Avatar’s 5-Color Bear Challenges Long-Time Shrine Commander

Last updated on October 30, 2025

Hei Bai, Forest Guardian | Illustration by TAPIOCA

Avatar: The Last Airbender‘s bringing a bunch of new mechanics to Magic–namely, the four elemental bending abilities from the TV show. But there's also plenty of returning favorites here, from allies to lessons, and even the return of shrines for the first time in a few years.

Shrines have had a de facto 5-color commander for years now in Go-Shintai of Life's Origin, but Avatar‘s introducing some friendly competition to the mix.

Hei Bai Has Entered Chat

Hei Bai, Forest Guardian comes from the Avatar Jumpstart add-on, and brings players an alternative 5-color shrine commander. If nothing else, it's a great new addition that every Go-Shintai of Life's Origin deck in existence will play in the 99, or vice versa.

The panda bear enters alongside a random shrine from your deck, then sticks around to pump out spirits equal to the number of legendary enchantments you control. Note that the enters ability specifically mentions shrines, but the second does not, so you could build around or include other non-shrine enchantments, though you definitely want the first ability to matter, so you're likely locked into shrines regardless.

Go-Shintai probably still wins out in a head-to-head here. The fact that Go-Shintai pumps out actual shrine tokens is so huge for the niche archetype, and Hei Bai's token generation isn't quite as useful. Not to say tapping for 5+ spirit tokens is bad, but remember that many of the shrines are already designed to be token generators, like Honden of Life's Web or Go-Shintai of Shared Purpose. You'd rather sink your time and mana into upping the shrine count and have them do the actual work than invest your mana into a pure payoff that doesn't increase your access to shrines.

The flip side is that Hei Bai always enters with another shrine due to the ETB ability. But even that's not as impressive since Go-Shintai is actually a shrine itself, and produces another shrine token when it enters. So the ETB's even arguably better on the existing commander. All of this on top of the recursion that Go-Shintai offers makes it the pretty clear better of the two, though Hei Bai plays a nice supporting role.

It's Your Time to Shrine

Sanctum of All | Illustration by Johannes Voss

I'm not here to give out financial advice, but if Hei Bai, Forest Guardian interests you, you might want to start eyeballing shrines sooner than later. Avatar will have plenty of new shrines to add to the collection, but this is the type of archetype that might see sporadic price spikes if people become interested in it again. Go-Shintai of Life's Origin has a market price of about $4-5 right now, but that could jump up if the new shrines end up being good. It also means the spirit bear could end up being pricy, given its auto-include status for existing Go-Shintai decks and its presence in Jumpstart Boosters rather than the main set.

Sanctum of All is the other 5-color shrine card to keep in mind. It's reasonably cheap right now, but who knows what'll happen if thousands of players start to put together new shrine decks? Other than the obvious 5-color includes, most other shrines have been printed at uncommon, and are fairly accessibly, so it's unlikely the new Jumpstart print shakes up the market too much.