A New Twist on Commander
I was working on an article and I had a funny thought. (I guess spoilers for the topic of an upcoming article)
What if Magic the Gathering's Commander format used a different banlist?
I'm not saying that they should unban Jeweled Lotus, or ban Sol ring - I'm saying: what if it used a different format's legality? What would the consequences be?
Let's start out with the obvious: Pauper commander, or pEDH (or PDH, which I guess would be "Pauper Dragon Highlander?"). If you don't know, pEDH is commander, but with only commons. You may also have any creature as your commander, as long as it has been printed at uncommon. It avoids the chase rares, and staples, as they're almost always simply de facto not legal.
Pauper commander's great, but since pauper is kind of its own beast, it's a bit outside what I'm talking about. What I'm looking at today is more "normal commander with a lot of the chase cards removed"
I'll skip to the conclusion, and say that commander using the modern legality rules is fascinating. Generally speaking, the things that get filtered out are either older cards, card in commander precons, and the made-for-commander sets.
Here are a few headliners for things that are gone:
- Sol Ring
- Swords to Plowshares
- Chaos Warp
- Nature's Lore
- The One Ring
- Fierce Guardianship (As well as all the "free if you control your commander" cycle)
This is definitely a heavy-handed way of "fixing" commander. I can't even say if this would fix it, but at the very least, it's pretty interesting.
I quickly threw together a Modern Commander deck(mEDH is the working title, but I'm open to suggestions) which you can see here.
As you can see, it's still a recognizable commander deck. You have ramp, removal, draw and whatnot, but it does feel more distinct.
Here's a list of every card I couldn't include in the deck.
At a preliminary glance, and this is all very preliminary, it seems like the removal of the top-end power outliers - The One Ring, Rhystic Study, Force of Will, even Sol Ring - would be an overall boon for the game. Over half of the game-changers are flat-out gone. Now, what we're left with is a smoother experience with a lesser emphasis on those near-ubiquitous cards. I think that this is a good direction to go, without forsaking magic's identity.
The primary issue is that it's not resonant. Mark Rosewater's concept for set design rings true for this. It isn't resonant because this format is so heavy-handed and antithetical to what WotC wants commander to be (this is incredibly intentional). By design, mEDH rejects not just the extraneous cards, but also commander precons. This means that there it will likely never be able break into the mainstream consciousness, nor the substratum of established players looking for a variant of their favorite format (such as Pauper EDH and even Oathbreaker to some extent). It's too finicky, too weird, and too different from what WotC wants commander to be, to ever fix the cancerous hemorrhage that commander is suffering from.
Despite all of that, I implore you - try it out. Throw together some mEDH decks, proxy a pod of them, mine was made with budget in mind, what would a full-powered one look like? Playing with limitations like this one could be much more fun than it seems.
Who knows, maybe Premodern commander would work too. Stay tuned for that mess.
This blog is, and always will be, 100% human-generated