If unbanning four cards and allowing Vehicles as commanders weren’t big enough changes this year for Magic: The Gathering’s Commander format, some new and proposed tweaks that were recently revealed could give your favorite decks one heck of a power boost for one of the best card games.
Revealed on the MTG Weekly stream by the Commander Format Panel, we’ve got an adjusted Bracket system, a whopping 10 cards have been removed from the Game Changers list, and Wizards is wanting our opinions on hybrid mana in Magic: The Gathering and the banning of two of the game’s most infamous cards.
Meet the new brackets
Up first is a fine-tuning of the bracket system revealed last year to help you gauge how powerful your deck is in relation to your tables’.
A new image released by Wizards clarifies the differences between the brackets, and it’s largely intent. The more a deck intends to win quickly, the higher its bracket.
A helpful addition is how many turns each bracket usually takes to win. Bracket 1 games should generally go for nine turns, with each bracket getting faster until Bracket 5 can win at any time.
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Again, this highlights how important intent is; a deck that wins in five turns isn’t Bracket 1, even if none of the cards are Commander staples and there’s a funny theme behind them.
The other change is the removal of tutors, or cards that search through your deck. Because some are far better than others, they are no longer part of the brackets. Angrath’s Fury in your Bracket 1 Angrath deck is totally fine, even if it is technically a tutor.
Don’t forget that these aren’t rules, they’re just another tool to help place your deck accurately. If your deck doesn’t neatly fit into a bracket, a quick chat with your pod will help work things out.
Get ready for a Game Changer
Game Changers are a list of the most powerful cards in Commander, with lower brackets limiting how many you can use. 10 cards have been removed, and, at first glance, the list is shocking:
- Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur
- Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger
- Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy
- Urza, Lord High Artificer
- Winota, Joiner of Forces
- Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow
- Expropriate
- Sway of the Stars
- Deflecting Swat
- Food Chain
Kinnan? Urza? Winota? What? The reasons behind it make a whole lot of sense. They’re all legendary creatures that are scarier in the command zone than the deck itself – you can talk before the game about how you’d rather not play against a Kinnan, but not necessarily a Force of Will.
The other four are removed for different reasons. Expropriate and Food Chain define their decks and are easy to discuss, while Deflecting Swat and Sway of the Stars just aren’t as powerful as other Game Changers.
These changes are effective immediately, so feel free to stick that Deflecting Swat anywhere you dang well please!
Hybrid mana could be changing
Hybrid mana lets you pay one of two different colors of mana for a spell, such as Cold-Eyed Selkie costing one generic and two blue, two green, or a mix of the two.
In every other format, hybrid mana adds flexibility. However, in Commander, it’s considered as being both colors, which falls foul of its color identity rules. This means Cold-Eyed Selkie is strictly for decks that use blue and green mana.
The proposal is simple: make hybrid mana the ‘or’ it is everywhere else in Magic. A hybrid blue and white card would be blue, or white, or both, depending on the needs of your deck. That’s a heck of a lot of new cards to use.
It's been a turbulent time for Magic over the past few months; as an example, MTG's Spider-Man set is only just fine, which isn't good enough.
There are two questions to be answered before the changes take effect. The first is ‘two-brid’ cards that split the hybrid cost with one color and one generic cost. Would Beseech the Queen be a black card, or colorless? Would Ulalek, Fused Atrocity be colorless, or WUBRG? Wizards has said it is leaning more towards counting them as colorless cards that could slot in anywhere, but is open to feedback on the matter.
The second question is whether this fits the spirit of Commander. Color identity isn’t found in most other formats, and provides a deckbuilding restriction as integral to Commander as the 100-card singleton rule. Would allowing hybrid mana confuse new players on what they can and can’t play?
This is only a proposed change, but I lean towards keeping the rules as they are. Although, the thought of running Murkfiend Liege in my Goreclaw, Terror of Qal’Sisma deck is still very enticing.
The banhammer is looming
The last thing up for debate is the fate of two iconic Commander cards that have caused major upset for years. Rhystic Study and Thassa’s Oracle are on the chopping block in upcoming MTG banlist.
Wizards is wary of banning Rhystic Study because of how iconic it is in Commander, but it gunks up a game with constant asking if each player pays one mana, and can lead to the controller running away with the game.
Thassa’s Oracle, on the other hand, is a combo piece that regularly ends games in multiple brackets. It’s too easy to stumble into the ‘Thoracle’ combo, and it gets worse with the greater consistency of higher brackets.
Neither of these cards are banned yet, and likely won’t be for a while. After all, Dockside Extortionist was up for a banning for years before the ban finally dropped, so enjoy them while you can.
For more tabletop goodness, be sure to check out the best board games or the best 2-player board games.
