Thanksgiving is here in the US this week. As major American holidays go, it’s admittedly a modern oddity, though not necessarily in a negative way. Unlike all the other top tier holidays here (Christmas, Halloween, Easter, the Fourth of July), and even many second tier federal holidays, Thanksgiving behaves differently. For one, it is a massively and almost exclusively food-centric holiday – unlike nearly all the rest in which we merely pile on the food as an afterthought. But this means that outside of grocery chains, it has largely avoided being co-opted as a vehicle for rampant consumerism. There unquestionably have been attempts over the decades to commoditize one of the nation’s oldest national traditions, but few, if any, have really stuck. Instead, in a purely capitalistic move – particularly in retail – the market simply…steps over it. After numerous attempts at trying to tie a family-focused event of home and hearth into the larger impulse to buy stuff, the market decision was merely to expand the scope of the Christmas holiday season into late November.

Of course, the fact that it now encroaches on Halloween, which is in October, shows that they may be losing containment on that front.

Secondly, and directly linked to the first point, is that when you get down to it, Thanksgiving is remarkably anachronistic in today’s age. Its entire point is to be around family and partake in a feast. Irrespective of the broader historical and sociocultural subtexts the day also evokes, particularly around the saccharine and over-simplified fable of the First Thanksgiving most of us learned as children, the day nevertheless retains its strong cultural significance. For all the pop culture commentary on it being an absolute nightmare to endure, it’s still a longstanding tradition that we nationally ascribe to. Maybe it’s simply because it is a tradition (which doesn’t inherently make something bad) why it endures the way it does that makes it stand out. Or perhaps because it harkens back to a less busy time in the world and offers a sense of foundation when so many other things are undergoing rapid change. Or it could merely be because it offers us a free pass to indulge in a table full of edibles without remorse. Likely it’s all the above. And once again, it is upon us.

Therefore, because it’s a short week here due to Thanksgiving, we’re likewise going to keep this piece short and wade right into this week’s card pick. Which is a little ironic, since its whole flavor is about wading back out again…

Today we have: Risen Reef

Name: Risen Reef

Edition: Core Set 2020

Rarity: Uncommon

Focus: Card Draw

Highlights: For all its laudable traits, Commander is very much a format stuffed with higher tier and higher rarity cards. Even some of Wizards’ own preconstructed decks have well over a dozen rares and mythics within them. With self-built decks that number is even higher, with them tending to make up the vast, vast majority of the nonland contents of one’s deck. It’s understandable. A higher rarity card exists as such due to its strength, scope, or complexity – as well as making them harder to get. (It’s still a CCG after all.)

So whether it’s due to the desire for added utility, overall power level, or the practical benefit of the format to allow splashier and higher costing cards to be used at all, Commander predominantly runs on rare and mythic cards. Which means for commons and uncommons to find equal footing in the minds of many EDH players, it needs to be doing something particularly worthwhile.

One especially poignant example of this is the deceptively advantageous Coiling Oracle. Its first appearance came all the way back in Dissension and was a staple card for both casual and competitive Simic players alike. Since then, Coiling Oracle had enjoyed quite a steady lifespan, particularly in the Commander era. It has been reprinted more than half a dozen times, including Commander precons different 3 years (2015, 2016, and 2021), a duel deck, and 3 different supplement sets with Conspiracy 2, Modern Masters 2017, and Commander Legends – each of which caters to a distinctly different slice of Magic players. It is versatile, cheap, and incredibly useful as a creature that immediately replaces itself afterwards. It also revolves around two things that nearly every Magic player enjoys regardless of their stripes: card draws and getting free land drops.

Coiling Oracle is indeed a well-liked and appreciated card, which is all the more impressive given its common rarity. It helps smooths out a deck, can give you some early game tempo, drops a creature quickly, and either boosts your efforts by putting a land directly onto the battlefield (thereby circumventing having to waste a card draw on it) or cantripping itself by drawing a replacement card. As card designs go, it’s earned its prestige.

Still, as a Commander player who is more than willing to sacrifice speed for being able to use a card repeatedly, I was always hesitant on using it myself. For as good as Coiling Oracle is, it’s kind of a one-and-done card. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Still, if there is a more robust creature alternative for around the same casting cost, my instinct is to give that one my initial attention.

Compared to Coiling Oracle, that card is Core 2020’s Risen Reef. Outwardly these cards are highly similar. Both of them are relatively fragile 1/1 creatures, and Risen Reef costs 3 mana versus 2 with the Oracle – though in Commander this is a paltry difference of cost the vast majority of the time. Both of them also have a highly similar Enter The Battlefield trigger. With the Reef,  when it hits the board you look at the top card of your library and then either put that card on the battlefield tapped if it’s a land or into your hand if it is not. The differences between the two are subtle here. True, Risen Reef is technically less potent than the Oracle if the top of your deck is a land since it comes into play tapped (probably tired from all that scuttling). On the other hand, the Oracle has you reveal the top card of your deck, whereas only you see the card with Risen Reef. Again, for most Commander players, such a distinction is immaterial.

The real tradeoff between the two comes with the fact that Risen Reef can trigger more than once. In fact, it will trigger every time another Elemental creature enters the battlefield under your control. How (or even whether) you decide to take advantage of that added benefit is up to you, but it provides an added opportunity to be used more than once in the right circumstances. Having repeating usage out of a card has both visceral and tactical appeal, and Risen Reef brings both to the table without sacrificing the established usefulness of its snake-based brethren.

The only real downside to Risen Reef is that with only a single printing, and it currently being used heavily in an Elementals deck in Modern, the cost to obtain is admittedly higher. Not prohibitive. Just more than an 8x reprinted common. And being within the realm of affordable Commander cards is certainly something to be thankful for!

Keep an eye out for us to be regularly featuring other more accessible-but-worth-it Commander cards going forward. In the meantime, we’ll keep the light on for you.

350th Showcase Celebration!

In honor of recently hitting 350 Showcase articles, and as a way of offering my own thanks to you all after all this time, I’m raffling off a pair of fun prizes to one lucky winner!

• A $25 store credit to TCGPlayer.com to let you get some all new (or old) cards for your own Commander decks.
• A copy of the latest webcomic book by Cardboard Crack – giving you something to do if you’re still not able to play Commander as often as you’d like these days.

All you have to do to enter is fill out the form below and tell us a little bit about some of your own Magic favorites:

The contest will run through the rest of November, so don’t miss out on a chance to enter. Thanks again, and good luck!

You can discuss this article over on our social media!