Finance bros and harassment force MTG’s biggest player-owned format into corporate hands
Wizards of the Coast’s game designers assume control of Commander, for better and worse.
It has been a wild time for Commander players, and inarguably worse for the political body that guides Magic: The Gathering’s most popular casual format. What started with the banning of four highly powerful cards has led to Wizards of the Coast, MTG’s publisher, accepting official control of a game variant that was always supposed to remain in the hands of fans. How we got here is a complicated week of violent threats from pissed off collectors and the limits of volunteer passion for a hobby in the stranglehold of monetary value.
On September 23rd, the Commander Rules Committee (RC) released a quarterly update that shook the foundations of the format: four powerful and polarizing cards had been banned—Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom. Except for the lattermost winged horror that had previously been kicked out of Modern, these cards were staples of the competitive Commander format (cEDH) and had effectively bent play around their design through “fast Mana”, or allowing players to outstrip their opponents’ resource generation. Think of it like balancing the meta in a competitive video game—but instead of tweaking numbers the RC simply bars certain cards from seeing play.
Largely, players rejoiced for a number of reasons. For one, all of these cards were poisonous to the overall health of the format, forcing all competitive decks to either play or play around them. That’s not symptomatic of a format meant to celebrate the breadth of a 30-year-old TCG. Secondly, the RC had built a reputation of acting slow when they moved at all, so receiving four much needed bans dropping at the same time felt like a glacier suddenly rocketing down the mountain, and with all the resulting collateral damage. As a fan-created format, the RC and its related Commander Advisory Group (CAG) had consisted of mostly unaffiliated players and fans (some members have simultaneously worked for WotC). Their decisions were borne out of a primary desire to keep Commander healthy. What could be wrong with this?
