The Gathering Officially Reveals the Ur-Dragon’s New Commander Replacement

In Magic: The Gathering, the Command Zone often feels like a liminal space. Your Commander is always on full display outside your deck, but it’s also not officially in play. Until you pay the mana to cast it, your Commander has very little impact on the game itself other than determining your deck’s colors and strategy. (And putting your opponents on high alert.) Except, of course, if your Commander has “Eminence,” an ability that might be one of the most fundamentally broken mechanics in the entire game.

Eminence appears on two of the three most popular Commanders ever, according to data from EDHREC. That’s because it gives The Ur-Dragon and Edgar Markov a persistent ability that functions even when they remain in the Command Zone — safe from any kind of interaction from other players. Their designer, Gavin Verhey, previously admitted in a January 2025 video that Eminence was too powerful and a mechanic he “shouldn’t have made.” And yet, Eminence is back in a huge way with the upcoming Reality Fracture set.

Verhey appeared in a Commander Showcase preview video published Wednesday in which he outlined the new Multiverse Reforged preconstructed Commander deck alongside The Command Zone podcast host Rachel Weeks, content creator Reggie The Arcade, and actor Jacob Bertrand.

Multiverse Reforged is a four-color deck (white-blue-black-red) led by Jace, Multiverse Architect, a planeswalker card showcasing the villainous version of Jace responsible for creating the Echoverse. The deck’s core strategy is essentially polymorph: create small, expendable creature tokens, then exchange them for more dangerous creatures from your library. One of the most dangerous of them all is The Ur-Sphinx.

Magic’s next hugely popular Commander is here

The Ur-Sphinx costs nine mana (six colorless and one each of white, blue, and black) for a 10/10 sphinx avatar with flying. Whenever one or more sphinxes attack, each player mills that many cards. Then, for each player, you may cast one of the milled cards for free. That alone is incredibly strong for a sphinx deck, but The Ur-Sphinx also comes with an Eminence ability that reduces the cost of all sphinx spells you cast by one colorless mana.

This is almost a one-for-one reconstruction of The Ur-Dragon, which essentially has all the same abilities but for dragons. The Ur-Sphinx is a bit more predatory, however. The Ur-Dragon draws cards equal to the number of attacking dragons, then allows its controller to put a permanent from their hand directly onto the battlefield. The Sphinx instead mills all players, which means you can cast multiple spells. If you work some reanimation into your deck or some other kind of interaction with cards in your graveyard, then you’re only helping yourself by self-milling. Considering The Ur-Dragon’s popularity, it’s safe to say that his sphinx counterpart is going to become hugely popular as well.

“I thought it would be so fun to call back two cards from old Commander products and old decks that are really beloved,” Verhey said during the Commander Showcase. “In this world, in the main set, there are these elder sphinxes, right? So what if we did that with The Ur-Sphinx?”

In Reality Fracture’s story, Jace died trying to reshape the Multiverse, and his fractured mind was able to construct a new body for him — one that was taken over by a particularly villainous fragment calling itself The Theorist. He, in turn, created the Echoverse as his version of a perfect parallel. In it, the magical school of Hexhaven was founded by Elder Sphinxes instead of Elder Dragons, which was the case with Strixhaven. The Ur-Dragon is a primordial entity that’s the progenitor of all dragonkind, so it makes sense that Jace would do the same for sphinxes.

A brief history of Eminence

Wizards of the Coast released four new precons as part of Commander 2017, and each deck’s face Commander came with an Eminence ability. Each of the four decks focuses on a popular creature type in Magic, namely dragons, cats, vampires, and wizards. Arahbo, Roar of the World (cat) and Inalla, Archmage Ritualist (wizards) are each powerful in their own right, but they pale in comparison to The Ur-Dragon (dragons) and Edgar Markov (vampires).

Verhey explained in his January 2025 video that the design team created Eminence to solve a fundamental problem with creature-type-focused decks. Players have to commit numerous creatures to the battlefield to make those strategies work, leaving them particularly vulnerable to the board wipes that are ubiquitous in Commander. Eminence was designed to compensate players for taking that risk by providing a persistent benefit from the safety of the Command Zone.

“What could go wrong?” Verhey joked in the video. “As it turns out, giving you something extra for free from the Command Zone: very powerful. In most cases, too powerful.”

Edgar Markov remains the best example. Every vampire spell generates an additional creature at no extra cost, allowing the deck to quickly snowball into a sea of vampires. The Ur-Dragon’s discount is less immediately explosive, but it still generates mana value throughout the entire game even if you never pay to play the nine-mana Commander. Those advantages cannot be removed, countered, or otherwise meaningfully disrupted.

Wizards largely left Eminence alone after Commander 2017. Sidar Jabari of Zhalfir brought it back in 2023’s March of the Machine Commander decks, but with a more restrained ability that allows its controller to draw and discard a card when attacking with knights. The Ur-Sphinx is a much more extreme Eminence ability, and one that already seems like a contender for the most powerful ever.

That makes The Ur-Sphinx very dangerous, especially because it won’t be a rare or difficult-to-find card by any means. Players won’t have to hunt through play boosters or purchase it as an expensive single. Every Multiverse Reforged precon comes with a copy, giving players immediate access to their favorite new Commander — and a deck filled with plenty of useful cards to go along with it.

Wizards has known for years that Eminence is too powerful. Commander players responded by making its greatest offenders two of the game’s most popular cards. Now, The Ur-Sphinx is about to turn that controversial design mistake into another massive hit.