Five Post-Ban cEDH Lessons
This past weekend, I participated in the SCG Con DC cEDH 5k tournament. Over a hundred players from across the United States descended on the Dulles Expo Center in what was one of the first large cEDH tournaments after the format was rocked by the recent bannings of Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist, Nadu, Winged Wisdom, and Mana Crypt.
Needless to say, the format is still settling into place after such a massive shakeup, but some lessons were immediately clear from the tournament. So, what can we learn?
Totally fair mana acceleration.
Lesson One: Games are more than one turn longer.
When the bans were first announced, most cEDH players I know immediately predicted that games would be at least one turn longer. The logic went that turn one became much more of a developement turn, as opposed to an action turn. Pre-bans, players could both deploy mana and use it in the same opening turn. This all came down to cards like Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus being free to cast, leaving their controllers with (in theory) at least one more colored mana at their disposal.
Turn one Rhystic Study off of a Mana Crypt was a very real threat, but that isn't possible off of a Sol Ring (without additional help, that is). This represents the coupling of development with action; not only did you develop the resources necessary to progress the game proactively, but so too could you use those immediately to get ahead.
After the bans, this is now far less frequent. The most common first turns at SCG Con DC were purely developmental, with players tossing around Sol Rings, Mana Vaults or mana dorks, or occasionally a Signet off the likes of an Ancient Tomb. Yes, Esper Sentinel and Mystic Remora still exist, but that isn't the majority of games (at least, the majority of first-turns).
On top of not being proactive on turn one, this also means that players aren't accumulating resources through turn-one engines nearly as frequently. Landing the likes of Pollywog Prodigy or Rhystic Study turn one also means that you've spent a whole turn cycle profiting from its triggers, providing you with a cumulative wealth of value that enables games to close quickly when not counterbalanced by opposing resources.
Since these early-turn advances are much rarer now, the snowballing-value they accumulate is also delayed a turn, creating a real delay in their otherwise absurd effectiveness. Just think about The One Ring - casting that spell a turn later doesn't just mean one missed activation, instead its a whole game's worth of missed burden counters.
Lesson Two: Interaction is more flexible - and expendable.
If Lesson One was all about Mana Crypt - and, to a lesser extent, Jeweled Lotus - then Lesson Two might as well be called "The Dockside Effect." To demonstrate this, let me ask you two, pre-ban questions. First, when playing against a red deck, how likely is your opponent going to deploy a Dockside Extortionist as a part of their "I-win" turn? Second, how many commonly-cast counterspells can you count that can deal with a Dockside?
The answers to these two questions reveal how Dockside Extortionist subtly warped the pace of interaction in a game. If you were playing red, then you were playing Dockside Extortionist, and the odds were pretty good that resolving one significantly boosted your chances of winning the game, even if Dockside wasn't a part of your combo.
The natural response from players was to wage counterwars over Dockside, but the problem was that very few such spells could actually answer Dockside's threat - Force of Will, Pact of Negation, Mindbreak Trap, and that's about it.
The result of this limited toolkit of answers was that cEDH games would result in crux-points of interaction deployment. Players kept interaction tight, only deploying it when absolutely necessary, as tunnel-vision would set in around the question of "when is someone casting Dockside?" Without this omnipresent Goblin in the format, players are now inclined to deploy countermagic in a more relaxed fashion. Sure, there are creature combos still out and about, but there isn't the same boogieman haunting any-and-every cEDH table with red in the pod.
Lesson Three: Don't discount the "Jeweled Lotus" commanders.
Did I mention that Godo, Bandit Warlord won the 5k? Yeah. So, on to the real Jeweled Lotus lesson.
Jeweled Lotus leaving the format disproportionately hurt a lot of fringe cEDH decks, so much so that I honestly believed most wouldn't recover. Blue Farm might not be casting Kraum, Ludevic's Opus nearly as often as it did pre-ban, but that's just one engine in a deck absolutely stuffed with them.
Decks like Urza, Lord High Artificer, Talion, the Kindly Lord, and many other commander-centric decks, meanwhile, were primarily viable because they were able to keep pace with the rest of cEDH's top-tier decks by casting their commanders as early as is humanly possible. Mana Crypt leaving the format certainly hurt these decks, as well, but Jeweled Lotus was the real gut-punch.
Now, the upside to playing these decks - many of which are low-color lists that shy away from good-stuff piles in order to focus on high-synergy builds - just isn't as appealing anymore. That being said, after fighting against (and losing to) several of these commanders down at SCG Con DC, I can't say that they're all dead.
We've talked alot about the fast mana that has left cEDH recently, but it's equally important to remember just how much we still have. Chrome Mox, Mox Diamond, Sol Ring, and so many more cards like them are still kicking around cEDH, making sure that players untap on turn two with more than just the land they played a turn earlier. So, while you almost certainly won't be playing Urza on turn one anymore, it's fair to say that he'll come down on turn two plenty often.
When you compare this against the pace of the rest of the format, things start to look a little better for our commander-dependent friends: everyone is slower now, so - in a weird, equalizing way - no one is.
Ultimately, I have a feeling that future tournaments will reveal that the loss of Jeweled Lotus is going to serve as a filtering moment. The strongest, most resilient commander-focused lists will continue to win games, while some of the more mana-intensive lists will fall by the wayside. Niv-Mizzet, Parun almost certainly isn't coming back, and I'm doubtful about the long-run success of Tivit, Seller of Secrets, but they aren't everything.
Lesson Four: RogSi is certainly still scary, but it isn't everything.
When I settled in to play at DC, I was expecting to see RogSi everywhere. The partner pair of Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh and Silas Renn, Seeker Adept had already been dominating cEDH for a while as the de facto fastest deck in the format, so the fact that it was largely insulated from the bans (no need for Jeweled Lotus if your go-to commander already costs ) meant that it was - theoretically - slowed down far less than the rest of the format.
In short, if everyone else was around a turn slower at minimum, RogSi was only slowed down half a turn. Or so I thought.
It is true that RogSi was hurt significantly less than many other decks in the format. It doesn't miss the banned cards as much as other decks, and that is reflected in terms of the pace at which it plays. The deck is still the very definition of turbo - aiming to win as early as turn one (and quite reliably at that).
The problem, however (as I mentioned earlier in Lesson Two) is that countermagic is a bit more flexible now, and every other deck in the format is sitting in to play a longer game. So, RogSi now finds itself fighting against a lot more interaction in the early game, effectively negating the disparity in speed which the bannings created. If the RogSi pilot in your pod can't win on turns one or two, then odds are it won't be winning that game at all.
Lesson Five: Green, especially Kinnan, is much better now.
Now on to the real winner from the bans: green. Care to take a guess as to what gets a lot better when it has an extra turn to untap? Mana dorks. Now add Gaea's Cradle to the mix, and you have a recipe for the largest mana producer in the format.
Part of green's biggest problem, pre-ban, was that the mana it produced was simply a turn too slow. cEDH was a game played in bursts, be it rituals or Dockside Extortionist triggers, so the requirement of untapping with your mana producers was an incredibly detrimental setback to what was otherwise a reliable source of mana advantage. Now that the biggest source of burst-mana has been taken out of the format, green players are able to breath a sigh of relief as they untap their board full of Elves.
This brings me to Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, and the one banning we've barely touched on in this article: Nadu, Winged Wisdom. With Nadu out of the format, Kinnan has returned as the go-to Simic value commander (discounting Partners, that is), and boy oh boy has Kinnan come back with a vengeance.
Mana production is slower right now, unless you're Kinnan, that is. Doubling up on mana dork output is one of the best things to be doing in the format right now, and Kinnan does this consistently, resulting in game after game where the deck's pilots routinely have more mana than the rest of the pod combined.
From my early impressions in DC, I'd venture to say that Kinnan is probably one of the best targets for cards like Mockingbird and Gilded Drake right now. You certainly won't be making the kind of mana that cloning a Dockside would've granted, but this is a midrange format through-and-through right now, and there's nothing more midrange than playing a value Kinnan.
Wrap Up
It's going to be a bit before cEDH truly settles into the post-ban meta, but as I play more and more games, the more optimistic I become. I no longer fear the initially-expected tyranny of RogSi, nor am I mourning every four-drop commander that ran Jeweled Lotus. Kinnan is certainly spooky to see, same goes for the resurgent Tymna and Thrasios, but it's also refreshing. Given some time, and I'm hopeful that cEDH will continue to be what it always has been: a fun way to play commander in a different environment.
