The Bans Made cEDH Better

On September 23, 2024, Commander was hit with most impactful bans in recent memory: Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Dockside Extortionist, Mana Crypt, and Jeweled Lotus were all banned from the format.

Outside of Nadu, Winged Wisdom, a card which the now-defunct Rules Committee decided to ban due to its role as a problematic powerhouse of a commander, the unifying theme for this ban announcement's selections was the targeting of fast mana. Simply put, the latter three cards all made Commander too explosive and volatile in the early turns, per the Rules Committee. That had to change, and thus the format was reshaped in an instant.

Before getting into the ramifications of each of these bans, it's important to note that the Rules Committee expressly stated that cEDH was not a format which they were paying particularly close attention to when these bans - or just about any bans, except for Flash - were considered.

The bans targeted casual play, and given that cEDH uses a unified banlist with the rest of Commander, it was simply caught in the crosshairs. Say what you will about format management practices, but this does provide important context for moving forward. cEDH certainly had pre-ban problems, as it does now, but this ban list announcement was not meant to address those - nor was it specifically meant to prevent new ones from propping up.

So, how has the format evolved since, and why do I think it is better off?

A Brief Note on Nadu

First off, let's talk about the one ban that truly stands out from the rest, simply because it was a universal problem with few players crying fowl (pun intended) when it left the format - Nadu, Winged Wisdom. 

Nadu is a broken commander by every metric. For , this legendary 3/4 flying Bird Wizard simply generated too much value, granting each creature you control the triggered ability "Whenever this creature becomes the target of a spell or ability, reveal the top card of your library. If it's a land card, put it onto the battlefield. Otherwise, put it into your hand. This ability triggers only twice each turn."

Combine this with cards like Shuko or Lightning Greaves and suddenly it became very likely that a cEDH deck helmed by Nadu could suddenly put just about every card in their deck either into play or into their hand. 

This ability was so powerful that most decks with blue and green in their color identity started running both Nadu and Shuko in their mainboards, an astonishing feat considering this was a two-card, nondeterministic value engine combo that relied on having a preset board presence.

Think about that: Nadu let players ramp so much and "draw" so many cards (despite not being punished by Orcish Bowmasters) that players began running it as part of a two-card maindeck combo that didn't definitively win the game. 

All in all, it's not too much of a hot take to say that cEDH is better with Nadu gone. If this card had been nonlegendary, then maybe there's an argument for letting it stay, but that just wasn't how the card was printed. Instead, cEDH was terrorized by this briefly better-than-Kinnan Simic commander, and that was just too much for the format. You were a fun deck to play once, Nadu, but only once. 

The Goblin in the Room

Alright, now it's time to talk about real bans: the ones that destroyed multiple decks and had some folks leaving the format. Oh Dockside Extortionist, where do I even begin.

First, what we lost. Dockside Extortionist was arguably the best red card in the format (debatably second to Underworld Breach, but I'd argue that enablers can be more powerful than combo pieces, especially enablers that often become combo pieces). For , this Goblin Pirate did more than just make Treasure tokens en-masse; it routinely won the game.

As a combo piece with cards like Dargo, the Shipwrecker, Temur Sabertooth, Hullbreaker Horror, and many more, Dockside Extortionist was a good-at-all-times ritual that could just as easily be put to work as part of an A + B that would win games on the spot. More problematically, however, was that it could only do so if your opponents made the "mistake" of playing to the board. That is, it failed as a red catch-up card because it caught up with your opponents to effectively.

If you were playing red in a game of pre-ban cEDH, then your opponents were disincentivized from playing the game as any artifact and or enchantment resources they deployed could rapidly come back around to cost them the game simply due to Dockside's ETB trigger.

Say what you will about Rhystic Study - another card that disincentivizes players from actually playing the game - but at least it only puts pressure in play once it has resolved. Dockside Extortionist, on the other hand, was a card that warped the entire game around it from the very beginning. Players needed to sequence development such that playing a preemptive Mox Opal or the like wouldn't cause the table to lose because suddenly Dockside Extortionist created 5+ Treasure tokens.

As we'll see with the rest of the cards from the ban announcement, Dockside Extortionist was a key card for many of the format's fringe decks, and as such often played a role as the defining piece in an otherwise noncompetitive decklist. The problem, however, was that Dockside Extortionist was so game warping that it's role as a necessary card for format diversity came at the cost of demolishing gameplay diversity.

Yes, dozens of pre-ban Dockside decks existed that are now unplayable, and I agree that that is a tragedy. However, with Dockside out of the picture, players are now able to play increasingly to-the-board and the fear that mistakenly playing an early mana rock will be game ending is now gone. cEDH continues to be a game of window shopping, where players have to be keenly aware of how their forward momentum may leave them open to another player's win attempt, but the efficiency and compactness of those win attempts has been loosened just enough that play can be all the more forgiving.

That's important in a competitive format, especially one with so many opponents. 

Our Missing Rocks

Speaking of mana rocks, the other two banned cards can largely be discussed as one and the same, although they do have some important differences that we'll touch on towards the end: Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt. 

To kick things off, I need to clarify something important about my earlier statement that cEDH was better off post-ban. While I believe that this is the case broadly, I also believe that these two cards - Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt - made the format better and as such should still be in it. Nadu was a problem that needed to be dealt with, and Dockside Extortionist hurt cEDH far more than it benefited it.

Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt, on the other hand, were almost completely positives for the format, and as such the primary reason I think that the format is overall in a better place post-ban is simply because the benefits they conferred were less than the harm dealt by the rest of the ban announcement, especially Dockside Extortionist.

If Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt had to go so that Dockside Extortionist and Nadu, Winged Wisdom would be taken with them, then so be it.

Alright, with that out of the way, let's talk about the cards themselves, starting with Jeweled Lotus. For , this Black Lotus reskin was an artifact that could be tapped and sacrificed in order to add three mana of any one color, with the restriction that the mana produced this way could only be used to cast your commander. An incredibly straightforward card, Jeweled Lotus - like Dockside Extortionist - was a linchpin card in many of cEDH's most entertaining fringe decklists.

Urza, Lord High Artificer isn't winning too many tournaments nowadays, but boy oh boy was the threat of a turn one Urza often enough to make up for the fact that this commander-dependent decklist shunned every color but blue. Similarly, despite winning SCGCon DC's 5k earlier this year, Godo, Bandit Warlord has also taken a real hit to its popularity thanks to the turbo-ritual that was Jeweled Lotus being removed from the format. 

Our other missing rock is Mana Crypt, a card long thought to have been grandfathered in to Commander similar to that of Sol Ring, given that these two cards are functionally twins of one another, except that Mana Crypt costs less to cast with the trade off of potentially dealing three damage to its controller each turn. 

Fun, fair Magic.

Unlike Jeweled Lotus, which served a key niche in propping up many fringe decklists, Mana Crypt was the definition of ubiquitous. An absolutely powerful card that anyone could - and would - play, Mana Crypt also benefited from not being a terrifying powerhouse like Dockside Extortionist that could actually end games.

There's certainly an argument to be made that the incremental, cumulative advantage of controlling a Mana Crypt from turn one onward was game-defining, but in a format dominated by the likes of Sol Ring and a half-a-dozen Moxen Mana Crypt didn't really stand out as a problem card. Instead, it decreased the volatility of opening hands, smoothing out sequencing for the earliest turns of the game since now each player was more likely to have a viable rock on the first turn.

With Mana Crypt gone, mana inequity hasn't gotten better; it's gotten worse, simply because the luck of the draw is now that much more random.

Wrap Up

Since the bans, cEDH has slowed down considerably. Value engines abound, red has fallen off the leaderboards, and deck diversity at the fringes has been pruned significantly. However, with the dominance of Nadu and Dockside Extortionist gone, the brackets of tier one and tier two decklists have expanded, opening up more room for diversity in the readily-played toolkit of cEDH.

It may not be immediately intuitive, but a strange shift has occurred: as a whole, cEDH shrank, but in terms of what is routinely considered playable, it has become a more open field. Will this stay the case over the next year as competitive players work to solve the format? I'm not sure, but I'm certainly hopeful.