Hello everyone and welcome to the Rosetta (and First Strike) Commoner review! This will be the longest of these review articles I’ve written thus far because of how much I believe in the set’s playability and impact for the format. This is also the first time that we’ve seen some more generically playable cards for existing talents, a stark difference to the more focused attempt at alternate playstyles for Light and Shadow heroes in Dusk Till Dawn.

Many heroes get a whole bag of new toys, including Oldhim, Kano, Briar, Iyslander, and, somehow, Chane. As usual, I won’t be examining the new heroes for playability since it’s always largely uncertain how strong they’ll be upon release. So I’ll be focusing on the existing heroes within Commoner.

Oldhim Becomes More Streamlined

One of the more exciting aspects of revisiting existing talents is the expansion of each talent’s respective card pool. Oftentimes, the primary needs of a limited file mean that a lot of the cards are slightly weaker in power, or are very redundant in their effects, resulting in varying degrees of playability (please refer to my Bright Lights review to see this in effect). One of Oldhim’s weaker points was how bad the Earth and Ice cards felt in the rare cases where you weren’t pitching them for his reaction (aside from Autumn's Touch and Winter's Grasp). Rosetta brings some excellent new choices, chief among them being Fruits of the Forest.

This card is absolutely everything I’d want in an Earth card for Oldhim decks; it’s got reasonable strength in the rare edge cases of being played face-up, enables the buff on Titan’s Fist, and has an incredible ability. Gaining two life at instant speed, while seemingly about the same as pitching it to Oldhim’s ability, is genuinely an incredible upgrade to the existing Earth cards. Namely in the matchups where you’re trying to prevent non-physical damage, such as Runeblade and Wizards, there’ll be times where you aren’t given the option to perform a defense reaction due to not being presented with an attack. Additionally, you can just discard this whenever you want to gain the two life, either to get it out of your hand before drawing back up or if they manage to go over the top with more reactions than your answer. I’m immediately cutting Break Ground for Fruits of the Forest, and not looking back.

In a similar vein, Harvest Season seems like quite a good addition to the Oldhim decks, acting as another way to gain an extra life. I’d split the difference between Sow Tomorrow and Harvest Season and play one copy of each. I’ve been screwed by stranding the first Sow in arsenal with no legal targets and the second copy oftentimes has pretty rough diminishing returns as a closer due to needing to be played from arsenal to immediately get the card in the fatigue endgame. I also recommend Harvest Season over the new Fertile Ground which, while offering more life gain, can’t block.

A quick shoutout goes to Sigil of Shelter in the First Strike: Terra deck, which I think is actually a very useful card, and can see the yellow being played, though the life gain potential from Oasis Respite still currently wins out for me (and I wasn’t and wouldn’t play Brush Off to begin with).

This Bad Boy Can Fit SO Many Zaps; Also Iyslander

Wizard gets… a whole lot of new Zaps. It feels almost comedic to say, but at least now they’re no longer spoiled for choice, so I’ll quickly run over the ones that I personally like. Arcane Twining seems to be or a contender to be the best of the new Zaps, simply due to the additional text of being able to discard it to amp one. Overflow the Aetherwell is a nice little attack to Amp up to force an action, and Trailblazing Aether is another must-block, though I personally like the red more in terms of what it offers.

However, Wizard gets a lot of nice little toys with Rosetta. Red Exploding Aether is a card I really like, supercharging your Aether Flares and Reverberates through arcane barrier two or three. Similar to Arcane Twining, Photon Splicing also has the ability to be discarded to amp, providing further utility in the blues and being used in tandem with the newly downshifted Aether Quickening and other existing surge cards will increase the hit rates of these cards by further increasing the arcane damage cap (especially with Aethervein). Speaking of amp, how amazing is Hold Focus? Wizard didn’t have the most amazing choice of arm equipment, and now there’s another way of eking out extra points of damage, which Rosetta seems to offer in spades.

Iyslander also gets an interesting new toy in the other downshifted card, Fyendal's Fighting Spirit. With the adoption of a more Bullander approach to the deck post-Amulet ban, having both versions of the namesake card can only be good for this direction of the deck, even if I personally remain slightly unimpressed by its numbers.

Runeblade Gets a New Piece of Gear and Chane Somehow Still Wins

From purely looking at the set as ways to expand the card pool, Runeblade has some of the nicest options for a variety of heroes. Runehold Release is similar to Hold Focus in that it’s simply a great option to add an extra point of damage in a post-Stubby world, and also enables all the cards that care about returning or destroying an aura you control in a pinch. I can see this being played in a variety of Runeblade decks, if not all of them, simply due to how universally useful a free Runechant can be.

I think though that Chane by far is the biggest winner from this new direction for Runeblade due to always having access to an aura via the Soul Shackle, and actually now having ways to manage their quantity means you can be more free in constantly activating his ability for the go again half without fear of decking out. As for upgrading and supplementing existing blue lineups, Hocus Pocus is yet another card that can provide some unexpected reach in a simplified game state, or at the very least force another card out to prevent the arcane damage.

Perhaps the most obvious card that instantly slots into Chane lists is red Hit the High Notes. One-cost six-strength with go again from the Soul Shackle is completely bananas, and having a slightly cheaper version of Shrill can help trigger more copies of Seeds of Agony, depending on which colors you’re playing. Red Runerager Swarm is also in a similar type of consideration for the same reasons, though the rate is incomparable to the juiced stats of High Notes. While slightly more unimpressive, Swarm offers good offense and defense simultaneously in one card. However, please be careful and sequence a different attack after the Soul Shackle so the go again isn’t wasted.

I’d like to also highlight Deadwood Dirge as a fun little potential sideboard card for non-Chane Runeblades against Rangers since the templating on the arrow on hits create the Bloodrot, Inertia, and Frailty under your control. In Chane, the card is just completely insane; you can fire it off to control your Soul Shackle count while also generating three damage and fulfilling one half of Rosetta Thorn‘s requirements? Sign me up! Similarly, Sigil of Deadwood presents quite a strange option for Runeblade, as it really wants the synergistic attacks that ask you to have an aura in play to remove. I’m not entirely sure an extra Runechant is worth including this blue in your deck, especially considering it blocks for two, but it’s a card that I’m keeping a close eye on.

In a similar vein, the newly downshifted Oath of the Arknight also feels underwhelming at the current pace that Runeblades operate at. Two pitch for that effect is extremely taxing, and oftentimes reading the card gives the impression that the Runechant created by it is a justification for the extra pitch for these type of effects, as the generic card pool offers existing options like Nimblism that already work well with how Runeblades want to construct their deck.

Briar’s Potential Resurgence?

I’ve labeled these cards as “For Briar” since I’m not entirely certain how much Lexi would want them due to a lack of experience playing Rangers in Commoner, so please keep that in mind. Briar was one of the original tier-one decks in Commoner when it was fully powered with Ball Lightning and Belittle, but has since fallen down the ranks with subsequent bannings and new releases. Rosetta offers a swath of new options for the deck, filling a similar niche of zero-cost go again attacks that sacrifice any semblance of defense for pure unfettered offense. Immediately, I believe that Flittering Charge is a trap since the only instant that’s legal, and also what I consider to be playable, is red Electrostatic Discharge, so living the dream of a zero-cost seven-strength go again is just too fanciful to come to fruition. Similarly, I think Flash is slightly too much setup for Briar, and generating an Embodiment of Lightning would fulfill most of the use-cases of the card, save for some extreme edge cases (I will caveat that Discharge becomes exponentially more playable to more Lightning fuse and flow there is in the deck, though this doesn’t change my evaluation of Flittering Charge).

Second Strike and Fry, however, are what I’m really looking at. Fry just has Ball Lightning’s stat line without the additional bonus, so I’d consider playing reds just to beef up the cheap go again count in the deck, while Second Strike has some really nice synergy between cards like Bramble Spark, Mark of Lightning, or even the Runechant generated off the new Runehold Release. Additionally, Briar gets some really nice new toys in the First Strike: Aurora deck in the form of Photon Rush and Crackling. I felt like the deck was always leaning closer to Lightning than Earth due to the needs of Lightning fusing Entwine Lightning or Arcanic Shockwave, so having some extra zero-cost attacks that naturally get their Lightning flow bonuses is just more juice for the deck.

Conclusion

That was a lot of cards that I’ve earmarked for Commoner playability, possibly the most to date in any one set (maybe aside from all the Hyper Driver stuff in one of the Mechanologist sets), and I think Rosetta does so much to elevate the existing Aria-talented heroes as well as expanding their talented card pools meaningfully with cards that immediately slot into their strategies, or could potentially see play later down the line. I’m very excited for this set’s release leading into Calling: Sydney, and what it could do to the metagame over the weekend, and I can’t wait to play with a lot of these new cards.

More Rosetta Reviews

Rosetta Set Review – Florian (Runeblade + Earth)

Rosetta Set Review – Verdance

More soon!

Daniel Yam

Daniel is a competitive psychopath who has relegated himself into playing the most casual format of Commoner. Starting Magic at the onset of Shards block, he jumped into Flesh and Blood when the Ira demo decks were being given out to Australian stores and is a proud holder of a 4-digit GEM ID. In his spare time, he enjoys trying to convince his friends to play increasingly worse cards, going to museums, and playing Guild Wars.