WeeklyMTG | On the Future of Commander

Blake Rasmussen sits down with Gavin Verhey and Aaron Forsythe to discuss the On the Future of Commander announcement from Monday.

#MTGCommander #mtg #MagicTheGathering

[Pokemonetc]

Can we stop printing advertising cards in packs to make room for more tokens? Asking for my limited player friends.

[Darkvoltrox]

I Trust Gavin, I don't trust Hasbro corpos.

[obsidiansiriusblackheart]

22:44 please consult Play To Win, they're a pretty damn good presentation of the cEDH community in my opinion

[ZawadaP]

Idea: Crowdsource the bracketing to have a "Community Power Bracket" (similar to EDHRec's Salt score) with badges that signal "high variance" or other data anomalies. And then WOTC can come in and adjust cards (if needed) into the "WOTC Power Bracket", which becomes its "official" rating.

[StephenWSanders]

I think Aaron's comment about a single card not determining a deck's power level is correct. I just played with someone a few days ago who had a Vampiric Tutor in his deck, but the deck was basically just a pile of black cards that he liked with no real game plan, certainly not a power level 4 deck. I think this kind of thing is quite common - people sometimes include a card because they have it or for the "prestige" of owning it, but the rest of the deck isn't tuned enough to really take advantage of its power.

[LunarWingCloud]

Well, silver lining, having Gavin and Aaron on board here is about as good as we can get

Still extremely disappointed in the small sector of the community for their abhorrent behavior after the recent banned list update, but at least there seems to be a genuine effort to try and move forward in a positive way

[TheDanteBoots]

Sell complete token packs for each set, they're as vital as basic land station for limited play.

[DannyLtscher]

if brackets do happen - it'd be cool to have pre-cons with more than 99 cards so that you can modify the power level of the deck

[KeenanPayne]

Thank you for the transparency as you move forward with the commander format. Wishing you the best of luck in this endeavor!

[suicyde]

Verhey is on the money. The problem with Commander for me is that decks have started to become more and more ubiquitous the more competitive games become. Like every blue player is going to run rhystic study, fierce guardianship and mana drain, every red player will run deflecting swat and dockside, black is always going to run vampiric and demonic tutor etc etc. A format that was meant to have all the fun variation becomes saturated with must have cards for each colour or risk being casual.

[TobiasLeonHaecker]

I already had a 4 Tier system which worked quite good, because it wasn't just the powerlevel but also how the player attitude is to that round:
1) Low power: weak precons, joke decks, let's test/learn
2) casual: my deck is as much fun for me as for you. Let's have fun board game night.
3) focused: our decks are well constructed, good synergies and answers, we play concentrated for the win, but it will feel fair and earned
4) high power: this deck is capable of unfair stuff and has expensive cards. Better keep a counterspell up. We are okay to start a new round after maybe 5 turns.

Yes, technically cEDH would be tier 0, but that's a different beast.

[tresnalder]

I'm kind of let down by the vitriol shown by this community. I'm not a big fan of this change, but I am just hoping that the future of commander is more in the hands of players rather than the hands of investors and not driven by money and profit.

[OzxGG]

For a tier system to work properly, EVERY card needs a tier assignment and there must be a system we can upload deck lists to spit out the average tier, with all cards accounted for- and that is the deck power level. Having one card shift a deck from precon lvl 1 immediately to a 3 or 4 isnt gonna work and isnt the same level as another with half the deck being level 3 cards. This is just a more complex rule zero that will lead to more issues.

[weeklyweeks]

If Gavin wasn’t a wizards employee Sheldon would’ve had him on the RC. Let’s never forget that Sheldon’s primary vision for Commander was the social aspect first and game play second. So design should adhere to this founding principle as closely as possible. That’s why the bans that happened were necessary. Those cards, which 3 of the 4 we designed specifically for commander, fundamentally did not adhere to the commander mission statement. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun to win but for you grinders out there, standard and modern are great places to be more competitive! And yes, maybe cedh should have its own governing principles to be run by.

[opekun]

My playgroup has been firmly in bracket 1 for almost 2 years. We arrived there from a very competitive, and cutthroaty arms-racey place 😅
Because we play other, highly competitive formats we've to keep commander casual.

TL;DR
- We keep our decks below $100 barring basics (TCG player low).
- We don't play fast mana (we even dropped sol ring some time ago).
- We don't play free spells (so no FoW or Fierce Guardianship).
- We don't play tutors (unless they're really in flavour of the deck, like artifacts fishing for constructs, and goblins finding their kindred).
- We don't play infinite combos (it's up for discussion as long as we're not all dead by turn 3 :P).
- We try to limit stax pieces in our decks (Rule 0). No one play hardcore stax decks anymore.

Just to summarize, the amount of fun cards we've already found (cause we're no longer play expensive format staples) surprised even us :)
The sheer fun of finding replacements for the big cards is great, and we tend to keep quite big maybeboards.

Other than that, just enjoy the format. Playing the game, with friends, is what is really important!
See you in the Multiverse!

[Blacklodge_Willy]

I do think it's important to note pregame discussion is still a thing and these brackets are just guidelines/ a tool they may implement for convention's or at the convenience of LGS pairings. This is not a strict ruling change.

[Dylfunkle]

My concern with the new power scale is that the "it's a seven" scale already lacked nuance and this sounds like it could have even more blind spots.

[scottserage]

To the people that threatened the rules committee with death because they made an understandably frustrating decision, please get professional help. Obviously you have a right to be mad about whatever you want, reasonable or not. But you need to wake up if you think it’s acceptable to threaten people, especially for something trivial like a predominantly casual variant of a card game.

[braxtonrenfro]

Very rational and thoughtful discussions. I think having specific cards defining the brackets is probably the easiest method, it's 1 or 0, easy to identify. But you should consider "what turn your deck is usually trying to win". It's a little harder to identify, especially for new players with no goldfishing experience, but I think is more accurate for defining the experience. But I know no method is perfect; a land destruction deck may try to win turn 10 but through a slog of a game. Just worth considering I think.

[moralessanchezoscarelias]

Another important aspect of deck power level in a singleton format is consistency.
Having one single counterspell in the deck is not the same as having 15 counters. Same goes with tutors, rituals, ramp spells, removal, extra turn spells, etc.. Consistency increases the power level of a deck significantly.

So the bands could also consider the redundancy of cards in a certain bracket, instead of a single card.