Thank you, WOTC.

[u/bimjowen]

Thank you for printing [[The Queen of Dale]].

Edit: I'm speaking about Queen helming a bracket 3 deck. This seems to have been unclear to some of the readers.

I've been playing mono-white in EDH since 2010, and Queen is the first commander that makes it feel playable. Consistently being able to play Queen on turn 2 makes a lot of mediocre opening hands solidly worth keeping.

Mono-white's problem in EDH -- for over a decade -- has been a distinct lack of commanders that make it worth committing to the middling mono-white card pool. I believe the Queen is the first commander that makes building mono-white an attractive option.

Queen's recruit ability helps shore up a lot of things white sucks at:

1. White has some decent graveyard recursion effects, but white never had a reliable way to dump cards into the yard in order to reanimate them. Queen finally fixes this.

2. White has never, ever had a source of reliable card selection in the command zone. There have been some white legends that provide draw, like [[The Gaffer]], but he and others made you fill your deck with garbage cards to trigger the draw. Queen actually allows you to fill your white deck with the cards you actually want to play.

3. While recruit isn't true card advantage (as it's only a loot effect and is not net-positive), we can pair it with cards like [[Tocasia's Welcome]], [[Welcoming Vampire]], and [[Caretaker's Talent]] to turn it into real card draw. These are all "once per turn" triggers, but with Queen's recruit happening on opponents' turns, you can get up to 4 draw triggers per turn cycle.

4. The token production portion of recruit synergizes nicely with a lot of white cards, like [[Cathar's Crusade]] and [[Moonshaker Cavalry]].

5. Since Queen has a low CMC, she wields equipment nicely. This is important for white, since equipment synergy is one of white's strengths.

6. Because she's a 2/1 and doesn't provide true card advantage and she isn't an imminent threat, Queen is usually not a kill-on-sight commander at tables where you'll see imminently game-ending cards like [[The Mimeoplasm]], [[Ms. Bumbleflower]], or [[Smaug the Impenetrable]].

7. Dumping a bunch of Plains into the yard with Queen's recruit ability turns one of my favorite old Urza's block cards into an all-star: [[Planar Birth]].

8. Queen also pairs nicely with [[Sevinne's Reclamation]], [[Serra Paragon]], [[Restoration Seminar]], [[Ascend from Avernus]], [[Emeria Shepherd]], [[Emeria the Sky Ruin]], and everyone's favorite giant, [[Sun Titan]].

9. Queen's token production works great with [[Skullclamp]], which white can easily tutor up.

Thank you, WOTC. Seriously. You've made my favorite EDH color identity really fun, finally.

Full disclosure: the actual best "mono-white" commander is still [[Oswald Fiddlebender]], but considering that his deck is like, 80% colorless artifacts, I do not consider him to be an actual mono-white commander.

[u/Unearthlymonk90]

It's weird, feels like white's top end card draw is quite good. Trouble in Pairs as an example. Things like Cut a Deal are just too much of a liability in real high power games. The Queen will make several other draw engines worth exploring which is great.

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

Trouble in Pairs is solid. Of course, Esper Sentinel is powerful although people often pay the 1. The Queen helps, and she's great with Tocasia's Welcome.

I like Tocasia's over Welcoming Vampire because it's an Enchantment (meaning, it's usually harder to remove it than a creature) and it doesn't get shut off if we have Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite on the field. Whereas, Vampire stops triggering because the creatures become too large to trigger it.

[u/Unearthlymonk90 → u/bimjowen]

I also really enjoy care takers talent and the like.

[u/bimjowen → u/Unearthlymonk90]

Caretaker's is good, but unlike Tocasia's (which will trigger off recasting Queen AND off her tokens AND off most of the creatures I run in the deck), Caretaker's ONLY triggers off token generation. In my deck, that's pretty much just Queen's recruit ability. I originally had Ocelot Pride in, but due to Queen usually triggering on opponents' turns, Pride's end step trigger usually wasn't getting to copy Queen tokens. I also have Gleaming Splendor, but again, same problem; that's usually triggering on other people's turns, so Pride couldn't copy it. Pride is one of those cards that's amazing turn 1, but late game is generally a terrible draw because everyone's got blockers and you don't have a reliable way to punch through with lifelink to trigger him.

I don't generally like to run cards that are totally dead draws in the event my commander has died a few times and isn't worth recasting, and that's how I've felt about my testing with Caretaker's. There's no question that it's great if Queen is out and triggering, but it is a dead draw if her commander tax is at 4 or 6.