Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, Magic never thought to draw on the intellectual properties of others. Then, everything changed when the shareholders attacked. Joking aside, this brand-new pair of sets takes us into the deeply spiritual & thematically rich world of Avatar, and introduces new mechanics tied to each of the core bending styles seen in the show. In this article we’ll talk about those mechanics, and offer some thoughts on what they mean for Commander and other formats.
Avatar: The Last Airbender will release to Magic: the Gathering Online and Arena on November 18th, and to the tabletop on November 21st. Avatar: The Last Airbender Eternal will release on the same date.
New Mechanics
Waterbending
Waterbending comes in many forms: As additional costs, optional riders, or activated abilities. In each, however, you can tap Artifacts & Creatures alongside Lands to pay for their Colorless requirements. This is similar to what we’ve seen in previous mechanics like Convoke & Improvise, being appropriately fluid in translating resources on-board to tricky tools at a moment’s notice.
Saffgor: Waterbending is not so much a mechanic as a series of mechanics. It takes the role of varied game design tools like Kicker, Convoke, and Enlist in this set, doing basically whatever is required to make cards function during the course of play. It makes sense, in such a complex set, to have a workhorse like this that synergizes with so many other options. It asks you to go wide, play Artifacts, and even Firebend (as we’ll cover later), given the broad scope of ways one has to pay for these abilities, alternately applying discounts to abilities or spells, depending on the exact card. Waterbending is broad, but purposefully so.
BPhillipYork: This seems like a solid ability. It really depends on what it’s paying for exactly, but it’s basically just a combination of convoke and improvise. Given how easy it is to generate tons of tokens, a deck that wants to waterbend a lot should be well equipped to meet these costs. It’s more unusual to see this on an ability cost than a spell cost, because it means you’re potentially paying it over and over, which makes building a deck around trivializing these costs make more sense.
Earthbending
Earthbending is a spin on Awaken, placing +1/+1 counters on lands to turn them into hasty Creatures that return to non-Creature permanents upon being removed. This offsets the normal ‘feelsbad’ of your Land Creatures being killed, with a greater focus on giving these Lands keywords and riders over sheer size.
Saffgor: I’m going to be honest, the thing that sours me on this mechanic is the exile clause. I know it feels bad to lose Lands in the same breath as losing Creatures, and yes this set has Airbending, but they could just have easily changed Airbending to say ‘play’ and this to just care about dying. It’s complicated, clunky, and rewards so many facets of what midrange players enjoy. Have a counters-matter deck? Landfall? How about aristocrats? Earthbending serves each of these admirably, holding their hand and kissing their boo-boos when the mean control player so much as touches a precious Land.
BPhillipYork: This is a bit of a strange ability. Turning a land into a creature is kind of whatever, in fact many times it’s kind of a bad thing, in Commander at least, since you generally aren’t playing the kind of game of attrition where you want to weaponize lands. However the codicil that returns them to play when they die or are exiled make the ability much more powerful in general. It suddenly makes your earthbent lands available as sacrifices to power things, which is more useful than just straight up attackers. The way the ability is templated the trigger returning them to play sticks around even if the original earthbender leaves play, which is pretty nice. All in all it just seems mostly like a super utilitarian ability, with a lot of potential value generated.
Firebending
Firebending cranks up mana generation more than nearly any other mechanic we’ve yet seen, adding ample Red mana to your pool when a Firebending Creature attacks. This mana goes away at the end of Combat, so you’ve got to use it or lose it, making for huge swings and Instant-speed tricks.
Saffgor: Flashy, temporary, and undercosted across the board, Firebending is everything Red could ask for. Firebending is of course on more than just Red cards, but the idea of adding massive chunks of mana on attack tickles pink the aggro player in my head. While I don’t think it’s necessarily the most powerful, as it begs for an outlet that often comes overcosted if we’re talking about cards in the set itself, this hits on levels both narrative and mechanical unlike anything in Universes Beyond before. If you can find a good way to spend it, you’re in for an explosive time.
BPhillipYork: Firebending out of the gate seems built to do two things that red already does. Extra combats, and creatures or abilities that override the game state and allow you to keep mana between phases, and especially those that then turn into a bomb when they leave play, cards like Leyline Tyrant will let you keep the mana around, and if you don’t spend it just blow someone or something up. Both of these seem fun, though the extra combats is definitely the more powerful, since it can easily lead to a scenario where you keep having combats until your opponents are dead. Finally there’s a ton of combat tricks it can pay for, in the set there’s a decent amount of red combat tricks, and there’s many many more in the wider Commander pool.
Airbending
Airbending resolves problems on the board nonviolently, whisking them away to exile to be cast later for {2}, instead of their normal mana cost. This is used for both offense & defense, protecting your own cards and repeating Enters effects, or slowing down opponents who get too far ahead.
Saffgor: Airbending is my favorite of the new mechanics, as can be surmised by my coverage of Monk Gyatso last week, and that’s almost exclusively because it can be cracked in half like a delicious egg. Applying discounts, whether from the Airbent card itself or some external source, makes this potentially even better than blinking, and it’s one of the first times we’ve seen a good way to make use of powerful cast triggers over & over within White. It reminds me a bit of Web-Slinging in that way, but that’s a bit of an insult to Airbending—it’s much cooler than that would suggest. The biggest shame is that this mechanic is the rarest bending keyword to appear on cards, as a practically-extinct bending art in the series, an understandable disappointment.
BPhillipYork: Airbending seems a mixture of defensive value plays and semi-detainment type effects. For creatures with powerful enters play abilities it lets you generate them again, and it covers both enters play and cast triggers, which is a fairly large distinction now (and of course those abilities that require both). If needed this is a decent way to get rid of powerful tokens, or to remove equipped or enchanted creatures, causing their Equipment and Auras to drop off, but I think most of how it will be used it to regenerate powerful ETB effects, most likely for expensive artifacts and Eldrazi, since large amounts of colorless mana are usually fairly easy to generate.
Returning Mechanics
Exhaust
Exhaust is a more thematically neutral take on Monstrosity, allowing a permanent to use a powerful ability once while on the battlefield. This can be the addition of counters, single-use abilities, or any number of potent effects. This comes conditionally, however, as in order to to gain access to these abilities again the Exhausted card would need to leave and return to the battlefield.
Saffgor: Unexpected but not unwanted! Exhaust has some memory issues, oftentimes, but it’s a great control valve that allows Wizards to print extremely powerful effects on low-rarity cards, without worrying about repeated play patterns. Seeing this become deciduous would be great, though it matters more in Limited than Constructed play.
BPhillipYork: Exhaust is a neat mechanic but it’s probably more appropriate for regular non-singleton Magic, though if it’s abilities like this example (creating a permanent token that gives a new ability) it’s usable. A bit expensive in comparison to other existing cards, but still it’s potentially a useful dump for firebend mana.
Lessons
Lessons don’t do…anything, inherently. Much like Arcane, it’s a way to call out specific cards as belonging to the subtype, and many things in this release care about them being in the Graveyard. They can be added to hand from the Sideboard using Learn, but that’s only relevant for 60-card formats, as there is no Sideboard in Commander.
Saffgor: The most obvious tee-up for Secrets of Strixhaven we could ever have seen. Lessons came with the first Strixhaven set, and return but a few sets before the next, and I fully expect to see further support when that arrives in 2026. At the very least, some of the cooler Commanders this set care about Lessons, so you will probably see them at your LGS.
BPhillipYork: It’s neat to see Lessons return. I think they were a neat mechanical group, and probably more coherent than Arcane, which is probably the closest analog. An increase in Lessons essentially means all Lessons get more powerful, and Lesson focused commanders become possible. In Commander the ability to sideboard them in midgame is moot so they inherently become less powerful, which means the range of them or synergies have to be even stronger to really be useful. In general the lessons in Avatar seem stronger and more useful than those in Strixhaven, so they’re more likely to see play. Colorless sorceries and instants are pretty rare, and a significant amount of them are Lessons at this point.
Next Time: The Set’s Multicolor & Colorless Cards
That wraps up our look at the mechanics of Avatar: The Last Airbender. We’ll be back later to look at the most noteworthy cards in the set, starting with the Multicolor and Colorless cards, and then Monocolor options in the following articles.
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