Commander: Ok, Let's talk about the Format's Changes

NOTE: This article was originally written on September 27th. The last parts have been updated and written considering the recent change in management of the Commander format to Wizards of the Coast.

I don't write about Commander. Although it is the most popular format in Magic: The Gathering, it doesn't appeal to me when it comes to content creation - this is not a personal dislike, much less a minimization of the format. On the contrary: Commander is, technically, one of the best possible ways to play MTG because it bypasses all the rules and problems pre-established by the game to be its own mode - the Metagame doesn't matter, the acquisition cost matters less, the toxicity that a tournament naturally brings to players becomes less frequent.

In theory, Commander is a place where people play with whoever they want, however they want, spending whatever they want, and with whatever rules they prefer. It is sanctioned and has its own banned list and set of tournament organizations for those with a more competitive bent, but the very nature of the format's creation and management is geared towards it being a place for everyone. It is the most played and most famous format in Magic for this reason.

This popularity, of course, comes with consequences: creating and playing a format made for everyone is planting the seeds of what will one day be a large tree with a structure too complex to know where to prune each branch without damaging the balance of the surrounding ecosystem. Over time, there will be more branches, the roots will come out of the ground, and before you know it, the tree might be slowly growing around your house - and you no longer have the resources to stop it. Even if you set your tree on fire, it will take away your house and everything you built on it.

This analogy in Magic is a little more convoluted: every Commander player has their house and tree. Everyone prunes their tree in the way they see fit for their needs, and consequently, they find some neighbors in the neighborhood with whom they have harmonious conversations because their ecosystem is in line with theirs, or they even create relationships between their trees that help both trees grow and become more beautiful - there is an agreement between them about how their neighborhood should be and how the trees should be cared for.

There are other neighbors, however, who will be in constant disagreement - one may complain that the position of the tree next door does not allow theirs to get enough sun to keep it healthy, or that the way the other waters the leaves upwards causes the wind to splash the water on their tree and this can kill it in the long run.

Others will complain that if your neighbor doesn't want to have a massive tree that blocks the view from their window, then they should move! It's not his problem! After all, he invested time and a lot of his hard-earned money to grow that tree and get it to the size it is! There are also those who will place bright lights on the trunks, others who will create environments for birds to nest in their branches - and an immeasurable number of neighbors who will be very bothered by a flashing light at night, or some by the sound of birds at 5 in the morning, asking that these be banned from their respective streets.

Amidst the cacophony, there is the city government - the same one that cultivated the idea and culture that each house should have its own tree and that each neighborhood could take care of them in the way that was most convenient for them - which intervenes little because it believes in the ability of its citizens to communicate and resolve these problems in a civilized manner.

The government of this city receives constant complaints from residents or representatives of the respective neighborhoods - after all, is it right for a tree branch to start invading another resident's land, or for a person to be getting in the way of their neighbor's plans because they have some fertilizers that make the roots of a tree prevent the growth of others? And after all, wouldn't it be easier if these neighborhood disagreements could be resolved with a good conversation, or even with the possibility of exchanging properties between residents so that they could be next to people who think similarly to them? That way, the trees would all grow the way they want and peace would reign in the city.

This is the idea that the government tries to convey to citizens, but how many institutional messages from governments do we ignore each year? It's not as if they would work because residents create their own habits and regionalized cultures - what's the point of having a law saying that garbage must be put out on the street for collection on certain days and times when everyone in your neighborhood throws out their garbage on any day of the week and at any time? The civilizing concept exists - a proposal for social consensus to keep the city clean - but it is not applied.

So the city government needs to step in and define new laws about how trees can and cannot be pruned and grown in gardens. Christmas baubles that sparkle in the sun? Banned. Certain fertilizers that can harm the soil of neighbors next door? Banned. A specific type of pruning that causes too many leaves to fall on other people's homes? Banned. And so the city government believes it has solved the most pressing problems of its incredible tree-lined city.

But the fertilizers were expensive. The Christmas baubles? Made of crystal. The way some people prune their leaves was what maintained the ecosystem of their home - how are they going to continue growing them now that they are forbidden from doing what they have always done? Cut down the trunk and plant another one from scratch? Is their soil fertile enough to plant another tree? Concern and outrage take over a portion of the city - a few hours later, there is already an angry crowd at the door of the city hall.

They threaten to break down doors, break furniture, hurt members of parliament, and some even go so far as to throw bricks at windows. This is proof that the city government, by giving too much freedom to grow trees and believing in the common sense and good neighbor policy of its growing community, has failed at crucial points in managing a city by neglecting the need for more objective rules and communications to raise awareness among its residents.

And this is where we get to the point of this article: by growing too much and without more assertive supervision of the problems around the tables, Commander has failed to cultivate a healthier community than the others. By having faith in the good practices of its players, RC may have created a monster that it alone can no longer contain - which is why, today, my article is about this format and why, in the end, the RC is no longer responsible for Commander management.

Commander is different from absolutely everything else in Magic: The Gathering. In most formats, there is a Metagame - a categorization of decks that are more successful in tournaments and therefore likely to face, and consequently, you can prepare in the way that you consider most appropriate for a given event and/or season - it is like fighting a fire-breathing dragon: you know what it does, so you can wear chainmail that is more appropriate for the heat, avoid flammable materials and equipment at the time, and have some magic fire resistance potions at the time you confront it.

On the other hand, playing Commander is like facing an eight-headed Hydra that breathes fire, throws lightning, makes the ground shake, and shoots lasers from its eyes - all at the same time. There is no way you can prepare for every detail, you will need to choose what your objective is when facing the beast while the other players will choose other properties to focus on.

At some point, you need to decide what kind of format you want to play. Commander is closer to a battle royale, but just like the eight-headed creature, there will be four or more players, each with their own vision, purpose, and goal for the format.

Some just want to enjoy a quiet day with their friends or strangers at a local store while making crazy plays on turn 8, while others want to close a combo with Thassa’s Oracle on turn 2 or 3, feel good about themselves for the quick win, and call it a day - these two aren’t going to talk, and if they do, it’s unlikely to be pleasant for either party.

In between these two, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of different types of Commander players, and none of them are “wrong.” For example, I love playing with precons because they are the main way to avoid dozens of stresses that you can have because someone makes a speech about what they don't agree with something in your list when we include the deckbuilding elements - Edgar Markov, one of my favorite commanders, is absurd when well-built with the best possible cards and one of the most annoying Aggro to play against for the casual audience. In his Commander 2017 deck, however, he is just another one on the table, with a horrendous mana base, and the person who rolls their eyes in disgust when seeing him in their command zone is just being presumptuous.

When everyone has a perception of what their ideal format is, the same thing happens with Commander that has happened with society since time immemorial: people try to impose their visions on others. You can divide these cases into the two players I mentioned above: one follows the logic of “if it’s in the game, it’s for playing”, even if it’s not correct or ethical at a casual table. The other will usually not like this speech because they feel disadvantaged by the discrepancy in power levels between the decks - or, in some cases, this person feels genuine empathy for those who can’t keep up with faster and, consequently, more expensive decks.

To solve this problem, RC (and now Wizards) proposes two solutions: categorizing decks on a scale of power level and what is known by players as Rule 0 - a pre-game conversation to establish that everyone has their interests and goals aligned at the table and, thus, make the experience enjoyable for everyone. Let's face it, neither of the two works very well.

The proposal of Rule 0 is to allow players to create their own social agreements at a table so that everyone can enjoy the game in the best possible way. This can range from pre-banning certain unpleasant combos, preventing certain play patterns, or even allowing silver-bordered cards to be used in a game.

Theoretically, Rule 0 is a message that says Commander can be whatever you and your group want it to be. Including allowing you to change the banlist in the most convenient way, for example, allowing Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus and Dockside Extortionist at cEDH tables. But that's not how things work because despite Rule 0, Commander has its own set of official rules and banned lists defined by a rules committee and published/sanctioned by Wizards of the Coast, which most players will apply at their tables.

Silver border conversations are pretty fun because they only come up at casual tables and everyone there likes to laugh when someone has to run around the room asking who likes squirrels or calls a friend to get an extra turn, but the debate gets gray when they start talking about, for example, proxies.

Some don't see any problems because it's a casual format, while others vehemently defend the idea of ​​using them because, after all, there's a personal interest in not wanting to spend a lot of money on pieces of cardboard - other players will be perpetually against proxies for the opposite reason: if they spent so much money on Commander, why let others have the same cards without investing? And in the middle ground, there are those who won't allow proxies because they're not willing to let people play with things that go beyond their purchasing power since it doesn't seem "ethical" for them.

These cases are, of course, more of a person problem. Ideally, you'll find players who think like you and form a table. But is that really the experience that Rule 0 has brought? To what extent are the players' interests, in fact, aligned at the tables?

Here comes the other problem: power level. How do we define this? Is my level 5 the same as the level 5 of the person at the next table? What is the yardstick for what is acceptable? Do combos with Thassa’s Oracle and Demonic Consultation count if I don’t have tutors? Why do I need to explain how I built my deck to make excuses for the combos in it? And if combos are the most efficient way to end games in Commander, why do people complain about them so much?

Wizards introduced a skeleton of their Power Level tiers last week. It’s not going to work to make Rule 0 easier, not in the way it’s currently planned. It doesn’t make sense to categorize Ancient Tomb as a cEDH tier, but to say that you can use it in a casual tier if “your deck is tomb-themed” - if the system is going to categorize your deck based on the highest power level card, it’s just going to add more complications and stress to you if you have to explain why a casual table needs to allow your most powerful card. In practice, the effect is the same as today, the famous “I play with cheap tutors, but I won’t make combos” or anything along these lines.

The point is that Commander is so free in its interpretation of how it should be played and what it is as a format that it is absolutely impossible to please everyone. It suffers from the excess of casual as much as it suffers from the amount of people trying to turn it into a competitive modality that it was not made and is not intended to be - the excess of Rule 0 is as harmful to the format as the seriousness with which some people take cEDH, and the middle ground between the two dissipates as everyone feels entitled to say what Commander should be instead of accepting that it, too, has its own rules.

So we end up in situations where it is not enough to just show up at your local store with a deck of your choice and sit at the tables: there is bureaucracy. There's the "I don't play against this commander" and also the "fetch, Mana Vault, Arcane Signet, Demonic Tutor for the combo, pass." and in very close proportions to each other. And if things got to this point, it's RC's own fault, who didn't know how to hold the reins as the format grew and failed to understand that "house rules" only work up to a certain point in civilized debate.

In an ideal world, each Commander table in the world would be like the famous Magic ad with Post Malone - everyone laughing on a Friday night, having fun, enjoying the company of their friends and their favorite card game.

I'm sure there are many tables like this and I admire those who manage to establish, with Magic, connections even remotely similar to those in this advertising material. But for each of them, there are also players willing to impose their vision of the format on others.

There are situations where people leave the tables because they didn't like a certain play that, in the end, is part of Magic - and there is also that player, in his eagerness to feel good about winning games or being rewarded with that promotional booster at the end of the night, will close a combo in the second turn and ruin the experience of others, table after table. Most of us have been in both positions and know how it feels.

Whether you’re the most casual player in your store or a cEDH grinder who wins tournaments on Spelltable, you’ll probably agree that there’s a big difference between Commander’s goal and Magic: The Gathering’s competitive vision.

This is a cultural issue: from its inception, Magic was designed for competition. Back then, it was 1v1 games, with established formats, banned lists, rotations, and a set of rules that every player had to follow to participate in tournaments and win prizes. The core of the game grew out of this—for over a decade, the only format that mattered if you wanted to play in a store was Standard because FNMs were always in it.

Times changed, MTG became more popular, Wizards started releasing more products, and in 2011, Commander was an opportunity that they embraced and never let go of. Today, Friday events in many stores around the world are dedicated to the multiplayer format - a true post-work night with your friends, drinking and eating snacks while playing cards. For this reason, I often say that Commander is closer to the experience of a board game than a TCG.

And we are talking about the most complex board game of all time: in addition to having the rules factors, it has almost 30 thousand different cards (it should reach that number by late 2025) and hundreds of thousands of possibilities when it comes to building decks and making interactions between these cards - its aspect of unpredictability is almost endless.

When we play board games, there are also the two types of people that we find in Commander: those who play to win and those who play to have fun - the difference is that, in this case, the parity of weapons and resources on the table is equal for everyone, whereas a TCG requires constant investment to keep up with your friends and the other tables.

But Magic was born from competitive play. For years, its culture was geared toward this audience: “Play the Game, See the World” was the reason for many to dedicate themselves to the TCG. When Commander started to become popular, it was clear that it was affected by this more competitive vein at some point - after all, no one plays to lose, even “for fun”. And any competitive game bets on that.

As the years went by and the format's staples became more expensive and more coveted, the investment for those who wanted the most optimized version possible only increased. - Now they face the consequences of the snake egg that was hatched back then: seeing their expensive staples disappear because Commander was not - according to the latest RC bans - philosophically designed to compete, unlike the Magic they know and have known for decades.

With this imminent threat of their staples and Reserved List cards no longer being a safe investment, this same audience tries to find solutions or starts getting rid of their decks and collections to recover the lost investment. They have lost confidence in Commander, they do not trust RC's decisions and consider that, in the end, it is useless to dedicate themselves to the format.

And if this is the case, isn't it time to admit that Commander's ideals do not correspond to those of competitive tables and, consequently, that it should be a separate modality with its own regulations and banlist? Wouldn't it be time for a group of players to take advantage of the famous Rule 0 to create their own unified cEDH management between the various communities, with their own banned list? Call the format whatever you want - Leviathan and Duel Commander essentially exist with this proposal - just do yourself a favor and accept that the conversation between these two formats no longer exists and create your own regulations for the more competitive side.

Once that's done, a competitive committee can do whatever they see fit. Unbanning Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt, take advantage of and unban other cards from the current Commander list that doesn't make sense for the format's speed and power level, ban pieces that create a huge disparity in matches (and it would be hilarious if they were positive mana rocks), among other changes to make cEDH what its players - a smaller portion of Commander's overall scope - and a group of competent and influential people in its community consider ideal.

Another benefit of this separation between the two would be for the players: tables where there is a disagreement of interests or where someone ends up angry because they closed a combo in the first three turns would be less frequent. More common would be the use of tables in local stores that could, for example, segment separate tournaments in their systems to serve both audiences so that every player understands the difference between one and the other.

It would be better for stores if they could, for example, think of a competition structure for the cEDH audience with an increased prize pool while considering other modalities that encourage lighter and more casual Commander games, with raffles and gifts instead of credit or booster pack prizes - a practice already adopted in many stores.

Things will be better both for the market to understand which products and cards each type of player wants, and for content creators to focus on what they really want to cover without needing disclaimers and other details that Commander currently requires when we discuss a deck or strategy.

Even Commander itself benefits from this change as a format: it is about Gathering. About getting your friends together and enjoying your favorite card game in a way that other formats don't allow due to the competitive factor that permeates them. A safe and ideally less harmful place for those who just want to have fun after a tiring week.

Everyone wins if we separate Commander from cEDH. But do we have people willing to take on this role? Would it be possible to have permission from Wizards - now that they make the format decisions - to “create” this mode where competitive players can play their own version of Commander?

Last Monday, one day before this article was scheduled to be published, Wizards announced that it will take over Commander management following the controversies involving threats to the format’s committee members.

I am a strong advocate that every sanctioned Magic format should have its own committee similar to the Pauper Format Panel: a group of competent people analyzing the data of a format to make more assertive decisions about bans and unbans while maintaining clear and objective communication with its community as things develop and unfold.

Let's be clear that PFP doesn't please the entire community of the format it encompasses, but it's not the duty of any committee to please all players - if there was a mistake in RC that caused its social death, it was trying to please too much of a specific part of its community and making arbitrary decisions without external advice from the advisory group they built.

But what PFP has beyond its other formats is a level of autonomy and communication. They openly discuss the Metagame on their networks, talk to the public and, sometimes, consult them on some decisions - which I consider a mistake because banning decisions in competitive formats should not be made based on what the players want because, as with Commander, everyone has a different vision of the ideal format - and they are able to make changes as needed. They banned Cranial Ram before MH3 came out, made choices in their first ban announcement that caused negative commotion but were largely healthy for the format, and they can establish a bond between the community and Wizards that is only possible because they exist as a link.

RC was different in that it made decisions in a more authoritative manner. They had an ideal vision of the format and put it into practice through rare bans, often worrying about other details. Their last announcement was so full of controversy that the trust of their audience no longer existed and no matter how much they tried to fix things, they could not. In this sense, passing Commander decisions to Wizards is a good decision.

However, Wizards is a company, a subsidiary of Hasbro. Magic is a product to be sold, and many decisions are known to be made - or not - considering the company's business. There is now a threshold of how long a card can be acceptable even when it is breaking formats and, in the case of Commander, this period tends to increase because its nature differs from competitive.

Through the WeeklyMTG, the company made a gesture about how it intends to maintain an advisory group to make decisions, with a number between 10 and 20 people - it is a good first step because it removes, for example, the concerns that the next decisions will be arbitrary and purely commercial and the idea that the direction of the format will be at the mercy of banning or unbanning cards based on what is most convenient for the game's products.

With this change, however, a new "serpent's egg" was planted: the Power Brackets - and this should be everyone's biggest concern at this moment.

The intention of this new balance scale, according to Gavin Verhey, is to “facilitate the communication of the unwritten rules of the format” - in short, to make Rule 0 easier.

The brackets will be defined by cards according to their power level and the experience they provide. On the one hand, the idea of ​​establishing a Vampiric Tutor at a higher scale makes sense, although the card is only as good as what you do with it. Just as it makes sense to include Armageddon in this higher bracket - after all, almost no one likes to play against mass LDs in Commander and the people who use them tend to follow the logic of "if it’s in the game, I can play it."

During the live, the opinions about how this scale will work seem logical when we consider a few factors: there is no reason for Polluted Delta to have a high bracket if what it does is, essentially, manafixing. On the other hand, there are cards that are in a very gray area: is Farewell a bracket 1 because it was released in a precon recently? And if so, which bracket will cards like Fierce Guardianship be considered? What about cards like Voja, Jaws of the Conclave and other commanders that players usually don't enjoy playing against? Will they be included in these brackets as well?

Will precon decks even be categorized into power brackets? And if so, will this be specified in the new releases? Will we have Tier 1, 2, and 3 lists coming straight out of the box from now on? Will they have the same MSRP, or will they be split based on their power level? Will Hasbro take advantage of this to create premium products with higher bracket levels and charge, say, $200 for them? Is this a possibility, or just a bad tinfoil theory?

Once the brackets are set, how long will it take for them to be updated to accommodate new staples or cards that come out in new expansions? Will it be possible, through the WPN, to hold Commander events at local stores separated by power brackets? Will there be a decklist registration system? What if a player has a vampire deck with a power bracket 2, but includes a Vampiric Tutor for thematic purposes, where does that fit? How do I enter it into this event? How does he communicate with other players when they complain about his Vampiric Tutor?

The focus of future changes will not be on cEDH, but there is also no intention to separate the banned lists. Is it possible for a card that is problematic in cEDH, but has little relevance at casual tables, to be banned? Will there be other cases where a staple like Mana Vault could take the hammer in favor of more progressive games at casual tables? How relevant will cEDH be in decision-making?

Does this system really solve the problems of misunderstanding in games, or does it just make the issue even more complex? Because as promising as it may have seemed and with so much potential to help separate different categories of Commander players, it only takes a single mistake in planning and implementation for both Wizards and the community to have to deal with another hydra, perhaps bigger than the last - another one, again, caused by the excess of complexities that exist way before the start of a Commander game.

That's all for today.

Commander is not my favorite format, especially when it comes to content creation. But I do have fun playing Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow or any precon they put in my hand, and I believe that the magic of the format is much more about creating fun situations at the table than winning the game. Commander, to me, is a format for a Friday night or Saturday afternoon at your favorite local store with the sole purpose of being a happy hour after work.

It is with this view that I consider each of the points presented here. Both the criticisms of the excess of casual that Rule 0 allows and that causes several uncomfortable situations at the tables and the attempts to turn something that was not originally made to be played that way into competitive, which is the main reason for the bitter taste that many players have with these bans.

In the end, the format is a victim of its own growth, of the excess of freedom that RC has created by allowing players to define how they want to play it while also having to reinforce interventions that, in the end, end up giving in to one side. Now, it will take time for everything to be rebuilt, and the community may regret these last few weeks when Commander stops being what they wanted it to be and becomes something different. In the end, due to the very nature and proportion that things have taken, and the excess of demands and "ifs" and "buts" that both players and those responsible for the format deal with, it is difficult to imagine a harmonious future in the coming years.

Thanks for reading!