Review – The Fantastic Four Commander Deck

Magic: The Gathering (MtG hereafter) has continued to push forward into more nerd territories this year with their Marvel Super Heroes Commander Decks. The Fantastic Four lets you play with the first family of Marvel themselves, and you can choose 1 of the 4 of them as your Commander. While each of them focuses on a Mana color, they all have Red, Green, White and Blue on their cards, making any of them a versatile choice in a deck that lets you quickly draw cards while also playing cards from your Exile or Graveyard piles with abilities like Rebound and Flashback. 

Review

Each of the 4 main members of the FF align with a Mana color: Sue Storm is White, because she can cast Wall Tokens and make allies more powerful; Reed Richards is Blue because he can help you draw extra cards or double triggered abilities; Ben Grimm AKA The Thing can get 4 +1/+1 counters and even double the counters any permanents; and Johnny Storm can gain Flying, Double Strike, and Haste. To top it off you also get some great abilities centered around the team’s abilities like Invisible Force Field or Fantastic Elasticity. 

In addition to all this, longtime enemy of the FF Galactus and his herald Silver Surfer are both in the deck. Silver Surfer will let you search your library to find your copy of Galactus, and he can also curb big G’s Insatiable Hunger. Galactus himself is a 10 cost, 12/12 creature with Flying, Trample, and Indestructible that also exiles a target permanent when he enters the fray. So you end up with a deck that gives you many opportunities to draw cards, and the Surfer doubles your chances of finding your big bad devourer of worlds. 

I will be tweaking a few of the included cards; while it’s great that they included several of the Inhumans, who got their start on the pages of FF’s comic run in the 60’s, I’d much rather include a few other faces who occasionally fought with the team, like She-Hulk or Spider-man (yes, I know the Inhumans fought alongside them too but Spidey > Black Bolt, ok). And while most of the non-creature cards fit quite well, I don’t see the utility of “Cut a Deal” unless you’re playing with 4 players (Each opponent draws a card, then you draw 1 for each who did). And while “Deep Analysis” lets you draw 2 cards, and has Flashback, paying 3 life to draw 2 more cards doesn’t make a lot of sense. Oh no, I might need to buy a few boosters (wink wink) to change a few things in an otherwise powerful deck!

My only other beef is you basically only get the deck, 6 cardboard +1/+1 tokens, and a flimsy cardboard box. No mini-booster, no nothing, so you definitely will want to run out and get a case to go with your boosters and sleeves. That being said this deck feels like a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to taking it out against one of the other Marvel Super Heroes decks and seeing how they match up. MtG has done a good job pulling in nerds like myself that have until now resisted the siren call of the most popular CCG, and with upcoming releases like The Hobbit and Star Trek, I can’t imagine that’s going to slow down anytime soon. 

So if you’ve been thinking about playing MtG and are a big fan of Marvel, you should really check out one of their new Commander Decks like The Fantastic Four. 

For a full Deck list of The Fantastic Four and other Marvel Super Heroes Commander Decks, check out the MtG Website here.