It’s been a while since I’ve seen this much controversy in the Magic community. Wizards of the Coast recently announced that they would be taking over the duties of the Commander Rules Committee after the ban update from last week resulted in a backlash from the player base that included personal threats to members of the RC.
Like the other controversies, I’m sure this one will blow over eventually and the players will move on to complaining about MTG Foundations, but the effort to shoehorn a casual community-driven format into a managed organized play format feels odd.
The proposed solution in Wizard’s announcement is to create four brackets of “deck power level” based on individual cards and combos in a given deck’s list. The idea being that this will help players organize games where everyone at the table is playing at the same level, and give everyone a chance to interact, do cool stuff, and generally have a good time.
But Commander isn’t like any other format in Magic. It isn’t easily codified.
While not impossible, this approach feels like a heavy handed way of managing a format, that, judging from the response of the player base, clearly does not want to managed.
I get that Commander is Wizard’s cash cow and a major driving force in the sale of Magic cards across the spectrum, so it makes sense that Wizards would want to bring control of the format in-house, but if I were them I would approach the situation very differently.
Commander has never been my preferred way to play Magic, so I can’t speak from a ton of experience, but it seems like Wizards should simply separate the “competitive” format out and manage it with a banned list as best they can, as closely matching the current agreed upon ban list the community uses already, and leave the “casual” side completely up to the player base.
cEDH already exists, has a loyal base of players, and an established banned list that most players seemingly agree upon.
Wizards should just adopt that as the official Competitive Commander format, and then make it clear that casual Commander/everything below that competitive standard is up to the players to handle.
Recognize Rule 0 and the organic formation of EDH/Commander and allow individual players and groups to sort out what kinds of fun they want to have at the table.
This would show the players that this change isn’t a hostile takeover on Wizard’s part, and allow the vast majority of the player base to retain control of the kind of fun they want to have with the game, in the way they’ve been doing pretty successfully up until a week ago.
On a side note, if they didn’t ban Jeweled Lotus, a card made exclusively for Commander and sold as one of the marquis cards in a Commander Legends, I doubt the response would have been as vitriolic.
What do you think about the announcement? Is Wizards of the Coast taking on the stewardship of the Commander format a good thing?