Leovold should stay banned. I'm sure there are some evil people out right now trying to figure out how to empty everyone's hand on turn 1 or 2. Nobody wants that in the format.
Braids isnt a problem in 99.. unless it's in your opening hand and can be ramped out on turn 1. The same argument can be used for any card. Channel is too strong can end game on turn 1. Orrrr, it's 1/99 and yu never see it. Might as well unban it. The rationalization of most bans is, it's too powerful early in game. Many of them later in game aren't nearly as bad. Wanna ban advantage cards? Get rid of smothering tithe
@AwesomeSocialDancing especially now with flair of cultivation, it's very easy to get them out turn 2 and play windfall/dark deal/ or timetwister on curve.
Unbanning Lotus or Crypt just puts you on the side that death threats get results. Also encourages and supports more use of threats to get cards banned/unbanned. Terrible for the Command Zone to support.
You can tell Jimmy is a professional actor because he was able to say that there would be thoughtful discussion in the comments with such a straight face.
Maybe an extra turns episode, since GK is a WOTC sponsored thing. The extra turns series could be the perfect place to showcase a couple of these episodes. Good idea
@@brittonstewart3577the problem is they wouldn’t build the decks strong enough to take advantage of some of these commanders, like flash is banned for a reason and it does a similar thing to dockside
When Nadu was relase in my group do a experiment with him so we can see how powerful is. 4 players with Nadu as comander. When the frist one put Nadu, the sroud boots and another creature in play, well... 3 cretures more later, 4 land drops and 10 cards draw later we make the decision to ban Nadu before wizards do.
In my opinion you’re overestimating how easy the pre game convos/self regulations are. Walking into an LGS as a newer player or even a somewhat experienced player honestly, can be really intimidating. Asking someone not to play a specific deck requires me to not only have knowledge of that card but also puts me in an uncomfortable spot. Braids is a great example of this, mechanically and on the power scale it may not be ban worthy but I think socially it’s very much deserving, promoting poor gameplay experiences. You could always argue the inverse is easier where a play group can allow braids via “rule zero” which I think is much less detrimental to new players or new pods.
Yeah they really wash how uncomfortable it can be for introverts to talk with random people in a pregame, and it comes off super rude to ask someone to change decks imo. Every time I’ve seen it it was awkward and came off as a dick move
This is a very reasonable critique. Leaning too hard on Rule 0 puts a lot of pressure on players to both know and be able to speak up for what they want in a game. This may not be a realistic expectation of the community at large.
@@RG-wv3gt To be clear, we were not suggesting Rule 0 be used to play banned cards. We were suggesting Rule 0 be used as a tool to defend against commanders you don't find fun (Braids, Erayo, and Leovold) if they were to be unbanned.
You can tell Jimmy in particular is a player that has a specific group of people that he regularly plays with and doesn’t play with randos at an LGS. And if he does his status as a figure in the community warps those Rule 0 discussions to the point where they’re not representative of the greater population. Most Rule 0 discussions come down to “I want to play this” and everyone says ok and that’s it.
cEDH enjoyer here: The problem with flash is that you can actually win with it as early as the first upkeep of the game. It kind of relies on having a "god hand" but it's possible. 1: pregame actions - begin with gemstone caverns on the battlefield 2: first upkeep (even an opponent's!) - exile elvish or simian spirit guide for a mana tap caverns for blue cast flash put protean hulk in hulk dies put thassa's oracle, cephalid illusionist, and nomads en-kor into play with thoracle trigger on the stack activate nomads en-kor targeting cephalid infinite times to mill your library win Even with out that perfect hand it was extremely common for games to end on turn one
yeah, t0 wins and winning at instant speed for 2 mana at any point after were fucking Brutal. Even now Borne Upon a Wind is very popular for winning at instant speed requiring so much more investment and is still very powerful. It was a miracle Flash got banned in the first place, no reason it should come off the banlist.
Another issue with Flash Hulk is that it wins through most stax effects, including things like Rule of Law. You don't cast the Hulk, so there are very few ways to preemptively stop the win other than countering the Flash or a Stifle effect.
Opt in vs opt out. It takes more effort to opt out of something that to opt in for it generally. So if the reasoning for unbanning a card is rule 0 can take care of it if the table doesn’t like that style I’d rather see the reverse where people rule 0 it into their games instead of rule 0 it out of their games.
I haven't watched the episode yet, but I definitely like this idea. I also wouldn't hate also giving cEDH their own ban list, and let them be their own thing. They kind of are already tbh.
I dont think the goal is to make rule 0 easier and more frictionless, if it was than i would agree, but i think its much harder to convince strangers to let you play something on the ban list than it is to ask a stranger not to play something legal but toxic, and in the reality where they are partial to banning something on the fringe of toxic it makes rule 0 conversations less frequent but more difficult for the side that would have to initiate
communication skill issue, and even if youre good at communicating with fellow lgs players, that doesnt guarantee good games 100% of the time, nothing will, especially not more bans - just the way life is. toughen up and deal with it
@@Metherelsaying "skill issue" and "deal with it" is completely unhelpful and also doesn't address the point raised. It is a generic response that shuts dialogue down instead of clarifying it.
@@Metherel”oh I forgot I had rhystic study in this deck” is a sentence that I hear from people I only play with once at my lgs. I would say that the bracket system is helpful but we can’t help but have a need for bans when people will lie to get an edge in a casual format.
@@TingusPingus269 what do you mean, you solved your own problem right there - you only play with them once. whats the issue, you dont play with them again? no amount of bans will guarantee you have good games
Anyone arguing to unban Tolarian Academy or Channel or Tinker are either nuts, have never actually seen a game with these cards, or trolls. Moreover, anyone comparing Tolarian Academy to Gaea’s Cradle or Serra’s Sanctum or Nykthos… You’re comparing BB guns to a bazooka. Creature decks and Enchantment decks require the creatures and enchantments to do things. Artifact decks require the artifacts… be artifacts.
Yeah like Gaea's Cradle teeters on the edge super hard of being too good. Academy is way easier to exploit, and makes arguably more valuable mana type as it's in a color that dosen't make massive mana production as easy as green an without cradle. And it was easier to exploit before things like treasure, food, and clues came along. With mass production of those now available it's even easier.
Cradle also just requires the creatures to be creatures, especially now that creatures are so good on their own now. Enchantments are at least harder to be good just on their own.
I think Iona is the biggest one I disagree with... yeah, it's a 9-mana angel, but there's a fundamental difference between it and other big angels like Avacyn and Serra's Emissary -- the latter are win-cons for your deck, and do powerful stuff for you, but still leave room for interaction and gameplay. Iona is not a wincon, it points to one player and says "you're not allowed to play the game anymore". Like sure, giving yourself and your creatures protection from a card type of your choice is strong... but it still allows your opponents to find something else to deal with the board, or if they can't deal with you, at least to continue playing cards to affect their other opponents or build their own board. Same with Avacyn, making all your permanents indestructible is very strong, but exile effects like Swords and Farewell still exist, and if you can go wider than them or go taller with trample, you can still interact with them meaningfully. Meanwhile, if you play Iona against a mono-color deck, they are literally just sitting there not playing magic anymore. And nobody else at the table is incentivized to help deal with that problem, since they are either benefitting from it (because one of their opponents was just neutralized), or are equally shut down and limited in how they can even try to deal with it in the first place. The best thing to do if somebody plays Iona and picks your color is just scoop and go find another table, which is a pretty big sign that it's not a healthy card for the format
I actually played games back when Iona was unbanned. The player playing buried alive and reanimating Iona turn 3 had a great time.. my mono black deck being locked out of the game did not.
just dont play a mono coloured deck into a deck that runs iona easy peasy ??? "Hey anybody running iona in their decks? I wanna play my mono coloured list" how hard was that?
Rule zero does not work at cons and at an lgs. I can’t rebuild my deck because people don’t like some of the cards I play or my power level is off. It does work with regular play groups but if you have a play group you don’t need a ban list you can make your own. The ban list needs to be actively managed so when I play with strangers we can sit down and play
As someone who has played at both and done so at every Magic Con (and seen it done by many others), I can assure you that Rule 0 is a very plausible and reasonable way to balance a pod. People bring multiple decks and also go searching for games that match what their appetite is. Maybe less so at an LGS, but I have never seen a major issue with rule 0 at conventions. -Jimmy
if your rule 0 conversations arent working it could be a communication issue. and some players are just gonna wanna troll games, you cant change that by just banning every offending card. roll with the punches and do your best to communicate properly youll be just fine
@@commandcast you are also a magic content creator on one of the most popular channels. rule zero convos you have are likely are not the same as others
This is the exact problem with having a ban list in the first place. It's not going to 100% cover YOUR idea of what cards are acceptable to play or not. You HAVE to have the rule 0 conversation regardless of the presence of the ban list. As someone who has traveled the world playing Magic at random LGSs, Rule 0 conversations work perfectly fine. If you "had a bad experience" it's because the game didn't go the way YOU expected it to. Remember, EVERYONE ELSE has a different definition of "fun" than you. The reality is you are going to come across cards you don't "like" quite often. Not being able to rebuild your deck that moment doesn't matter. Being able to force someone else to NOT play with cards they WANT to play with does matter. The ban list just gives people the justification to complain about someone else's fun in a format that was SPECIFICALLY designed to allow players to play with ANY card they own. That's why it's a CASUAL format. It's not suppose to matter if you win or lose... just experience the game and the wonky stuff you see happen. If you didn't have "fun" THAT game, almost always someone else did and it was their turn to have that fun. However, if you truly despise a particular card or deck, you discuss it and the social norm is that the "offending" player either switches decks or removes it. Not that moment, but when they can. Because remember, it's not about winning but playing the game.
I have the exact opposite view as you...we can't ban things to support the idea that random players should just be able to be mashed together without any foresight or planning. That's a COMPETITIVE format, not a CASUAL one, in spirit. The philosophy you're asking for should necessitate tons of bans, as we'd have to balance things before people even sit down.
I'd agree the discussion around the ban list is premature, but for another reason: the bracket system will essentially be a system of tiered banlists. Which would mean we'd end up with a number of different Commander formats, each of which could be tuned towards a specific play experience. Once such a system is in place, there may be a place to take out "feelbad" cards, whereas in higher brackets they are explicitly part of the game.
no, now is the time to rock it all the way. If you wait a year for things to "settle" and THEN change it up? people will lose their minds. Things are changing and they should change fast and THEN settle.
Idk. Everyone already expects wizards to set a course as the new captain. If they're planning on correcting/changing course then waiting a year to do it seems like a mistake.
A lot of repeated uses of the idea that if someone plays a commander like Leovold or Braids that you can just say no. A lot of people play random pairings at commander nights at their LGS and uou cant force someone to not play Leovold or Braids. The response to just drop a round and not play is probably the worst case scenario for someone wanting to play casual commander.
The problem, obviously, is using "random pairings", as you're going to get pretty awful matchmaking this way given how huge the Commander card pool is. You can't shove a casual format into the trappings we'd give a competitive one, like random pairings, and then complain that the machine isn't working correctly. Commander is not a tournament format, and it doesn't make any sense to pair people up randomly.
I initially thought that the casualness with which most of the Command Zone hosts talk about avoiding problematic Commanders like Braids, Leovold, or Tergrid might have come from the privilege's of their celebrity within the community, but after considering it, it might be more likely to be from their living in a large city. I live in a decent sized city and regularly the choice I have to make if an opponent brings out a commander I don't want to play against isn't "Play against this or play at a different table" it's "Play against this or don't play magic tonight."
As a person who's lived in the city their entire life myself, this is such a different opinion I would have never thought about, and it's so very true. Analogously, this also happens to people whose social skills are not too great to avoid troublesome tables, even in a big city.
I live on the outskirts of a town of 50k people. There are are atleast four magic shops I can drive to within 30 minutes of my house. Each shop has their own culture. One more casual, one more degenerate, etc. Get to know people and it removes the majority of the issues you are talking about. Most people will swap decks if asked nicely
@@commandcast Having the players who dont have as much player/pod variety available to them wanting to sculpt the ban list to support their personal idea of fun actually seems rather unreasonable to me
Going into my LGS to play Commander was eye-opening. Telling them I brought an upgraded precon made them switch from their turn 3 win kind of decks to turn 5 ones. Rule 0 helps, but if the culture at the store is cut throat, you better adapt and start playing more powerful stuff. You can't really refuse to play against other people's decks if there's noone else to play against.
Turn 5 wins are still god awful except very high power pods, level 9 or 10. If a game store only had these types of tryhards, I'd easily play another format.
@@hermodnitter3902 That's kinda the point, the other formats the store had were Pokemon and Yugioh. These guys were the only other ones playing magic on the only lgs within 200 km, so I kinda don't have other option but to try to fit in. Rejecting someone else's archetype is a luxury I just don't have.
@@Grimjr7 I don't think a ban list would have helped here, unless by that you mean we should get rid of a whole lot more cards, from rhystic studies to combo pieces like sanguine bond, exanguinate or tassa's oracle. In the end I just learned to keep more removal and counterspells on hand with mana open.
8 mana sorcery that wins the game? "Hey!? What do you expect? It's 8 mana... it's fine!" 15 drop creature that will rarely be in the command zone and can only be cheated out in a handful of ways and cannot win the game? "TOO STRONG! People may have to sacrifice lands!" 4 drop creature that will only be in the command zone and has a billion ways to accelerate into play and that also makes you sacrifice lands... "It's fine! Rule zero exists... you will have clues to sacrifice"
@@FearOgreI feel like Biorhythm is a better card than Emrakul. Let's be honest: no one is going to hard cast Emrakul and, if they do, they probably deserve to win. So you need to combo it with Through the Breach or Sneak Attack. What does it accomplish? It probably ends the game for one of your opponents and then gets sacrificed at the end of your turn, which is cool enough. Biorhythm is a different beast though. Most green decks can reliably cast it by turn 4 and it might kill the whole table at that point. If it does not, your opponents will probably be at a low enough life total where combat will just end at least one of them. Sure, you can counter Biorhythm. But, as early as turn 4, it's probably the best spell you can cast for 8 mana to try to win the game. And while green cannot search it, a simic commander will give you every tool to get to it. I don't know, but I'd rather deal with Emrakul 😅
Have to agree with a lot of the sentiment in the comments. People have this ideal that you can just wave your hand and rule zero away unfun or ridiculous combos etc... but it very rarely works in person. Rule zero is genuinely a terrible way of doing this and seems to exist as a way to justify not banning things, when it should really exist as a reason TO ban things. Further, newer players have next to no idea what they dont want to play against, especially because Commander is an eternal format. If cards immediately ruin the gameplay experience, have a massive power disparity, combo with loads of cards to make game ending plays very early and very consistently etc... they should be banned by default and you should have to Rule Zero argue why you should be allowed to play the card which is too powerful/completely unfun (i.e. its a combo piece but you're running it for a different reason or some such). This is much more for the casual commander experience rather than cEDH. On another note, a better way of describing deck power (which is being discussed currently) could go a long way to improving this regardless. It has to be a system that describes the entire deck rather than the system suggested of 'if any card of this level is in the deck the deck is of that level' - a ridiculous system which is not even slightly helpful and the only reason it would exist is so that Wizards can market their Commander precons as all equally powerful etc... because they all have at least one good card within them.
Insane to me that Jimmy thinks Griselbrand should stay banned but Emrakul should be unbanned. The fact that it’s a 15/15 is t the issue, the issue is the annhilator 6 and inability to interact with it with the “can’t be countered” and essentially hexproof that it comes with
Have you read griselbrand? It’s significantly easier to get out early with reanimate effects as you literally cant reanimate emrakul. Griselbrand can reasonably draw you 20+ cards and put you in a position to beat the entire table where as emrakul can MAYBE take out one person if you keep attacking them
The first time I played against the new Ulamog it had Annhilator 10 (making it a 17/17) I never had an issue with Emrakul before it was banned and I don't see why it needs to be banned anymore with the reintroduction of potentially larger Annhilator.
@@FearOgre True, it just exiles 1/2 of one players deck rounded up instead of taking an extra turn. I'm not saying it's not Strong, it just isn't necessarily the largest Annihilator on a Titan anymore, which was part of the reason it was banned in the first place (not the only reason, but still part of the reason).
It's important to note that recurring nightmare, unlike chthonian nightmare, doesn't have an etb, and because returning it to owner's hand is part of the cost, u essentially can't interact with it when it resolves.
Someone: *suggests cards that "will take care of themselves at tables"* Me: Tell me you don't regularly play on Spelltable against random people without telling me you don't regularly play on Spelltable against random people.
@@OuterCraft This is highly incorrect. I play across the world at random LGSs and the rule 0 conversation works perfectly fine. People across the world don't typically play cards like Urza or Winter Orb in "casual" games because of the global Rule 0 conversations. They definitely self regulate. It may not be the case on the internet, such as spelltable, but when does regulation over anonymous platforms ever work?
If this is already happening to you, then how are a couple more cards going to change that fact? I think you might need to change the way you approach these groups, because there are already salty commanders and cards in the format, so if anything, these kinds of statements are supporting more bans.
Iona needs to stay right where she is. She is so potent that people stopped building mono colored decks when she wasnt banned. It literally hinders the whole format.
@@mjkuehl you are greatly over estimating her impact. Also considering the amount of colourless removal we got in the format over the years she won't be doing as much as she was before which already wasn't that much.
My experience was very different from yours...I basically never saw the card. I'd argue that the overall impression, online, when she was banned was total surprise, as I don't think she was on people's radar.
@@skylounge5868 im not saying you have to have multiple decks (also if you dont want to pay money for cards you can proxy, choosing not to is a choice you make yourself) you are allowed to just not play if its going to make you very upset, nobody is forcing you
I would love to play Fastbond...but I would use it to play Strip Mine out of my graveyard until noone else had any lands ever. Shenanigans like that is why I agree with it being banned.
@@raiserofchickens I’m pretty sure that Life from the Loam is among the 10 cards I’ve cast most in my life. Number one is probably Swords to Plowshares. 😂
@@avall0nNn1992 exactly, and in high powered games it was less of an issue. No one in my cEDH group had an issue with it, it was mostly those who play casual. I think in cEDH thoracle is a far bigger issue personally.
I feel that the people who say "X can totally be unbannned" never played with X in the format. I took a break from commander and only played with Dockside for a little bit and didn't see anyone really abuse it. So when I came back (crazy time to come back, i know), I heard it was getting banned. I was asking, "Why?" But after thinking about it, yeah, flickering, sacking, and reanimating. Absolutely would make it unfun to play against.
This is a bad take imo because dissolving the RC says way more about the harassment than unbanning the cards would. Keeping cards that you would have otherwise unbanned just to "teach the internet a lesson" is a twofold bad idea. One: you can't teach the internet a lesson and two: you punish the players who want then unbanned and had nothing to do with the toxicity. There is no reason to consider the harassment when deciding if these cards should be banned or not, exactly how harassment shouldn't be considered when initially deciding if something should be banned or not. The banlist shouldn't be influenced by pressure like that.
Talks about dockside needing to stay banned because it becomes about trying to copy or reanimate it and then says primetime should be unbanned when it was banned precisely because it became about trying to copy it, take it, or reanimate it.
There's a big difference between a game-warping 2-mana creature and a game-warping 6-mana creature. I think most 6-mana creatures printed these days warrant being copied, stolen or reanimated. - Rachel
As a CEDH player keep Flash out of our games. It warps the entire thing around a single combo and 2-3 colors. It is also hard to interact with and is just a win the game if you have the two cards in play to combo off with it.
but bro dont you hear the comments? prime time will just WARP GAMES and is WAY TOO STRONG, nobody gonna care about flash when you can get your 6 mana land tutor/ramp engine!!!
@@Metherel Prime time isn't as bad as Flash. If you have hulk in your hand and you cast flash at instant speed you get a combo that you go through your deck with abilities only happen from that point forward until you win the game. It is a better win con than Thassa's oracle demonic consultation.
I think they need to bring back the "Banned As Commander" section of the banned list. I feel there are a lot of cards that are a problem specifically because of how accessible they are in the command zone that are fine in the 99. Also, can we get your opinions on the new RC members being forced to sign a Non-Disparagement Clause towards Wizards?
Why the hell should Iona be unbanned? This completely stops monocolored deck, and they can't even interact with it because their removal spells are of that color. What an INSANE take to have.
"These cards are objectively bad for the format, but should be unbanned" huh? did i miss something? why do you want bad things in the format? I don't care if the ban list is 300 cards long; i care about playing a good game.
Ok someone else also caught this lol like wth are we talking about?! The formats health is more important than the banned lists health. Cards that make commander worse and overly oppressive need to stay away.
@@spoogtastic but also keep in mind wizards plans to create official power brackets, it's likely that these more spikey cards will be regulated to higher brackets of deck construction. A massive 300 card banned list along with all of these card brackets ratings is a lot
@@beyond.thebounds9049yea but the bracket system has tons of problems as well and i sincerly doubt it will truly moderate any better than the old power level talk
Golos is strictly on the banlist because he takes up so much of the oxygen in the room regarding 5 color commander design space. I wish they'd print a variant with the land tutor part and a more on-theme 5 color activated ability.
Instead of an activated ability, just make the casting cost WUBRG. WUBRG for a 3/5 artifact creature scout. When it enters, search your deck for a land card, put it on the battlefield tapped.
I feel like coalition victory and Iona is the poster child of the banlist philosophy of “we don’t ban on power level”. These are objectively unfun cards to play against (when you do). I hope they don’t come off because they make the format worse. Like sure you can whataboutism with torment of hail fire or something else but that ignores the fact that these cards just suck to play against and are already banned so why even free them. Biorhythm feels similarly
The simple presence of Iona automatically ban monodecks. Maybe it is not a powerful card by competitive standars but the ability to said to a player: "you don´t play" is reason to ban a card. Similiar reason to Erayo. When come online have a tax to play every turn.
I feel like so many of the critiques cane down to “I’ve never played with the card, but I don’t see how it could be so bad.” So many of them ended up banned because Wizards couldn’t see how toxic they were either. Golos doesn’t just ramp you/cut commander tax, but also lets you circumvent mana costs. It’s total combination that’s not great. Gifts Ungiven isn’t powerful because it lets you search for four cards. It’s powerful because it lets you put two cards of your choice into the graveyard at instant speed.
I guess I am one of the players who would prefer a firmer hand. I know people who love to grief a table and some of these cards are making them salivate, just keep blinking sundering titan/sylvan primordial.
Yeah people who played back in the early 2010s can attest to Sundering Titan/Sylvan Primordial being absolutely miserable play experiences. The upside to unbanning them is so small compared to the downside. I also feel like Prime Time is also worth staying on the ban list.
@@djredlantern"what fo u mean this is so much fun, anyway imma blink sylvan 3 times. Oops sorry to set u back to turn 1" like people read "etb really obnoxious effect" and then go "obviously if we only fo it once its not as bad" no ones doing it just once, thats happening 4 times a turn
Those cards would be the top end of most if not all Yarok the Desecrated decks. Including mine. In fact, I'm going to buy Sundering and Sylvan. Just in case they get unbanned in the future. If they stay banned, I'm only out $2 USD.
@k9commander as a green player...do not give me sundering titan or sylvan..I will abuse the hell out of them..those that taught me to play learned quickly I am that guy without realizing it until I've got them out and see the line in game. Funny story, my first deck was a mono black control and sundering titan was in it for the big body..then I noticed "hey I can keep popping it and bringing it back!" It was very quickly they told me not to play that deck and take it elsewhere.
Its interesting how the USA culture shows alot here, this belief that "yeah, you do what you want, I will do what I want, we will agree on what we want together" is something that literally does not exist outside the ideas realm that this belief pushes. You played against cards that were banned and you wanted them to be banned, there is no self regulation outside of your own friend group.
Yeah command zone definitely lives in an echo chamber. An average Joe with no playgroup and goes to their lgs needs a good ban list and “just talk about it” is not always the solution.
This is highly incorrect. I play across the world at random LGSs and the rule 0 conversation works perfectly fine. People across the world don't typically play cards like Urza or Winter Orb in "casual" games because of the global Rule 0 conversations. They definitely self regulate.
I also love how Jimmy wants Mana Crypt unbanned, but then he and his playgroup rule-zero it out of the format so they don't have to deal with it and you never see it in their decks 😅 Commander is a casual format and the banlist must cater to the casual player. cEDH cannot be a consideration and "let's keep this broken card so they can play with it" is not a real argument. At the end of the day, cEDH is just commander, but pushed to its limits, so it will always adapt to the current banlist. Defending broken cards so "cEDH players can play with them" is so backwards I cannot believe it is even a real argument
Golos should remain banned. Ubiquity, sure, but once you got 7 mana (tutored out The World Tree on Golos cast facilitates this) no matter what strategy you are playing, that activated ability is better. If you want a reference, MTGGoldfish featured a Scout Typal deck once with Golos and just the ability alone destroyed the game. It’s a trap that the other generic 5c commanders don’t create, as even Kennith’s utility abilities aren’t enough to push every deck to activate them all the time.
I personally think if they could errata hullbreacher and take off the word “instead” it would be ok to take off the ban list The part I don’t like with hullbreacher is that it stops the card draw. And replaces it with the treasures. I personally would be fine with it if it were to only tax the cards draw. Not prevent it.
Apparently the logic behind every unban is "not as good as Craterhoof" or "not as good as Thassa's Oracle" . Maybe those cards are the problem and not the bans.
Also there's another thing is I can stop a crater hoof win. A Crater hoof when is still just an attacking win. There's still interaction there. Spells that just say win the game if I can't counter it there's nothing I can do.
These comparisons are just wack. Craterhoof winning against 3 40 life opponents means you had an insane board state that probably deserved the win. 8 mana sorcery after casting your 5 mana commander is not nearly the same.
It's hard for Craterhoof to kill the whole table, especially early in the game, but Biorhythm could easily do it by turn 3/4 😂 Sure, Craterhoof is searchable in green by other green spells, while Biorhythm is not. However, we are playing commander and all you need to do is put a simic commander in your command zone. Suddenly, you get access to a bunch of cheap tutors for an instant win button 😅 Now, will Biorhythm break the format? Probably not. Is it an autoinclude payoff in every single green deck? Most likely
I think a lot of these proposed changes hinge on the perceived function of the ban-list, and has big implications for what should be done with it. The Sheldon-led RC, I think, focused more on "sign posting" and "communicating about the culture of commander" through its bans compared to other groups. I think the current Command Zone discussion leans more on the "mechanical" function of cards within the culture(s) of commander, and where/how things would be expected to play out. I tend to agree with the Command Zone perspective, and think that WOTC actually has an immeasurable advantage in how it could market the *philosophy* of commander in something like a commander precon (i.e., like the card insert explaining the game, also tell the "stories" of what different player groups get out of the game - see Mark Rosewater on the types of Magic players). It seems strange to me that "rule zero"-ing to allow "un"-cards is seen very differently than "rule zero"-ing to allow a Mana Crypt. Most commentary (at least that I hear) seems to indicate that Mana Crypt generally contributes negatively to game balance outside of a certain type of commander game, but that having it banned prevents it from being used where it could/should exist. I think WOTC is looking to brackets to somewhat deal with this fractionation of what people want from a game of commander, but I think its more of a "personality assessment" problem than a "power-level" problem. Rachel had a good quote in a recent episode to the effect of "Commander is closer to DnD than it is Modern" - and I think that is very true *of certain casual groups*. cEDH is arguably much closer to Modern as a "sub-culture" than the precon "sub-culture". Understanding what players/clusters of different players want out of the game is arguably going to be a necessary pre-condition for a well-functioning banlist, and it is somewhat disheartening to hear in recent episodes that WOTC (among others) don't seem to have a clear picture on what people want but the conversation moves past that almost immediately to what should be done "for the monolithic community".
Biorhythm in elfball. Sure Biorhythm won't see play in every green deck, but it will see play in EVERY elf deck. The average elf deck has 8 mana by turns 3-5. Depending on the draws. The highly tuned ones have it turn 3.
Just do a Game Knights with your proposed Banned List. Have Jimmy, Josh, Rachel, and The Professor. Then have a discussion about the impact the previously banned cards had.
i'd argue have the three of them and someone who is a better builder than them (no offense prof) play. put kibler or something on and they might reconsider
@@JaceBeleren-d3c I get your point, but I also think that having a Kibler-tier player gives people the out of assuming the cards are fine and he's just better. Some of the banned cards allow for entirely average skill players to do silly things, and - no offense to the main crew - their level of play is a good bit closer to the average player than hall of famers.
No unbans for me. Just an opinion: Last week, we said "commander is a dark room, don't just run blindly." This week, we are saying "it would be fun to unban 20~ cards." There are tons of cards on that list I would love to play, but my problem is: 1. Cards getting compared to non-banned cards: Having more than one of an effect builds consistency. We do not need more consistent toxicity because it encourages that as an archetype. Cards should not just be unbanned on the logic of "eh, why not? we have X already." I have played games where every spell I played was countered. I do not need two Jin Gitaxias. 2. A huge chunk of cards are on this list because they encourage unfun things. This is not adding a pool of fun, silly antics with new exciting brews. I have played a lot of games against stuff like mana drain, armageddon, stasis, no mercy, the abyss, and I could go on and on. My experience does not tell me that adding more poisonous stuff like Iona, Sundering Titan, Emrakul, Braids, etc is suddenly going to be great for the format and make my games better.
You keep saying that the point here is to "improve the banlist", but...shouldn't the point be to improve the format? Improve people's games? Edit: grammar
I don't want to come off as rude I hope you understand that this comes from a place of respect I've always understood the banlist as setting a bar for expectations for people going to a FNM or commander night at a game store and playing games with strangers. A lot of the cards you are saying you think could or should come off the banlist would or could make that experience worse. I don't understand these: How is Iona a win con it just stops a person from playing while Griselbrand is actually a win con Leovold is Hullbreacher in the command zone but swap mana for card draw Biorhythmn 8 mana win con* coalition victory 8 mana win con Griselbrand 8 mana win con Also you've said before that you have your own house banlist and mana crypt is on it so that feels very weird "You can just remove it" that is not a fair statement because you are also calling for the unban of cards that you can't remove in Iona Yawgmoth's Bargin is stronger then Griselbrand. 2 less black mana, 1 card 1 life and as an enchantment its harder to remove. This is definitely more up for debate but that's how I see it. "People aren't really gonna play it" so why take it off the list if not many people want to or will play it and the card is problematic? You said that 3 mana Narset as a commander would be miserable but that's what Leovold is in 3 colors Also you said that if people have a high powered pod they should be allowed to play these cards. They can. If you are in a pod with friends its very easy for your group to have your own banlist. Like I mentioned earlier you have a house banlist for Game Knights. Maybe I grossly misunderstand what the banlist is about but as I stated I've always understood the banlist as setting a bar for expectations for people going to a FNM or commander night at a game store. This feels very out of touch and i hope you can see where I'm coming from also it feels weird not having josh in the video and I feel like this podcast could have been better if you had more people on to talk. For anyone that read this thank you so much and have fun
Lets be honest, a lot of the cards that were suggested to be unbanned would be terrible for pick up games at an LGS. It would definitely need the help of something like the bracket system. If I go to my LGS for commander night and a guy want to play Braids, it's not as easy as just telling them 'no thanks'. The whole pod could tell that guy 'no', and it wouldn't matter.
The way I see it, the problem comes when you say no and the other two say yes. If all 3 of you say no and that one player refuses to change or borrow decks, play a 3 player game without them.
what do you mean? just because braids player doesnt listen to you doesnt mean you have to listen to him just find a new 4th or play a 3 man if youre gonna tilt that hard (over a commander thats less oppressive than tergrid tho?)
@@Takadox so then you also should expect to play against some cards you dont want to see, because if you know that youre the kind of player that will tilt over seeing cards you dont enjoy YOU WOULDNT BE QUEUING GAMES WITH RANDOMS right?
Yes, they could take off a bunch of cards from the ban list. But the problem is something Rachel said in a previous episode discussing the bans: if you are expected to have a conversation before the game of which cards you can, cannot, should, or should not play with... ALL of those cards are on the chopping block, not the other way around. Rachel only mentioned the first half, but the second half where each and every card that has to be discussed beforehand a game is 100% a candidate to be banned. So WotC shouldn't undo a single ban as it is. The cards that were banned should have been banned and they were for good reasons, namely because they made the format worse. If Sol Ring only exists to this day because it is a commander staple, then a better Sol Ring that ISN'T a commander staple shouldn't be allowed to be played. So no, none of the bans were bad, and all of the bans, as they stand right now, should be upheld.
I think a ban lost should be for exclusively cedh. There’s plenty of cards that aren’t banned that our table agrees not to play like grave pact or craterhoof because none of us enjoy what it does to the game. (Not saying they’re broken just unfun in our agreed opinion) cedh is the most high powered decks you can put together with what cards are available. I think if wizards focused on making a ceiling for that then other casual players can have a rule zero conversion about what they don’t want to play with or against and the ban list keeps the most egregious things out of the game for everyone
I really hope they stop thinking we are too dumb to understand a “banned as companion” “banned as commander” concept. Lutri would be a super fun commander
The stated problem with banned as a companion/banned as a commander is not that the community is too dumb to understand it. It's that making a separate ban list to accommodate for approximately 5 cards that warrant it (Rofellos, Braids, Leovold, Erayo, Golos) is not worth it, especially when 3 of those 5 cards create negative play patterns from the 99 as well and could reasonably be left on the regular ban list. - Rachel
@@commandcast In that case I don't see a problem. If the banned as companion list had 2-5 cards (depending on if some are on the regular banned list) then it would not be a huge list for players to remember and since companion is rarely used (I don't believe it was a popular mechanic) it is not a list that will need to be discussed or updated very often.
So, Hullbreecher is a 1 without discussion, but Leovold is an easy 3? Sure, there are differences between the two, stopping card draw is worse than stopping card draw and replacing them with treasures for the player playing it, but both these cards were banned for the same playpattern. The auxiliary reasons for why they in particular got banned is different, but not even discussing Hullbreecher and then being so low on Leovold feels off. I played quite a lot against Leovold. I would much rather see Hullbreecher unbanned before Leo
Lutri should just be banned as companion. It’s not an overpowered card in the 99 at all… but I want to play it in my new Bria deck because it’s an on-theme Otter.
I'm on a pretty solid 4 for jeweled and crypt. Having the option to play them is awesome to me. Letting em be band-aids for clunky decks and highly costed commanders. I think the easiest rule 0 conversation to have is fast mana imho, they shouldn't be completely barred off
Sylvan Primordial can destroy lands and you ramp 3. The game only revolves around flickering, reanimating and copying Sylvan Primordial if it is in the game.
@@CA-zn8hu yeah probably like 5 or something then it would get old and i would wanna see some different decks. same with a lot of gameplans that exist currently
@@Metherel mmmkay. The sylvan primordial and even primeval titan games back in the day were ALL like that. Casually speaking. Even at the junior college i played at. People had creature tutors and copy effects.
@@Metherel every blue deck playing Bribery for primeval titan. Every ugx deck playing it for sylvan primordial after prime time was banned. No joke, primeval titan was the best blue creature in commander. As dumb as that sounds.
A lot of the points you made about the banned Legendary creatures seem to point that returning to "banned as commander" would be the safest way to unban many of those (and address currently legal legendary creatures that are fine in the 99 but miserable in the CZ). Talks of it being too complicated for players having to remember 2 ban lists kinda go moot when you consider the bracket system they're currently suggesting which already seems 10 times more complicated for non-enfranchised players than saying "Golos is ok in your deck, just not as your commander".
Coalition Victory remains a solid 1 in my eyes, because of a few factors. First, it has zero opportunity cost. Any 5C commander can and should run the card, it's an instant staple and you don't have to add or remove a single card in your deck to make it work. For a lot of commanders all you need is two lands and you commander. That's nothing. I don't think the format benefits from having more auto-include cards that should be there by default. Second, is that because it has no real cost, it changes how the table is going to react to the 5C player's board. Suddenly, they can threaten game by having their commander out and a bunch of mana, so the correct play is to target that player and nuke their commander on the chance CV is in their hand. With friends, yeah you can know their deck and know if CV is in there or not, but against strangers? Unless you want to start asking "Hey do you run the insta include card?" against everybody, the safe bet is to treat a 5C commander the same way you'd treat an Aristocrat Deck's Altar or a Spellslinger deck's un-live fishbowl. Or the huge feelbad of players who don't know CV that will ask "what do you mean you just win?", because this card WILL be used by casuals against other casuals (again, staple with no opportunity cost). I think that CV would demonstrably lead to more miserable 5C games for a card that literally adds nothing to the format. It's the least interesting or fun effect possible, an instant include that doesn't reward cool deckbuilding, and will just lead to worse games when playing against strangers. Casuals are going to find it miserable and enfranchised players will find it both boring and will lead to worse games against 5C decks regardless of it they have CV in hand or not.
eh I have basically the same point of view of Cyclonic Rift. "Oh cool. Guess you either instantly win next/this turn or I spend the next turn playing as many mana rocks as I can and discarding to hand size." It's a really annoying card you functionally CAN'T play around without shutting someone out or always holding up a counterspell. It's just an unfun card..
Victory also limits future design and is way stronger now than when it was originally banned thanks to Omo and the new green Overlord. Plus triomes! It's so easy to do now.
A 5 color commander plus an 8 mana spell winning the game isn't really winning out of nowhere. Insurrection often wins without even needing your commander in play, and removing just one creature doesn't stop it from having any effect.
If your turn 3 Dockside makes 10 treasures then obviously your opponents were doing a lot. To say that's "a non game" is actually incredulous. Dockside being banned does make sense, but c'mon guys let's be real if you are making tons of treasures your opponents were going hard too
1:29:56 - I think WotC pushes Oathbreaker more to not have to truly make this decision. Have both formats exist and be healthy and they (and players) get the best of both worlds.
You needed to preface with the possibility of WotC reversing the removal of "banned as commander" as a high possibility seeing as how dual commander is now a solely WotC controlled format and banned as commander exists in that format.
I'm not sure why there is no discussion of roughly what Tier these cards should be. I think that could even influence whether some cards should be unbanned, like Balance. It's a very powerful card, but if it is unbanned and placed in Tier IV, then playing against decks with it included will be an easy decision to make. Same could be said for Braids and such.
I play in a pod where we only just started playing commander abiding by the ban list and I can say this. Out of all the cards we can actually access emrukel is both the biggest and not biggest problem in that list. It’s ability to be cheated out in so many different ways as well as the generic mana exploitation you can do to make 15 mana seem null and void is a problem, annhilator 6 is very meaningful for most boards unless your playing tokens or enchantress. It’s come to the point now where ornithopter of paradise is a staple in every deck just so we can assign it as a blocker and tap at the block step to be able to fire off a wrath.
I would guess that the majority of people that think Primeval Titan is fine to unban didn't play EDH back when it was legal. So so so many games turned into: cast Primeval, blink Primeval, clone Primeval, reanimate someone else's Primeval, etc. etc. etc. So many games just turned into everyone trying to get as many Primeval triggers as possible. You put it in every deck that plays green. Please WoTC do not unban that card.
@@Hapkins-le6xf Turn 1: Swamp, dark ritual, Entomb Primeval to the yard, Shallow Grave it back to play for 2 free lands then smack an opponent with a hasted Titan for another 2 free land. You're on 5 mana going in to turn 2 from a 4 card opening hand. Hold on to or draw in to a Reanimate, a Dread Return, an Unburial Rites, Animate Dead, Necromancy or any other of the cheap grave return cards, and that's all she wrote. That's why Titan needs to stay banned.
@raiserofchickens you can't be serious. "In a situation where you get a perfect hand prime time is too strong so keep it banned." Apply that same logic to every card.
All these arguments for unbanning cards just seem to constantly boil down to playing solitaire in a vaccum as if some of these cards aren’t just defacto reanimate/bribery targets in people’s decks…
I think that the solution to someone these cards such a Braids is to simply bring back Banned as Commander. You solve the problem with it being in the zone and as mentioned it's not a problem in the 99.
i heard "fine in the 99" several times in the video, so that brings me to a question. Do you think the banlist should be split into "banned" and "banned as commander" ? since some cards would probably not be a problem if they're not the commander.
They kind of answered this question. I don't agree with their answer but they basically answered it when they brought up lutri. That making a separate list Is unnecessary or could be confusing or whatever. I disagree because a singular list can have multiple sections that separate. It doesn't have to be multiple lists. It can just be one list that is broken into multiple sections.
I'm pretty sure part of the reason Iona was banned was because they unbanned painters servant at the same time, and that combo just says I'm the only one who gets to play
There was a minority of players that wanted Iona banned. The RC was considering unbanning Painter's Servant. This was essentially a case of two birds with one stone.
Golos was banned bc if u wanted a 5 color deck, you had to actively choose not to play the best 5 color commander, it was a generic ramp spell for colorless and u get to cast 3 things typically for free. Think about all 5 color commanders, and then think how many of them are for a very specific mechanic, or are just very medium at most things, golos is ramp in any deck and free casts, no 5 color deck would turn that down unless they realeased another mander specifically for the niche of that deck. Not to mention what golos does to deck building, since u get to cast stuff for free, almost every golos deck just devolves into "good stuff" and its not fun to play against 17k "different" golos lists
45:42 Gifts Ungiven has the words "up to" where intuition does not, which is a big part of the difference. In some formats, Gifts is read as "Search your library for 2 cards and put them in your graveyard" which is a line that Intuition cannot take since it must find three cards. For graveyard combo decks Gifts is a much stronger card. That said I don't think Commander is going to be a format that really needs to keep it banned, perhaps I would put it at a 3 though rather than a 4 considering that difference.
Jeez… Jimmy just wants everything unbanned. You guys know tons of shops (and Magic online, spelltable, etc) pair people randomly, right? You don’t always get to choose what you don’t want to play- which is why a lot of these are banned.
Adding, now that I’m further: primeval titan, sundering titan, and sylvan titan are banned because they are blink targets and the entire game revolves around animating, stealing, or cloning them. They create awful feel bads. Did you not play when they were all legal?
Adding, now that I’m further: primeval titan, sundering titan, and sylvan titan are banned because they are blink targets and the entire game revolves around animating, stealing, or cloning them. They create awful feel bads. Did you not play when they were all legal? Also, unbanning anything from the recent ban only encourages the horrible people who were threatening the RC and giving them what they wanted. That’s an awful precedent to set because they WILL repeat those actions next time they don’t like something. Have some foresight 🤦🏻♀️
@@SkyeSpiderThank you. I feel like actual thought was lacking with a lot of these takes. The point of the format is to make it more diverse not less. Homogenizing deck lists is what unbanning these cards does. People arguing that “oh they wouldn’t be that big a deal now” are talking from a cEDH grind set and that’s a part of this problem people aren’t discussing seemingly at all.
You've established that you are skeptical of the bracket system, but I think its a little strange to have this banlist discussion without accounting for it. Right now unbanning a card is a direct ticket to "play this card in any setting you want, until you find out its Rule Zero's there". That is a significantly more dangerous proposition than "We are unbanning this card and placing it in bracket 4. It is incredibly powerful and/or conducive to unfun game states, but it is not entirely out of band with other currently legal cards that also tread into that criteria but are just widely known to be Rule Zero'd out of the format that are also being placed in bracket 4." Emrakul was probably the best example here. Rachel had a reasonable argument that its unlike ThOracle in that casual players would want to play it, and for that reason it should maybe stay banned. But putting it in bracket 4 may be a suitable flag to wave away casual players from trying it.
I second this. It's big sad that they didn't talk about the Tier system at all, because I think it leads to an argument to unban more cards than they said while also leading to better explanations for why they should or shouldn't be unbanned.
yes the wave of unbannings goes hand-in-hand with the new tier system a lot of players are forgetting. tier system should mean lots more cards get unbanned and stay as T4 cards
Because being in bracket 4 really doesnt mean anything. Nothing stops you from playing 4s against 3s. And people have a much harder time saying no to a legal card that has a warning label than a banned card
@@donb7519 hard disagree here. It will be very easy for people to say they won't play against 4's with their less powerful decks. It makes having a rule 0 conversation actually possible and kinda the default, imo.
Jimmys arguement, "ive been slapping people since i started but now you tell me its banned and i think it can be unbanned" 😂 Playing with very strong cards for no time or since day 1 doesnt change the effect the card has on the format. I just dont like thr argument of well we have been playing with it so its prolly fine.
Sol Ring isn't a problem card. The difference between Sol Ring and Mana Crypt is availability. It is far more likely for the average person to get multiple copies of Sol Ring than getting one copy of Mana Crypt. Because Sol Ring is so readily available, it puts everyone at the same level.
@@HarryW83 proxying or playing budget commander solves your own issue without effecting anybody else, banning expensive cards effects many many other players
I am a lands mage and would love to have prime time in EDH but I do believe that even now prime time is too strong, and would be an auto include in every green deck.
@@F3A5T Prime Time's ban is a relic of an older era of Commander. I have no doubt midrange green decks and land decks would still run Prime Time, but not all decks are midrange. Aggro decks, combo decks, tribal decks, control decks, etc have stronger plays for six mana.
@@imaginarymatteryea like reanimating someone else primetime to fetch urborg coffers in mono black reanimator. Or stealing it in a control deck. Or using at as one of your few non tribal creatures in a tribal deck.
I'm personally on the unban Golos train. I don't think format boredom will become a problem with him, since if people are getting bored of him they can just switch to a different commander. As you also mentioned, he's not a specific commander which I think will turn many new players away. Golos, to me, was always a commander that you could run as commander in an unsupported archetype until WotC printed a commander for it. Also, I feel that if Morophon exists, Golos can as well.
I think it is not just about being bored of playing him as your commander, but also playing against him. This would happen often when he was popular. He is arguably worse (from fatigue standpoint) than other popular commanders since he is wubrg + colorless, he can potentially be played in every single deck (in cz).
Golos is a more powerful dragon commander than ur-dragon. Golos is the best non cEDH commander for every and all archetypes. The best mill deck is golos, the best +1 counters deck is golos, the best aggro deck is golos, the best control deck is golos. Literally take any precon, slap in golos and world tree, the deck just got way stronger. Golos is mana ramp, card draw, and cheating mana cost all in 1 package.
With the bracket system, they would essentially be creating X number of new formats each with their own ban list, as all the cards in higher brackets are “not legal” in that bracket. This makes the current ban list almost useless as some of the cards would be ok in cEDH but not lower. Those cards could just go in that bracket, save for the few cards that are deemed unhealthy for both casual and cEDH, in which case each sub format now has essentially 2 ban lists to keep up with.
No … that’s not how It will work… your deck would have a total score and that would dictate the 1-4 ranking … like you could put one or two power 4 cards and still have a power 2 deck.
Or, maybe people just use it as a tool to give you context to the contents of the decks and you can use that information however you want. Currently, when someone says their deck is an 8 and you say your deck is a 5, is there anything stopping you from still playing with your 5? I would hope not, and if that's the case, then that is exactly how it will continue to work with the brackets. Just because they classify things into brackets doesn't mean you cannot mix brackets. It's a casual format, do whatever you want. Pit your bracket 1 deck against a player that has a bracket 4, nothing is stopping you.
@@thetogtube2 that's not how it works if you read the article. Your deck's Tier is equal to its highest tier card, not based off an average. It's like the different usage categories in competitive Pokémon
@@thetogtube2Not according to Gavin Verhey in their initial talk about the system. He explicitly said if your deck has even a single top tier card in it, that’s the tier of your deck.
@@jakosky1 But again, as I said before, this is a casual format and you can just ignore the brackets. It's not a strict structure that make a WotC staff member stop you from playing. A judge (ex judge I guess since our program ended last year) isn't going to walk up and stop your game from happening. It is not four separate ban lists. Just play the game how you currently are, mix power levels just as we all do now. No one will stop you from doing that.
I don't understand the communal need to un-ban cards that will not add to the format or create more positive experiences and games. If our only criteria is "it's not as bad as it used to be" that doesn't mean it will make better games, so why are we even having this conversation? What are we gaining by "making the banlist better?" The better conversation to have is definitely what cards should continue to get banned to create better games.
The "broken" play patterns with Gifts aren't usually the ones where you choose 4. If you choose only 2 cards from your deck, the opponent no longer has a choice in the matter--you're effectively sending any two cards of your choice to the graveyard.
That happened because of communication with the RC. Nadu was originally going to give all your spells Flash. RC said "we're worried about this because it's half a Prophet of Kruphix." Then it was changed by WotC to try to preserve commander. It ended up breaking multiple formats. Something like that should /never/ happen again. An outside group should never have influence on what cards are printed in this game in that kind of way.
Golos ramps every time you cast him, his abillity adds so much value that even janky decks can outvalue most casual ones, never saw a golos deck underperform tbh. Also its another autowin with infinite mana commander, we have enough of those I think.
While limited resources is a bridge too far for EDH, I would very much like to see an updated version of the card that is right-sized for EDH. In the right kind of 'fair' deck, it or something like restore balance or balancing act are perfectly fine to level-set the game when someone turbo ramps ahead. Something like force-sacrifice down to 8 lands and disallow playing/putting of lands into play if you already have 8 in play would be a dream to see. Green turbo-ramp has no natural 'fair' counter that doesn't immediately create salt with most tables. Land destruction, stax, no searching libraries and other forms of resource denial are met with a dirty side eye but when an opponent resolves their 5th ramp effect the lead is typically too great to combat without the game becoming arch enemy. Wild we live in a world where folks think prime-time is perfectly fair and balanced magic but *any* "balance" effect is the devil incarnate. There is disparity between the number of tools blessed as 'allowable' to each of the colors in EDH.
Great video, I thought the contention when talking about Emrakul was interesting in regards to wanting to play it but not wanting to play against it. I think a lot of splashy impactful cards feel the same. Some others that come to mind are Void Winnower, Avacyn (usually in combination with Armageddon, mass wipes etc) omniscience and many more. I think Emrakul and most of the other cards should come off the ban list. There's a lot of wildly powerful stuff in the format and I feel like if we had in depth conversations about cards that are currently unbanned the same we there was a conversation about Emrakul, there would be a lot of questions about weather cards should be legal or are fun enough for the format. Also the contention of looking at biorythm and coalition victory as 8 mana win the game being fine but then why isn't Emrakul a 4 for the same reason? Also Golos feels like such a bizarre ban to me. I'd argue that Golos has more creativity than not. The argument of homogenization feels mute to me for the card. Having Golos banned feels reminiscent of solo play RPG games having really high cost for respecs. Like who is this actually serving having it banned. If someone wants to build Golos does it really have that much of an effect on other players. Just let people play it if they want to have a generic good 5 color commander.
He was the defacto best WUBRG commander, cheated on commander tax, and gave you free stuff while being generic to cast and fixed your mana for you. Golos was *everywhere* and deserved a ban.
I used to go to an LGS with easily 4+ pods going at one time and it was never hard to find a game with different people. I played against golos 1 out of every 3 games because like 7 people had built it. it was everywhere
I definitely believe it should be reprinted on the same level. I've never had a problem playing against Crypt. Most of my play group had it in multiple decks. I was the only one that didn't and just after I finally do, it gets banned lol. I enjoyed getting players to die to Crypt
56:49 the biggest reason for me to keep Crypt and Lotus banned, is to stick it to the idiots that thought it was necessary to start threaten people over pieces of cardboard. If you can’t play nice, you don’t to play at all. In Dutch we say: “It’s your own fault, big bump!”…
The opening to that Rendmaw ad read might be the funniest thing I've seen come out of this channel. As a Rendmaw player, I feel seen, my opponents never like the birds.
As a strictly casual player there are very few cards that I think could be unbanned, in general I agree with the ban list HOWEVER I have a slew of suggestions on things to ADD to the ban list for promoting unfun gameplay 😂
Curious. What cards would you put in the list as someone who plays casually because this aspect of play or idk the literal nature/heart of the format is being forgotten in all of these discussions.
That’s why they are adding 4 power levels so an extensive ban list isn’t necessary but with that said you’ll have trouble finding games at the lowest power level
A lot of cards on the banlist are fun for cedh. Yes, they should match the bracket system, not just for commander because the trouble with power 1 through 10 is this depends on how fast your deck wins go in the old power system with made slow 7 mid ter 7 high-powered 7 so we have to put in the new bracket system as well because then will know if the bracket system will really work
Because u have an edh high-powered edh cedh old power scale did not work because it turned a lot of decks into a 7, so the bracket system should work for each bracket
55:27 Rachel with the correct take and Jimmy not so much. We do NOT reward threatening behavior, full stop. Unbanning those 4 cards ever will embolden those abusive people.
the alleged, what, 3? people who sent in threats? i have yet to see ANYBODY threaten anyone on ANY comment, video, thread, discussion. i HAVE seen thousands bemoan the bans because they enjoy playing with those cards. are you so blinded by spite that you would rather stick it to the insanely small number of bad apples than to listen to the opinions of the masses?
Disagree. Let us play with the cards we bought in the environments we know the cards are okay in. The death threat nonsense was completely overboard from those individuals, but dont punish real mtg players due to a couple bad apples. RC shouldve never been in charge, they were doing such a good job staying mostly uninvolved.
@AlexMTG_ super annoying and bad take. 90% of the people who want the cards unbanned didn't send any death threats. For that matter, not even one was proven to even happen.
@@L_Zant super annoying and bad take? Apparently not, by these numbers. Maybe trust the folks making these decisions. They did just fine for like 20 years until the rabble got too unruly. Format is better with the 4 gone 💁♂️
I have always preferred the approach of fewer bans but more pre-game (rule 0) conversations. MTG is about friends having fun (or me crying alone), the most important aspect should be whether or not your playgroup is having fun.
Someone in my playgroup would only play Golos as a commander because he thought it was fun, which was fine, except for the fact that he would always hit the blink spells that allowed him to fetch a land from his deck and reactivate Golos on the same turn. It caused long games that had no conclusive end until hours later, making it not fun for everyone else. To this day, he is still chanting unban Golos.
I've not seen anyone discussing ban lists understand that Golos is banned because he's "nearly" tax free. His enters ability gets you 50% commander tax rebate.
@Dragon_Fyre Golos enables access to 5 colors and has no deck building requirements. He fixes any color you need for colorless and you always have access. He is so versatile it's almost better to run him a the commander than other options for a lot of strategies. Yuriko is very good but much more restrictive, they requires a creature to attack and be unblocked. This means the deck needs to dedicate a lot of space to that. While yuriko avoids commander tax, it's not with cost. The gameplan is very telegraphed and has many points to interact to deny it. Powerful yes but not banworthy while golos is
@@Dragon_Fyre Yuriko doesn't have another option of playing "3 cards for free" from the top of your library. It's not about 1 effect, it's the combination of both. Golos gives opponents a choice, kill me and I'll just replay him OR 3 cards free. Yuriko must be unblocked to ninjitsu in.
![ILLSLICK - WINTER IS COMING [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dwTMeM1zIhQ/mqdefault.jpg)
Which of our conclusions do you disagree with? What cards would you take off the ban list if given the chance?
Fastbond. I'm insane, and I love it...
Leovold should stay banned. I'm sure there are some evil people out right now trying to figure out how to empty everyone's hand on turn 1 or 2. Nobody wants that in the format.
Braids isnt a problem in 99.. unless it's in your opening hand and can be ramped out on turn 1. The same argument can be used for any card. Channel is too strong can end game on turn 1. Orrrr, it's 1/99 and yu never see it. Might as well unban it. The rationalization of most bans is, it's too powerful early in game. Many of them later in game aren't nearly as bad. Wanna ban advantage cards? Get rid of smothering tithe
@AwesomeSocialDancing especially now with flair of cultivation, it's very easy to get them out turn 2 and play windfall/dark deal/ or timetwister on curve.
Unbanning Lotus or Crypt just puts you on the side that death threats get results. Also encourages and supports more use of threats to get cards banned/unbanned.
Terrible for the Command Zone to support.
You can tell Jimmy is a professional actor because he was able to say that there would be thoughtful discussion in the comments with such a straight face.
Nailed it.
😂😂😂😂
Maybe we should have a thoughtful discussion to prove the exception to the rule?
yeah honestly, they know exactly what they're posting.
Or a professional poker player...
I think you all should do a Game Knights with Rule 0, with those cards you think should be un-banned, make a deck around them and see.
I could see them doing an extra turns based on that but i don't know about game knights
Maybe an extra turns episode, since GK is a WOTC sponsored thing. The extra turns series could be the perfect place to showcase a couple of these episodes. Good idea
@@brittonstewart3577the problem is they wouldn’t build the decks strong enough to take advantage of some of these commanders, like flash is banned for a reason and it does a similar thing to dockside
When Nadu was relase in my group do a experiment with him so we can see how powerful is. 4 players with Nadu as comander.
When the frist one put Nadu, the sroud boots and another creature in play, well... 3 cretures more later, 4 land drops and 10 cards draw later we make the decision to ban Nadu before wizards do.
10 min video?
In my opinion you’re overestimating how easy the pre game convos/self regulations are. Walking into an LGS as a newer player or even a somewhat experienced player honestly, can be really intimidating. Asking someone not to play a specific deck requires me to not only have knowledge of that card but also puts me in an uncomfortable spot. Braids is a great example of this, mechanically and on the power scale it may not be ban worthy but I think socially it’s very much deserving, promoting poor gameplay experiences. You could always argue the inverse is easier where a play group can allow braids via “rule zero” which I think is much less detrimental to new players or new pods.
Yeah they really wash how uncomfortable it can be for introverts to talk with random people in a pregame, and it comes off super rude to ask someone to change decks imo. Every time I’ve seen it it was awkward and came off as a dick move
This is a very reasonable critique. Leaning too hard on Rule 0 puts a lot of pressure on players to both know and be able to speak up for what they want in a game. This may not be a realistic expectation of the community at large.
@commandcast it also assumes the person wanting to run crypt or whatever is reasonable and that just is not always the case
@@RG-wv3gt To be clear, we were not suggesting Rule 0 be used to play banned cards. We were suggesting Rule 0 be used as a tool to defend against commanders you don't find fun (Braids, Erayo, and Leovold) if they were to be unbanned.
You can tell Jimmy in particular is a player that has a specific group of people that he regularly plays with and doesn’t play with randos at an LGS. And if he does his status as a figure in the community warps those Rule 0 discussions to the point where they’re not representative of the greater population. Most Rule 0 discussions come down to “I want to play this” and everyone says ok and that’s it.
cEDH enjoyer here: The problem with flash is that you can actually win with it as early as the first upkeep of the game. It kind of relies on having a "god hand" but it's possible.
1: pregame actions - begin with gemstone caverns on the battlefield
2: first upkeep (even an opponent's!) - exile elvish or simian spirit guide for a mana
tap caverns for blue
cast flash
put protean hulk in
hulk dies
put thassa's oracle, cephalid illusionist, and nomads en-kor into play
with thoracle trigger on the stack activate nomads en-kor targeting cephalid infinite times to mill your library
win
Even with out that perfect hand it was extremely common for games to end on turn one
yeah, t0 wins and winning at instant speed for 2 mana at any point after were fucking Brutal. Even now Borne Upon a Wind is very popular for winning at instant speed requiring so much more investment and is still very powerful. It was a miracle Flash got banned in the first place, no reason it should come off the banlist.
Yep keep flash banned please.
same with dockside, it made cEDH boring with most decks doing the same thing
@@F3A5Timagine cEDH players agreeing to a ban list for their format. Crazy idea, I know.
Another issue with Flash Hulk is that it wins through most stax effects, including things like Rule of Law. You don't cast the Hulk, so there are very few ways to preemptively stop the win other than countering the Flash or a Stifle effect.
Opt in vs opt out. It takes more effort to opt out of something that to opt in for it generally. So if the reasoning for unbanning a card is rule 0 can take care of it if the table doesn’t like that style I’d rather see the reverse where people rule 0 it into their games instead of rule 0 it out of their games.
Absolutely this.
Perfect reply
Describes my feelings exactly
I haven't watched the episode yet, but I definitely like this idea. I also wouldn't hate also giving cEDH their own ban list, and let them be their own thing. They kind of are already tbh.
Yeah just practically speaking, asking to add in a banned card is easier than having to take one out and find a sub
I dont think the goal is to make rule 0 easier and more frictionless, if it was than i would agree, but i think its much harder to convince strangers to let you play something on the ban list than it is to ask a stranger not to play something legal but toxic, and in the reality where they are partial to banning something on the fringe of toxic it makes rule 0 conversations less frequent but more difficult for the side that would have to initiate
It kinda shows how rarely you play in an lgs with strangers if you think just having that rule 0 chat will solve power level issues
communication skill issue, and even if youre good at communicating with fellow lgs players, that doesnt guarantee good games 100% of the time, nothing will, especially not more bans - just the way life is. toughen up and deal with it
@@Metherelsaying "skill issue" and "deal with it" is completely unhelpful and also doesn't address the point raised. It is a generic response that shuts dialogue down instead of clarifying it.
@@Metherel”oh I forgot I had rhystic study in this deck” is a sentence that I hear from people I only play with once at my lgs. I would say that the bracket system is helpful but we can’t help but have a need for bans when people will lie to get an edge in a casual format.
@@TingusPingus269or don’t care if somebody has a rhystic study? It’s just a card draw spell that doesn’t spike the power level of your deck.
@@TingusPingus269 what do you mean, you solved your own problem right there - you only play with them once. whats the issue, you dont play with them again? no amount of bans will guarantee you have good games
Anyone arguing to unban Tolarian Academy or Channel or Tinker are either nuts, have never actually seen a game with these cards, or trolls. Moreover, anyone comparing Tolarian Academy to Gaea’s Cradle or Serra’s Sanctum or Nykthos… You’re comparing BB guns to a bazooka. Creature decks and Enchantment decks require the creatures and enchantments to do things. Artifact decks require the artifacts… be artifacts.
plus, everything makes treasures now
Yeah like Gaea's Cradle teeters on the edge super hard of being too good. Academy is way easier to exploit, and makes arguably more valuable mana type as it's in a color that dosen't make massive mana production as easy as green an without cradle. And it was easier to exploit before things like treasure, food, and clues came along. With mass production of those now available it's even easier.
Not to mention that if people could go to Tolarian Academy Prof would lose his job.
Cradle also just requires the creatures to be creatures, especially now that creatures are so good on their own now. Enchantments are at least harder to be good just on their own.
@@braddorcas9363 Decks with Cradle or Sanctum or Nykthos are decks that have that land. Decks containing Academy are ACADEMY decks.
I think Iona is the biggest one I disagree with... yeah, it's a 9-mana angel, but there's a fundamental difference between it and other big angels like Avacyn and Serra's Emissary -- the latter are win-cons for your deck, and do powerful stuff for you, but still leave room for interaction and gameplay. Iona is not a wincon, it points to one player and says "you're not allowed to play the game anymore". Like sure, giving yourself and your creatures protection from a card type of your choice is strong... but it still allows your opponents to find something else to deal with the board, or if they can't deal with you, at least to continue playing cards to affect their other opponents or build their own board. Same with Avacyn, making all your permanents indestructible is very strong, but exile effects like Swords and Farewell still exist, and if you can go wider than them or go taller with trample, you can still interact with them meaningfully. Meanwhile, if you play Iona against a mono-color deck, they are literally just sitting there not playing magic anymore. And nobody else at the table is incentivized to help deal with that problem, since they are either benefitting from it (because one of their opponents was just neutralized), or are equally shut down and limited in how they can even try to deal with it in the first place. The best thing to do if somebody plays Iona and picks your color is just scoop and go find another table, which is a pretty big sign that it's not a healthy card for the format
I actually played games back when Iona was unbanned. The player playing buried alive and reanimating Iona turn 3 had a great time.. my mono black deck being locked out of the game did not.
had in a painter servant and now it no one can't play but me so yeah not a great card to unban
I had a similar experience with iona, kaalia player dropped her on turn 5 nothing crazy, but that was my game over.
just dont play a mono coloured deck into a deck that runs iona easy peasy ??? "Hey anybody running iona in their decks? I wanna play my mono coloured list" how hard was that?
@Metherel back then I was still quite new to edh, I didn't even know it was a question to ask.
Rule zero does not work at cons and at an lgs. I can’t rebuild my deck because people don’t like some of the cards I play or my power level is off.
It does work with regular play groups but if you have a play group you don’t need a ban list you can make your own.
The ban list needs to be actively managed so when I play with strangers we can sit down and play
As someone who has played at both and done so at every Magic Con (and seen it done by many others), I can assure you that Rule 0 is a very plausible and reasonable way to balance a pod. People bring multiple decks and also go searching for games that match what their appetite is. Maybe less so at an LGS, but I have never seen a major issue with rule 0 at conventions. -Jimmy
if your rule 0 conversations arent working it could be a communication issue. and some players are just gonna wanna troll games, you cant change that by just banning every offending card. roll with the punches and do your best to communicate properly youll be just fine
@@commandcast you are also a magic content creator on one of the most popular channels. rule zero convos you have are likely are not the same as others
This is the exact problem with having a ban list in the first place. It's not going to 100% cover YOUR idea of what cards are acceptable to play or not. You HAVE to have the rule 0 conversation regardless of the presence of the ban list. As someone who has traveled the world playing Magic at random LGSs, Rule 0 conversations work perfectly fine. If you "had a bad experience" it's because the game didn't go the way YOU expected it to. Remember, EVERYONE ELSE has a different definition of "fun" than you. The reality is you are going to come across cards you don't "like" quite often. Not being able to rebuild your deck that moment doesn't matter. Being able to force someone else to NOT play with cards they WANT to play with does matter. The ban list just gives people the justification to complain about someone else's fun in a format that was SPECIFICALLY designed to allow players to play with ANY card they own. That's why it's a CASUAL format. It's not suppose to matter if you win or lose... just experience the game and the wonky stuff you see happen. If you didn't have "fun" THAT game, almost always someone else did and it was their turn to have that fun. However, if you truly despise a particular card or deck, you discuss it and the social norm is that the "offending" player either switches decks or removes it. Not that moment, but when they can. Because remember, it's not about winning but playing the game.
I have the exact opposite view as you...we can't ban things to support the idea that random players should just be able to be mashed together without any foresight or planning. That's a COMPETITIVE format, not a CASUAL one, in spirit. The philosophy you're asking for should necessitate tons of bans, as we'd have to balance things before people even sit down.
I think the ban list should be left as is for a year before making any changes. The boat has been rocked, let it settle a bit.
We definitely agree the community needs time to breathe.
The format had been left to breath for 4 years
I'd agree the discussion around the ban list is premature, but for another reason: the bracket system will essentially be a system of tiered banlists. Which would mean we'd end up with a number of different Commander formats, each of which could be tuned towards a specific play experience. Once such a system is in place, there may be a place to take out "feelbad" cards, whereas in higher brackets they are explicitly part of the game.
no, now is the time to rock it all the way. If you wait a year for things to "settle" and THEN change it up? people will lose their minds. Things are changing and they should change fast and THEN settle.
Idk. Everyone already expects wizards to set a course as the new captain. If they're planning on correcting/changing course then waiting a year to do it seems like a mistake.
A lot of repeated uses of the idea that if someone plays a commander like Leovold or Braids that you can just say no. A lot of people play random pairings at commander nights at their LGS and uou cant force someone to not play Leovold or Braids. The response to just drop a round and not play is probably the worst case scenario for someone wanting to play casual commander.
Yeah, you definitely can see from this video that playing with strangers in an lgs is just not something they are used to
I have no issue telling someone they are a jerk and congrats you win without playing. hope you enjoyed the win.
Just bring back “Banned as commander”
@@jaybunny7616 that’s great, unless you have to sit for an hour or more to wait for the next match while everyone else plays.
The problem, obviously, is using "random pairings", as you're going to get pretty awful matchmaking this way given how huge the Commander card pool is. You can't shove a casual format into the trappings we'd give a competitive one, like random pairings, and then complain that the machine isn't working correctly. Commander is not a tournament format, and it doesn't make any sense to pair people up randomly.
I initially thought that the casualness with which most of the Command Zone hosts talk about avoiding problematic Commanders like Braids, Leovold, or Tergrid might have come from the privilege's of their celebrity within the community, but after considering it, it might be more likely to be from their living in a large city. I live in a decent sized city and regularly the choice I have to make if an opponent brings out a commander I don't want to play against isn't "Play against this or play at a different table" it's "Play against this or don't play magic tonight."
As a person who's lived in the city their entire life myself, this is such a different opinion I would have never thought about, and it's so very true.
Analogously, this also happens to people whose social skills are not too great to avoid troublesome tables, even in a big city.
"some of us magic players dont have more pods available, so ban more cards on our behalf"
@@Metherel This is a very reasonable critique!
I live on the outskirts of a town of 50k people. There are are atleast four magic shops I can drive to within 30 minutes of my house. Each shop has their own culture. One more casual, one more degenerate, etc. Get to know people and it removes the majority of the issues you are talking about. Most people will swap decks if asked nicely
@@commandcast Having the players who dont have as much player/pod variety available to them wanting to sculpt the ban list to support their personal idea of fun actually seems rather unreasonable to me
Going into my LGS to play Commander was eye-opening. Telling them I brought an upgraded precon made them switch from their turn 3 win kind of decks to turn 5 ones. Rule 0 helps, but if the culture at the store is cut throat, you better adapt and start playing more powerful stuff. You can't really refuse to play against other people's decks if there's noone else to play against.
Turn 5 wins are still god awful except very high power pods, level 9 or 10. If a game store only had these types of tryhards, I'd easily play another format.
I'm not sure if this was your goal. But this is a good argument for the ban list
@@hermodnitter3902 That's kinda the point, the other formats the store had were Pokemon and Yugioh. These guys were the only other ones playing magic on the only lgs within 200 km, so I kinda don't have other option but to try to fit in. Rejecting someone else's archetype is a luxury I just don't have.
@@Grimjr7 I don't think a ban list would have helped here, unless by that you mean we should get rid of a whole lot more cards, from rhystic studies to combo pieces like sanguine bond, exanguinate or tassa's oracle. In the end I just learned to keep more removal and counterspells on hand with mana open.
8 mana sorcery that wins the game? "Hey!? What do you expect? It's 8 mana... it's fine!"
15 drop creature that will rarely be in the command zone and can only be cheated out in a handful of ways and cannot win the game? "TOO STRONG! People may have to sacrifice lands!"
4 drop creature that will only be in the command zone and has a billion ways to accelerate into play and that also makes you sacrifice lands... "It's fine! Rule zero exists... you will have clues to sacrifice"
@jaredhuckstep20 yeah braids is a big no from me. Can literally win the game like turn 2 if you get her out
"8 mana sorcery that might win the game and can be interacted with in multiple ways"
@@FearOgreI feel like Biorhythm is a better card than Emrakul.
Let's be honest: no one is going to hard cast Emrakul and, if they do, they probably deserve to win. So you need to combo it with Through the Breach or Sneak Attack. What does it accomplish? It probably ends the game for one of your opponents and then gets sacrificed at the end of your turn, which is cool enough.
Biorhythm is a different beast though. Most green decks can reliably cast it by turn 4 and it might kill the whole table at that point. If it does not, your opponents will probably be at a low enough life total where combat will just end at least one of them.
Sure, you can counter Biorhythm. But, as early as turn 4, it's probably the best spell you can cast for 8 mana to try to win the game. And while green cannot search it, a simic commander will give you every tool to get to it.
I don't know, but I'd rather deal with Emrakul 😅
Have to agree with a lot of the sentiment in the comments. People have this ideal that you can just wave your hand and rule zero away unfun or ridiculous combos etc... but it very rarely works in person. Rule zero is genuinely a terrible way of doing this and seems to exist as a way to justify not banning things, when it should really exist as a reason TO ban things. Further, newer players have next to no idea what they dont want to play against, especially because Commander is an eternal format. If cards immediately ruin the gameplay experience, have a massive power disparity, combo with loads of cards to make game ending plays very early and very consistently etc... they should be banned by default and you should have to Rule Zero argue why you should be allowed to play the card which is too powerful/completely unfun (i.e. its a combo piece but you're running it for a different reason or some such). This is much more for the casual commander experience rather than cEDH.
On another note, a better way of describing deck power (which is being discussed currently) could go a long way to improving this regardless. It has to be a system that describes the entire deck rather than the system suggested of 'if any card of this level is in the deck the deck is of that level' - a ridiculous system which is not even slightly helpful and the only reason it would exist is so that Wizards can market their Commander precons as all equally powerful etc... because they all have at least one good card within them.
Insane to me that Jimmy thinks Griselbrand should stay banned but Emrakul should be unbanned.
The fact that it’s a 15/15 is t the issue, the issue is the annhilator 6 and inability to interact with it with the “can’t be countered” and essentially hexproof that it comes with
Have you read griselbrand? It’s significantly easier to get out early with reanimate effects as you literally cant reanimate emrakul. Griselbrand can reasonably draw you 20+ cards and put you in a position to beat the entire table where as emrakul can MAYBE take out one person if you keep attacking them
The first time I played against the new Ulamog it had Annhilator 10 (making it a 17/17) I never had an issue with Emrakul before it was banned and I don't see why it needs to be banned anymore with the reintroduction of potentially larger Annhilator.
And Griselbrand kills the entire table for the low price of 35 life.
@@Raznab Ah that new Ulamog which is far easier to interact with and doesn't give you an extra turn.
@@FearOgre True, it just exiles 1/2 of one players deck rounded up instead of taking an extra turn. I'm not saying it's not Strong, it just isn't necessarily the largest Annihilator on a Titan anymore, which was part of the reason it was banned in the first place (not the only reason, but still part of the reason).
It's important to note that recurring nightmare, unlike chthonian nightmare, doesn't have an etb, and because returning it to owner's hand is part of the cost, u essentially can't interact with it when it resolves.
Someone: *suggests cards that "will take care of themselves at tables"*
Me: Tell me you don't regularly play on Spelltable against random people without telling me you don't regularly play on Spelltable against random people.
Rule zero just doesn't work outside of your personal playgroup
@@OuterCraft maybe youre not good at communicating?
@@OuterCraft This is highly incorrect. I play across the world at random LGSs and the rule 0 conversation works perfectly fine. People across the world don't typically play cards like Urza or Winter Orb in "casual" games because of the global Rule 0 conversations. They definitely self regulate.
It may not be the case on the internet, such as spelltable, but when does regulation over anonymous platforms ever work?
If this is already happening to you, then how are a couple more cards going to change that fact? I think you might need to change the way you approach these groups, because there are already salty commanders and cards in the format, so if anything, these kinds of statements are supporting more bans.
all im getting from this comment is to stop playing on spelltable with all the other antisocials that cant make their own friends to play with
Iona needs to stay right where she is. She is so potent that people stopped building mono colored decks when she wasnt banned. It literally hinders the whole format.
just dont play a monocoloured deck into a deck with iona in it easy fix
@@mjkuehl you are greatly over estimating her impact. Also considering the amount of colourless removal we got in the format over the years she won't be doing as much as she was before which already wasn't that much.
@@MetherelYou're making assumptions about how many decks people have, are available to them on hand, can afford, or are willing to invest in.
My experience was very different from yours...I basically never saw the card. I'd argue that the overall impression, online, when she was banned was total surprise, as I don't think she was on people's radar.
@@skylounge5868 im not saying you have to have multiple decks (also if you dont want to pay money for cards you can proxy, choosing not to is a choice you make yourself) you are allowed to just not play if its going to make you very upset, nobody is forcing you
Flash being unbanned makes Oracle even more obnoxious
at this point I want oracle banned
37:36 I am one of those people who would really love to play with Fastbond… and because of that, I know it should stay banned.
I would love to play Fastbond...but I would use it to play Strip Mine out of my graveyard until noone else had any lands ever. Shenanigans like that is why I agree with it being banned.
@@raiserofchickens I’m pretty sure that Life from the Loam is among the 10 cards I’ve cast most in my life. Number one is probably Swords to Plowshares. 😂
If a dockside makes 10 mana turn three then everyone else must have a pretty crazy board state.
Super common in high powered games. Being last player a turn 2 Dockside can make 10 treasures.
@@avall0nNn1992 exactly, and in high powered games it was less of an issue. No one in my cEDH group had an issue with it, it was mostly those who play casual. I think in cEDH thoracle is a far bigger issue personally.
Precisely. I would cast it and get like 3-6 treasures.
I feel that the people who say "X can totally be unbannned" never played with X in the format.
I took a break from commander and only played with Dockside for a little bit and didn't see anyone really abuse it. So when I came back (crazy time to come back, i know), I heard it was getting banned. I was asking, "Why?" But after thinking about it, yeah, flickering, sacking, and reanimating. Absolutely would make it unfun to play against.
There should be an Extra Turns episode where you each build decks that include cards on your levels 3 and 4 just to see what happens
Taking Crypt and Jeweled Lotus off the ban list sends the wrong message imo
Yeah it would send a message : death threats can make em unban cards
amen, both for the death threat reason and for general trust from the community. going back on recent decisions doesn't grow trust for anyone.
Sadly this is true which has effectively takes these cards off any future discussion.
Threats aside, WotC warned the RC not to do the bans. So as the company proper they can unban at least those 2.
This is a bad take imo because dissolving the RC says way more about the harassment than unbanning the cards would. Keeping cards that you would have otherwise unbanned just to "teach the internet a lesson" is a twofold bad idea. One: you can't teach the internet a lesson and two: you punish the players who want then unbanned and had nothing to do with the toxicity. There is no reason to consider the harassment when deciding if these cards should be banned or not, exactly how harassment shouldn't be considered when initially deciding if something should be banned or not. The banlist shouldn't be influenced by pressure like that.
Talks about dockside needing to stay banned because it becomes about trying to copy or reanimate it and then says primetime should be unbanned when it was banned precisely because it became about trying to copy it, take it, or reanimate it.
There's a big difference between a game-warping 2-mana creature and a game-warping 6-mana creature. I think most 6-mana creatures printed these days warrant being copied, stolen or reanimated. - Rachel
And thinking Sylvan is fine. Lol no
He is just like the rules committee. completely hypocritical. Lets band fast mana, but not band to most common fast mana.
There both fine@@raedien
Spending 2 mana to get upwards of 4-5 mana on the low end compared to six mana for 2 lands isnt even in the same universe.
As a CEDH player keep Flash out of our games. It warps the entire thing around a single combo and 2-3 colors. It is also hard to interact with and is just a win the game if you have the two cards in play to combo off with it.
*thassa’s oracle has entered the chat*
but bro dont you hear the comments? prime time will just WARP GAMES and is WAY TOO STRONG, nobody gonna care about flash when you can get your 6 mana land tutor/ramp engine!!!
@@Metherel Prime time isn't as bad as Flash. If you have hulk in your hand and you cast flash at instant speed you get a combo that you go through your deck with abilities only happen from that point forward until you win the game. It is a better win con than Thassa's oracle demonic consultation.
@@matthewrose8002 i know im just poking fun at the players that think prime time is too strong
I like how Josh isn’t here cause he’d just say unban for basically every thing
I think they need to bring back the "Banned As Commander" section of the banned list. I feel there are a lot of cards that are a problem specifically because of how accessible they are in the command zone that are fine in the 99.
Also, can we get your opinions on the new RC members being forced to sign a Non-Disparagement Clause towards Wizards?
Real I don’t understand why banned as commander is “too confusing”
a side effect of golos being super good for any strategy is that he enables strategies that don't have good options for commanders
I agree 💯 👍
This! He was the theme x commander until wizards prints a commander to run x.
I feel like emrakuls problem is that it comes out and takes one player out but probably doesn't kill them which creates an unfun experience in general
you just described the average voltron deck experience
Why the hell should Iona be unbanned? This completely stops monocolored deck, and they can't even interact with it because their removal spells are of that color. What an INSANE take to have.
Their reasoning on most of the cards is pretty poor.
"These cards are objectively bad for the format, but should be unbanned"
huh? did i miss something? why do you want bad things in the format? I don't care if the ban list is 300 cards long; i care about playing a good game.
Yeah their philosophy was literally not banning power level but format health.
Ok someone else also caught this lol like wth are we talking about?! The formats health is more important than the banned lists health. Cards that make commander worse and overly oppressive need to stay away.
@@spoogtastic but also keep in mind wizards plans to create official power brackets, it's likely that these more spikey cards will be regulated to higher brackets of deck construction. A massive 300 card banned list along with all of these card brackets ratings is a lot
This is basically exactly my thoughts on this. They're gone. Overall they suck. There is NO reason to put them back into the game.
@@beyond.thebounds9049yea but the bracket system has tons of problems as well and i sincerly doubt it will truly moderate any better than the old power level talk
Golos is strictly on the banlist because he takes up so much of the oxygen in the room regarding 5 color commander design space. I wish they'd print a variant with the land tutor part and a more on-theme 5 color activated ability.
Instead of an activated ability, just make the casting cost WUBRG.
WUBRG for a 3/5 artifact creature scout.
When it enters, search your deck for a land card, put it on the battlefield tapped.
I feel like coalition victory and Iona is the poster child of the banlist philosophy of “we don’t ban on power level”. These are objectively unfun cards to play against (when you do). I hope they don’t come off because they make the format worse. Like sure you can whataboutism with torment of hail fire or something else but that ignores the fact that these cards just suck to play against and are already banned so why even free them. Biorhythm feels similarly
The simple presence of Iona automatically ban monodecks. Maybe it is not a powerful card by competitive standars but the ability to said to a player: "you don´t play" is reason to ban a card.
Similiar reason to Erayo. When come online have a tax to play every turn.
Biorhythm and coalition victory are fine they have high costs and can be interacted with in many ways.
Unfun is also very subjective...
@@FearOgrereason to unban nearly every card "just keep counterspell up".... nah man.
I feel like so many of the critiques cane down to “I’ve never played with the card, but I don’t see how it could be so bad.” So many of them ended up banned because Wizards couldn’t see how toxic they were either.
Golos doesn’t just ramp you/cut commander tax, but also lets you circumvent mana costs. It’s total combination that’s not great.
Gifts Ungiven isn’t powerful because it lets you search for four cards. It’s powerful because it lets you put two cards of your choice into the graveyard at instant speed.
I guess I am one of the players who would prefer a firmer hand. I know people who love to grief a table and some of these cards are making them salivate, just keep blinking sundering titan/sylvan primordial.
Yeah people who played back in the early 2010s can attest to Sundering Titan/Sylvan Primordial being absolutely miserable play experiences. The upside to unbanning them is so small compared to the downside. I also feel like Prime Time is also worth staying on the ban list.
@@djredlantern"what fo u mean this is so much fun, anyway imma blink sylvan 3 times. Oops sorry to set u back to turn 1" like people read "etb really obnoxious effect" and then go "obviously if we only fo it once its not as bad" no ones doing it just once, thats happening 4 times a turn
Don’t play with them, then.
Those cards would be the top end of most if not all Yarok the Desecrated decks. Including mine.
In fact, I'm going to buy Sundering and Sylvan. Just in case they get unbanned in the future. If they stay banned, I'm only out $2 USD.
@k9commander as a green player...do not give me sundering titan or sylvan..I will abuse the hell out of them..those that taught me to play learned quickly I am that guy without realizing it until I've got them out and see the line in game.
Funny story, my first deck was a mono black control and sundering titan was in it for the big body..then I noticed "hey I can keep popping it and bringing it back!" It was very quickly they told me not to play that deck and take it elsewhere.
Hear me out, Shaharazad under Panoptic Mirror
Now you're talking.
Yessss
Its interesting how the USA culture shows alot here, this belief that "yeah, you do what you want, I will do what I want, we will agree on what we want together" is something that literally does not exist outside the ideas realm that this belief pushes.
You played against cards that were banned and you wanted them to be banned, there is no self regulation outside of your own friend group.
Yeah command zone definitely lives in an echo chamber. An average Joe with no playgroup and goes to their lgs needs a good ban list and “just talk about it” is not always the solution.
This is highly incorrect. I play across the world at random LGSs and the rule 0 conversation works perfectly fine. People across the world don't typically play cards like Urza or Winter Orb in "casual" games because of the global Rule 0 conversations. They definitely self regulate.
I also love how Jimmy wants Mana Crypt unbanned, but then he and his playgroup rule-zero it out of the format so they don't have to deal with it and you never see it in their decks 😅
Commander is a casual format and the banlist must cater to the casual player. cEDH cannot be a consideration and "let's keep this broken card so they can play with it" is not a real argument. At the end of the day, cEDH is just commander, but pushed to its limits, so it will always adapt to the current banlist.
Defending broken cards so "cEDH players can play with them" is so backwards I cannot believe it is even a real argument
Some people don't want to be told what to do.
'Things have been unstable, let's de-stabilize them more by unbanning a whole bunch of degenerate stuff!'
Golos should remain banned. Ubiquity, sure, but once you got 7 mana (tutored out The World Tree on Golos cast facilitates this) no matter what strategy you are playing, that activated ability is better. If you want a reference, MTGGoldfish featured a Scout Typal deck once with Golos and just the ability alone destroyed the game. It’s a trap that the other generic 5c commanders don’t create, as even Kennith’s utility abilities aren’t enough to push every deck to activate them all the time.
I personally think if they could errata hullbreacher and take off the word “instead” it would be ok to take off the ban list
The part I don’t like with hullbreacher is that it stops the card draw. And replaces it with the treasures. I personally would be fine with it if it were to only tax the cards draw. Not prevent it.
Apparently the logic behind every unban is "not as good as Craterhoof" or "not as good as Thassa's Oracle" . Maybe those cards are the problem and not the bans.
Yeah but if you do that cEDH players will send you death threats and doxx you.
Also there's another thing is I can stop a crater hoof win. A Crater hoof when is still just an attacking win. There's still interaction there. Spells that just say win the game if I can't counter it there's nothing I can do.
These comparisons are just wack. Craterhoof winning against 3 40 life opponents means you had an insane board state that probably deserved the win. 8 mana sorcery after casting your 5 mana commander is not nearly the same.
Craterhoof is literally only playable in casual and it is not even the best overrun since Finale of Devastation exists.
It's hard for Craterhoof to kill the whole table, especially early in the game, but Biorhythm could easily do it by turn 3/4 😂
Sure, Craterhoof is searchable in green by other green spells, while Biorhythm is not. However, we are playing commander and all you need to do is put a simic commander in your command zone. Suddenly, you get access to a bunch of cheap tutors for an instant win button 😅
Now, will Biorhythm break the format? Probably not.
Is it an autoinclude payoff in every single green deck? Most likely
I think a lot of these proposed changes hinge on the perceived function of the ban-list, and has big implications for what should be done with it.
The Sheldon-led RC, I think, focused more on "sign posting" and "communicating about the culture of commander" through its bans compared to other groups. I think the current Command Zone discussion leans more on the "mechanical" function of cards within the culture(s) of commander, and where/how things would be expected to play out. I tend to agree with the Command Zone perspective, and think that WOTC actually has an immeasurable advantage in how it could market the *philosophy* of commander in something like a commander precon (i.e., like the card insert explaining the game, also tell the "stories" of what different player groups get out of the game - see Mark Rosewater on the types of Magic players).
It seems strange to me that "rule zero"-ing to allow "un"-cards is seen very differently than "rule zero"-ing to allow a Mana Crypt. Most commentary (at least that I hear) seems to indicate that Mana Crypt generally contributes negatively to game balance outside of a certain type of commander game, but that having it banned prevents it from being used where it could/should exist. I think WOTC is looking to brackets to somewhat deal with this fractionation of what people want from a game of commander, but I think its more of a "personality assessment" problem than a "power-level" problem.
Rachel had a good quote in a recent episode to the effect of "Commander is closer to DnD than it is Modern" - and I think that is very true *of certain casual groups*. cEDH is arguably much closer to Modern as a "sub-culture" than the precon "sub-culture".
Understanding what players/clusters of different players want out of the game is arguably going to be a necessary pre-condition for a well-functioning banlist, and it is somewhat disheartening to hear in recent episodes that WOTC (among others) don't seem to have a clear picture on what people want but the conversation moves past that almost immediately to what should be done "for the monolithic community".
Biorhythm in elfball.
Sure Biorhythm won't see play in every green deck, but it will see play in EVERY elf deck. The average elf deck has 8 mana by turns 3-5. Depending on the draws. The highly tuned ones have it turn 3.
fuck ya! lets get some biorhythms going!
Shaman of Forgotten Ways already does this and doesn't see play at all.
@@HollowPlace
Magus of the Balance is legal in commander. Balance is not. The creature and the Sorcery are not the same.
Elfballs already win by turn 4 or something stupid like that
@@HollowPlace i love my shaman of forgotten ways in mono green omnath
Just do a Game Knights with your proposed Banned List. Have Jimmy, Josh, Rachel, and The Professor. Then have a discussion about the impact the previously banned cards had.
Agreed. Sometimes people need to get spanked a few times with banned cards to understand why they got put on the list in the first place.
i'd argue have the three of them and someone who is a better builder than them (no offense prof) play. put kibler or something on and they might reconsider
@@JaceBeleren-d3c I get your point, but I also think that having a Kibler-tier player gives people the out of assuming the cards are fine and he's just better. Some of the banned cards allow for entirely average skill players to do silly things, and - no offense to the main crew - their level of play is a good bit closer to the average player than hall of famers.
No unbans for me. Just an opinion: Last week, we said "commander is a dark room, don't just run blindly." This week, we are saying "it would be fun to unban 20~ cards." There are tons of cards on that list I would love to play, but my problem is:
1. Cards getting compared to non-banned cards: Having more than one of an effect builds consistency. We do not need more consistent toxicity because it encourages that as an archetype. Cards should not just be unbanned on the logic of "eh, why not? we have X already." I have played games where every spell I played was countered. I do not need two Jin Gitaxias.
2. A huge chunk of cards are on this list because they encourage unfun things. This is not adding a pool of fun, silly antics with new exciting brews. I have played a lot of games against stuff like mana drain, armageddon, stasis, no mercy, the abyss, and I could go on and on. My experience does not tell me that adding more poisonous stuff like Iona, Sundering Titan, Emrakul, Braids, etc is suddenly going to be great for the format and make my games better.
You keep saying that the point here is to "improve the banlist", but...shouldn't the point be to improve the format? Improve people's games?
Edit: grammar
I don't want to come off as rude I hope you understand that this comes from a place of respect
I've always understood the banlist as setting a bar for expectations for people going to a FNM or commander night at a game store and playing games with strangers. A lot of the cards you are saying you think could or should come off the banlist would or could make that experience worse.
I don't understand these:
How is Iona a win con it just stops a person from playing while Griselbrand is actually a win con
Leovold is Hullbreacher in the command zone but swap mana for card draw
Biorhythmn 8 mana win con* coalition victory 8 mana win con Griselbrand 8 mana win con
Also you've said before that you have your own house banlist and mana crypt is on it so that feels very weird
"You can just remove it" that is not a fair statement because you are also calling for the unban of cards that you can't remove in Iona
Yawgmoth's Bargin is stronger then Griselbrand. 2 less black mana, 1 card 1 life and as an enchantment its harder to remove. This is definitely more up for debate but that's how I see it.
"People aren't really gonna play it" so why take it off the list if not many people want to or will play it and the card is problematic?
You said that 3 mana Narset as a commander would be miserable but that's what Leovold is in 3 colors
Also you said that if people have a high powered pod they should be allowed to play these cards. They can. If you are in a pod with friends its very easy for your group to have your own banlist. Like I mentioned earlier you have a house banlist for Game Knights.
Maybe I grossly misunderstand what the banlist is about but as I stated I've always understood the banlist as setting a bar for expectations for people going to a FNM or commander night at a game store. This feels very out of touch and i hope you can see where I'm coming from also it feels weird not having josh in the video and I feel like this podcast could have been better if you had more people on to talk.
For anyone that read this thank you so much and have fun
well done you speaking FACT !!!!!
Lets be honest, a lot of the cards that were suggested to be unbanned would be terrible for pick up games at an LGS. It would definitely need the help of something like the bracket system. If I go to my LGS for commander night and a guy want to play Braids, it's not as easy as just telling them 'no thanks'. The whole pod could tell that guy 'no', and it wouldn't matter.
Why not?
The way I see it, the problem comes when you say no and the other two say yes. If all 3 of you say no and that one player refuses to change or borrow decks, play a 3 player game without them.
what do you mean? just because braids player doesnt listen to you doesnt mean you have to listen to him just find a new 4th or play a 3 man if youre gonna tilt that hard (over a commander thats less oppressive than tergrid tho?)
@@Metherel most LGSs randomly assign pods, you can't really choose who you play with. And you can't exclude that person either since he paid the entry
@@Takadox so then you also should expect to play against some cards you dont want to see, because if you know that youre the kind of player that will tilt over seeing cards you dont enjoy YOU WOULDNT BE QUEUING GAMES WITH RANDOMS right?
Yes, they could take off a bunch of cards from the ban list. But the problem is something Rachel said in a previous episode discussing the bans: if you are expected to have a conversation before the game of which cards you can, cannot, should, or should not play with... ALL of those cards are on the chopping block, not the other way around. Rachel only mentioned the first half, but the second half where each and every card that has to be discussed beforehand a game is 100% a candidate to be banned.
So WotC shouldn't undo a single ban as it is. The cards that were banned should have been banned and they were for good reasons, namely because they made the format worse. If Sol Ring only exists to this day because it is a commander staple, then a better Sol Ring that ISN'T a commander staple shouldn't be allowed to be played. So no, none of the bans were bad, and all of the bans, as they stand right now, should be upheld.
And Sol Ring should be banned. 🙂
I think a ban lost should be for exclusively cedh. There’s plenty of cards that aren’t banned that our table agrees not to play like grave pact or craterhoof because none of us enjoy what it does to the game. (Not saying they’re broken just unfun in our agreed opinion) cedh is the most high powered decks you can put together with what cards are available. I think if wizards focused on making a ceiling for that then other casual players can have a rule zero conversion about what they don’t want to play with or against and the ban list keeps the most egregious things out of the game for everyone
I really hope they stop thinking we are too dumb to understand a “banned as companion” “banned as commander” concept. Lutri would be a super fun commander
Just ban companion as a mechanic in EDH
@@Azuth65 Careful friend that makes too much sense.
@@sir_quirkus7206 agreed, I really don't get why they think having a "banned as companion" list would be too complicated
The stated problem with banned as a companion/banned as a commander is not that the community is too dumb to understand it. It's that making a separate ban list to accommodate for approximately 5 cards that warrant it (Rofellos, Braids, Leovold, Erayo, Golos) is not worth it, especially when 3 of those 5 cards create negative play patterns from the 99 as well and could reasonably be left on the regular ban list. - Rachel
@@commandcast In that case I don't see a problem. If the banned as companion list had 2-5 cards (depending on if some are on the regular banned list) then it would not be a huge list for players to remember and since companion is rarely used (I don't believe it was a popular mechanic) it is not a list that will need to be discussed or updated very often.
So, Hullbreecher is a 1 without discussion, but Leovold is an easy 3? Sure, there are differences between the two, stopping card draw is worse than stopping card draw and replacing them with treasures for the player playing it, but both these cards were banned for the same playpattern. The auxiliary reasons for why they in particular got banned is different, but not even discussing Hullbreecher and then being so low on Leovold feels off. I played quite a lot against Leovold. I would much rather see Hullbreecher unbanned before Leo
Lutri should just be banned as companion. It’s not an overpowered card in the 99 at all… but I want to play it in my new Bria deck because it’s an on-theme Otter.
Companion just blanket shouldn't be a thing in commander
Rule zero covers this quite well.
Easiest rule 0 in the world. Nobody will object to lutri in the 99.
I'm on a pretty solid 4 for jeweled and crypt. Having the option to play them is awesome to me. Letting em be band-aids for clunky decks and highly costed commanders. I think the easiest rule 0 conversation to have is fast mana imho, they shouldn't be completely barred off
Sylvan Primordial can destroy lands and you ramp 3.
The game only revolves around flickering, reanimating and copying Sylvan Primordial if it is in the game.
sounds like a fun minigame tbh
@@Metherelhow many times do you want to play that mini game? 1? 2? 10?
@@CA-zn8hu yeah probably like 5 or something then it would get old and i would wanna see some different decks. same with a lot of gameplans that exist currently
@@Metherel mmmkay. The sylvan primordial and even primeval titan games back in the day were ALL like that. Casually speaking. Even at the junior college i played at. People had creature tutors and copy effects.
@@Metherel every blue deck playing Bribery for primeval titan. Every ugx deck playing it for sylvan primordial after prime time was banned.
No joke, primeval titan was the best blue creature in commander. As dumb as that sounds.
A lot of the points you made about the banned Legendary creatures seem to point that returning to "banned as commander" would be the safest way to unban many of those (and address currently legal legendary creatures that are fine in the 99 but miserable in the CZ). Talks of it being too complicated for players having to remember 2 ban lists kinda go moot when you consider the bracket system they're currently suggesting which already seems 10 times more complicated for non-enfranchised players than saying "Golos is ok in your deck, just not as your commander".
Golos is NOT OK in any part of a deck. IMO
Coalition Victory remains a solid 1 in my eyes, because of a few factors.
First, it has zero opportunity cost. Any 5C commander can and should run the card, it's an instant staple and you don't have to add or remove a single card in your deck to make it work. For a lot of commanders all you need is two lands and you commander. That's nothing. I don't think the format benefits from having more auto-include cards that should be there by default.
Second, is that because it has no real cost, it changes how the table is going to react to the 5C player's board. Suddenly, they can threaten game by having their commander out and a bunch of mana, so the correct play is to target that player and nuke their commander on the chance CV is in their hand. With friends, yeah you can know their deck and know if CV is in there or not, but against strangers? Unless you want to start asking "Hey do you run the insta include card?" against everybody, the safe bet is to treat a 5C commander the same way you'd treat an Aristocrat Deck's Altar or a Spellslinger deck's un-live fishbowl. Or the huge feelbad of players who don't know CV that will ask "what do you mean you just win?", because this card WILL be used by casuals against other casuals (again, staple with no opportunity cost).
I think that CV would demonstrably lead to more miserable 5C games for a card that literally adds nothing to the format. It's the least interesting or fun effect possible, an instant include that doesn't reward cool deckbuilding, and will just lead to worse games when playing against strangers. Casuals are going to find it miserable and enfranchised players will find it both boring and will lead to worse games against 5C decks regardless of it they have CV in hand or not.
eh I have basically the same point of view of Cyclonic Rift. "Oh cool. Guess you either instantly win next/this turn or I spend the next turn playing as many mana rocks as I can and discarding to hand size." It's a really annoying card you functionally CAN'T play around without shutting someone out or always holding up a counterspell. It's just an unfun card..
Victory also limits future design and is way stronger now than when it was originally banned thanks to Omo and the new green Overlord. Plus triomes! It's so easy to do now.
This is exactly right. On the face of it cv doesn't look nearly bad enough to ban but there is so much more to it that your articulated very well.
If you keep losing and losing game after game to CV, your deck is trash and you really should reevaluate your choices.
A 5 color commander plus an 8 mana spell winning the game isn't really winning out of nowhere. Insurrection often wins without even needing your commander in play, and removing just one creature doesn't stop it from having any effect.
If your turn 3 Dockside makes 10 treasures then obviously your opponents were doing a lot. To say that's "a non game" is actually incredulous. Dockside being banned does make sense, but c'mon guys let's be real if you are making tons of treasures your opponents were going hard too
Wait a second. You definitely want Hullbreacher to stay banned but you'd be open for Leovold to be unbanned?
Just like them being okay with all of black and Green's tutors but God forbid Blue get Tinker 🤦🏽
1:29:56 - I think WotC pushes Oathbreaker more to not have to truly make this decision. Have both formats exist and be healthy and they (and players) get the best of both worlds.
You needed to preface with the possibility of WotC reversing the removal of "banned as commander" as a high possibility seeing as how dual commander is now a solely WotC controlled format and banned as commander exists in that format.
"does this card contribute to a positive gameplay experience" is the most vague and meaningless metric to use for banning cards.
I'm not sure why there is no discussion of roughly what Tier these cards should be. I think that could even influence whether some cards should be unbanned, like Balance. It's a very powerful card, but if it is unbanned and placed in Tier IV, then playing against decks with it included will be an easy decision to make. Same could be said for Braids and such.
Honestly, I thought that's what the video was going to be.
I play in a pod where we only just started playing commander abiding by the ban list and I can say this. Out of all the cards we can actually access emrukel is both the biggest and not biggest problem in that list. It’s ability to be cheated out in so many different ways as well as the generic mana exploitation you can do to make 15 mana seem null and void is a problem, annhilator 6 is very meaningful for most boards unless your playing tokens or enchantress. It’s come to the point now where ornithopter of paradise is a staple in every deck just so we can assign it as a blocker and tap at the block step to be able to fire off a wrath.
I would guess that the majority of people that think Primeval Titan is fine to unban didn't play EDH back when it was legal. So so so many games turned into: cast Primeval, blink Primeval, clone Primeval, reanimate someone else's Primeval, etc. etc. etc. So many games just turned into everyone trying to get as many Primeval triggers as possible. You put it in every deck that plays green. Please WoTC do not unban that card.
Times have changed. Primeval would be good, but not as good as it was.
Yeah card is absurd. Rofellos was my first cmdr. Titan did work
@@Hapkins-le6xf Turn 1: Swamp, dark ritual, Entomb Primeval to the yard, Shallow Grave it back to play for 2 free lands then smack an opponent with a hasted Titan for another 2 free land. You're on 5 mana going in to turn 2 from a 4 card opening hand. Hold on to or draw in to a Reanimate, a Dread Return, an Unburial Rites, Animate Dead, Necromancy or any other of the cheap grave return cards, and that's all she wrote. That's why Titan needs to stay banned.
@raiserofchickens you can't be serious. "In a situation where you get a perfect hand prime time is too strong so keep it banned." Apply that same logic to every card.
All these arguments for unbanning cards just seem to constantly boil down to playing solitaire in a vaccum as if some of these cards aren’t just defacto reanimate/bribery targets in people’s decks…
I think that the solution to someone these cards such a Braids is to simply bring back Banned as Commander. You solve the problem with it being in the zone and as mentioned it's not a problem in the 99.
Iona should be a 1.
i heard "fine in the 99" several times in the video, so that brings me to a question. Do you think the banlist should be split into "banned" and "banned as commander" ? since some cards would probably not be a problem if they're not the commander.
They kind of answered this question. I don't agree with their answer but they basically answered it when they brought up lutri. That making a separate list Is unnecessary or could be confusing or whatever. I disagree because a singular list can have multiple sections that separate. It doesn't have to be multiple lists. It can just be one list that is broken into multiple sections.
I'm pretty sure part of the reason Iona was banned was because they unbanned painters servant at the same time, and that combo just says I'm the only one who gets to play
There was a minority of players that wanted Iona banned. The RC was considering unbanning Painter's Servant. This was essentially a case of two birds with one stone.
@k9commander ok, I just knew it happened at the same time. I just wasn't sure if they were directly linked
Golos was banned bc if u wanted a 5 color deck, you had to actively choose not to play the best 5 color commander, it was a generic ramp spell for colorless and u get to cast 3 things typically for free. Think about all 5 color commanders, and then think how many of them are for a very specific mechanic, or are just very medium at most things, golos is ramp in any deck and free casts, no 5 color deck would turn that down unless they realeased another mander specifically for the niche of that deck. Not to mention what golos does to deck building, since u get to cast stuff for free, almost every golos deck just devolves into "good stuff" and its not fun to play against 17k "different" golos lists
45:42 Gifts Ungiven has the words "up to" where intuition does not, which is a big part of the difference. In some formats, Gifts is read as "Search your library for 2 cards and put them in your graveyard" which is a line that Intuition cannot take since it must find three cards. For graveyard combo decks Gifts is a much stronger card. That said I don't think Commander is going to be a format that really needs to keep it banned, perhaps I would put it at a 3 though rather than a 4 considering that difference.
Jeez… Jimmy just wants everything unbanned. You guys know tons of shops (and Magic online, spelltable, etc) pair people randomly, right? You don’t always get to choose what you don’t want to play- which is why a lot of these are banned.
Adding, now that I’m further: primeval titan, sundering titan, and sylvan titan are banned because they are blink targets and the entire game revolves around animating, stealing, or cloning them. They create awful feel bads. Did you not play when they were all legal?
Adding, now that I’m further: primeval titan, sundering titan, and sylvan titan are banned because they are blink targets and the entire game revolves around animating, stealing, or cloning them. They create awful feel bads. Did you not play when they were all legal?
Also, unbanning anything from the recent ban only encourages the horrible people who were threatening the RC and giving them what they wanted. That’s an awful precedent to set because they WILL repeat those actions next time they don’t like something. Have some foresight 🤦🏻♀️
@@SkyeSpiderThank you. I feel like actual thought was lacking with a lot of these takes. The point of the format is to make it more diverse not less. Homogenizing deck lists is what unbanning these cards does. People arguing that “oh they wouldn’t be that big a deal now” are talking from a cEDH grind set and that’s a part of this problem people aren’t discussing seemingly at all.
You've established that you are skeptical of the bracket system, but I think its a little strange to have this banlist discussion without accounting for it.
Right now unbanning a card is a direct ticket to "play this card in any setting you want, until you find out its Rule Zero's there".
That is a significantly more dangerous proposition than
"We are unbanning this card and placing it in bracket 4. It is incredibly powerful and/or conducive to unfun game states, but it is not entirely out of band with other currently legal cards that also tread into that criteria but are just widely known to be Rule Zero'd out of the format that are also being placed in bracket 4."
Emrakul was probably the best example here. Rachel had a reasonable argument that its unlike ThOracle in that casual players would want to play it, and for that reason it should maybe stay banned. But putting it in bracket 4 may be a suitable flag to wave away casual players from trying it.
I second this. It's big sad that they didn't talk about the Tier system at all, because I think it leads to an argument to unban more cards than they said while also leading to better explanations for why they should or shouldn't be unbanned.
Thought the same thing. Then again, they are professional content creators. Maybe they saw an opportunity to milk the same topic twice ;)
yes the wave of unbannings goes hand-in-hand with the new tier system a lot of players are forgetting. tier system should mean lots more cards get unbanned and stay as T4 cards
Because being in bracket 4 really doesnt mean anything. Nothing stops you from playing 4s against 3s. And people have a much harder time saying no to a legal card that has a warning label than a banned card
@@donb7519 hard disagree here. It will be very easy for people to say they won't play against 4's with their less powerful decks. It makes having a rule 0 conversation actually possible and kinda the default, imo.
Jimmys arguement, "ive been slapping people since i started but now you tell me its banned and i think it can be unbanned" 😂 Playing with very strong cards for no time or since day 1 doesnt change the effect the card has on the format. I just dont like thr argument of well we have been playing with it so its prolly fine.
Jeweled lotus is one use man’s that can only be used to cast a commander. That isn’t even close to broken.
Sol Ring isn't a problem card. The difference between Sol Ring and Mana Crypt is availability. It is far more likely for the average person to get multiple copies of Sol Ring than getting one copy of Mana Crypt. Because Sol Ring is so readily available, it puts everyone at the same level.
just play pauper commander if budget is such a big issue for you
@@Methereljust rule 0 in Mana Crypt in your playgroup if it is so important for you…
@@HarryW83 proxying or playing budget commander solves your own issue without effecting anybody else, banning expensive cards effects many many other players
If you spent 8 mana to win the game and no one can stop you then you deserve the win. That's how i feel about it
but if you spent it in 3 turn ? you feel again right about it ? bc it can totally happen 8 mana in 3 turn easy
Free Prime Time!
I'm glad you addressed the "What does unbanning this card add to the format?" arguments.
I am a lands mage and would love to have prime time in EDH but I do believe that even now prime time is too strong, and would be an auto include in every green deck.
@@F3A5T Prime Time's ban is a relic of an older era of Commander. I have no doubt midrange green decks and land decks would still run Prime Time, but not all decks are midrange. Aggro decks, combo decks, tribal decks, control decks, etc have stronger plays for six mana.
@@imaginarymatteryea like reanimating someone else primetime to fetch urborg coffers in mono black reanimator. Or stealing it in a control deck. Or using at as one of your few non tribal creatures in a tribal deck.
@@imaginarymatterare aggro decks a think in commander?
I'm personally on the unban Golos train. I don't think format boredom will become a problem with him, since if people are getting bored of him they can just switch to a different commander. As you also mentioned, he's not a specific commander which I think will turn many new players away. Golos, to me, was always a commander that you could run as commander in an unsupported archetype until WotC printed a commander for it. Also, I feel that if Morophon exists, Golos can as well.
I think it is not just about being bored of playing him as your commander, but also playing against him. This would happen often when he was popular. He is arguably worse (from fatigue standpoint) than other popular commanders since he is wubrg + colorless, he can potentially be played in every single deck (in cz).
Golos is a more powerful dragon commander than ur-dragon. Golos is the best non cEDH commander for every and all archetypes. The best mill deck is golos, the best +1 counters deck is golos, the best aggro deck is golos, the best control deck is golos. Literally take any precon, slap in golos and world tree, the deck just got way stronger. Golos is mana ramp, card draw, and cheating mana cost all in 1 package.
With the bracket system, they would essentially be creating X number of new formats each with their own ban list, as all the cards in higher brackets are “not legal” in that bracket. This makes the current ban list almost useless as some of the cards would be ok in cEDH but not lower. Those cards could just go in that bracket, save for the few cards that are deemed unhealthy for both casual and cEDH, in which case each sub format now has essentially 2 ban lists to keep up with.
No … that’s not how
It will work… your deck would have a total score and that would dictate the 1-4 ranking … like you could put one or two power 4 cards and still have a power 2 deck.
Or, maybe people just use it as a tool to give you context to the contents of the decks and you can use that information however you want. Currently, when someone says their deck is an 8 and you say your deck is a 5, is there anything stopping you from still playing with your 5? I would hope not, and if that's the case, then that is exactly how it will continue to work with the brackets. Just because they classify things into brackets doesn't mean you cannot mix brackets. It's a casual format, do whatever you want. Pit your bracket 1 deck against a player that has a bracket 4, nothing is stopping you.
@@thetogtube2 that's not how it works if you read the article. Your deck's Tier is equal to its highest tier card, not based off an average. It's like the different usage categories in competitive Pokémon
@@thetogtube2Not according to Gavin Verhey in their initial talk about the system. He explicitly said if your deck has even a single top tier card in it, that’s the tier of your deck.
@@jakosky1 But again, as I said before, this is a casual format and you can just ignore the brackets. It's not a strict structure that make a WotC staff member stop you from playing. A judge (ex judge I guess since our program ended last year) isn't going to walk up and stop your game from happening. It is not four separate ban lists. Just play the game how you currently are, mix power levels just as we all do now. No one will stop you from doing that.
I don't understand the communal need to un-ban cards that will not add to the format or create more positive experiences and games. If our only criteria is "it's not as bad as it used to be" that doesn't mean it will make better games, so why are we even having this conversation? What are we gaining by "making the banlist better?"
The better conversation to have is definitely what cards should continue to get banned to create better games.
26:55
15 squirrels with reach: Hold my nuts
You'll likely need 21 squirrels since you're sacrificing 6 permanents. So you're only off by 40%
@@Discollama217 no way, I'm sacrificing everything but my 15 deadly squirrels
@@Discollama217 This guy would rather have 6 lands than 15 squirrels lmao
The "broken" play patterns with Gifts aren't usually the ones where you choose 4. If you choose only 2 cards from your deck, the opponent no longer has a choice in the matter--you're effectively sending any two cards of your choice to the graveyard.
they know this game inside and out....prints nadu
That happened because of communication with the RC. Nadu was originally going to give all your spells Flash. RC said "we're worried about this because it's half a Prophet of Kruphix." Then it was changed by WotC to try to preserve commander. It ended up breaking multiple formats. Something like that should /never/ happen again. An outside group should never have influence on what cards are printed in this game in that kind of way.
Prints grievous wound
Prints Leyline of Resonance
Prints Maddening Cacophony.
They know how to make money*
@@isidoreaerys8745 you are the worst type of magic player... nothing is wrong with any of those cards. LOL
Golos ramps every time you cast him, his abillity adds so much value that even janky decks can outvalue most casual ones, never saw a golos deck underperform tbh. Also its another autowin with infinite mana commander, we have enough of those I think.
Exproriate is much more powerful than Biorhythm and not banned.
Ban "Expropriate".
While limited resources is a bridge too far for EDH, I would very much like to see an updated version of the card that is right-sized for EDH. In the right kind of 'fair' deck, it or something like restore balance or balancing act are perfectly fine to level-set the game when someone turbo ramps ahead. Something like force-sacrifice down to 8 lands and disallow playing/putting of lands into play if you already have 8 in play would be a dream to see. Green turbo-ramp has no natural 'fair' counter that doesn't immediately create salt with most tables. Land destruction, stax, no searching libraries and other forms of resource denial are met with a dirty side eye but when an opponent resolves their 5th ramp effect the lead is typically too great to combat without the game becoming arch enemy. Wild we live in a world where folks think prime-time is perfectly fair and balanced magic but *any* "balance" effect is the devil incarnate. There is disparity between the number of tools blessed as 'allowable' to each of the colors in EDH.
Great video, I thought the contention when talking about Emrakul was interesting in regards to wanting to play it but not wanting to play against it. I think a lot of splashy impactful cards feel the same. Some others that come to mind are Void Winnower, Avacyn (usually in combination with Armageddon, mass wipes etc) omniscience and many more. I think Emrakul and most of the other cards should come off the ban list. There's a lot of wildly powerful stuff in the format and I feel like if we had in depth conversations about cards that are currently unbanned the same we there was a conversation about Emrakul, there would be a lot of questions about weather cards should be legal or are fun enough for the format. Also the contention of looking at biorythm and coalition victory as 8 mana win the game being fine but then why isn't Emrakul a 4 for the same reason?
Also Golos feels like such a bizarre ban to me. I'd argue that Golos has more creativity than not. The argument of homogenization feels mute to me for the card. Having Golos banned feels reminiscent of solo play RPG games having really high cost for respecs. Like who is this actually serving having it banned. If someone wants to build Golos does it really have that much of an effect on other players. Just let people play it if they want to have a generic good 5 color commander.
He was the defacto best WUBRG commander, cheated on commander tax, and gave you free stuff while being generic to cast and fixed your mana for you. Golos was *everywhere* and deserved a ban.
I used to go to an LGS with easily 4+ pods going at one time and it was never hard to find a game with different people. I played against golos 1 out of every 3 games because like 7 people had built it. it was everywhere
Golos has been banned in most every format and for good reason. Way too cheesy!
The only scenario that i would support Mana Crypt being unbanned, would be it getting reprinted as much as sol ring.
I definitely believe it should be reprinted on the same level. I've never had a problem playing against Crypt. Most of my play group had it in multiple decks. I was the only one that didn't and just after I finally do, it gets banned lol. I enjoyed getting players to die to Crypt
Fair.
Personally Mana Crypt has lost me more games than it's ever helped me win.
56:49 the biggest reason for me to keep Crypt and Lotus banned, is to stick it to the idiots that thought it was necessary to start threaten people over pieces of cardboard. If you can’t play nice, you don’t to play at all. In Dutch we say: “It’s your own fault, big bump!”…
The opening to that Rendmaw ad read might be the funniest thing I've seen come out of this channel. As a Rendmaw player, I feel seen, my opponents never like the birds.
As a strictly casual player there are very few cards that I think could be unbanned, in general I agree with the ban list HOWEVER I have a slew of suggestions on things to ADD to the ban list for promoting unfun gameplay 😂
Curious. What cards would you put in the list as someone who plays casually because this aspect of play or idk the literal nature/heart of the format is being forgotten in all of these discussions.
That’s why they are adding 4 power levels so an extensive ban list isn’t necessary but with that said you’ll have trouble finding games at the lowest power level
Classic Tox-Salt-Keeper take
@@bqing87
Gravepact
Aura of Silence
Anything with Eminance
Winter Orb
This is just a few things off of the top of my head.
@@dealinoutdevon5498
I have a regular pod to play with I'm not worried about finding games with random people
A lot of cards on the banlist are fun for cedh. Yes, they should match the bracket system, not just for commander because the trouble with power 1 through 10 is this depends on how fast your deck wins go in the old power system with made slow 7 mid ter 7 high-powered 7 so we have to put in the new bracket system as well because then will know if the bracket system will really work
Because u have an edh high-powered edh cedh old power scale did not work because it turned a lot of decks into a 7, so the bracket system should work for each bracket
55:27 Rachel with the correct take and Jimmy not so much. We do NOT reward threatening behavior, full stop. Unbanning those 4 cards ever will embolden those abusive people.
the alleged, what, 3? people who sent in threats? i have yet to see ANYBODY threaten anyone on ANY comment, video, thread, discussion. i HAVE seen thousands bemoan the bans because they enjoy playing with those cards. are you so blinded by spite that you would rather stick it to the insanely small number of bad apples than to listen to the opinions of the masses?
Disagree. Let us play with the cards we bought in the environments we know the cards are okay in. The death threat nonsense was completely overboard from those individuals, but dont punish real mtg players due to a couple bad apples. RC shouldve never been in charge, they were doing such a good job staying mostly uninvolved.
@AlexMTG_ super annoying and bad take.
90% of the people who want the cards unbanned didn't send any death threats.
For that matter, not even one was proven to even happen.
@@TheBuspusThen just rule zero them back in! Unless you're ok with the threats. Are you?
@@L_Zant super annoying and bad take? Apparently not, by these numbers. Maybe trust the folks making these decisions. They did just fine for like 20 years until the rabble got too unruly. Format is better with the 4 gone 💁♂️
I have always preferred the approach of fewer bans but more pre-game (rule 0) conversations. MTG is about friends having fun (or me crying alone), the most important aspect should be whether or not your playgroup is having fun.
Someone in my playgroup would only play Golos as a commander because he thought it was fun, which was fine, except for the fact that he would always hit the blink spells that allowed him to fetch a land from his deck and reactivate Golos on the same turn. It caused long games that had no conclusive end until hours later, making it not fun for everyone else. To this day, he is still chanting unban Golos.
Most banned cards are only fun for exactly the person playing them
I've not seen anyone discussing ban lists understand that Golos is banned because he's "nearly" tax free. His enters ability gets you 50% commander tax rebate.
@@ticklemeozmoYuriko bypasses Commander tax entirely and is not banned.
@Dragon_Fyre Golos enables access to 5 colors and has no deck building requirements.
He fixes any color you need for colorless and you always have access. He is so versatile it's almost better to run him a the commander than other options for a lot of strategies.
Yuriko is very good but much more restrictive, they requires a creature to attack and be unblocked.
This means the deck needs to dedicate a lot of space to that. While yuriko avoids commander tax, it's not with cost.
The gameplan is very telegraphed and has many points to interact to deny it.
Powerful yes but not banworthy while golos is
@@Dragon_Fyre Yuriko doesn't have another option of playing "3 cards for free" from the top of your library. It's not about 1 effect, it's the combination of both. Golos gives opponents a choice, kill me and I'll just replay him OR 3 cards free. Yuriko must be unblocked to ninjitsu in.
A 2 for Golos and a 4 for Iona is crazy to me lol but everyone is entitled to their opinion