On the Future of Commander

[EMaxxi]

My bigger worry is that people might expect this to solve power level problems when it clearly won't. At least now we'll have well-defined deck categories, but a "2" won't always be weaker than a "3", etc so the potential for bad feelings is still there. Brawl weights are a hot mess and a deck having a higher or lower score still doesn't mean all that much.

I.e. is Sol Ring a 1 because it's in every deck, or is it a 4 because they admitted that by the RC's own logic should have been banned?

[crimsonking]

In Old School there exists the X-points variant, where most powerful cards have some points assigned. A deck cannot have more than 10 points and things are arranged so that, for instance, you cannot play the entire power 9 etc.
Let's say Thassa's Oracle, Ad Nauseam and Underworld Breach are given 10 points each and power levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 have a max point limit of respectively 10, 20, 30 and 40. You could play the three of them only at level 3, but then you would have no more points left, while at level 4 you would have 10 points for a few support cards etc.
It could work, except the card pool is huge and it could be tricky to balance everything out.
Anyway, the problem is not the banlist. Remember the time they proposed to allow planeswalkers to be used as commanders? RC said no and they started to add the "can be your commander" clause nonetheless.
Now that RC is gone, expect all kind of bullshit like that...

[Morganator 2.0]

So there's pros and cons here.

One reason why I'm optimistic about WotC taking over is that they make data-driven decisions. They already manage every other format and the banlists for those formats. They monitor the formats and see when there is a deck or card that is warping the meta, and they have data to back it up. Not opinions, data. Match results, tournament results, and meta game analyses. And they have approximately 30 years of experience making these decisions. I'm confident that if they make a decision to ban or unban a card it will be backed by statistics.

Here's my issues with this merger. Wizards of the Coast is a company, meaning their decisions will be made to benefit the bottom line, even if that is less beneficial for consumers, players, and game store owners. We've already seen these questionable decisions with the removal of the MSRP and Universes Beyond.

Wizards also doesn't really understand commander. We've seen their attempts with Brawl and Duel Commander, neither of which was ever as popular. And we also know that the Rules Committee was somewhat involved in the goings on of Wizards card design. Hybrid mana was a big clash for a long time, and I'm sure there are other things we don't even know about that the Rules Committee vetoed.

So I'm less optimistic than I was when the bans were first announced. I don't think this will be a good thing for the health of the format, but I do think it's too early to say the format is dead. I guess I'm just not scared of change.

[Cosmic_Insight]

With all of this on my mind, I played with a group of friends last night and still had a lot of fun! Commander at its heart is still a casual format, you and your playgroup can interpret it however you want, and you can still have fun despite scummy corporate decisions! I swear that some people spend more time complaining about the damn format than actually playing it.

[EMaxxi]

One reason why I'm optimistic about WotC taking over is that they make data-driven decisions. They already manage every other format and the banlists for those formats. They monitor the formats and see when there is a deck or card that is warping the meta, and they have data to back it up. Not opinions, data. Match results, tournament results, and meta game analyses. And they have approximately 30 years of experience making these decisions. I'm confident that if they make a decision to ban or unban a card it will be backed by statistics.

How would they gather Commander data exactly? For other (competitive) formats, they obviously have tournament results, but do they track casual games on MTGO?

[WWolfe]

One reason why I'm optimistic about WotC taking over is that they make data-driven decisions. They already manage every other format and the banlists for those formats. They monitor the formats and see when there is a deck or card that is warping the meta, and they have data to back it up. Not opinions, data. Match results, tournament results, and meta game analyses. And they have approximately 30 years of experience making these decisions. I'm confident that if they make a decision to ban or unban a card it will be backed by statistics.

How would they gather Commander data exactly? For other (competitive) formats, they obviously have tournament results, but do they track casual games on MTGO?

And what fraction of the community actually plays on MTGO for them to base it on?

ETA- every content creator I've seen so far thinks this is disaster waiting to happen.

[crimsonking]

It doesn't matter how much data you gather, if your decisions are business-driven anyway.
Again, the problem is not the banlist. They will just keep printing pushed cards to drive sales; if a problematic combo arises, they will just ban the older half; if the card is problematic by itself, they will wait to ban it until they've emptied their stock, the same way they've been doing with other formats.
On the other hand, RC haven't banned anything relevant for years, so it's bad either ways. In fact, the day they decided to actually ban something, they got publicly arrassed, so it's three-way bad.
The problem is rather that they will change the rules, take all sort of crazy decisions to keep selling cards in the short term, regardless of the long-term health of the format.
The same way they've been trying all this time, except there won't be RC anymore to stop them.

[anjinsan]

Yeah WotC don't have the best banning track record (see Brawl, for example, where Paradox Engine and Sundering Titan are both legal - on Arena, where sitting through Paradox Engine is even more boring than in real life).

[WWolfe]

Watched Weekly MTG on Twitch at 1. There were 6600 people watching. Gavin and Aaron Forsythe said all the right things about keeping the format community driven, but will it hold?

The plan is to have something like their Pauper Community Panel that they take advice from. Gavin mentioned the initial talks including 10-20 people but it could be less. He did say he wanted at least one cEDH representative involved. He was asked about it including people from Europe and Asia for instance to which he answered he would like to include people from all over the world.

About the tier system, they said it's going to be something they work on "quickly". He would like to have something in place by MagicCon Las Vegas to try out there. He said it was a delicate process, mentioned an example of using ThOracle but not with Demonic Consultation as something that careful thought would have to go in.

They said nothing will happen until after the Community Panel is put together, so not to expect any changes to how things currently are until after that, it is the priority. He was asked about the Silver Border project that the RC was working on, he said it was something they would work on in the future but that it would be down the road, right now their priority was the Panel and the Tier system.

However, they did say Sol Ring won't be getting banned and would be a tier 1 card. Sorry to the #BanSolRing movement.

[EMaxxi]

However, they did say Sol Ring won't be getting banned and would be a tier 1 card. Sorry to the #BanSolRing movement.

Yeah, because God forbid we have consistent tiers 🤣🤣🤣

EDIT: the community panel sounds an awful lot like the Commander Advisory Group. You know, that group that was completely cut off for "fear of leaks"... and while the Pauper panel is working, don't forget that Pauper, by definition, is a format where most of the cards are dirt cheap, so bans/unbans don't affect the market the same way last week's bans did.

[Morganator 2.0]

How would they gather Commander data exactly? For other (competitive) formats, they obviously have tournament results, but do they track casual games on MTGO?

First off, there is already some data available, but it's not perfect. EDHREC provides an approximation to which cards are being played in which quantity and which cards players don't like (salt score), although it provides no info about win rates. EDHtop16 provides win rates for decks at the highest level of commander, though this does not help with gauging what things are like at the casual level.

Second, there are already public events (most notably CommandFest) that feature commander that run through the MTG companion app. That app is... absolute trash... but it already tracks participation and match results. It wouldn't take much to re-purpose this for commander and start tracking stats there.

[WWolfe]

Pretty much all the popular content creators have weighed in and the majority feel like this is a bad thing.

A lot of the talk I'm hearing now is how WOTC has a little "cover" to do some things with the banlist right now with how muddy the water is right now because of all this. Speculation is they could unban Crypt, Coalition Relic, and maybe some other things without it drawing much attention right now because everyone is focused on how the RC kind of "fouled" all this up.

One thing that hit me that JLK said was it seems now like Sheldon was "holding back the gates of hell" with this being the RC's first moves since the change in leadership.

Also, apparently WoTC told the RC not to make those bans. Take that for what you will rather you believe it was WoTC foreseeing this fallout or them looking to protect cash cows in chase cards.

[anjinsan]

Yeah it sounded more like WotC said "don't make four dramatic bans at once, people will hate you" not "don't make these bans they are a bad idea", but who knows?

Frankly the backlash was pretty ridiculous; the bans are all pretty good bans, and even if you agree with them, I don't think you can argue that there aren't good arguments for banning them and it comes down mostly to subjective choices. The big issue was just that a bunch of people were scammed into paying $$$ for bits of cardboard and then realised their mistakes, so they were mad - but that wasn't the RC's fault, it was their own.

Possibly banning only one or two at a time would have been smarter, but IMO they should just have stuck to their guns. Everything switching over to WotC and the brackets thing just seems like it's making even more of a mess out of an already mess situation (even if it should actually have been a pretty straightforward one). Honestly I don't think WotC doing anything else right now is very smart, it's only adding to the drama. Let the dust settle, let everyone get over the bans, maybe review in the future.