In the late 1990s, Adam Staley developed a fan-created version of Magic: The Gathering known as Elder Dragon Highlander. As indicated by the name, this version of the game was inspired by the movie Highlander. Staley took the line “there can only be one” from the title rather literally, making it so that there could only be one of any given card type in a deck.
In 2004, Sheldon Menery wrote an article after witnessing Staley playing the format. Menery, a level five competitive Magic judge, took the idea with him on the Magic Pro Tour, tweaking and changing the format until it resembled something close to the version of Commander that we play today. After playing the format with Scott Larabee, the Pro Tour manager for Wizards of the Coast at the time, in 2005, he and Menery, along with fellow judges Gavin Duggan and Duncan McGregor, created an official rules committee for the format, with Wizards of the Coast themselves releasing products centered around the format starting in 2011.
Menery passed away in 2023, but more and more people joined the official Commander Rules Committee over the years. It became a board that represented the community writ large, with an advisory group known as the Commander Advisory Group existing to help the Rules Committee make decisions that best represented the players of the format. The RC would change the format as needed, modify mechanics, and change the legality of certain cards, which would be unfair in this game version.
How We Got Here
Over the years, and with input from the Commander Advisory Group, the Rules Committee made a series of bans to make the game healthier. Some of the earlier bans were done to make the game less favored for players with more money, thus banning more expensive cards such as the original Power Nine (the Power Nine were a selection of cards that could win games on their own and cost a small fortune).
In 2020, the fastest banned card in all of Commander happened: Lutri, the Spellchaser. Lutri was part of a new series of “companion” cards that could be used from outside the games and didn’t count as part of a deck count. The trade-off, however, was that the decks in which they were used had to meet a specific deck-building requirement. On their own, these are incredibly powerful abilities. Still, Lutri was uniquely special in that the only deckbuilding requirement was that “each nonland card in your starting deck has a different name”, which is the very tenet of Commander as a format. Thus the card was banned prior to it even being released in the set it was first printed.
The most recent ban list hit, however, came after three years of silence from the team. It hit the following cards:
All of these, except Nadu, Winged Wisdom, were cards that had been in the format for a long time, and all, other than Nadu, were cards that were considered to be worth a substantial amount of money. Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, and Dockside Extortionist are all cards that accelerate the amount of mana in play and allow players to get ahead of the competition rather early in the game. These three cards were cards that, to certain degrees, weren’t expected to be banned by the player base. While warnings had been given about Dockside Extortionist being potentially banned, the other two bannings came pretty much out of the blue.
Lotus had actually been brought up as a card that the Rules Committee was keeping an eye on prior to the bannings, but the last mention of it by them was years ago, causing players to feel like they were blindsided by it. Mana Crypt, however, is a different story: there was no real indication that it would be banned, causing a large amount of upset in the community once it was hit. Several prolific content creators in the hobby stated that they disagreed with the banning, such as Josh Lee Kwai of The Command Zone (who was also a member of the Commander Advisory Group at the time). Others felt the bannings were hitting things that had run rampant in the format for a while.
Unfortunately, some Magic: The Gathering players don’t seem to understand the concept of common decency or boundaries. Post-bannings, several of the Rules Committee members and the Commander Advisory Group stated that they had been subject not only to doxxing attempts but also credible death threats. It should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: anybody who threatened or aimed to make any of RC or the CAG feel unsafe is a subhuman element that should never take part in the hobby again. Regardless of the reasoning and how much money they think they may have lost, it’s never acceptable to make other people feel unsafe over cardboard.
The Schism
However, a big problem that cropped up after the bannings was a schism between the Rules Committee and the Commander Advisory Group. Per several X posts from CAG members, they weren’t asked to give advice or opinions on the bannings before they happened, which drew into question the actual purpose of the group in the first place. Several members of the CAG resigned as a direct result of the bannings, though it’s unclear exactly what pushed them to decide now was the right time.
In an episode of the podcast The Command Zone, which he hosts alongside fellow Commander Advisory Group member Rachel Weeks and commander player Jimmy Wong, Lee Kwai revealed that he’d heard that several members of Wizards of the Coast had spoken to the Rules Committee prior to the bannings and advised against them. In that same podcast, Lee Kwai also brought up another circumstance in which the Commander Advisory Group hadn’t had any input, which we’ll discuss later.
But what of Commander itself? The format became almost undiscussable online for a period, with every post discussing it being jumped on by people who wanted to voice their anger and displeasure at the committee, yet lashing out at several people who had nothing actually to do with the decision.
“In a lot of ways, the worst of what we’ve seen from the resultant blowout from the announcement is more a barometer of broader social trends than something that’s isolated to our community,” Magic streamer TappyToeClaws told me in an email interview for this piece.
“Sadly, in the modern social media landscape, threats of violence and racist or misogynistic insults in response to something a vocal, cretinous minority decides they’re going to make their issue of the day aren’t unique. That doesn’t make either acceptable, obviously, especially in the context of a goddamn for-fun format of a PG13 trading card game, but it’s not as though leaving Magic: The Gathering is going to isolate someone from the hatred that's been allowed to fester in online spaces.”
This has been most visible in the last month or so. In the wake of the bans, both Jim Lapage and Olivia Gobert-Hicks went private on X following harassment directed at them from angry players. Several Commander Advisory Group members also reported being subject to abuse even though they had absolutely nothing to do with the bans themselves. Indeed, Lapage posted a statement to X not long before going private, revealing that Olivia was, in fact against several of the bans that took place.
“Olivia pushed back against yesterday’s change. None of us are above criticism, but if you hate the bans, she was your voice in the room,” Lapage revealed.
“The vast, overwhelming majority of players in the MtG space, and especially Commander, just wanna play the game. The idea of that game might vary from player to player or pod to pod, but that’s a feature, not a bug. The rules of EDH/Commander only existed to provide a basic set of rules to get everyone started on the same page, the Commander Rules Committee was never going to knock your door down and enforce a ban list at a kitchen table among friends, or even a community-run tournament,” TappyToeClaws told me, referring to the commonly talked-about ‘Rule Zero’ of the format, in which players involved in a game can decide exactly what they want to play and what cards they want to play with. Indeed, the discussion post-ban was that people who wanted to play with those newly banned cards still could, but the financial element of them was completely null and void now, with prices cratering in the days after the announcement.
The Fallout
But what of the days after the banning? We’ve already established that it wasn’t pretty, that abuse was being hurled at both Rules Committee and Commander Advisory Group members from all sides. But things clearly escalated at the end of September when an official announcement was posted on the Magic The Gathering webpage.
“This week has demonstrated the truly monumental task that faced the Commander Rules Committee. The Commander RC is made up of five talented, caring individuals, all with other jobs and lives, and they must balance managing the most popular format in Magic. It results in incredible amounts of work, time spent deliberating, and exposure to the public. Nobody deserves to feel unsafe for supporting the game they love. Unfortunately, the task of managing Commander has far outgrown the scope and safety of being attached to any five people,” the blog post read.
“So today, in partnership with members of the existing Rules Committee, we are announcing that the Rules Committee is giving management of the Commander format to the game design team of Wizards of the Coast.”
This raised a lot of questions in the community, namely what the future of the format even was. But before we can even discuss that comes the question of how Wizards taking over the format will help to reduce harassment towards community members in the future, and indeed if they were doing enough prior to taking over the format. Even though it was a community-driven format and one that Wizards of the Coast had little final say in, it was still something that the company was directly profiting off, and thus something they had a responsibility for.
“On the larger, systemic scales, there’s not a lot Wizards of the Coast can do about backlash. That being said, there should be some onus on WotC to protect those deputized to steward their game in the official capacity that the Commander Rules Committee was at the time this announcement was made. As soon as WotC began to design cards for Commander, entire products and whole sets for Commander, there’s a direct, monetary interest by the company in what was originally a grass-roots, community brainchild,” TappyToeClaws told me.
The reaction from both fans and media to the change has been one of apprehensiveness. Wizards of the Coast is very much a company, it exists almost entirely to make money. While certain members of the company (Gavid Verhey comes primarily to mind) are very much on the side of the game, it can’t help but be noted that even those with the best intentions cannot battle against a system entirely devised to make money.
This is also where the previously mentioned Command Zone podcast comes into the picture, with Josh Lee Kwai and Rachel Weeks confirming that neither they nor any other Commander Advisory Group members were asked about the process of turning the format over to Wizards of the Coast, with an announcement being made in the Discord on a weekend, when very few members of the group were online.
Lee Kwai also brings up that nobody was asked if they were willing to take over the format from the current Rules Committee, something that may come across as naive. Indeed as brought up by Brian Kibler (former Pro Tour player, current co-host of Commander At Home, and partner of Olivia Gobert-Hicks), why would anybody want to take over from a committee of people who they know for sure is getting death threats and doxxing threats from overzealous community members?
“I think that’s the one upside of Wizards of the Coast taking over for the Commander Rules Committee: going forward there won’t be a list of individual, volunteer members with their names out there that the worst parts of the digital MtG ecosystem can point to and say ‘Them. This is their fault. Get them’”, TappyToeClaws told me when I asked her whether they saw any upside to Wizards taking over the format.
“Outside of that, I see few upsides but I’ll try to stay cautiously optimistic. Wizards employs some incredible people, many of whom I call friends, but I also maintain a healthy skepticism of the motives of any large company. As a separate entity, the Commander Rules Committee’s goal first and foremost was always the future and well-being of the format. While I have no doubt there are individuals at Wizards of the Coast with the exact same principles as the folks on the RC and CAG, Wizards of the Coast as a whole is a company and Magic: The Gathering is a product. There will always be the shadow of profits, shareholders, and the rest of the corporate baggage that entails.”
The Future
There are a lot of questions and few answers here.While Wizards hosted a stream talking about the handoverto recently which helped to clear up some of the lingering concerns around the game, which we’ll dive into soon, there’s still the question of how cEDH, the competitive spin-off of Commander, will work in this new era. cEDH, unlike EDH, is a format that uses a host of proxies (fake cards that represent real game pieces, mainly used to replace extremely expensive elements of the game), which is not a process smiled upon by Wizards themselves, for obvious reasons.
The aforementioned stream, at the very least, confirmed that at least one member from the cEDH committee will be a member of a new panel that WOTC is setting up to govern the format, similar to how the old RC worked. There’s also no indication that the members of this new panel will be public, helping to avoid potential repeats of what happened over the course of the last month, and both members of the RC and the CAG will be considered as members of the new panel.
There was also a more interesting development in the stream, however. Previously decks in the format were split into ‘power levels’. These were numbers given to decks to denote the power level of cards in them, but these also had a handful of problems. People would often assign arbitrary numbers to their own decks, being incapable of measuring the power level compared to other players. As a format that relies heavily upon social contracts, this became a problem rather quickly.
Wizards, however, is planning on introducing a new system to measure the power level of decks, currently named ‘brackets’. It’s certainly a noble idea to attempt to make the game fairer, but there’s also a lot of concern that it simply won’t work. The power level discussion is as subjective as it comes, and even with lead designers in the company working on them, it doesn’t change that fact. Another point of discussion is Sol Ring, an incredibly powerful card for Commander that helps to accelerate mana extremely quickly, but has become synonymous with the Commander format, making it almost impossible to ban (indeed, in an FAQ released after the banning the Commander Rules Committee specifies this is why they’ve never considered banning the card). What power level does a card so powerful belong in, especially if it’s played in every deck?
The final major question is the ban list. We know that Wizards will be maintaining the ban list at pretty much the same pace as the RC (quarterly), but will they be willing to make the hard decisions that the RC made? Since they exist primarily to sell products, would they be willing to ban a card that is considered a mistake, especially if they’re selling it in packs? Would they have ever even considered banning Mana Crypt, since it was sold in packs as recently as Lost Caverns of Ixalan in late 2023? It’s something without an easy answer, but it’s something that needs to be thought about in this new world.
With MagicCon Vegas fast approaching, answers will likely follow. From the stream, we know that the team working on brackets as a system wants to have the system’s first draft ready by then. But that’s an extremely fast turnaround, and with such a fast turnaround, will it be representative of the players at all? We won’t really know until we see it.
What now?
So where do we go from here? The last month has been an extremely sobering watershed moment for the game, and if anything it’s shown the worst elements of the community at the forefront of it all. But this isn’t what Magic is as a game, and it’s not representative of the Commander community. TappyToeClaws puts it best:
“Have fun, do your thing with people who like the same sorta thing. Just be excellent to each other while you do it. It’s not really that hard to enjoy yourself and not be a dick, in my experience.”
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