Since apparently I'm still not inclined to shut up, I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here...
The new MTGO ban list includes Sol Ring, as I noted in my previous post. What I didn't say was how very much that makes sense, in the context of what else is on there. And yet, for others this has been a point of criticism. It's apparent that there's a segment of the Commander community that really wants their Sol Rings. The card is so good that it is in pretty much every Commander deck I've ever seen. Even my deck, which eschews all other non-creature artifacts except for Crucible of Worlds, employs the card. Because it's seen as such a Commander staple, Sol Ring has been in every single Commander precon. The card was an uncommon in Revised too, so combining the reasonably large supply with the fact that it isn't a legal card in most formats, the pricetag on the card isn't all that high. Basically, everyone has one, and it's a popular card. So when it was included on the new ban list, that decision was decried, mainly before the subsequent revision indicating that this list would only apply to 1v1 Commander on MTGO, when non-MTGO Commander fans were concerned that this was a sign WotC was going to take over the format and change everything. The general nature of the complaint seemed to be that Sol Ring was a universal staple in the format and that banning it showed that WotC was out of touch and didn't understand the format. But there was also an implication (that I saw a couple of times, not nearly as prominent but it was out there) that Sol Ring was an innocuous card. After all, it's a 99-card deck and you can only use one copy of it, and all it does is make a little mana. Plus, everyone else is using one too, so it balances out.
I'm not going to set out to make a definitive case that Sol Ring should be banned in Commander, because I think the "official" ban list has bigger problems that would need addressing, but I do want to speak to the sentiment that Sol Ring is innocuous or that everything balances out because everyone gets one. While most Commander players are "new" to the game compared to the members here, the format has been shaped by longstanding ideals and notions about casual magic, and casual players have historically been alright with Sol Ring. I know that I was. We definitely played forum games at the CPA with people using Sol Ring, and while that was largely done alongside prior agreement that the Vintage restricted list was in effect, such decks tended not to use very many other restricted cards. Yeah, you might see a Sol Ring, but not a Mox Emerald or a Time Walk, because those were "power" cards and these were just fun casual games. There was some game where we were spooked by Spidey's Library of Alexandria, but when I later played Sol Ring, it wasn't a play that drew any particular attention. Can't remember how many games I saw it in, but it was very common, including in virtually every tribal game, and I thought nothing of it at the time, especially since I'd gone much further myself. I used to build casual decks will full playsets of Sol Ring. So did other people in my playgroup. In the comment section of one of the articles that I wrote here, I remember someone proposing that Sol Ring should be restricted in Legacy instead of banned. Obviously we knew that the card was strong, but there was this unspoken assumption that, as a "staple" it was fine to have around.
Recently, I've been thinking about this differently. In the past, "Power 9" cards were something I only dreamed about. I didn't use them in my decks because I didn't own them, and I only ever faced opponents using real, physical copies of them on a very small number of occasions. So they felt like something legendary (not in the rules sense, but in the colloquial sense), and not like a normal part of the game. But Sol Ring was different. It was everywhere. And so that made it OK.
While I did a lot of Vintage testing in the past and was certainly aware, in a technical sense, of how Sol Ring, the original five Moxen, and other mana accelerants functioned, both when restricted and when used as full playsets of four, there was something about all the experience with the actual, physical cards that made Sol ring as a staple, at least one copy, feel real. But the original five Moxen? Not real. A thing of legend. Something from the days of yore, stretching back into the mists of time. Inaccessible. And then I bought them (not all at once, mind you, but over a period of a few years I did acquire a white-bordered copy of each one). And I put them in decks (mostly Vintage playtest decks). And the information that I knew in a clinical sort of sense became reality: Sol Ring is totally bonkers, even in a world with Power 9 cards. As restricted or singleton cards, the Moxen are really only particularly potent because there are five of them. From a strictly gameplay, non-financial perspective, I'd rather have four copies of Sol Ring than one copy each of the Moxen, in the vast majority of deckbuilding scenarios. There are many factors at work, but generally, Sol Ring is a stronger card than any one Mox.
I'm not necessarily saying that the Commander Rules committee is wrong for not banning Sol Ring over other powerful cards on the list, because it's a special format with some unusual considerations to weigh. But if the issue in Commander is that a critical mass of mana accelerants would break the format, and so for the sake of accessibility the most financially expensive cards are banned and the more widely available cards are allowed to remain, then a case could be made for keeping Sol Ring but banning the five Moxen. However, if that is the idea, I do think that it should be noted explicitly.
