Rarely do I consider the size of Toronto. It’s a city of roughly 3.4 million, thanks to amalgamation in 1998, it sprawls out from the shores of Laker Ontario and has been my home for the greater part of the past decade. But my corner is small. It’s a ragged patch cuts from the greater fabric of the city, with loose threads and frayed edges. I found myself in the west end during graduate school and only venture east of Yonge — a comically central border in most people’s minds.

I doubt I’m an outlier for residents of a major city. You grow up or move to a spot with thousands of options, but it’s an anomaly to seek out constant novelty. I have my favourite coffee shop, bookstore, movie theatre and assorted stops I visit on a free weekend. Lately, with no classroom schedule to keep my moored to consistent timetable, the hours I usually spend teaching will gradually be filled with other pursuits.

The past few months have been an exercise in seeking out new places throughout the city — buoyed by recommendations from friends and half-remembered suggestions from years ago. But even now, I prefer to make a day of it every week or two. Their enjoyment comes from a break in normalcy; much like a vacation or favourite band coming to town. A constant influx of variation would leave me disoriented, unmoored and, if prolonged, eventually bored. Despite the outward pressure, often fuelled by social media and a curated lifestyle, I’m a creature of habit and routine. I thrive on limitations. The parameters provide me something to push against. It’s when I do my best work.

Thanks to Mark Rosewater, and the relative stability of a lucky few articles from the mothership, we know that M13 is the first core set to include a multicolour card. In the wake of Foundations, this is a baffling fact to learn but it speaks to vision behind these sets and easing players into the game. Given the challenges with assembling coherent mana bases for multicolour at the time, especially when stretching beyond two, the risk for new players to stumble when jamming gold frame cards was much greater. And this card wasn’t even a legendary creature, able to be used as a commander in the burgeoning format. It was a planeswalker; namely, Nicol Bolas — um — planeswalker.

The incorporation of Bolas in M13 is evident but comes across as restrained when analyzing the card pool. There are later sets, Hour of Devastation among others, where the dragon god’s influence worms its way into countless designs. At the time of editing, the first chapter of Reality Fracture just released and Jace is a plague upon the illustrations in the story and the set’s accompanying planeswalker guide. This approach isn’t necessarily a bad avenue to take; for both Balos and Beleran, it illustrates in their omniscient control over their respective planes and has become the go-to approach for Wizards when featuring a villain. For players who are less invested in the ongoing story, or pick up the set years down the line, they are able to grok the importance of the adversary from art alone.

Is there a villain in Magic with as understandable of an appeal as Nicol Bolas? It’s hard to dismiss a malevolent draconic god who sought overwhelming power through cruel machinations. Paired with his twin brother Ugin, this era of the game’s storytelling allowed for broad operatic swings and set pieces that feel at distance from the more personal psychological tales in the Omen path era.  M13 allows Nicol Bolas to linger in the margins, an approaching threat but not yet at the peak of his power and influence.

But influence he has, nonetheless. Some of the most memorable cards to debut in M13 are derived from the Grixis shard. Krenko, Mob Boss; notorious Goblin engine and mono-red ringleader, along with Talrand, Sky Summoner made their debut in the set. Green and White had respectable additions like Thragtusk, Yeva, Nature’s Herald and Ajani, Caller of the Pride, but stacked against Worldfire, Archaeomancer, Omniscience, Disciple of Bolas, and Thundermaw Hellkite, it’s shocking the power in Grixis.

One of the lesser discussed cards in the set is a remnant of Bolas, arguably one of the iconic elements separating him from his brother. Before revisiting the M13 card list, I only knew about the Gem of Becoming as the shiny egg hovering between his horns. Thanks to Edge of Eternities and its suspect Endstone, the gem had been unearthed in my mind from the compounded detritus of lore tidbits, stories and facts that comprise ‘what I know about Magic: The Gathering.’ Admittedly, I was shocked it had a card at all; not because Wizards is unwilling to plum the depths of their designs and lore for card inspiration, but because of the gem’s unassuming power and reputation. Consider that his citadel is a gamechanger, while the Gem of Becoming is an uncommon.

For a total of six mana, three for casting and another to activate, the gem can be sacrificed to fetch an Island, Swamp and Mountain; and after revealing their selections can put the three lands into the player’s hand. Fetching lands outside of green can be a struggle. But the Gem of Becoming is more than a reasonable way to mana fix in a limited environment and undervalued as the years and sets continue to accumulate.

Another approach to these cards is to consider the opportunities in their limitations. Think of them as little puzzles to tinker with into a state of playability. Thanks to artifact recursion, the Gem of Becoming can be retrofitted into a shambling engine in much the same way as the now-sunsetted Burnished Hart. Where the Gem stands out, however, is that its fetch is unrestricted. If you need to grab a triome or two, perhaps a surveil land or a niche player like Witch’s cottage, the Gem will serve you well. Bringing the cards to hand rather than the battlefield is a limitation, but one easily overcome with the growing number of artifacts allowing for additional land drops outside of green. It will never measure up to the power of Crop Rotation or Open the Way, but it can spur conversation at the table as a nifty little piece of tech.

These are the cards that initially drew me into Commander, even if they have fallen out of fashion — if they were ever in the zeitgeist at all. There are decks in my collection that adhere to the conventions of their commander, not built by net-decking but gravitating toward the obvious inclusions until it is difficult to tell the difference between my list and the hundreds found on Moxfield. Unless you’re a player who thrives on niche cards and crewing never before seen strategies, there is no harm in building a reliable deck to play the game. Commander is about self-expression, but it’s also necessary to have fun. There are no judges grading you on originality when you’re shuffling up at a table, but that shouldn’t dissuade you from testing the limitations of your lists. The more you get comfortable with a deck, and with brewing, the more opportunities become available to find space for those niche pieces. They might not be staples or the best in class, but these limitations allow for some resistance. See what you can push against and what you can become.