Commander, A Week of Change

Hello and welcome back.

Take a seat, grab a beverage. Breathe.

It’s been a week, hasn’t it? Beyond all the real world issues that seem to be bombarding our eyes, ears, minds and indeed lives, one of our favorite hobbies also is in major upheaval, with a future somewhat uncertain. While indeed smaller than other things happening right now, today I’m going to give my own analysis of this last week of events as they pertain to the Commander format. These are my own opinions and takes, and do not in any way represent Flipside Gaming. Gotta make sure to say that after this week.

SEPTEMBER 23rd 2024: BANNED ANNOUNCEMENT

On the 23rd of September, the Commander Rules Committee issued a banned cards announcement. To the surprise of many, many people and seemingly out of nowhere, the body decided to ban Nadu Winged Wisdom, Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt. To say this was a shake up is to put it as if you live under a rock, like myself. The maelstrom that would follow isn’t something I think any would have guessed, but I’ll get to that in a bit.

The reason these cards were banned were due to play patterns and the speed at which they allowed a boardstate and game to develop. Nadu and Dockside for the former, Dockside, Lotus and Crypt for the latter. I’m unsure about how people that are newer to the format view Commander, but these all seem in line with what the format was trying to be curated to be in my opinion, me being from the era of when it was called EDH.

Even the CAG, the Commander Advisory Group, which is supposed to advise and give different perspectives from the community a voice for the RC to listen to, seemed blindsided by the announcement. In part, this caused at least two members of the CAG to leave that group, among other reasons known only to them.

THE WEEK OF THE 23rd

The announcement was met with gratitude and praise as much as with disdain and disappointment. Unfortunately, it was going to get far, far worse.

While I don’t have a massive bubble on social media by choice, I had to unfollow some people and block others because of the vitriol, sometimes coupled with what I felt were also views that didn’t understand what the bans were trying to achieve. People have feelings and some of those were hurt, rage, and pain. I understand that and can accept it. What people ended up saying however, even just around my own sphere and not at me or to me, was incredibly aggressive in nature.

In this now storm of opinion and feelings, the RC published a document outlining their thinking on the bans and explaining their thought process a little. Something I want to mention here and now is that the RC wasn’t a monolith, and there was at least one dissenting voice. However, they were out voted, and the bans went forward.

Unfortunately, this didn’t seem to help the situation where tensions and feelings were already high among a small part of Commander “players”. The vile and vitriolic remained, and kept spewing their bile into the cesspool forming around the bans until it finally broke the banks and the opinions turned into threats against various parties involved and not involved.

Before I move on, I’d like to say what seemingly everyone else said about this: threatening people isn’t okay and those people should be ashamed. What I’d really like to say to those individuals, however, probably isn’t proper for this medium. I’ll leave it at that if you participated in any of this in a manner that was indicative of violence or other harms against anyone, you are never welcome at my table.

SEPTEMBER 30th, 2024: END OF AN ERA

Unfortunately, this would culminate in the RC relinquishing control of the format to Wizards of the Coast after 15 years of stewardship. Thanks to those people who engaged in actual threats against them and others, the members of the RC didn’t feel they could keep themselves safe and manage the format, also citing that the format may benefit from a farther reaching entity then they were.

To understand the shift this represents beyond the personal well being of those people who volunteered their time to manage the format, it is being shifted from those volunteers without the overhead of a corporation to a corporation that hasn’t had the best track record of managing things and makes money from selling them to you. It really is the end of an era, one where the community owned format of Commander is seceded to the company that produces the game pieces.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but an untested thing. While I myself don’t have much faith in Wizards of the Coast to keep what Commander, in my opinion was supposed to be, I do have to keep an open mind and consider perhaps that Commander as I think it is or is supposed to be isn’t what it needs to be now.

There is going to be a piece of me that stays in this part of the format’s history. Having an outside group manage the format away from the company was reassuring in a way that just doesn’t exist for me now. Luckily, there are some reassuring things said but will have to be proven by the people at Wizards of the Coast over time.

OCTOBER 1st, 2024: GOING FORWARD

With Wizards of the Coast now in charge, the future is somewhat uncertain. With that said, there are some things already mentioned by an article from the company itself and a stream they had on their twitch channel. I just want to preface this section with it being extremely early and nothing is set in stone.

They want to keep Commander as a social format and emphasize this a lot. This is probably the most important part as it’s one of the defining features of the format to put the experience first and the play second. While some people are completely into the game and mechanical aspect of it, being able to hang out and have a good time while playing the game is at the forefront here.

They are working on a means to have better match ups between people and decks. In their article and stream they mentioned a bracket system and gave a loose example of how a small part of that might work. Caveat here is that it, if it comes to fruition, is in the very early stages of development. While I can applaud the effort, I don’t think it will be viable based on the little information we have and  fear that it would enforce metas around each bracket, partially “solving” the unsolvable Commander format. Time will tell, but for now we still have Rule 0 for those of us who can navigate it. I prefer it more freeform that way, but my experience isn’t someone else’s.

Gavin Verhey and Aaron Forsythe also mentioned during the stream that of the people who might eventually form a new body to regulate Commander, only a few identities would be made public to interact with the player base directly. I think this is largely due to the safety concerns the previous members of the RC faced during the most recent bans, and is a practical approach.

As of right now at the time of writing, the format remains unchanged. This means the rules are the same, the new bans remain in place, Un-Cards are still illegal to use, and hybrid mana still follows color identity rules. Who knows how this will all change in the future is anyone’s guess. While I’m open to some changes, I’m against others. I’ve been wrong before and some changes may be fine in application so I wait to see what happens.

FINAL THOUGHTS

For me having played this format since EDH and "banned as commander" was a thing and mana still burned, the Commander format was and is my favorite format. Even when I made 60 card kitchen table decks before I found out about EDH, each deck would have a “leader” in my mind. I remember specifically Kumano, Master Yamabushi being the one in my earliest burn deck. Commander was just a natural evolution for me in how I play Magic.

With that came my notice of how the format was governed. I really like rules because they provide a structure by which I can enter a situation. As a person with autism, having the safety structure can be paramount to other considerations. That doesn’t mean I agree with all the rules in a situation, but having a way to understand the basic idea of what’s going on is important.

The things that have changed over the last week are not only something I wish hadn’t happened, but also the catalyst for it happening was appalling. The bans to me were fine and will help the format stay healthy. There are already some opinions that the game slowed a bit and continues to be fine in some preliminary games played both in casual and cEDH. The hate that poured forth from some corners of the player base though was completely unstable. If nothing else is accomplished, I hope those cards remain banned and looked at as the end of an era that could have been avoided had people been decent to each other.

I’d like to apologize if the article was a bit of a ramble. A lot of thoughts are vying to be at the front of my mind.

Until next time, breathe.