Commander subformats

[Maluko]

It is widely accepted that Commander has become the default format for casual play. It has grown exponentially in the past years thanks to the release of Commander products by Wizards of the Coast and social media outreach. Such growth has diversified how people view and play the format either with regular playgroups or with strangers at local game stores. One of the playstyles that has risen consequentially is competitive Commander (or cEDH), where players disregard the social contract and just play the best cards they can affort in order to mercilessly win the game. While things have been doing fine for the format in general, many players still report having trouble communicating with their opponents about what kind of game they expect to have. More recently, cEDH players have been complaining the format is too unbalanced in favor of Hulk Flash combo decks, and have been calling for the Rules Committee to do something about it. There have also been recent concerns about the escalation of power creep in Commander. As the number of cards printed with the format in mind increases, the chances of Wizards printing a card that obsoletes many others and becomes a new format staple (yes, I'm looking at you, Cyclonic Rift) increases.

I believe one possible solution to ameliorate these problems is the creation of sub-formats inside the Commander universe. Ever since reading Gavin's article about Junior Dragon Highlander that I've been pondering about this idea. And the more I thought about this idea, the more I think it will make the format more interesting for a variety of players.

Competitive Magic has Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy and Vintage, formats with different power levels, investment levels and required knowledge. Commander only has, well, Commander and Brawl. And we all have opinions about Brawl, not many of them good. Of course, playgroups are free to experiment with their own twists, but nothing official. I think the creation of one or two official non-rotating formats that follow the basic rules of commander would be useful to appease a large spectrum of the player base. The idea is that all cards printed in expansion and core sets from that block onwards, and new cards (not reprints!) from supplemental sets printed after that block, are legal to play.

For starters, I think the Mercadian Masques Block is an excellent starting point to create a new format, for all the reasons Gavin already mentioned in his article. A lot of the format's staples and more powerful cards were printed in the seven years prior to Mercadian Masques. I am also very curious to see cEDH players explore a format without access to staples such as Demonic Tutor, Mana Drain, Flash, Reanimate, and Swords to Plowshares. I will call this "Primeval Dragon Highlander (PDH)" because of the new three-colored dragons that were printed not in Mercadian Masques, but in the next block (Invasion).

Next, Brawl needs to be fixed, in my opinion. The premises behind the idea were excellent, but it ultimately failed to become popular (at least in paper, but correct me if I'm wrong). There's just no way you can transpose Commander to Standard, a rotating format with a very limited number of available commanders. Brawl needs to become a non-rotating format if it ever comes to succeed. The big question is what's the threshold. Mirrodin Block (Modern) or Return to Ravnica (Pioneer) are two good options. Many players have already invested in these competitive formats, and, outside the supplemental sets, it will be easy to remember which cards are legal and which aren't. Lorwyn Block is another possibility: both planeswalkers and supplemental sets started being printed here. But, in my personal opinion, the best, and maybe easiest, for people to remember is Magic 2015. Magic 2015 is where cards started being printed with a new frame. Thus, a good rule of thumb to know if a card is legal for "Junior Dragon Highlander" is to search it online and see if it ever had a printing without the new frame. Sadly, we would lose the legends from Return to Ravnica, and Golos would still be legal (although it is already banned in Brawl). But it would be nice to try a format without Cyclonic Rift or fetchlands.

What do you guys think? Is this adding too much complexity to the format? Or do you think this would help solve some of the format's problems?

P.S. Here's a small list of relevant cards that would not be allowed in Primeval Dragon Highlander.

SPOILER

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Armageddon
Cataclysm
Enlightened Tutor
Humility
Land Tax
Back to Basics
Force of Will
Mystical Tutor
Palinchron
Timetwister
Animate Dead
Contamination
Demonic Consultation
Doomsday
Yawgmoth's Will
Apocalypse
Blood Moon
Gamble
Jokulhaups
Wheel of Fortune
Hermit Druid
Natural Order
Oath of Druids
Survival of the Fittest
Worldly Tutor
Mana Crypt
Metalworker
Smokestack
Sol Ring
Winter Orb
Bazaar of Baghdad
Gaea's Cradle
Mishra's Workshop
Strip Mine
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale

[folding_music]

Yes! It's really hard to get a new format off the ground when you're starting from scratch vs a behemoth with ten thousand articles online and decks already built, but I totally support it as a reasonable variant. You wouldn't be "fixing" commander, though - all you'd be doing is starting a sister format where the arms race hasn't yet begun. Every time you pioneer a new space in an old game for your own reasons, it will eventually be tempered and perfected by someone who doesn't care about them. You gotta keep moving! Which is why I support all new formats as a matter of course, giggle.

the idea seems neat, though - just a single start date rule. Rules out Demonic Tutor without specifically mentioning it. as a prediction I think it'd be a showcase for OP stuff from the Commander precons and for the Spark planeswalkers who'll have an easier time surviving without people having respectable tutors for their silver bullets. It'd still be the Golos and Atraxa happy hour if you build for strength, etc?

[MrMystery314]

From a competitive perspective, new formats are always fun to explore, but the prognosis for their survival is generally not good. Tiny Leaders, Frontier, and so on. It's quite hard to convince people who have invested thousands of dollars and countless of dollars into a format to jump to one they know will remain extremely niche. Also, as folding_music says, some sort of "PDH" isn't going to magically lure competitively-minded players away from regular EDH, at least at first, and if a new format is intended as a bastion of friendly, casual play, you can't necessarily enforce that. cPDH would become a real thing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it won't take away from cEDH in all likelihood.

[Maluko]

Also, as folding_music says, some sort of "PDH" isn't going to magically lure competitively-minded players away from regular EDH, at least at first, and if a new format is intended as a bastion of friendly, casual play, you can't necessarily enforce that. cPDH would become a real thing, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it won't take away from cEDH in all likelihood.

That depends on how novel PDH is for the current cEDH players. Many, if not most, of the cEDH staples were printed in the first seven years of Magic. Thus, I think the metagame will look very different from cEDH, different enough that players will not only like to try it, but will instantly feel that difference in their games. My initial assessment is that, without access to the omnipresent cheap tutors and mana rocks of cEDH, games will be more balanced and interactive and feel less like a Russian Roulette of combos. For players who prefer to play competitively at a more interactive level, and have no money to buy all those staples, PDH will be a blessing. And for those casual players (such as myself) that frequently complain about Sol Ring & friends and how tutors break the singleton nature of the format, this would be a way to play Commander without having to roll your eyes at yet another broken spell played in a casual game.

Of course, there is the risk that after a few years cPDH will lose its novelty, the metagame will be solved, and players will come to the forums complain about the new Flash. But this is something we will never know unless the format is tested and endorsed. Therefore, we can only speculate if cPDH will become the new Tiny Leaders/Oathbreaker/Brawl or the new Modern/Pioneer of Commander.

[RxPhantom]

When it comes to sub-formats, my reaction is always one of disinterest. I'm already invested in Commander with multiple decks, and I'm not interested in something that can be described as "Commander, but...."

They'll all inevitably go the way of Tiny Leaders and Oathbreaker. Now, variants that don't require changes in deck construction, like Planechase, Archenemy, or Horde, then sign me up.

[schweinefett]

Actually, couldn't there be some sort of subformat 'handicap'? i.e. if you're playing a tiny leaders vs a table of normal EDH decks, then maybe you could get a 8 card starting hand. Maybe if you're on a pauper build, you can start with 45 life instead. That way, players wouldn't need to feel bad for pummeling a tiny leaders deck into the ground with a 'normal' EDH deck.

But as @RxPhantom says, the variants that don't require deck changes are the way to go for me too. Hell, way back when, we did a legacy + EDH plus 60-card casual vs horde game. Somewhat broke it, but it was still super fun.