MTG Commander 2015 - Ezuri, Claw of Progress Review

by ElspethFTW, Old School Duelist

Elf lovers rejoice! There is a new Ezuri in town, and he’s Blue/Green this time! At first, the experience counter ability of Ezuri, Claw of Progress seems underwhelming, but the ability that uses the counters is quite fascinating. Each time a creature with power 2 or less enters the battlefield, you gain an experience counter. The important part of that is the fact that all it has to do is enter the battlefield, and isn’t a cast trigger like with most of the other experience counter abilities. What do you get for those experience counters? You get to put X +1/+1 counters on a target creature at the beginning of combat for each experience counter you have.

Keep in mind that Ezuri, Claw of Progress is available in the same deck as Kaseto, Orochi Archmage, who can make creatures unblockable. Also, despite being an Elf, this Ezuri is not Elf-centric like Ezuri, Renegade Leader. Therefore, he can be played in any Blue/Green/X deck that you like. Animar, Soul of Elements has already been mentioned as a Commander who would like him in the 99. Edric, Spymaster of Trest also wouldn’t mind having him around in an Elf-ball style deck. Those experience counters can add up extremely quickly, especially with token generators.

As a Commander himself, Ezuri could find himself leading a deck of a couple different archetypes. Simic Evolve was an interesting, if not highly competitive, deck back in Return to Ravnica Standard. There are tons of Evolve creatures that see play in Commander including Fathom Mage, Gyre Sage (an Elf), Master Biomancer (also an Elf), and Renegade Krasis. You could go all out and play most of the Evolve creatures from the Gatecrash set, including Cloudfin Raptor, Simic Fluxmage, and Simic Manipulator to name a few others. Prime Speaker Zegana also has good synergy with this sort of deck, allowing you to draw a lot of cards considering how quickly the power of this deck can grow.

The other option is to build a deck around Morph creatures. Since Morph creatures enter as 2/2 face-down colorless creatures, you trigger Ezuri’s ability. There are plenty of useful Morph and Megamorph creatures these days after the Khans of Tarkir block, including the Megamorph version of Eternal Witness in Den Protector. Blue/Green morph isn’t quite as good as Morph lists that feature Red led by Animar, Soul of Elements, or some Bant (white/green/blue) build that takes advantage of Mastery of the Unseen and its ability to gain you tons of life. But you can still play Whisperwood Elemental, which is Manifesting the top card of your deck every turn (making it a Morph creature that can be flipped face-up if it’s a creature). Since you’d be playing a lot of mana-ramp creatures and Morph guys, it’s very likely you’ll be able to flip those creatures over rather easily. Personally, the Evolve version seems a better way to go, especially as many of them are Elves. But I’d love to see a Morph deck build around Ezuri, Claw of Progress take shape.

Any time you have a Commander that can fit as a Commander for three archetypes (Elfball, Evolve, Morph) and is useful in the 99 of a good number of decks, you probably have a winner. Ezuri, Renegade Leader is only good with Elves, but is extremely good at that. This blue/green edition of Ezuri is more versatile and gives Elf players the ability to play a bunch of cool blue/green Elves (that includes Momir Vig!) that before now could only really work with Edric. There’s going to be a lot of brewing with this guy.

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