In General: Commander Rules Update

Hello Zoners! Welcome to what will probably be the last In General segment here on The General Zone. In case you missed it: we announced last week that we will be merging with Commandercast.com.

This is big news and an exciting time for us here on the blog. However, in the midst of this transition period, the Commander world was rocked by an even bigger announcement. The March 2015 B&R List Update. You can view it here if you have not already: Link. I am going to assume that you have read it, but I will include direct quotations when I reference particular parts.

I am going to comb through the post line by line, spewing vitriol and contempt for the EDH Rules Committee every step of the way. If that doesn't sound like something that you are into, get out of the way. If you are still reading...hold onto your butts.

The Article is titled Banned List Announcement. Not unexpected. This is an understated, but nevertheless exciting tag line. There is no Buzzfeed click bait here.

The First section addresses changes to the Banned and Restricted List...there are no changes. Oh boy. You can tell something bad is about to happen. It is like when your significant other says that we need to talk, so you ask: 'Okay, about what?', and then they are like: 'No. We need to TALK.'

In the next paragraph they explain that they are changing how the command zone replacement effect works. Applying this new change, anything that could send your commander into your library or back to your hand can instead send it to the command zone, at your discretion. They take care to point out that this is a replacement effect, but that it can apply multiple times to the same event. In layman's terms: If someone wants to put their commander back in the command zone, there is no way that you can stop them from doing so.

Now, if you have followed In General for any length of time you will know that I am not a supporter of the Rules Committee, their implied authority, or really anything that they do. They are an exclusive group with subjective opinions asserting control over something that they have no legitimate claim to regulate. They are essentially playground dictators and they have no place in my Commander experience.

Before we delve into their justification for this rules changes I want to discuss a primary concern I have about governance: If you want to institute a policy, you should have demonstrable evidence that this policy will affect the change that you desire it to. The reasons should be logical and provable qualitatively. The results should be measurable and documented quantitatively.

If you change a policy, it should be because something has changed in the environment that you are trying to regulate. If you are simply waffling back and forth about an idea, but nothing has prompted this change, that signals to me that you should never have instituted a blanket rule in the first place. You couldn't prove it was smart and you still aren't sure. Subjective leadership is inherently ineffective for groups of a certain size.

Let's digest their justifications line by line:

"We want to engender as positive an experience as we can for players. Nothing runs the feel-bads worse than having your commander unavailable to you for the whole game. "

This is generic boilerplate nonsense. This is exactly the kind of answer you would expect from a politician or CEO: pure rhetoric. Everyone has goals to increase satisfaction, but merely dreaming of improvement will not create it. Secondly, there are EXACTLY equal 'feel-bads' created by NOT being able to deal with particular commanders. If you can't tuck a Zur or Rafiq early, you are going to have trouble fighting through opposing counterspells and protection later on. Unchecked, certain cards will just take away a game. Eventually, they will have more lands than you have removal spells and just recast their commander.

The presence of tuck encourages players to play more tutors so that in case their commander gets sent to the library, they can get it back—exactly the opposite of what we want (namely, discouraging the over-representation of tutors).

This is the perfect example of a solution that is supported neither by logic or data. I won't stop playing tutors because you have taken away one POTENTIAL tutor target. There is no reason to believe that people will use less tutors. Mathematically, tutors still increase your win percentage by improving the quality of your average draw and adding consistency to situational cards. People play them because they are strong Magic cards and they have a place in strong decks.

Secondly, I don't believe that it is appropriate for the rules committee to have an official opinion about whether or not people should include certain types of cards in their decks. Discouraging tutors, counters, land destruction, removal, combos, etc. this is highly subjective and the 'logic' of one person's subjective experience does not translate well to other people. This is, simply put, not a strong position to build your governance on.

"While we are keenly aware that tuck is a great weapon against problematic commanders, the tools to do so are available only in blue and white, potentially forcing players into feeling like they need to play those colors in order to survive. We prefer as diverse a field as possible." 

The first statement is patently false. Red also has access to this type of effect and it is the strongest form of removal available to Red in the format. See Warp World or Chaos Warp. The former doesn't see much play, but the latter was specifically designed for the original Commander product releases, so I would think that Sheldon Menery should be familiar with it. He was on the design team of that product.

I can respect the idea that the format should rich and open. You should be able to play whatever strategy or colors you like at a high level of competition. There is no way any format can be perfectly balanced. Some thing will always be better than another thing. 

In reality, Blue has a tradition of being the strongest color in Magic. The game's design team has chosen to distribute certain effects across the color pie in a particular way. This shapes the way colors and cards interact. The power and responsibility to control this is outside the scope of the rules committee's authority and, quite frankly, their ability.

"It clears up some corner case rules awkwardness, mostly dealing with knowing the commander’s location in the library (since highly unlikely to actually end up there)."

There is absolutely no ambiguity in the rules about this. If a card in your library, or any face down card for that matter, is DISTINGUISHABLE such that you know the identity or physical location of that card in a pile of other face down cards, IT IS MARKED. Playing with marked cards is and ALWAYS has been against the rules of Magic. Also, when a library is shuffled it must be sufficiently randomized to the point where there is no reliable way to predict the position of any card(s). There is absolutely no need to create an ancillary rule just to enforce a rule that is already in force. 

Speaking of awkwardness. I always thought it was strange that they decided to include over-sized commander cards in the Commander decks. How is anyone supposed to shuffle that anywhere? What is even the point of using it in a game? They are novelty items meant for decoration and collection. They are not actual cards that can be used in the game. 

After a long discussion, we decided the best course regarding commander-ness was no change. Your commander is always your commander regardless of where it is or its status. That means enough hits from a face-down commander can kill you. 

The final rules change affects how commander damage is dealt, clarifying that damage dealt by a face-down commander is still counted as commander damage for the purpose of winning the game. I do want to point out that I have mixed feelings about this. There is no simple solution; any decision will be arbitrary. In situations like this I am in favor of having no position instead of taking an arbitrary one, but I understand the rules committee's desire to address the issue. My thoughts on this topic could fill an entirely separate article, but I will try to summarize.

A commander's commander-ness, in my mind, springs from its identity. It is embodying the leader of an army. The personality of that card is what unifies your other cards. I have a hard time believing that an army would follow a formless ball of energy unless THEY knew who it was. From a gameplay perspective, I don't like the idea of having to keep track of damage dealt by multiple separate Morph bugs. Am I going to constantly tabulate damage dealt just on the off chance that one is a Commander and could flip up at any moment revealing that I lost the game because it had done 21 damage to me? This situation seems tremendously awkward.

Personally, I think the simplest and most elegant solution is to say that only face up Creatures can deal commander damage. That makes it easier to track and everyone knows where they stand. Morphs are intended to be indistinguishable. Making one more important than any other is problematic for many reasons. Again though, this is just my opinion.

I expect there to be tremendous backlash from the community about these rules changes. Don't let me down. Grab your pitchforks and let's go storm the MTGCommander.net forums demanding the blood/resignation/both of the entire rules committee. Or, you know, we can just go back to our game of Magic and continue ignoring them.

-GG