The Upkeep: Killing Them Softly

Magic has been releasing a lot of cards new cards per year, and almost all of those of those cards are legal in Commander. It can be nice to have that many new options for your decks, but it can also cause problems, and today I'd like to talk about the power imbalance problem it can cause. And no, I'm not talking about the problems caused by cards like Voja, Jaws of the Conclave. 

First, though, let's talk about power as a concept. It's a thing we discuss in Commander in a way we don't in other formats. In other formats, the assumption is you've brought your A game to the table, and if you didn't, well, that's on you for not preparing properly. Commander doesn't really work that way because the casual and creative nature of the format means folks sometimes intentionally bring their B or C game. As such, we're encouraged to all have a pre-game conversation to make sure everyone is on the same page and to make sure nobody is bringing Beebles to an Dragon fight. 

Strumming My Pain with His Fingers

Now, no system is perfect, and the concept of a pre-game conversation is no exception. There's lots of things that can go wrong that I won't get into here, but there there's also a lot of things that can go right, and in my experience more often than not it makes sure folks are mostly playing at the same level.

Mostly.

When things do go wrong, however, I've begun to notice that they go wrong in one of two ways that I'll term "soft power" vs. "hard power". Hard power is power that is apparent on the face of the cards. For example, it's pretty easy to look at a pod where on player is using Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow and another is using Kentaro, the Smiling Cat and assume the Yurkio deck is probably going to be playing a game the Kentaro player isn't equipped to handle.

Cards in the deck make a difference, too. Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm is obviously a very strong commander, but not all Miirym decks are the same. One running Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, and Jeweled Lotus to ramp out their Commander is going to play differently than one running Manalith, Worn Powerstone, and Decanter of Endless Water. It's pretty hard to make a bad Urza, Lord High Artificer deck, but one running Fierce Guardianship, Force of Will, and Mana Drain for protection is going to play better than one running Cancel, Essence Scatter, and Syncopate.

You can even see the imbalance in things like a land base. A single ABUR dual land might to be very impactful in a two-color deck, but a The Ur-Dragon build running all 10 along with 10 Onslaught-style fetchlands, like Flooded Strand, is going to play much more cleanly than one running 10 dual lands from the Radiant Grove cycle and the Mirage-style fetches, like Flood Plain.

When you experience a hard power mismatch, it's usually very obvious the source of the mismatch, i.e., this commander is significantly stronger than that commander, or this deck is running much more powerful cards than that deck. Again, that's not to say these mismatches don't occur even with a pre-game talk, either accidentally or through malfeasance, but you can almost always see visually see why there was a mismatch.

Singing My Life with His Words

Soft power is a different story. Soft power is less about the cards than it is the space between the cards, if that makes sense, and that makes it way harder to see. It's the things you can't necessarily identify even if you handed someone a deck and let them look through your entire list. It might take the form things like a smoother mana curve, or a land base whose pips are tuned to match the color balance of the deck. Maybe it's more win conditions, or more paths to get to those win conditions depending on circumstances. Sometimes it's just running cards that are slightly better than other cards. Often times it's all of these things combined. To borrow a turn of phrase from EDHREC writer K. Mason, "You probably can't tell the difference between a single piece of printer paper and card stock on a flat surface, but you 100% will be able to tell if you stack 60-100 of them."

Just running cards that are slightly better is what I want to talk about here, because that's a facet of soft power that feels most clearly impacted by the sheer amount of cards released in a year these days.

Are you going to even notice if you see Meeting of Minds in someone's Brenard, Ginger Sculptor? Probably not. But in almost any blue token deck, Meeting winds up being an instant-speed draw two for a single blue mana since you can tap your Golems and Brendard right before the turn before yours ends. It's currently in just five Brenard decks, but I'd dare say way more often than not it's a better card in those builds than Divination, which is currently in 9 decks in our database.

Embrace the Unknown has already found a home in over two thousand decks on EDHREC in just a couple months, and for good reason: impulse drawing two cards for three mana is a solid rate, and the spell can then be repeatedly cast from your graveyard if you pitch a land and pay the mana cost. I'm a big fan of it, and if you're not doing some form of graveyard shenanigans or Treasure/artifact synergy, I'd much rather repeatedly have access to two cards than have the one-time impulse two, pitch one, and make a Treasure from Seize the Spoils. Seize is currently showing up in almost 68,000 decks, and while I like it, more often than not for me Embrace just does more. 

Some cards are only good in very, very specific decks, but I happen to play a deck that makes Mirror of Galadriel feel kind of amazing, namely Reki, the History of Kamigawa. My Reki deck runs only legendary creatures, which means, because Mirror is itself legendary, it's a two-mana draw one that I can then tap most turns for zero mana to scry 1 and draw a card. That's an incredibly efficient rate. 

The problem is, it's much harder to find those cards when we're getting almost 2000 new additions to the format than it was when I first started playing in 2013.

We see almost three times as many cards per year now as we did when I first began playing the format in 2013. We've already had more new cards printed through April in 2024 than we had in the entirety of 2013. There's a good chance we break 2000 new cards this year, which would be in excess of four times as many as we had in the game's first several years of existence. 

I distinctly recall the conversations among my play group about how good Aetherize might be in a blue control shell. It was immediately apparent that the scry two draw two for two life on Read the Bones would be a strong contender for any black deck, and not only did we talk about how Rapid Hybridization seemed to be giving blue its own Swords to Plowshares, but it let me to find out it already had one in Pongify. 

Those things were obvious and easy to see because we were only getting four sets per year. There was a break between each release, and after a several month drought you were excited to pour over each new reveal and find what would work for your decks. Back then, I don't think people I play with would have missed the Meeting of Minds/Embrace the Unknown/Mirror of Galadriel-style cards. Today, though, I know they miss them.

I'm still excited to dig through each wave of spoilers, but the reality is, with those waves coming sometimes days apart, it's exhausting for a lot of people. As a result, what I've seen happen is a growing gap between those of us who are still able to keep track of the game more or less like we could in 2013, and people who just for whatever reason cannot or will not, and this gap primarily takes the form of soft power imbalances. I'm still finding those cards, but people who used to be able to now just don't have the time or bandwidth to do so.

I Felt all Flushed with Fever

So what's the solution to this? I'm not sure, to be honest. I don't think not tinkering with your deck is a solution, and unfortunately with playing with strangers there's not really a good way to know for probably several games how much soft power their deck is packing. Here are the things I do:

• Almost no tutors in my decks. The one exception is a Pestilence deck that kind of needs a Pestilence variant to work.
• Bake in some kind of deck restriction I won't break
  • I have a deck with no creatures, one with no enchantments, one with no instants or sorceries. etc.
  • My Eldrazi Spawn deck runs only things that make Spawns or Scions, even though Blood Artist creatures would make it work significantly more efficiently. Similarly, my deathtouch deck won't run any creatures without deathtouch, and my Equipment deck only runs creatures that reference artifacts or Equipment.

I'm not suggesting these are things people should adopt for their own play, mind you. I'm just noting that they're some things I've done that build in some form of deck restrictions that keep my power somewhat in check for when I play against folks who just can't keep up with the current pace of card releases.

Embarrassed by the Crowd

Is the rising gap in soft power in decks something you've noticed lately in the places you play? I'd love to hear in the comments below if it's something you've experienced, and if so, what, if anything, you've done to try to close the distance between your decks and those from folks who just haven't been able to keep up. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time during your upkeep.