Last updated on September 10, 2025
Jackal, Genius Geneticist | Illustration by Pavel Kolomeyets
Marvel’s Spider-Man has been fully previewed, and the Commander brewers are a-brewing. Universes Beyond sets are an absolute sandbox of possibility given their high number of legendary creatures; Spider-Man alone has 79 new legends, and that’s before you count the supplementary sets!
One of those new legends is Jackal, Genius Geneticist, a new Simic commander that combines a busted creature-copying ability with a sort of Birthing Pod-like mana value mini-game. It promises great power, which means it’s our great responsibility to be the bearer of bad news and let everyone know that Jackal does not interact with some of Commander’s most powerful cards the way you might think it does.
A New Simic Legend
The idea here is that you want to work up a mana value chain, copying your creatures along the way while also making Jackal more of a threat. At face value, you need to start the chain with a 1-mana creature, which puts a +1/+1 counter on Jackal. Then you want to follow up by copying a 2-drop, a 3-drop, and so on, making Jackal a larger trampler in the process.
Slap a Rancor on the villain and start the chain with 3-drops instead. Maybe that 3-drop’s something like Rishkar, Peema Renegade, which gets copied and grows Jackal even further, up to a 6-power creature potentially, and then you’re off to the races, copying 6+ mana creatures as early as turn 4.
Season of Heartbreak
Doubling Season | Illustration by Chuck Lukacs
Bad news time: Jackal, Genius Geneticist does not work with Doubling Season or Parallel Lives the way you want it to, to use a few of Commander’s most popular token doublers. The +1/+1 counter doubling part of Doubling Season still works, but you won’t get any extra tokens from these cards.
The quirk here is that both green enchantments specifically use the text “If an effect would create one or more tokens….” And that’s just it, Jackal’s effect doesn’t make tokens. All Jackal’s effect does is copy creature spells on the stack. When its ability has resolved, you’re left with a creature and its copy on the stack, and an extra +1/+1 counter on Jackal, but that’s where its effect ends. Whatever happens after that has nothing to do with Jackal’s abilities anymore.
When the copy of the creature spell resolves, it’ll create a token on the battlefield that’s a copy of the original creature, but there’s no effect in place that’s making that token, it’s simply being created because that’s what happens when a copy of a permanent hits the battlefield. But again, no “effect’ is causing this to happen, so enchantments like Doubling Season will not kick in here.
Read Between the Lines
Of course, none of this means you have to go cutting Doubling Season and Parallel Lives from your Jackal brews right away, you might still have other uses for them. They still have value if you’re messing around with other token generators or +1/+1 counters, they’re just a bit of a non-bo with the commander itself (minus the counter-doubling on Season). The early PSA seems necessary though, given that 24% of early Jackal decks on EDHREC are running Parallel Lives, and 16% have Doubling Season.
And hey, this might even save your bacon at the Spider-Man prerelease: Parallel Lives is on the bonus sheet, and Jackal’s a normal rare in a smaller set, so don’t get duped!
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2 Comments
111.13. A copy of a permanent spell becomes a token as it resolves. The token has the characteristics of the spell that became that token. The token is not “created” for the purposes of any replacement effects or triggered abilities that refer to creating a token.
Thanks, this has been pointed out a few times and we’ve fixed it.
Funny, writing to warn people an interaction doesn’t work, then getting a whole different interaction wrong, haha
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