Wizards has made another announcement on the future of the Commander format.
Incase you missed the announcement here it is: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/announcements/introducing-the-commander-format-panel
TLDR: There will be a 17 person panel that advises Wizards on the decisions it makes for the format. Those people are from various levels of play from casual to cEDH and include people from all over the world. Some members will stay on, but some will rotate out after one year. The final call on all decisions will be Wizards, there is nothing holding Wizards to decide things based on the advice of the panel.
So, what does this mean going forward? While some of my more casual play friends may be worried, I am excited. As a competitive player in Modern, Standard and Legacy I am excited to see what Wizards does. Many of the bannings in Commander have not always made sense to me. I understand there are some cards that just don’t work in the format, or are so warping that they need to be banned. However, most of the list I felt would be better handled by rule 0 conversations. Why should Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus get the ban hammer, while Ravages of War and Armageddon do not. These discrepancies are what I hope Wizards cleans up. eventually make a true ban list where any card NOT included in the ban list is acceptable to play.
The bracket system. This is the current template Wizards seems to be playing with for Commander. A tier system by which players can easily (hopefully) identify how powerful their decks are and relay that to other players to match power levels. This seems like an over complicated version of what we already have. It was not uncommon to sit down at a table and have someone give a vague description of their deck, a power estimate, and then you shuffle up and play. I always felt this was good enough. Even just saying, this is a competitive deck, but not as good as a cEDH deck was enough to tell other players to put their precons away. Or vice versa, when someone would sit down with an upgraded precon, say they were relatively new and that they were hoping to have a more fun and crazy game, well then us veteran players know to reach for that one pet deck we have that 1 in 100 times does something wacky. Was this system perfect, nope. Did people sometimes get stomped, yup. But we were able to have a discussion for game two, maybe make some adjustments and get playing again.
I am not sure a bracket system can improve on this. Cards like Armageddon are not at the same power level as Demonic Tutor, but listed as examples as potential “Tier 4” cards in the bracket system. If you are playing a tutor based combo deck and I am playing mass land destruction jank, you will win, the vast majority of the time. That means a power level discussion is still needed. However, the bracket system may just make that more complicated.
In the end, I am hoping we get a more thought out banlist, with reasoning and purpose behind bans and I would like to see more things come off that current list. As for the power level system vs a bracket system, I think a power level system with better descriptions of what each level means, would be better than certain cards getting a rating. I would hope for some official version of this:
1 – Complete jank/random pile of cards.
2 – Most precons.
3 – Good or upgraded precons
4 – Decks that only do one thing
5 – Casual deck with poor interaction and/or no wincon.
6 – Casual deck with some of the below but not all the way there.
7 – Focused casual deck, good at doing what it is trying to do.
8 – High powered but not quite cEDH, could win a game within 5-6 turns.
9 – Fringe or outdated cEDH, can win a game within 5 turns constantly.
10 – True cEDH, win as fast as possible with ways to protect your win con. Wins possibly even in the first few turns.
I do not want to take credit for the above list, it is adapted from many found across the interwebs.
Osogladiator 