I've been posting in this thread a lot today. Let's keep it going. For context, this announcement reached the Commander community like a lead zeppelin. While most early responses seemed to be either bewilderment or outrage, it didn't take long for some of the more high-profile people in Magic to put another spin on the issue: the members of the Commander Rules Committee and the Commander Advisory Group were receiving
death threats. I did notice some stalwart individuals dismissing this as a separate issue, and rightly so. Death threats are a matter for the police to deal with. Anyone threatening the RC/CAG can potentially be prosecuted. The legal system has tools for that. There is nothing that a bunch of strangers who happen to play Magic can do about this, and it's also pretty offensive to try to take the whole broader Magic community to task for some unspecified death threats that might all have come from the same individual or which might not even have happened in the first place.
I say "some stalwart individuals" because what I found online was that
almost everyone immediately caved. The narrative went from one of general criticism of the RC for this announcement to one of condemnation of the whole community because of some purported death threats. Now, I have no reason to believe that death threats weren't made. In fact, with potentially millions of players adversely affected by this announcement, it would be a surprise if there weren't a handful of psychopaths in the mix. So no, I'm not contending that there weren't death threats. I assume that there probably were, just because of how math and human nature play out in these scenarios. But what I will say is that I haven't seen receipts and that fake death threats would apparently have been an excellent way to deflect criticism here. It worked like a charm. I myself had some stranger on the internet tell me to "shut up" and call me a "coward" for failing to properly bemoan the horror of death threats against the RC instead of skipping past that to offer what was actually a pretty minor criticism of an aspect of this decision. But that was just one guy, and whatever. What bugs me more is seeing Magic content creators in articles and videos talking down to their audience, going on and on about how death threats are actually bad, as though anyone in the audience doesn't already know this. On the whole, this affair has been a great litmus test of who will argue in good faith and who will jump to virtue-signalling the moment that an opportunity to do so presents itself. So thanks for that, Commander Rules Committee.
The day after the announcement, the RC posted a document meant to address the deluge of criticism they were receiving...
Commander Rules Committee said:
The following questions have come up repeatedly in the aftermath of this week’s bannings. This document aims to provide an easily-linked-to source for answers. Those answers may not be satisfying or provide solace, but they hopefully provide clarity.
Before we start with the questions, we need to make one thing perfectly clear. While disagreement and good-faith discussion is welcome, threats of violence - including people supporting those threats - is beyond the pale. They have no place in Commander.
Threats of any kind directed at anyone on the CAG, Moderators, or RC are not only counterproductive, they will be dealt with immediately through appropriate legal channels.
Did the RC sell any of their cards before banning to avoid loss of value?
No. There’s no way to prove it short of putting our collections in escrow, but the RC has a zero-tolerance policy for abusing knowledge of pending or potential changes. If a vendor has evidence of cards being sold before the announcement we invite them to reach out to and publish it.
There's been some discussion online about whether or not there's any evidence of front-running. A frustrating aspect of this, as often comes up in the context of the Magic secondary market, is that blatantly predatory business practices are effectively legal in this space. In theory, they
might not be legal (that's tangled web to deal with), but it doesn't matter if no case ever comes under scrutiny by regulators or appears before a judge.
You can't necessarily get away with actual fraud. But if you have come into information that would influence the price of a Magic card, you are free to exploit this information in advance of others, and the SEC isn't going to come after you over playing cards. Do I think that the RC is lying about this? No, not at all. For one thing, this announcement was their first activity in three years. If they were out to make a profit, they've been doing a lousy job of it. Also, this doesn't really make sense as a money-making scheme. Setting aside the fact that Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus, expensive though they may be, are still basically small potatoes, they could make just as much money selling their copies of these cards and not banning anything at all. I could think of some clever workarounds to squeeze some value out of this kind of maneuver, but it would be really clumsy and the controversy that would ensue could damage their position of authority over the format (spoiler alert).
The better question to ask isn't whether the RC sold any of their cards before the banning, but whether any of the WotC staff they consulted before making this decision issued a tipoff to major card vendors. We didn't all know right away, but it turned out that the RC kept the Commander Advisory Group (CAG) in the dark for this announcement, ostensibly to prevent the possibility of leaks. But they also talked to WotC staff, and that's a much bigger sieve. So let's say that you work for Wizards of the Coast, but don't get paid very well. Let's say that you also have a point of contact with a major card merchant. We'll call them Moon Village Games. The insider information that Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt are about to be banned in EDH doesn't do you much good because you don't own enough copies of those cards for it to matter. But if you surreptitiously provide a tip to your friend over at Moon Village Games that this is about to go down, then they can move to minimize damage to themselves and let other vendors take the brunt of this bomb. Even if anyone could prove that they had advance notice, there's no consequences for them. It's all just playing cards for kids, not the stock market, so it's no big deal. You wouldn't benefit directly from your knowledge of the upcoming announcement, but your friend and Moon Village Games would probably make it worth your while. This is all hypothetical. I made it up. I have no evidence to suggest that it happened. But if it did happen, there'd be no consequences for it happening, and there's the rub.
Will the RC roll back these changes? Do you listen to the audience?
We have no desire or intent to roll back these changes, and believe that doing so would make any financial concerns much worse. We also believe the format as a whole will be better for them. That said, we do listen to the feedback about how it was communicated/executed, and other suggestions about how to handle it in the future.
The reticence of the RC is so extreme that most Commander players just assume it's actually laziness on their part. It's a bit comical to see them seriously claim that they listen to feedback.
Why didn’t you give advance notice of this change?
We’ll own this one, this could have been done much better.
Our policy about advance notice has been, for many years, to avoid muddying the waters with advance warnings about what we’re planning to ban. We used to have a watch list but it
- caused noticeable grief when things weren’t acted upon
- slowed down our ability to react when we saw a problem,
- and shifted the losses to the less enfranchised players who were less aware.
so we got rid of it.
I was going to call this revisionist history, but perhaps that's too blunt. The first point I'd grant, but give virtually no weight to. The second point I believe to be false (the RC never seemed to let the lack of mentioning a card's watch list status cause them to hesitate on a ban, or if they did, then they hid it well). The third point is trivial: less enfranchised players are almost always the ones left holding the bag. A watch list doesn't make that worse. It happens without one.
Second: On top of that, many recent bannings have come primarily from community feedback: Hullbreacher, Flash, Paradox engine were all cards the community told us were a problem… so there was public awareness in advance. This wasn’t the case with Golos and there was some objection to the surprise, but it has borne out as a good ban.
I mean, there's no way to measure that? Like, if I'm in charge of deciding what gets banned, then I decide to ban a card and my decision is controversial, how can I later tell everyone, "it has borne out as a good ban"? Would anyone who didn't like my decision really take at face value my claim that it "has borne out" to be a good? This is just, like, weird flexing?
Lastly, discussing potential/pending bans with more people increases the chance of leaks which make the losses even more unfair. Our goal with keeping it secret, especially in the case of expensive cards, was to avoid any possibility for advance trading based on leaks.
This bit has drawn some real criticism, and I'm kinda surprised that they said this. The RC created the CAG to give them insights, to be a voice at the table but not a vote on the final say. They choose who gets to be on the CAG. And for the biggest change they've made in many years, they opted not to seek advice from the group that they created to advise them because they were worried that their own advisory group would leak information. If you don't trust someone, then
why put them in an advisory group? Why not just, you know, not do that?
Perhaps CAG members started resigning for reasons totally unrelated to this. But I can't shake the feeling that advisors resigning was motivated largely or entirely by the fact that they were propped up as supposedly having a role in ban list changes, and then weren't consulted at all for the most controversial ban list changes ever because they were deemed
not trustworthy enough. Yeah, I'd resign too.
In the case of the September 2024 bans though the financial impact of this change justified more discussion or community awareness ahead of time. Keeping details secret to avoid leaks was important, but discussing the concept openly would have been worth it.
That's a contradiction. You can keep it a secret or you can discuss it openly. You can't do both! That's impossible.
Will you give advance notice of changes in the future?
We will be discussing the concept of “warming up” community awareness before bans like this in future. To be clear, it would be less of a shock, but casual players will more likely get taken advantage of, so it’s not clear it would be a strict improvement. Nevertheless, there is a significant portion of the player base who want to see it and we acknowledge that this set of bannings caused a lot of pain made worse by surprise.
Do I need to create some sort of chart to show why this concept of a watch list causing ignorant players to be duped by card sharks (moreso than already happens) doesn't make sense? It seems simple enough to me that the concept is dead-on-arrival, but the RC just invoked it twice in this FAQ.
Why didn’t you ban cards one at a time and see how that went?
The decision to ban multiple cards at the same time (Dockside, Crypt, and Lotus) was based on the belief that it sends a stronger message about what we’re trying to achieve. Agree with that goal or not, a “slow drip” would have diluted the impact and if the problem is real then we wanted to act decisively.
It's not about banning cards. It's about sending a message. Got it. Message received. And now WotC has taken over your format. Was it worth it? For the message? And what was the message anyway? I never actually understood that part.
You know, if you don't wait three years between bans, you can actually evaluate the impact of any one ban by itself. You might learn that some other card you thought of banning doesn't need banned after all. Crazy, right?
Did WotC know these cards might be banned when they sold them in 2023?
We have discussed our concerns about fast mana, including marquee cards like Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt, with WotC for some time but had not decided to ban them until recently. We knew it would be a painful change and maybe waited too long, but once we decide to ban cards we act and have never “sat on” a banning.
Three years. I've said it enough times now, right? Many of the sycophants in the Commander community defend the RC by casting them as unpaid volunteers doing a thankless job. You know, because waiting three years between doing anything counts as a job, apparently.
Did you ban these cards specifically because they’re expensive?
No, that reverses the cause and effect. The cards are expensive because they’ve been kept as chase rares and are very powerful. We banned them because of their power and impact on the format, and while we accept that their monetary value is real it doesn’t justify leaving them in the format.
Why does a card that has been part of the format since its inception suddenly need to be "justified" in order to avoid a ban? Shouldn't the onus be the other way around?
Did you ban these cards specifically to target cEDH/tEDH?
No. While this set of bannings does have a large impact on the cEDH/tEDH metagame, that was neither our goal nor an overwhelming consideration (in fact it’s something we like to avoid, but not a high priority). We banned them because they’re having an increasing effect on casual games and rule-zero/pregame conversations were no longer keeping them in check.
One of the big criticisms of the RC for years was that, other than Sheldon, most of them had long been rather inactive in the format. And WotC have freely admitted that a source of trepidation for them "taking over" and running the format is the lack of data, as casual Commander doesn't have a tournament structure and they can't just scrape MTGO to get some numbers. I say this because the mention of an "increasing effect on casual games" is a quantitative claim that the RC could not actually back up. It sounds good in theory, but the answer to "How do you know that the effect is increasing?" is a resounding, "They don't."
Do you care that banning these cards damages the cEDH metagame.
We care because some of our players enjoy that style of play, but believe this is a small portion of the global playerbase and that high-powered play “leaking” into lower power groups is a recurring problem. We have always been very clear that we would make changes based on helping casual players have the best play experience, and that cEDH-style players who simplify the pregame conversation may be caught in the blast. This was an extreme example of that, although our contacts in the high-power community believe it will not be destructive to the format and/or it will evolve into something new.
This paragraph is strange enough that I don't actually know how to analyze it. "Contacts in the high-power community"? I didn't know this was a thing! The subset of the non-cEDH community of Commander players who play "high-power" decks is, at best,
extremely slippery. I've met many of these people, and they don't really seem to have much in common with each other. They're not organized and no one speaks for them. Anyone contacting the RC and purporting to be a spokesperson for "high-power" casual EDH is bound to be a grifter.
Why wasn’t the CAG told about the bans or consulted?
The CAG has been involved in numerous conversations about format speed over the past few years, and have shared their opinions with us. They were not informed of the choice to ban these cards because we felt we had the information we needed (from them and elsewhere) and as a large group it would be difficult to keep it under wraps. As above, we felt making sure there were no leaks was paramount.
I know that some members of the CAG have shed some light on this statement, and it seems rather damning. From what I've read, it looks like the CAG were vaguely surveyed on some topics and that they only real connection this has to these bans was that they were asked general questions about "fast mana."
Are other expensive cards safe from being banned?
Yes but not absolutely beyond reproach. We’re not going to paint ourselves into a corner and say that we’ll never ban expensive cards, but we can say categorically that we do not want to ban cards, that staples are part of commander (the card pool is incredibly large), and that we will try to keep the format stable going forward unless those cards are causing large problems.
For most of these cards, players were either unaware that the RC viewed the cards as "causing problems" or players had complained about the cards for long enough that they just assumed that the RC wasn't interested in banning them.
