MTG’s New Rulebreaking Otter Is a Messy Rules Nightmare for Commander

Last updated on July 20, 2026

Lutri, the Spellchaser | Illustration by Lie Setiawan

What's up with Magic: The Gathering and broken otters? Lutri, the Spellchaser would've rocked Commander if it was allowed as a companion. Stormchaser's Talent has been the talk of banlist predictions for well over a year now. And now we've got Tolabow, Loch Rascal, which is already one of the most controversial cards of the decade, despite not even being released yet.

Otter Read the Card First

Tolabow, Loch Rascal will be released with Mystery Booster Commander Edition coming out later this year. That set is designed for Commander drafting, and Tolabow is one of almost 60 new cards designed to faciliate drafting functional Commander decks.

It's one of eight new cards with the “rulebreaker” mechanic, which technically existed on playtest cards prior to this release, and lets you mess with the typical deckbuilding restrictions for Commander. Tolabow's rules text reads as follows:

“Rulebreaker — A deck with this commander can have instant and sorcery cards of one additional color not in this commander’s color identity and any basic land cards.”

And thus, the confusion begins.

Schrödinger's Otter

Tolabow's rulebreaker ability can be read in one of two ways:

• You can play any instants and sorceries in your deck, so long as each one's only one extra color in addition to blue.
• Or, you can play any instants and sorceries in your deck, but they can collectively include at most one additional color.

The second bullet point is the correct translation. Pick a color, and your instants and sorceries can now include that color, either with or independently from blue.

For example, you could run a Tolabow deck with Rampant Growth and Growth Spiral, since that only adds one collective color to your instants/sorceries. You could not, however, play Doom Blade and Rampant Growth together, since that adds more than one color beyond blue.

Color vs. Color Identity

Here's where The Curious Case of the Colorshifting Otter gets weird. While Tolabow only lets you add one color of cards to your deck, it does not care about the color identity of those cards. This came to my attention with the card's Scryfall page, which points to a BlueSky post by Matt Tabak, a designer for Magic: The Gathering who's often known to make rules clarifications on social media.

The implication here is that you could add cards of another color to your deck while totally disregarding the color identity of those cards. Let's break that down.

Consider the card Damn. This is a black card with a black-white color identity. If you choose black for Tolabow, you're allowed to add Damn to your deck because Tolabow only sees that you're adding a black card. Your deck's color identity remains mono-blue; Tolabow simply bends the rules on what you can put in that mono-blue deck (hence the name rulebreaker).

But picking black as your secondary color doesn't necessarily mean you can add cards with a blue-black color identity to that deck. By the same token where Damn is now allowed in your mono-blue deck, you cannot add cards like Mystical Teachings or Rona's Vortex. These are blue cards with a blue-black color identity, not black cards that Tolabow allows you to add to the deck.

Confusing, right?

Essentially, Tolabow lets you pick one color beyond blue, and add instants and sorceries that have only that color and/or blue in their mana costs. It does not consider the color identity so long as the mana costs are in line with the chosen color. However, color identity will still be considered for anything that's not explicitly adding that second color to the mana costs of those instants and sorceries.

Here are some examples:

A Tolabow deck could choose red and add Fiery Confluence, Ancient Grudge, and Alchemist's Gambit to the same deck.

A different version could add Tracker's Instincts, Eureka Moment, and Channel the Suns to a blue-green Tolabow deck, but you could not add Joint Exploration to that same deck, since it adds to your deck's color identity without using the second color in its mana cost.

This is all obviously way more convoluted than it should be. The intentions seem to be something adjacent to partner or background, where you just go +1 on your color identity, but the color vs. color identity implications are way more complicated. Maybe it receives errata to fix this, but for now it's going to be a bit of a logistical nightmare explaining to newer players what can and can't be played with Tolabow.

What About Domain and Devoid?

Another aspect of Tolabow is that it lets you play any basics in your deck, regardless of what extra color you specialize in. If you add black instants and sorceries to your deck, you can still run Forests, Plains, and Mountains.

I don't really see this doing anything phenomenal outside of maybe unlocking some domain or converge spells in an otherwise mono-colored deck, but this isn't really a broken ability. If you're using rulebreaker just to craft a deck with 5-color wincons, that's not really different than just building a 5-color deck. This new commander didn't unlock anything you weren't already able to do.

Note that Tolabow will not let you indiscriminately add devoid cards to your deck. They're all colorless, but Tolabow specifically lets you add cards of one extra “color”, which means the ones you add must, in fact, have a color. Ghostfire Slice isn't eligible for any Tolabow deck, even if you're adding other red instants/sorceries.

But Is It Any Good?

Otterball Antics | Illustration by Rhonda Libbey

Totally separate from the spaghetti rules text is the conversation about whether this card is totally broken or not. You'll note that nothing above mentions the ability about making prowess otter tokens, and that's because that part of the card is… just fine? The actual effect of the card isn't anything special (see: Sokka, Tenacious Tactician), it's really just a matter of whether rulebreaker truly breaks the card or not.

And no, it doesn't. You can craft combos that you'd never be able to pull off in a mono-blue deck, but at that point all you've done is sculpted your own 2-color combo that you could've built into an actual 2-color deck anyway. Adding black to a mono-blue deck isn't something crazy and new. That's just what we call “building a Dimir deck”. So no, the rulebreaker ability isn't really broken from a gameplay perspective.

As some creators like Ben Bateman have mentioned, it's more about the implications of what rulebreaker can do than what Tolabow, Loch Rascal actually does. Messing with the established rules of Commander is always dicey and adds more complexity to the game, especially for new players. It's why the hybrid rule hasn't changed despite being a point of contention every time Magic releases new hybrid cards (read: every set). Introducing an ability literally named “rulebreaker” and messing with conventional rules is a slippery slope that could lead to actually broken cards. Tolabow's not broken, but it might be the first in a line of rulebreaker cards that actually leads to something unhealthy for Commander.

I'd like to think that's not the case, because I definitely don't see it with Tolabow. There will be seven other rulebreakers in the upcoming Mystery Booster set, but I'll reserve judgment until I see them, and I'm assuming they won't all mess with colors the way Tolabow does. Plus, these cards were deisgned with insight from the Commander Format Panel, so there were a lot of invested eyes on these cards, and I put faith in the members of that Panel.

I'm curious how the other rulebreakers pan out, and whether we'll look back at this mechanic like the next eminence. I highly doubt that based on this one card, but we can all agree Tolabow's a bit of a rules mess even if it's not completely broken.