Second, there are complaints about the inconsistency of bans. Often in the past the Rules Committee has said that they don't consider Competitive Commander in their decisions, but Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt see near-exclusive play in cEDH. Also in the vein of consistency, the RC admitted to their inconsistency in their post that they are not banning Sol Ring even though it fits the justification.
Third, there are other problematic cards that were excluded from this ban that is also format warping and lead to repetitive games and other scenarios mentioned in the Philosophy Document. Thassa's Oracle is the main one being name dropped but there are others like Orcish Bowmasters and Underworld Breach.
No one is complaining about the loss of Nadu, except Nadu mains. We all kinda saw this coming.
Calls for Dockside to be banned have been around since before it was reprinted. That one doesn't surprise me in the least, nor does Nadu (whose design was a massive oversight). The other two do slightly, but the RC has basically done nothing of note in close to three years. Just quickly flipping through their archived articles, it looks like the last time anything was banned/unbanned was September of 2021. Please correct me if I'm wrong, because that doesn't seem right. If it is, it just goes to show how vestigial the RC has become to Magic.
The lack of consistency is my perennial complaint about the rules committee and their bans. They will ban cards because they promote a "bad pattern of play," but then they only pick a few of such cards. The last big one I remember like this was
Hullbreacher. Leovold was already banned, then they banned
Hullbreacher, but cards that mechanically did the same thing like
Notion Thief and
Narset, Parter of Veils weren't touched. This time, they openly admit they should ban
Sol Ring but won't because it's so ubiquitous (i.e., it's printed in every single precon now and Wizards doesn't want to change anything, which I personally find to be a poor excuse). Also, did anyone notice the lack of
Ancient Tomb on the ban list? Tomb is, for all intents and purposes, Crypt on a land, but they conveniently glossed over it. The logic for banning Crypt applies equally, if not more so, to Tomb.
Mana Vault is also untouched. While you can argue that is effectively more a ritual than fast mana, a lot of decks that run it have ways of abusing it and I would argue that it's no less problematic. While not as egregious as the aforementioned cards,
Chrome Mox also escapes the list. I think
Mox Opal and
Mox Amber are fine because the cards have enough of a restriction built into them that you're probably not reliably getting any value out of them (except in specific decks) until turn two at the earliest.
Jeweled Lotus was printed in a Commander Masters set and designed specifically for Commander. It seems pretty asinine to me to ban a card from the
only format in which it can be played (technically, it's apparently legal in Vintage and Legacy, but why would you play it there when it does nothing?).
As a player who doesn't like cEDH or particularly care for "higher-powered" games, the fast mana ban was very welcome. I will admit, however, that I understand how impactful this is for the cEDH community. What I genuinely don't understand and can't forgive is why they didn't wait to ban Lotus and Crypt until
after they had established the cEDH RC and ban list like they said they would not that long ago. Now we have a period of however long it's going to be where the cards can't legally be run, and then presumably once the cEDH RC and ban list are in place, they will be legal for cEDH again. I think cEDH players are just going to ignore this ruling outside of sanctioned tournament settings, and rightly so.
I'd be lying if I didn't say that the impact on the monetary value of the cards wasn't a little irritating to me too. I'm a relatively new player (I'd say probably
six years or so) and don't have a particularly extensive collection (though I've probably spent more money on it than I want to know). Between reprints and bans, a significant chunk of the most valuable cards I own have lost anywhere from 50-90% of their value.
Jeweled Lotus was the second most valuable card in my collection. I thankfully cracked it from a CMR box (one of only three boxes I have ever bought) instead of buying it as a single for $100, but still. I can only imagine how much more painful it is for people who spend way more time and money on the game than I do.
As an aside, the idea of a separate ban list and RC for cEDH never made sense to me. There is no definitive, objective metric by which to judge the difference between a cEDH deck and a non-cEDH deck that is just a higher power level (it's largely subjective),
and the ruleset between the two formats is the same. Distinguishing between the two in a meaningful manner I think is a fool's errand ("I'll know it when I see it" type of thing). I don't understand why they don't just use something like the Canadian Highlander points system. At least that way you have
some sort of metric by which to gauge and compare the power levels of deck. All that being said, with the ban of Lotus and Crypt, the need for a separate ban list for cEDH is painfully obvious now. I just don't know how they're going to pull it off when they already have trouble getting it right with the current one.