March of the Machine just got its first look over at MagicCon Philly this weekend with Wizards of the Coast revealing several new cards to come as Phyrexia invades the multiverse. Besides Phyrexian praetors and compleated gods, we also found out there will be five new Commander decks in the upcoming Magic: The Gathering expansion, and they’ll all come with a Planechase surprise.
Planechase was the casual multiplayer format introduced in the 2009 set of the same name. It added oversized Plane cards that essentially added new modifiers to the game and allowed players to planeswalk whenever they felt like leaving. There are currently 78 Plane cards in Magic, all of which depict specific locations like Tolaria Academy West, Jund, and the Isle of Vesuva.
March of the Machine will bring five new Commander decks, and each of those Commander decks will also have new Planechase cards. We only got to see the general themes of the Commander Decks at MagicCon, including a white/black Phyrexians deck, a blue/white/black Knights deck, a red/green/white +1/+1 counter deck, a red/white/blue Convoke deck, and a red/green/blue artifact tokens deck.
Each of the new Commander decks will have 10 new Planechase cards, including five new Plane cards, four reprinted Plane cards, and one new Phenomenon card. One of the reprints will be Isle of Vesuva, while one of the new cards will be Towashi, from the plane of Kamigawa. This new Plane card will provide all modified creatures with trample as well as drawing cards upon dealing combat damage to a planeswalker or player. It also has a new chaos ability (now keyworded "chaos ensues") which allows you to distribute three +1/+1 counters among up to three creatures you control. It’ll likely be in the +1/+1 counters Commander deck, although we can’t say for certain just yet.
Expect more previews for March of the Machine to happen in the coming weeks prior to the expansion’s release on April 21.