Wizards of the Coast has announced it will manage Magic: The Gathering‘s Commander format from now on, taking the reins from the third-party Commander Rules Committee. In a new blog post, the company has confirmed this news is related to recent Commander card bans which led to a major storm of opinions online, many of which were “harmful or malicious.”
The Commander Rules Committee, which is a group of “five talented, caring individuals, all with other jobs and lives” which they had to “balance with managing the most popular format in Magic“, was subjected to much abuse following the recent bans for Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, Mana Crypt, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom.
Per Wizards of the Coast, conversations “escalated” over the past week, leading to “unacceptable personal threats to the safety of members of the Commander Rules Committee.” In the wake of this abuse, the company determined the task of managing Commander had “outgrown the scope and safety of being attached to any five people.”
It’s worth noting that Commander was originally a more casual format of Magic: The Gathering, and it’s within the last few years it has grown to become one of the most popular and approachable ways to play. As its scale has grown, so has the responsibility for ensuring it remains fun and engaging for everyone – and so, Wizards of the Coast has chosen to step in.
Read: MTG Commander ban list now includes Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, and more
From now, management of the Commander format will be overseen by the game design team of Wizards of the Coast. While members of the Commander Rules Committee will be involved with decision-making, the responsibility for changes will no longer rest solely on them.
New changes for MTG‘s Commander format
In addition to announcing these changes, Wizards of the Coast has also revealed tentative plans to shake up the Commander format with some new bounds to create fairer games. In collaboration with the Rules Committee, it’s currently working on an objective approach to categorising Commander Decks into levels of power.
The initial idea is to have four power brackets, with every Commander Deck able to be placed within these brackets. The baseline would be standard pre-con Commander Decks, with each level denoting a slightly more powerful deck. Certainly cards would determine how high up the rankings a Commander Deck is – for example, cards like Vampiric Tutor, Armageddon, and Grim Monolith, which make games “too much more consistent, lopsided, or fast than the average deck can engage with,” would be in the fourth bracket.
Players would be able to explain their deck’s power level in recognisable terms, and figure out how well that works with other players in games of Commander.
“Will this system guarantee perfectly matched games? No, and that might be fine at your table, but if it gets the conversation started from a shared understanding, that’s already great for the table,” Wizards of the Coast said.
At this stage, the team is still working on these power rankings, with plans to potentially implement them, after rounds of community feedback and discussion. To take part in these conversations, Wizards of the Coast has encouraged players to join its Discord server. Stay tuned for more on these developments.
