Should banned as commander come back?

[onering]

Actually, as someone who supports BaaC returning, I do think one thing has changed in the past year that hurts one of the arguments I made for bringing the rule back (or rather the past year has revealed the efficacy of a change made a couple of years ago, given the lag between design and release).

One of the arguments for bringing the rule back was so that the RC could more quickly ban problem commanders like Golos or Chulane to check the, at the time, out of control design of new commanders. This was after a period of a couple of years that saw a proliferation of kill on sight value bombs, combo enablers, and Tergrid. Whether wizards was going to pull back on this trend and actually succeed at reining in their designs remained to be seen. Over the past year, it appears that theyve been successful at reining in their designs. This, for me, removes the utility of a BaaC list as a more forceful means of telling wizards to dial back their designs.

[DirkGently]

@onering I do agree that they've generally eased back on a lot of the pushed designs, which I'm grateful for.

I've said before that I think banning powerful new commanders could create an unpleasant environment where people are nervous to build the commanders they like, for fear that they'll get banned. In a world where WotC continually pushes the power level of commanders, I think trying to ban them would be a mistake. If we banned Chulane a year after his release, we'd just be obliged to ban the next hot thing, and so on and so forth, creating a lot of feel-bads for people building those commanders. However, since it seems like the designs have been reined in, I think it's increasingly reasonable to consider banning some of the more problematic commanders from the more power-crept eras, like Chulane, Korvold, etc. I'd still advocate for a full ban rather than baac, ofc. But I think it looks more reasonable now than it did a few years ago.