Commander RC Reacts To Wizards Taking Format Reins
On Monday, September 30th, Wizards of the Coast officially announced that they would take the reins of the Commander format. This announcement is in the wake of the Commander Rules Committee receiving multiple violent threats from players after the RC banned four cards last week. This power shift was in the express interest of safety, according to Wizards of the Coast. However, it was also in close collaboration with the Commander RC. We have covered this announcement, but there is more to this story.
Reactions From the RC
As a response to this change of command, members of the Commander RC had a few things to say:
According to the body of this tweet, Jim Lapage of the Rules Committee explains that he sees Commander as growing beyond the scope of the five members of its governing body. This is why they have allowed Wizards of the Coast to step in and take command of the format.
A founding member of the Commander RC, Toby Elliot, expands on this belief in a thread of four posts, also on Twitter:
Elliot goes on to say that he still feels that the bans were wise for the health of the format. Furthermore, he is hopeful that the Design Team for Magic: The Gathering over at Wizards HQ will be able to carry Commander's legacy in a way that's respectful to the memory of Sheldon Menery. Menery, who is seen as the "Godfather of Commander," passed away last year.
How to Be the Commander RC
Currently, Wizards is bouncing ideas around about how exactly to regulate the format. Their current plan, one open to feedback, involves a four-tier system of ranking decks:
Here's the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we'll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.
According to Wizards, decks would be defined by the cards within and the highest bracket therein. We can only speculate on how long a tiering system would take to define the power levels of every card in the game, but luckily, sister site EDHREC already utilizes a similar system in the Salt Score project.
Wizards of the Coast is open to other suggestions, for whatever it's worth; to that end they've opened the floor on their official Discord server and on their upcoming WeeklyMTG Twitch stream, happening tomorrow at 10am Pacific Time.
Format Health Is More Than The Format
However the company wishes to do the job of the Commander RC, that isn't the point of why they are taking over the job of the Commander RC. This is, in their words, for "the safety and well-being of the Rules Committee." In that way, while the news is huge and in many ways probably jarring, it isn't a shock that they want to make safety a priority by doing this.
If you have any thoughts 0n this news, feel free to respectfully sound off below.
