planeswalker on the table. And that ability just outright kills other planeswalkers, no questions asked. Unless those Planeswalkers are also players, but still.

Okay, technically four abilities is less than his previous incarnation, Garruk the Relentless, which had five, but it took two sides of the card and he only had 3 active at one time, max.

The new version is more comfortable using black mana than the just transformed Garruk the Veil-Cursed. Instead of 1/1 deaththouch Wolves, he now produces 3/3 deaththouch Beasts. This (and his relatively high starting loyalty) does help protect him against attacks.

Then there is the -3 ability. When Deathtouch animals don’t cut it, because of flying creatures, he can just kill those. And due to his altruism, you gain some life. At least Garruk can really defend himself.

At -8, the ultimate ability is killer. Someone is going to get hurt, when everything going their way gets +5/+5 and trample. Maybe even some Assassin tokens from that other ‘Walker?

Sure, is a lot of mana, but with the new Nissa to help the ramping, it’s going to be reasonably easy to get him out, and start defending you own Planeswalkers. Together they can all form a group of somewhat villainous Superfriends. Maybe even Kiora can help and show up with some Krakens, it’ll be fun!

The new Garruk is expensive, but a potentially powerful toolbox. His succes will largely depend on how often other Planeswalkers show up. Producing an endless stream of deatthouch creatures that are a relevant threat on their own, and the ability to kill creatures and planeswalkers makes him certainly worth a look.

Theros block has an interesting sideproduct with the Challenge decks. Face the Hydra, Battle the Horde and Defeat a God are the three decks you could battle, and the best thing is that they ran on artificial intelligence, so you could play them even when you’re alone.

It also opens the way to play a couple of games of Magic cooperatively, which is a nice change of pace. Being A.I. run, they wheren’t without problems though. The challenge deck completely relied on luck, because making a cardboard A.I. makes it difficult to be skilled. The decks had some very specific weaknesses. Furthermore, the decks seemed to be designed for being played against with only one player, and sometimes they don’t scale really well when more players team up to face the challenge.

The worst part is that Battle the Horde sometimes inexplicably blew up it’s own creatures, making a victory over the Horde not really feel earned. It’s easy to fix by replacing the card that does that with Felhide Petrifier, but it’s still weird.

M2015 finds a new way to introduce a challenge, but this time it’s not A.I. driven, or even a deck. It’s just one oversized Planeswalker card representing Garruk, on the hunt for other Planeswalkers. The player acting as Garruk only gets that card and has to win through the four abilities. Let’s take a look at that card:

• 0: Put a 2/2 green Wolf creature token onto the battlefield.

The first ability gives Garruk a Wolf token. This is impressive early on and allows Garruk to put on some pressure. Garruk really depends on these wolves, so getting out some in the early phase of the game is important. It’s a shame it really doesn’t scale when facing multiple opponents though. It would have been cool to get a wolf for each opponent, so you can use the challenge card in a multiplayer game.

• +4: Target Wolf creature gets +1/+0  and deathtouch until end of turn.

The second ability helps growing some life/loyalty points, but it only works when Garruk has wolves. The deathtouch is nice, getting some juice out of a wolf, even when they start to get outclassed later on. But is that enough? Just one wolf gets a bonus, and you don’t get to do anything else that turn. Why not a blanked buff for all your wolves? Threatening one extra damage isn’t worth it, when you can simply make another wolf to threaten for 2 damage. It also means that once you’re at 10 life, you really need to keep a wolf for a full turn to start healing up.

• -10: Destroy target creature. Put loyalty counters on Garruk the Slayer equal to that creature’s toughness.

This is a very interesting ability. I hope seeing this on a regular Planeswalker. While you have at least half your lifetotal you can start killing things, and the bigger they are, the less the total cost. I guess you’ll seldom recover the total of 10 life, or even get back on the investment, but things aren’t killing you any more, so that’s good. Since Planeswalkers only have one ability per turn, the opportunity cost is very high though. He often spends an entire turn actually getting into a worse position.

• -25: Destroy all creatures Garruk the Slayer doesn’t control.

This is a final haymaker, that can help you get through all those tiny wolves. 25 loyalty is a lot though; It means you have to use the +4 at least twice, and hope you didn’t get damaged in the meantime. Or maybe have eaten a couple of Eldrazi – which are probably indestructible so why bother?

Garruk the Slayer takes 5 turns to kill, when going completely unchallenged. Even a lone early flyer is going to give hime lots of problems though. The choice between killing it or building up an offense will be difficult. It seems easy to back Garruk in a corner, and he’ll have to spend multiple turns to get out of that situation. A Garruk without wolves, an less than 10 life isn’t really going anywhere. It would have been cool if Garruk had a way to get out of that situation and turn the tables on his opponent. But I don’t see  that happening with these abilities.

While the Challenge decks where flawed, it would have been cool to see Garruk run itself, and has his own deck, instead of being just one (oversized) card. From my experience with Planechase and Archenemy, oversized cards have an additional problem: logistics. A normal deck can be carried in a deckbox, which often can fit in a pocket, making it easilly portable. The larger cards usually don’t fit in most deckboxes, so I have the tendency to leave cards for formats that use oversized cards at home. It’s nice Wizards is looking outside the box to change things up and have new (casual) formats, and it does offer a nice distraction, but they haven’t quite succeeded yet.  But as far as a free extra goes, it’s nice to see something different.

So many commander ideas, so little time. The Conspiracy Five are very exciting -Except maybe Brago, King Eternal, even though he has some potential. Having played some Conspiracy, I found Parley to be very fun, so I can’t wait to make something around Selvala, Explorer Returned. Marchesa, The Black Rose will surely unleash some Grixis-flavored insanity, possibly leading some Innistrad vampires with Olivia Voldaren and zome other undead, like Grimgrin. Muzzio, Visionary Architect could create a large machine army, which is always cool.

It’s hard to pick what to make first. So, why not Grenzo, Dungeon Warden?

A Grenzo deck can go many directions. Focus on large creatures? Creatures with low power, who enter the battlefield with counters, like Ignition Team? Both? Or is there a cool way to combo out and get lots of cheap creatures, possibly all of the cheap creatures? Goblins: They generally don’t need much finetuning to work, since the plan is simple – attack with all of them. That’s all the planning they need.

That seems like an insane trick to pull off. Just stick to a Goblin theme, get those echoes out, and it shouldn’t take long to gain some critical mass and put the majority of your deck on the table, with mana to spare. Just Siege-Gang Commander alone should propel the mana production from Mana Echoes through the roof.

But what is all that mana going to be used for? It shouldn’t be hard to simply give all the Goblins haste and attack with ‘m. It doesn’t need more than a Goblin Chieftan, Goblin Warchief or  Hellraiser Goblin, right? You probably get all three of them anyway.

The only problem is finding Mana Echoes from your 99 cards. Just kidding, you have black, so there are Demonic Tutor, Diabolic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Diabolic Intent… All the tutors!

So many Goblins, so little time… At least the deck practically constructs itself.