Commentary on the EDH/Commander ban list

[Oversoul]

Recently, the Commander Rules Committee completed a project in which their website was updated to provide brief explanations for all of the cards on the ban list. The results of the project look pretty nice, and I'm sure that the new blurbs would be informative for new players or those curious about the format. For my part, I first stumbled across the ban list back when it was a "suggested ban list" on their old website, back in 2008 or so. Since then, I've shifted from not playing EDH at all or only vaguely maintaining a single EDH deck to playing EDH every week and maintaining an arsenal of 8 to 10 decks. But across the past 16 years, I've pretty much always been severely critical of the ban list.

In the past, explanations by the RC for various ban decisions were mostly buried in internet archives of their defunct message board, as well as strewn sporadically across other Magic content websites, such as Star City Games. This new approach is far superior. Seeing the elegance of everything consolidated in one place, I am inspired to do the same. If I'm going to blather on about the EDH ban list, there might as well be a thread specifically for that.

It looks like the list, ignoring the three categorical bans at the top (for ante cards, conspiracy cards, and victims of the June 10th, 2020 massacre), there are 45 cards on the list. Since the blurbs for the original five Moxen are presuably identical, I figure I'll take the next 41 days to respond to each blurb, one at a time, providing my own commentary. Some of that commentary is likely going to be pretty critical, but some of it will likely be rather positive as well.

Feel free to add your own commentary as well, whether that's in response to the official RC blurbs or to the drivel I write in response. Before I begin with the individual banned cards, it's best to review the current Format Philosophy Document.

Commander is for fun. It’s a socially interactive, multiplayer Magic: the Gathering format full of wild interactions and epic plays, specifically designed as an alternative to tournament Magic. As is fitting for a format in which you choose an avatar to lead your forces into battle, Commander focuses on a resonant experience.

As someone who has recently played a fair bit of PreDH, there's a stark contrast between what the format used to look like when this Philosophy Document was originally conceived and the way that Commander is now played. It's a living format, so some degree of that is to be expected, but the departure is so pronounced that it can't go without mention. Is this WotC's fault and not something the RC can really do much about? Probably. But it's interesting, and strikes me as at least slightly dubious, that even though the format looks completely alien to the form it took a decade or so ago, the ban list looks pretty much the same.

Each game is a journey the players share, relying on a social contract in which each player is considerate of the experiences of everyone involved–this promotes player interaction, inter-game variance, a variety of play styles, and a positive communal atmosphere. At the end of an ideal Commander game, someone will have won, but all participants will have had the opportunity to express themselves through their deck building and game play.

Nice.

The rules of Commander are designed to maximize these experiences within a game of Magic. The addition of a commander, larger life total, and deck building restrictions emphasize the format’s flavor; they increase deck variance and add more opportunities for participation and expression.

They did once. I've seen that when I've piloted my PreDH decks against other PreDH decks, or even when I've played some of my goofier theme decks against new and clueless players. But these days, even the officially released precons are often so oppressive that I, as a player with decades of experience and access to pretty much whatever cards I want to play, can't afford to try "participation and expression."

The goal of the ban list is similar; it does not seek to regulate competitive play or power level, which are decisions best left to individual play groups.

This is an important distinction between the EDH ban list and ban lists for most other formats. Some have argued that this philosophy for a ban list is not really tenable, and they may be right. I have mixed feelings on the matter.

The ban list seeks to demonstrate which cards threaten the positive player experience at the core of the format or prevent players from reasonable self-expression. The primary focus of the list is on cards which are problematic because of their extreme consistency, ubiquity, and/or ability to restrict others’ opportunities.

We'll come to some individual examples later, but I contend that given this statement (emphasis theirs, by the way), cards that demonstrably don't exhibit these issues do not belong on the ban list. In other words, if a banned card wouldn't be extremely consistent, ubiquitous, or restrictive, then it should be unbanned, according to the very philosophy that the RC purport to be relying on.

No single rule can establish criteria for a ban; there are many mitigating or exacerbating factors. Some cards will represent an extreme on a single axis; others are a confluence of multiple smaller issues. The following list isn’t exhaustive, nor is it a checklist, but it represents ways in which cards challenge the positive experiences players look for in commander games. It includes cards which easily or excessively
• Cause severe resource imbalances
• Allow players to win out of nowhere
• Prevent players from contributing to the game in a meaningful way.
• Cause other players to feel they must play certain cards, even though they are also problematic.
• Are very difficult for other players to interact with, especially if doing so requires dedicated, narrow responses when deck-building.
• Interact poorly with the multiplayer nature of the format or the specific rules of Commander.
• Lead to repetitive game play.
Cards which are banned likely meet a few of these criteria in a significant way; not all cards which meet some of the criteria need to banned.

The thing I don't like about this section of the doument is that it is formated to look very thorough and detailed, but is actually so vague that it might as well be saying nothing at all.

We prefer to be conservative with what goes on or comes off the ban list. Commander players often become emotionally attached to their decks through play and personalization, and we value that experience highly. We only want to disrupt that bond when necessary.

The reasoning provided applies to bans, but not unbans. Emotional attachment to a deck, personalization, bonds, etc. are not affected by unbans.

Commander is designed to be a malleable format. We encourage groups to use the rules and the ban list as a baseline to optimize their own experience. This is not license for an individual to force their vision onto a play group, but encouragement for players to discuss their goals and how the rules might be adjusted to suit those goals.

I actually like this bit of the Document, but am a bit annoyed with the way it's been misapplied by other parties. Much of the EDH content on the internet uses this "Rule Zero" to promote the idea that everyone should be having some sort of chat session before every game, so that all of the players will be have a shared understanding of expectations for the game that is about to commence. In practice, if one has a regular playgroup of friends who know each other, this concept can be streamlined to well that it works. For a bunch of strangers at a local game store, attempts at this "Rule Zero Conversation" are inevitably awkward and boring.

The format can be broken; we believe games are more fun if you don’t.
There’s a channel for discussing the format philosophy over on the RC Discord server. We look forward to you joining us.
You can also jump right to the Commander Rules page from here.

I joined that Discord, but I almost always forget that it exists, so I'm not really active over there. However, the rest of you don't need to follow my bad example. The Discord is well worth checking out if you're interested in the format.

So that's the Philosophy. Now on with the ban list!

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1993-AUG-05
Banned: —
Ancestral Recall was originally banned for poor optics, rather than power level. While it’s plenty powerful, it’s the effect on perceived barrier-to-entry that really posed a problem because casual players watching Commander games in passing could reasonably assume that they needed hundreds (now thousands) of dollars in Power-9 mana as table stakes, just to join the format. Ancestral Recall was an iconic and expensive card at the time it was banned, and removing it from the card pool was intended to combat the notion that Commander is a prohibitively expensive and inaccessible format.

So, from a historical perspective, there's nothing wrong with this blurb. They explain why Ancestral Recall was originally banned, back when the format was first created (around 20 years ago). But whatever you think of Ancestral Recall, the fact of the matter is that none of the reasoning detailed in this blurb applies to Magic in 2024! I personally play with several perfectly legal cards in my own decks that are worth more money now than Ancestral Recall was worth back then. In fact, owing to the legality of the card in this format, Timetwister has become more expensive than Ancestral Recall.

Firstly, Commander/EDH is now the most popular Magic format in the world. It's simply not realistic that casual players watching Commander games in passing would see me playing Ancestral Recall and assume, based on this, that the format is inaccessible. They'd have to know how much Ancestral Recall is worth and also be unfamiliar with the Commander format. The intersection of those two doesn't really capture today's casual Magic players. The only demographic it might capture would be some enfranchised old school card collectors.

Secondly, the sheer rarity of Ancestral Recall has probably made it less obvious as a signal of extreme card prices to casual players than plenty of perfectly legal EDH staples. Dual lands, Gaea's Cradle, Mox Diamond, Wheel of Fortune, Gilded Drake, and Grim Monolith are probably all seen so much more and commented on so much more that they stand out more as examples of budget player inaccessibility than Ancestral Recall ever could or would.

Thirdly, WotC continues to print new cards in a way that strategically keeps them at high secondary market price points, and deliberately makes some of these cards EDH staples. So the Reserved List, and old cards in general, is one issue, but I'd argue that it's dwarfed by the ubiquity of more recent format staples with ridiculous price tags. Sure, they aren't thousands of dollars like Ancestral Recall. But seeing a bunch of $100 cards in several different decks, often at the same table, is probably a far more pronounced price signal to casual players than seeing the one guy who happens to own an Ancestral Recall.

Mana Crypt sees occasional reprints in limited quantities, including some recent ones, but the cheapest version of the card is still almost $180. Jeweled Lotus, a card explicitly made for this format, is worth $100. Chrome Mox is still worth at least $80. Sheoldred, the Apocalypse is at least that much, despite being a new card from 2022. Dockside Extortionist is right behind them, sitting above $70 even for cheaper printings. And if I broadened this to include staples that are in the $20 to $50 range, a price point that is still quite high for most casual players, I could go on for several pages listing examples. The mythic rarity and WotC's strategy with reprints work together to ensure that there are always expensive cards for EDH players to spend money on.

I'm not saying that Ancestral Recall should be unbanned. What I'm saying is that what I get out of the RC blurb on this card is that back when the format was new and relatively unknown, there was a concern that bystanders would mistake a janky format full of creature combat for being more akin to Vintage, if they saw Ancestral Recalls being slung around. Fair enough. Since that's no longer a realistic problem, it doesn't make sense as justification for why Ancestral Recall is still banned.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1993-AUG
Banned: —
On its face, Balance looks like a very effective catch-up strategy that’s mechanically very white, but in practice it leads to slow, long games with a low density of meaningful decisions or memorable events. Players are often left with little-to-no resources and little-to-no cards in hand, feeling like they don’t have any agency in the game they’re playing.

In any other format, the explanation for why Balance is banned would note the extreme effect of the card along three separate axes of gameplay all for a mere two mana. It's well-known to experienced players, pretty much universally. I'd speculate that anyone here at the CPA has pretty much the same understanding of why Balance is banned in Legacy as I do, which would also be pretty much the same understanding that I'd expect a dedicated Legacy tournament grinder to have. This card is the textbook example of pushing symmetrical effects too far.

Frankly, I'm a bit surprised to see that the RC don't mention the low mana cost of Balance a single time. In my mind, that part is key. Notably, cards like Cataclysm, Catastrophe, and Balancing Act are perfectly legal in EDH. Balance being a two-drop is a big deal. Instead of even alluding to that, the RC assert that it "leads to slow, long games with a low density of meaningful decisions or memorable events." And I don't think that's even true!

I agree that Balance should be banned in EDH, so the qualms I'm stating with this explanation might seem pedantic. Notably, Balance isn't really a problem in Vintage, nor in contemporary 1v1 Highlander formats. The distinction in EDH is that Balance would scale with player count, and unfettered access to Balance synergies and setups (either using a commander or using the fact that this format doens't ban any tutors) totally changes the picture. So I totally wouldn't unban Balance in EDH. I just think that this official explanation is a lousy one. It makes me wonder if the members of the RC haven't actually experienced playing against Balance, and are simply imagining what it would be like.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2002-OCT
Banned: —
As an eight-mana sorcery, Biorhythm can appear to deck builders as a fair and funny haymaker but the reality is that it usually results in a disappointing twist to the game, ignoring previous gameplay to wipe 100+ life off the board. Wrath effects are a core element of casual metagames, and most often Biorhythm results in the accidental elimination of players rather than a strategic payoff.

Going in alphabetical order, we've hit the first card that exemplifies a classic issue with the RC. What they've always told us with some of these cards is that the cards are ones that ignorant casual players would believe at first glance to be fun, but that these cards are actually not fun. Essentially, the cards are traps for well-meaning players, but the RC are here to save us from our own inexperience. While I'm sure that the RC would never word it the way I just did, and would always phrase this concept more diplomatically, the core concept remains the same.

Biorhythm does not look "fun" to me. But it doesn't look "disappointing" either. It just looks like overcosted trash from a bygone era. In order to make Biorhythm work in multiplayer, you need some combo in which your own creatures live, your opponents don't get any, and Biorhythm goes off. This is potentially achievable! It's not impossible. The easiest way to pull it off would probably be to overload Cyclonic Rift on the end step before your turn, then cast Biorhythm. If no one has any responses, you win the game! But really, a lot of things win with Cyclonic Rift, so this approach seems like a moot point. Other combos are generally even more expensive, convoluted, and unreliable. A common theme with potential Biorhythm scenarios is that the setup they entail requires a bunch of generally good cards, while Biorhythm is dead weight until the exact perfect scenario unfolds. This issue isn't new. I recall commenting on it way back when Biorhythm first came out in Onslaught. We're talking about an eight-mana sorcery which, even once you do have the mana to cast it, you still need to hold onto until you can guarantee that the board state is in your favor. Opponent has a response that wipes out your creatures? You die to your own spell. Opponent has a response that puts creatures on the field? Well, if your creatures couldn't swing in for the win already, then they probably still can't.

I'm trying not to be too hard on Biorhythm, as I really don't think that it's the worst card in the game or anything. But it is kind of bad! It was an ill-fated card design. I suspect that WotC got a bit too unfocused on whether they wanted a "Timmy" card or a "Johnny" card. They ended up printing something far too situational to be worth running in a casual green deck. This card came out when I was in high school, and the poor kids who tried to make Biorhythm work all quickly learned that they'd just be sad, seeing it sit in their hands as dead weight, game after game. The handful of times that it might have actually done something, they could easily have won with Overrun or whatever. So, ironically enough, I kind of agree with the RC that Biorhythm is a trap. They just have it backwards. It's not that Biorhythm looks fun, but plays out in a way that it "accidentally" eliminates players. It's that Biorhythm looks fun, but shouldn't be in a deck because it probably just won't get cast at all. And I, for one, don't think that we should be banning cards just to protect players from being sad that they were too inexperienced to realize that those cards were not viable.

One of the topics that I knew I'd delve into is the history of how the RC presented the ban list, saying stuff like how it isn't meant to be comprehensive and that the banned cards are meant to be guideposts on what to avoid. I've spent most of this post disputing the idea that Biorhythm is oppressive. But what if I'm wrong? Hypothetically, even if I agreed with the RC that Biorhythm was a card that looked fun, but led to accidental eliminations and disappointing twists, well, then what? How could I use that as a guidepost? What the RC are (probably inadvertently) telling the players is that they should avoid cards that the players think would be fun, but that actually result in unfun gameplay. This is not useful advice!

Reading the blurb on this card makes me want to rant about how I think that Biorhythm was lazy card design by WotC, and how they could have fixed it if they'd put some thought into it. But that goes beyond the scope of this thread. But this does bring me to one final note before I wrap this one up. If Biorhythm had been designed differently, and if this had resulted in a card that really could do the things that the RC describe it doing, then that would actually be pretty interesting. If some Biorhythm-like card were actually causing "twists" in gameplay, if it were suddenly wiping out hundred of life points, if it were causing these big swings and sometimes accidentally eliminating players, then I'd totally play that card. And I'd hope that it remained legal, for that matter. So I've been a bit harsh on RC with this one, but I really believe that they deserve it beause this explanation sucks. The real card doesn't act the way that they say it does, and if a card did act in that way, then it should be legal.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1993-AUG
Banned: —
Black Lotus was originally banned for poor optics, rather than power level. Players watching Commander games in passing could reasonably assume that they needed hundreds (now thousands) of dollars in Power-9 mana as table stakes, just to join the format. Black Lotus was an iconic and expensive card at the time it was banned, and removing it from the card pool was intended to combat the notion that Commander is a prohibitively expensive and inaccessible format.

I guess that this is, word-for-word, the same blurb as the one for Ancestral Recall, except for the card name. The thing that I didn't cover in the Ancestral Recall post is the effect that these cards would actually have, assuming that they were legal. And I find it interesting that the RC steer clear from this. On the one hand, perhaps that they believe such a topic to be too speculative. If Black Lotus is off the table forever because of "optics" then it doesn't really matter what the result would be if it were legal. On the other hand, we have a lot of evidence from Vintage, from pointed Highlander formats, and even from "No ban list EDH" to give us some insight. And consistently, across the board, Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus are two of the most potent and dominant cards. From what I've seen of No ban list EDH, Black Lotus is basically a card that the whole format is warped around. It's like Sol Ring in regular EDH, dialed up to 11.

It's fascinating that we've got these two cards, the case for a ban based on power level could never be clearer, and yet the RC give some blurb about historical optics and card prices. Black Lotus isn't just the most expensive card. It's more than five times the price of Ancestral Recall. Seriously. So now comes the question I didn't ask when I talked about Ancestral Recall. If finance and optics are a dealbreaker for Black Lotus and for Ancestral Recall, then why not for Timetwister? The secondary market value of Timetwister is currently just slightly higher than that of Ancestral Recall. It's higher than Time Walk and any of the Moxen. Timetwister rose to become the second most valuable card in the Power 9, and that is 100% because of EDH. So why not ban Timetwister?

The questions don't stop there. Timetwister might be far more expensive than non-P9 cards, but I can even use it in the same deck as Mishra's Workshop, Bazaar of Baghdad, and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale. This isn't just some academic consideration. I personally have run at least three of these cards together in the same deck, and wouldn't hesitate to jam them all into the same deck if I felt like I'd found a deck where it made sense. Throw in a Candelabra of Tawnos, perhaps a Moat, The Abyss, and some dual lands. At some point along the way, we'd eclipse the value of a mere single Black Lotus. If expensive cards are a problem because they'd convince bystanders that the format is inaccessible, then several of my former and current decks should be banned. Where's the cutoff? Are we seriously being told that it's totally OK if I run a $775 Gaea's Cradle in my deck, but bad for optics if I run a $9,500 Black Lotus? Because if that's the case I think that I have a reality check for the RC. No one thinks that hundreds of dollars for a single Magic card is sane or normal.

It seems like we're actually being told something even more bizarre. It seems like we're being tolt that it's bad for optics if I run a $9,500 Black Lotus, totally OK if I run a $4,000 Timetwister, bad for optics if I run a $3,000 Ancestral Recall, and totally OK if I run a $2,700 Tabernacle. Presumably it goes back to being bad for optics again if I run a $1,600 Library of Alexandria, but swings around to totally OK one more time if I run a $775 Gaea's Cradle. Now that I think about it, perhaps the RC just don't understand how numbers work.

This whole mess would have been the easiest thing in the world to avoid. All they needed to do was say that Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus were banned for power level reasons.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2001-AUG
Banned: 2009-JUN (as commander)
2014-SEP (overall)
Braids has a tendency to create fully locked down boardstates and ends games early in a remarkably unsatisfying way. Braids removes resources aggressively, meaning players are unable to keep the resources needed to remove it. First banned as a commander in 2009. When ‘Banned as a Commander’ was removed in 2014, Braids was moved to the general banlist.

This is a good explanation. I kinda roasted the RC for their weird blurbs on those Power 9 pieces, and for their hilarious take on Biorhythm. It's only fair that I give them props when they do better. The main point of interest here is the 2014 change that saw the "Banned as Commander" category eliminated. I have no strong opinions either way on that. I know that the RC wanted to streamline the format, and believed that having two different categories of bans would be too confusing for new players. And I can see their point. I've also seen some players scoff at this reasoning. They note that the format is already too complex for new players to understand everything anyway, and that "Banned as Commander" is pretty simple compared to other things. And I can see their point too. Sorry. I guess I've been on the fence regarding this for nearly a decade now. Oh well.

I wouldn't want to play against Braids as a commander. Notably, back in 2009 or even in 2014, there were very few legendary creatures I'd bother saying this about. But now it's 2024, and there are lots of legends I'd say this about. Braids would be egregious, but the fourth most popular mono-black commander of all time is Tergrid, God of Fright. I do not want to play against Tergrid as commander any more than I want to play against Braids as commander. They're similar to each other in terms of how oppressive they are. The difference that sees one banned and the other totally legal is merely a twenty year gap between their first printings. That's it.

Some idiot nerd could probably challenge that Braids is somehow more egregious than Tergrid, but we all know that's a load of crap. They're both mono-black commanders that keep opponents from being able to have stuff at all, but require a bit of setup to work. the setup looks different between the two of them, but the victim of either doesn't really care, and setup is easy enough in both cases that casual pods would fall victim to these prisons all the time.

Am I arguing for a Tergrid ban? Maybe. But there's nothing special about mono-black. WotC has released oppressive legendary creatures in other colors too.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1993-AUG
Banned: 2010-JUN
Channel abuses two important aspects of the format:
1) Higher life totals make the life payment essentially trivial if this is played in the early game;
2) Players always have something to do with the mana (eg. cast their commander).
Channel often catapults its controller way ahead by producing huge amounts of mana.

Yeah, I can't really think of anything to add for this one. It's a solid explanation. Channel is broken even at 20 life. Starting at 40 life instead and always having access to a legendary creature would push Channel to absurdity. Notably, back when Channel was originally banned, the payload of choice was typically Emrakul, the Aeon's Torn. Just a few months later, Emrakul would get banned anyway. Usually, when that sort of thing happens I'm pretty critical of it. But Channel would have needed to be banned anyway.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1993-AUG
Banned: —
Cards that require manual dexterity present unique accessibility challenges for the format. We don’t want Commander to be a format that you can only play if you can engage in specific physical actions. Chaos Orb incentivizes players to physically spread their cards out over a large area in order to minimize the possibility of multiple permanents being affected. At best, this is awkward, and at worst it adds needless complexity to maintaining the state of the game.

First Printed: 1994-JUN
Banned: —
Cards that require manual dexterity present unique accessibility challenges for the format. We don’t want Commander to be a format that you can only play if you can engage in specific physical actions. Falling Star incentivizes players to physically spread their cards out over a large area in order to minimize the possibility of multiple permanents being affected. At best, this is awkward, and at worst it adds needless complexity to maintaining the state of the game.

I combined these two. Not much to say on them. Unlike ante cards, conspiracies, and the salty seven, these weren't covered in the introduction to the ban list, perhaps because there are only two of them. These cards are relics of a bygone age. It wouldn't make any sense for them to be legal, so of course they're on the ban list.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2000-OCT
Banned: 2007-MAR
Coalition Victory threatens a strongly negative experience largely out of nowhere for a casual table where the game is expected to go long enough that a spell such as Coalition Victory will be cast. In general, tapping out at a healthy life total against an opponent with nothing but any 5-color Commander in play shouldn’t cause you to lose the game unless you have signed up for that kind of experience (in which case Coalition Victory is far from your biggest problem.) Steering folks away from this kind of experience is at the heart of what the banlist is trying to accomplish.

Here we are. I don't know if I'm going to be quite as critical of any of the other entries on this list as I am of this card right here. And the bizarre explanation blurb here doesn't help matters. What does "in which case Coalition Victory is far from your biggest problem" even mean? Seriously, I have no idea what they're trying to say with that parenthetical. And if it's so cryptic that someone like me doesn't get it, I can guarantee that the average player doesn't get it either. And as for the "tapping out at a healthy life total against an opponent with X shouldn't cause you to lose the game" idea, I'm afraid that's just too bad. High-powered EDH decks capable of winning in a single turn from what was an innocuous starting point run rampant these days, and Coalition Victory isn't even close to being a good enough way to do this that it would make the cut.

In the past there have been comments from the RC on some cards, this one particularly, that I've parphrased as "Casual players think that these cards would be fun, but they're wrong about that. The cards are actually unfun. We've banned them to protect casual players from themselves, because they don't know what fun is." I guess it's good that the new official blurb doesn't quite say that, but I actually think it comes kind of close. And it's one thing to tell your playerbase that you are the authority on which cards get banned, that you have to make a decision one way or another, and that this is your decision. It's another thing to infantalize your playerbase.

When it comes to alternate win conditions, Coalition Victory is probably in the middle of the pack for ease of achieving a win. Now, I've debated some experienced players who agreed with this ban decision, and I'm sure they'd point out that it's significantly easier to unlock Coalition Victory now than it was back when Coalition Victory was new. And that's true! These days, you don't need actually need to find multiple dual lands and you don't even need a creature with a WUBRG cost. If you want to, you can simply use a Transguild Courier and a Dryad of the Ilysian Grove. There are plenty of ways to quickly deploy both of those creatures, including cards that can tutor for both of them. I'm willing to straight-up concede this point to my opponents because I don't think that it's compelling. There are more alternate win condition cards now than ever, and a lot of the old ones have become easier to fulfill as new synergies have been introduced. Coalition Victory is "better" now in the same sense that any card reliant on synergies might be.

The second point I generally see used as a mark against Coalition Victory is that unlike other alternate win condition cards, there's a reduced window of opportunity to stop the game from ending. The notion here is that cards like Test of Endurance and Hellkite Tyrant require a condition to be satisfied at the beginning of your upkeep. So you generally pass the turn with the game-winning permanent on the table for all of your opponents to see. Everyone else still in the game gets to untap and have a turn to try to stop you, either by removing the permanent that would win the game, by causing the victory condition to no longer be satisfied, or simply by killing you before your next upkeep. Coalition Victory wins "on the spot." Opponents have to either counter the spell, kill whichever creatures are giving you all five colors before the spell resolves, or destroy enough lands that you don't have all basic land types before the spell resolves. This argument always bugged me because Coalition Victory is the second-oldest card in this category (after Celestial Convergence), and the number of cards that win the game without requiring an upkeep trigger has been growing ever since. Thassa's Oracle and Laboratory Maniac are hugely popular in EDH, and much more easy to win with than Coalition Victory. By a lot. It's not even close. There's also stuff like Approach of the Second Sun, Maze's End, Halo Fountain, Biovisionary, Darksteel Reactor, and even Ramses, Assassin Lord. The idea that Coalition Victory is uniquely egregious compared to these other cards just doesn't make sense.

The third point usually raised against Coalition Victory is that it is too anticlimactic. We see that echoed in this official blurb. While I don't like this argument, I can't say too much against it because it's heavily based on emotion and perception. Personally, I think that Coalition Victory could sometimes end games anticlimactically and sometimes be very climactic. It depends. If my opponents all know that I'm going for Coalition Victory, so one of them keeps bringing back Wasteland to get rid of my dual lands and keep me from fulfilling one of the conditions, but I start gradually finding true basics so that this tactic won't work, we all know that the clock is ticking, there's tension here, and it's all building up to the threat of Coalition Victory. On the other hand, if a game is running long, I'm on all five colors, no one suspects that I might cast Coalition Victory, then sudddenly I recast my commander and also cast Coalition Victory, and also no one has any responses, then I'd win "out of nowhere." But is that really a problem? It's already true that not every game ends in some storybook climax, and really, that's alright.

When it comes to commentary from the RC themselves as well as discussion in the community, I've noticed that sometimes players don't seem to be evaluating the actual cards on the ban list, but instead these extreme charicatures of the cards on the ban list. Coalition Victory is an eight drop sorcery that requires all five colors of mana and has two separate conditions that must both simultaneously be fulfilled at the time it resolves in order for it to function at all. In the scenario that seems to be the imagined default during ban list discussions, all three opponents of the player with Atogatog or whatever tap out during the same turn cycle, and suddenly an unexpected Coalition Victory ends the fun and dynamic battle they'd been having, so now they're all sad about it. And it's not that such a game could never happen, just that it wouldn't be the norm. If Coalition Victory were legal in EDH, it usually wouldn't win the game, and not because it would get countered, nor because lands would get destroyed, nor because creatures would get removed. It usually woudln't win the game because it would usually not get cast in the first place. And if it were unbanned, players would pretty quickly stop running it, once they realized how clunky it is.

 

[saprolingtoken]

Power 9 should just be banned due to being expensive + appearance. That includes Twister. I'm fine with everything else being legal regarding price. These cards can be a special exception. Special pleading, if you like

Balance is way too broken and way too easy to abuse and way too cheap. You could make an argument that it's as good as it is in 60 card formats pretty easily. I think there are quite a few cards that just interface with the format in a way that's broken and this is one of them.

Biorythm is bad and no "worse" than any other card. Easy unban. Too expensive

Channel is basically the same as Balance. Both cards are dumb as-is but even more broken here in EDH.

Braids is whatever and falls under categories like MLD for me i.e. not really a problem at all. Good comparison with Tegrid.

Manual dexterity is what it says. Won't waste my time on that.

Collation Victory is awful. Bad card. Lots of similarly priced cards win the game with less downside.

Good explanations though.

 

[Oversoul]

Power 9 should just be banned due to being expensive + appearance. That includes Twister. I'm fine with everything else being legal regarding price. These cards can be a special exception. Special pleading, if you like

They are the Power 9 after all. If they'd just always banned those 9 specific cards for price/optics then I would never have thought much of it.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2010-APR
Banned: 2010-DEC
Emrakul’s collection of game-warping abilities come at a high cost, but they have a tendency to effectively win games without explicitly ending them. Emrakul was banned due to overwhelming outcry from the community, who told us that ramping quickly into it was one of the most common and least-interesting ways to win. As an amazing colorless finisher, it was too tempting for too many decks.

I actually don't have any strong opinions on the Emrakul ban. Ultimately, I guess I'm against it, because there are plenty of overpowered and pretty comparable things that one can do with big mana in EDH. The extra turn thing is kind of bonkers, but now we have Rise of the Eldrazi (the card, not the set) anyway. I mean, yeah, even after all these years Emrakul is still basically the best-in-slot card for a single-card colorless big mana dump. But is that banworthy? We don't ban every other best-in-slot thing.

There is one thing about this ban that interests me: how it's such a bold illustration of the evolution of the RC itself. They banned Emrakul because of "overwhelming outcry from the community." And for those who don't remember, this was basically a bunch of players complaining on their message board. Well, now they don't even have a message board. Players certainly still complain about cards, some of them on a much greater scale than the complaints about Emrakul, and for longer. But the RC don't ban those cards. I'm not even saying that it's better to have a format where this kind of community feedback drives decisions. I'm just saying that we went from a world in which players complaining got cards banned in this format to a world in which the RC decidedly doesn't listen to the players at all.

Emrakul is a victim of timing. If this card's first printing had been last year, it would totally not have been banned.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2005-JUN
Banned: 2014-SEP
When played as a commander, Erayo leads decks that cast and flip her early, leading to games where even targeted removal is often ineffective. Worse, a flipped Erayo does not always send a strong signal to newer players that the game is essentially over. The natural result is a play pattern that is nearly always one-sided and oppressive.

Like Braids, I kind of get this one. And also like Braids, I also kind of think that it's futile because there are tons of perfectly legal (and often heavily played) commanders that are just as oppressive. The nature of the ban list and the apparent laziness of the RC is that commanders that were oppressive in the late 00's are banned, but newer ones that are just as bad are totally fine. The #1 mono-blue commander on EDHrec right now, by a lot, is Urza, Lord High Artificer. I'd have way more trepidation bringing my casual scrub EDH decks to a table across from Urza than Erayo.

I guess that the elephant in this room is Arcane Laboratory. If an Erayo deck can successfully flip the commander and also land Arcane Laboratory, then opponents literally only get to cast one spell each turn, and the first one that they cast each turn is countered. That's a pretty hard lock. And, in my hazy recollection, it's a big part of what really got Erayo banned as commander so many years ago. The 2014 ban date listed here is simply when the switch was made from banned as commander to banned entirely (because the RC did away with the "banned as commander" category, as I detailed in the Braids post). And that hard lock is pretty oppressive. However, I don't buy for a minute that newer players would fail to realize that they're locked out of the game. Newer players are inexperienced, but they're not morons. But there are other commanders that can just as easily lock the game down. Off the top of my head, an even easier mono-blue hard lock to set up would be Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir + Knowledge Pool. It's more mana than Erayo + Arcane Laboratory, but blue has an easier time tutoring up artifacts than enchantments, and the benefits of flash for utility in setup also make the combo way better. This combo is infamous in EDH, but it's reasonably popular on EDHrec. It's actually been about four or five years since I've run into the combo, but I wouldn't be shocked to see it agin.

Should Erayo be banned? Eh, if "banned as commander" is ruled out and we started making a list of all the most obnoxious commanders that can easily lock games down, Erayo would be a strong candidate for that list. So would Braids. The issue I'm trying to make clear here is that these cards really aren't special in that regard. They're simply old.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1993-AUG
Banned: 2009-JUN
Fastbond exploits two unique and important aspects of the format:
1) Higher life totals make the damage essentially trivial if this is played in the early game;
2) Players always have something to do with the mana (eg. cast their commander).
Fastbond often catapults its controller ahead by producing huge amounts of mana and landfall triggers.

I'm fine with this explanation. There's a lot that I want to say about Fastbond, in general, as a Magic card. But specifically in this format, I think that those three points are sufficient to justify this ban.

Before I read the blurb on this card, I had all these ideas floating around in my mind for what I might say, because I do mean it: there's a lot that I want to say about Fastbond. I should save that for a Magic Memories thread or something. There are a few cards on the EDH ban list that really take exploiting the high starting life total to the extreme. There are also some legal cards can be far too powerful for the same reason. But if we're only going to ban a few of these cards, Fastbond should be one of them. So I don't need to stretch this post out. I can just give the RC a win on this one. I'll have plenty of criticisms as we go through the list, so it's only fitting that I throw in the occasional "good job, you guys" when it makes sense.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 1996-OCT
Banned: 2020-APR
Flash effectively allows players to evoke a creature in their hand for 1U. Many other formats have recognized that the mechanism that Flash uses to do this prevents meaningful interaction. Worse, because Flash’s power is tied to the creatures that are being cheated into play, its power increases over time as creature designs become more powerful.

It would seem that immediately after giving the RC a pat on the back for a job well done with the Fastbond blurb, I already have to go the other direction. This blurb is bad and lazy. Firstly, Flash doesn't "effectively allow players to evoke a creature." That's not what the card does. Wrong. Secondly, the sentence "Many other formats have recognized that the mechanism that Flash uses to do this prevents meaningful interaction" doesn't even make sense. Are they just trying to say that Flash is banned in other formats?

Other than the word salad about "other formats have recognized that the mechanism" bit, this blurb reads like something that was made up by someone who didn't actually know why Flash was banned, but was trying to guess. Did they have Chat GPT write this? The Flash ban was kind of recent. It isn't some mystery lost to the ages. The contemporary explanation at the time of the ban is still available on the Commander website, without needing any kind of external tools or archives to find it.

Speaking of exceptional decisions, we are banning Flash (the card, not the mechanic). Enough cEDH players who we trust have convinced us that it is the only change they need for the environment they seek to cultivate. Though they represent a small fraction of the Commander playerbase, we are willing to make this effort for them. It should not be taken as a signal that we are considering any kind of change in how we intend to manage the format; this is an extraordinary step, and one we are unlikely to repeat.

We use the banlist to guide players in how to approach the format and hope Flash’s role on the list will be to signal “cheating things into play quickly in non-interactive ways isn’t interesting, don’t do that.”

We believe Commander is still best as a social-focused format and will not be making any changes to accommodate tournament play. Taking responsibility for your and your opponents’ fun, including setting expectations with your group, is a fundamental part of the Commander philosophy. Organizers who want to move towards more untrusted games should consider adding additional rules or guidance to create the Commander experience they want to offer.

So, Flash was explicitly banned for the sake of cEDH players. For those who were busy with other stuff in early 2020, the COVID lockdowns had caused and explosion of online EDH gameplay through "Spelltable" and other applications, and cEDH was becoming much better established and better understood. Perhaps the lack of in-person interaction made the proxy-heavy and fast-paced environment of a cEDH table more convenient for Magic players stuck at home. But Flash Hulk decks virtually dominated cEDH, and there was a lot of controversy in this growing subculture regarding Flash, a card that saw little play in low-power casual pods. At the time, this was well known. Did the RC forget their own reasoning? Most of the people there now are the same people who sat on the committee when they banned Flash. They should be able to remember why they banned a card.

So here's my dilemma. If I go by the contemporary statement, the Flash ban makes some sense. Personally, I think that Toby Elliott's statement reads as a bit condescending toward the cEDH community, but maybe I'm being too cynical. If I go by the official blurb, then it makes it seem like the RC don't even remember why they banned Flash, and that they don't care either. The statement from 2020 is clearly better than the new one, but it's buried in their archive. The only reason I'm even quoting it here is because the new Commander website launched in 2019, so the original context for the Flash ban shows up on their website. For almost any other banned card, I'm not going back and looking at the contemporary statement.

Oh well, there may not be a satisfactory answer to that. It's down to personal preference. Well, the RC made an exception to their usual methods when they oh so very mangnanimously banned a card for the sake of cEDH players, so I'll make an exception to my own formula and engage with the real reason that Flash was banned, not the nonsense in the official blurb. But only after making fun of the official blurb for being so bad. Some readers might even know cEDH well enough to know what I'm talking about. For the uninitiated and the forgetful, you need to understand that around the time of the Flash ban, decks built to win the game with Thassa's Oracle were already starting to take over. Thassa's Oracle was a brand new card, released just a couple of months before the Flash ban. Although there are multiple ways to shrink one's own library for a win with Thassa's Oracle, the most popular and powerful in cEDH is Demonic Consultation. Previously, this could be done with Laboratory Maniac, but Thassa's Oracle is cheaper and more reliable.

If Flash Hulk decks were still around today, would they outcompete "Thoracle" decks? I don't know. Maybe. Either way, in the years since 2020, Thassa's Oracle has thoroughly established itself as the top dog in cEDH. It's more prevalent than Flash ever was, and I'd bet that it's won far more games too. If the RC were trying to regulate the format the way that the DCI would, I'd imagine that Thassa's Oracle (or perhaps Demonic Consultation) would be banned already. But the RC have always maintained that they're not trying to curate a ban list for competition, but to provide social guidelines for fun casual games. They deviated from this for Flash, but they don't intend to do it again. Can we acknowledge how weird that makes things? I don't know that Demonic Consultation + Thassa's Oracle is more oppressive than Flash + Protean Hulk, but they're at least comparable. And something new might come along that's worse than both. If a card is a problem for cEDH players but isn't popular at casual tables, then is the answer from the RC seriously some form of "Sorry guys, but Flash was your one exception. You already got your one. No takesies backsies." That's one possible implication of Toby's statement. And if cEDH players do want to get a card banned, it would seem that their logical course of action would be to infiltrate casual tables and flood them with the card, dominating until the outcry against the hated card is coming from the right people. Likely? No, not really. But it is logical.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2004-OCT
Banned: 2009-JUN
Gifts’ low U investment makes it splashable, and the instant speed means you can use it at the most opportune time with lowered chance for countering or interaction. The ability to tutor for two combo pieces and two ways to recur them generally makes this a one-card game-ender, and even in the most casual play is a double tutor.

Other than Coalition Victory, this just might be the silliest choice for a card that's inexplicably still on the ban list. The official blurb here doesn't say it, and I'm starting to question the memory of the members of the RC, but this card was totally banned because it had been restricted in Vintage. Back in the mid 00's, Gifts Ungiven was a prominent combo enabler. Unlike Fact or Fiction, casting the spell on your opponent's end step really did mean that the opponent was about to lose. And unlike Yawgmoth's Will or Doomsday, it didn't require much setup. As players became better at navigating games to set up lethal Gifts piles more decisively, the card became a dominant force in Vintage. I don't know how long those Gifts decks would have been on top if the card had been left unrestricted, but there really weren't a lot of 4x Gifts decks taking down tournaments anyway. Aaron Forsythe noted that The Gifts archetype had displaced Control Slaver and Gro-A-Tog, which was true. But the deck essentially stuck around, since a 1x Gifts deck could still cast Gifts almost as reliably as a 2x Gifts deck. I'm sure that Gifts pilots had to adjust, though. Maybe it weakened the deck enough that the restriction held it in check? Pretty soon, it would have stopped mattering anyway. The Gifts restriction came about in an era where Vintage revolved around Mana Drain. These days, that seems quaint. So the card was quietly unrestricted in 2015. It still sees occasional Vintage play, but it's at 1x in those decks.

If Gifts Ungiven was setting up combo piles to dominate casual EDH tables in 2009, I missed the memo on that. I was not very active in the format back then, so this would have been easy to do. But my perception, and my recollection of what others were saying back then, was that the RC banned this card because it was a tutor, and one that had somewhat recently been restricted in Vintage.

Well, it's not 2009 anymore. Although tutors can be a contentious subject in the EDH community, they're legal and see tons of play. Demonic Tutor is the 64th most popular card on EDHrec, and easily the #1 black card in the format. While multi-card tutors might sound more scary or dangerous, they really aren't. In a world where I can use Mystical Tutor to grab Transmute Artifact, then grab Foundry Inspector off the Transmute Artifact, use Tezzeret the Seeker to fetch Mystic Forge, and crack my Inventors' Fair to find Sensei's Divining Top, I don't really need or want some less flexible card that can potentially, in the right circumstances, do it all. Better to just stick with more practical cards that are always good.

The closest analog to Gifts Ungiven in EDH would probably be Intuition. Arguably, Gifts Ungiven is a bit better than Intuition, although really it depends on your deck. I love Intuition. I have a lot of history with the card. But I hardly ever sleeve the card up for EDH because it's just not that great in most of my decks.

I'm not saying that Gifts Ungiven isn't still powerful. It's a very strong card, But when it comes to broken cards, EDH has plenty of others that are just as egregious, if not more. The aforementioned Demonic Tutor has fetched up combo pieces to win games far more than Gifts Ungiven ever will. I don't buy the idea that Gifts Ungiven being banned sends some social signal that informs the players on which cards they should exclude from their decks (I've met too many players to buy that). And the idea that the card would be a problem even at low-power tables because it would tutor for two cards is even sillier.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2019-JUL
Banned: 2021-SEP
There are many problems with the card, but the greatest is that in the low-to-middle power level tiers where we focus the banlist, Golos is simply a better choice of leader for all but the most commander-centric decks. Its presence crushes the kind of diversity in commander choice which we want to promote.

In lieu of a proper analysis, let's just ignore this one. Feel free to sing this song I just wrote, to the tune of "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from the Disney movie Encanto.

Pepa: We don't talk about Golos, no, no, no!
We don't talk about Golos. But...
It was Commander night.
Félix: We would play EDH.
Pepa: Decks were jank. Not a tryhard in sight.
Félix: Casual vibes, all right!
Pepa: Golos comes in, fetches Glacial Chasm and then...
Félix: Locked out!
Pepa: Hey, are you telling this story or am I?
Félix: Sorry, go ahead.
Pepa: Next here comes Life from the Loam.
Félix: All the lands coming back now.
Pepa: And I'm wishing I'd stayed home.
Félix: Never get to attack now.
Pepa: Took another hour just to win the game.
Félix: It was a crazy game. Oh well, anyway.
Pepa: We don't talk about Golos, no, no, no!
All: We don't talk about Golos!
Dolores: Well, I first met Golos at the M20 prerelease.
Lost to a Cavalier my opponent colorfixed with ease.
Right then I knew I had to have that guy.
Never saw a commander with such great utility.
All five colors and relevant abilies.
But I never opened him in any pack I'd buy.
Camilo: Five CMC.
Creature type scout.
When he ETBs he gets a land out.
He can cast spells for free.
Rainbow identity.
Came out in M20.
All: We don't talk about Golos, no, no, no! We don't talk about Golos.
Player 1: He fetched a Bojuka Bog, ruining what I'd planned.
All: Oh no, no more graveyard, no, no no.
Player 2: He fetched a Strip Mine and destroyed all my land.
All: No mana, no, no, no.
Player 3: He fetched a Cradle and deployed his whole hand.
All: His reign of terror lasted 'til he was banned.
Isabela: He watched me play with my Kenrith Wheels. And I think that he wasn't so bad.
He let me play with stax decks all day. My opponents were not even mad.
Dolores: He cost me like twenty bucks when he went and got banned.
Two day after I bought him!
What a waste.
Isabela: Hey sis', I think I sold her that card.
Dolores: What a waste.
Mirabel: So, Golos?
Yeah, about that Golos.
Who even decided to ban Golos?
And what else did they ban besides Golos?
Camilo: Isabela, your order's here.

Reprise: Five CMC (it was Commander Night, we would play EDH).
Creature type scout (decks were jank).
And when he ETBs (not a tryhard in sight).
He gets a land out (casual vibes, all right).
He can cast spells for free (Golos comes in, fetches Glacial Chasm and then).
Rainbow identity (locked out).
Are you telling this story, or am I?
Sorry, go ahead.
Next here comes Life from the Loam (Five CMC)
And I'm wishing I'd stayed home.
Never get to attack now.
Don't talk about Golos, no!

Mirabel: Wait, Sylvan Primordial?
All: Not a word about Golos!
Mirabel: Why'd they ban all these cards?

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2012-MAY
Banned: 2012-JUN
Griselbrand’s typical play pattern involves cheating it onto the battlefield early to draw an overwhelming number of cards. Its effect is amplified in Commander due to higher starting life totals, its constant availability as a commander, and by the fact that you get the cards in hand immediately after activating its ability.

First, let's cover the blurb itself. Then I'll talk about Griselbrand. I think there's a technical term for it, but I can't think of one right now. If anyone knows, please chime in. What the RC have done with this blurb is employ two arguments that are used together in a way that, based on structure, would seem intutively to support one another, but which actually don't. The RC correctly note that the typical use for Griselbrand is to cheat it out, such as with a reanimation spell. They then cite its reliable availability as commander as part of the problem. You know what a deck with Griselbrand in the command zone can't do? Cheat Griselbrand out. I mean, technically, you could use Command Beacon to move Griselbrand out of the command zone. But that's just shifting the issue onto another card (you'd still need to find Command Beacon in your maindeck).

You can have Griselbrand in the command zone, where it's easy to find but expensive to cast, or you can have Griselbrand in your maindeck, where it takes work to find but can be cheated out. You can't do both. The two are mutually exclusive. So I think that this blurb is misleading. It overstates what Griselbrand can do by conflating things that can't both be true in the same deck.

I'll admit that a more charitable reading would be to say that what the RC intended here was to point to both maindeck Griselbrand and commander Griselbrand as separate issues that are both egregious, and to say that they're banning the card for the sake of both. Seems like a stretch, though. Commander Griselbrand would cost 8 mana and lock the player into mono-black. There are way more broken commander options than that. I contend that if Griselbrand is banworthy in EDH, then it's for its role as a maindeck card. The "this could also be your commander" bit seems irrelevant.

In most formats, Griselbrand can only draw 14 cards without killing you, unless you are recouping the life payment in some way, such as with Children of Korlis. Because players start with 40 life in EDH, Griselbrand is easier to break. In a mathematical quirk, the card draw potential of this ability at 40 life isn't merely double what it would be at 20 life. In Legacy, 3 activations would normally kill the player, so you can only do 2. But in EDH, it would normally take 6 activations to kill the player, so you can get away with 5 activations (potentially). That's a lot of cards. Yawgmoth's Bargain is another card on this list, and it was banned before Griselbrand existed. So the RC clearly realized that the format's high starting life total made some cards too strong, and decided to ban them. Wait, what's this?


Yeah, those cards are totally legal. And in case it's not obvious, yes, these cards are totally busted in EDH, to the point of being some of the most powerful and format-warping cards in cEDH. It occurs to me that perhaps most casual players see Griselbrand and assume, because it's a creature and therefore easier to cheat onto the battlefield, that it's just a bit more egregious than these other cards. That's not the case. If Griselbrand were unbanned tomorrow, the "turbo Naus" decks that are prevalent in cEDH would remain virtually untouched. Griselbrand would likely find a niche in cEDH, but it wouldn't dominate, nor even be particularly remarkable.

Of course, the RC doesn't make their decisions based on competitive play, but instead based on what's socially healthy for a casual atmosphere or whatever. In that context, yeah, Griselbrand is broken. So are a bunch of perfectly legal cards. I'm trying not to make my analysis of this ban list too repetitive, but that issue has some up several times now. And it's worth codifying as a kind of reasonable principle here.

Just because a card would be powerful in the format, that doesn't mean that unbanning it would be a problem. The format is filled with powerful cards.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2020-NOV
Banned: 2021-JUL
Hullbreacher creates an environment of asymmetric resource denial in the early game. Its ability easily combines with several other cards to strip opponents’ hands, and keep them empty. This creates an environment where players don’t have agency, but doesn’t outright end the game. Combined with its easy splashability, it was an attractive and popular card to include in decks that were played in environments that couldn’t handle it.

Three points come to mind regarding the Hullbreacher ban. You may or may not think that any of them are important here. I leave that up to you.

The Hullbreacher ban was somewhat controversial at the time, and I saw some commentary online decrying players for flaming the RC over this ban. Basically, some people thought that some other people went too far with their criticism. And it's a big tent, so yeah, probably someone out there behaved poorly. I dug through some old posts and found a statement I made at that time regarding what I considered to be "the elephant in the room."

WotC created Commander Legends explicitly as a product for this format. They did that and they pushed the power level in a lot of ways, clearly because they wanted players in this format to want to pick up these cards. They wanted to sell packs. Well, of course they wanted to sell packs. They're in the business of selling packs. But pushing the power level carries a risk. The Rules Committee waited eight months to ban Hullbreacher. In other words, they waited until well after Commander Legends had flown off the shelves. Sold like hotcakes. And done so in part because of the perceived value of chase rares like Hullbreacher. Neither of those things, in a vacuum, is necessarily cause for concern. It's perfectly reasonable for WotC to want to print cards that people will want to buy. It's perfectly reasonable for the Rules Committee to want to hold off on banning a powerful new card until they've had some time to evaluate it. Both groups have plausible deniability there.

So some people paid significant money or traded away significant value in cardstock for the purposes of acquiring a format staple, a rare card with a powerful effect, printed in the product that was explicitly designed for this format. Maybe they paid a premium for a foil version or extended art frame version. Now the card was banned and they're sore about that, but these things happen. We know that these things can happen. And when it happens to a whole lot of people, the reaction is going to range across a whole spectrum, from those who shrug it off to those who are mildly annoyed to those who really lose their cool over this. I can understand the impulse to tell those reacting poorly to this that it's not OK to be a jerk about it. But are they the real problem in this scenario? How far do we stretch plausible deniability?

There's a case to be made that Hullbreacher is simply more egregious than something like Notion Thief. You're already in blue. Presumably you can already draw cards. If there's a Wheel hitting the table, then you were already drawing cards anyway. Giving you more cards and your opponents none is potent, but giving you treasure tokens and your opponents no cards is more easily gamebreaking. Hullbreacher is an obnoxiously pushed card. Pushed enough to be banned? I don't know. But this is the same set that introduced Jeweled Lotus (I wrote a whole article about the problems with that card), Opposition Agent, and some of the most overpowered commanders and "partner" commanders of all time. It's long been a kind of open secret that the Commander RC are beholden to WotC and cannot rock the boat. I'm surprised that there isn't more controversy over the idea that WotC can make cards too powerful on purpose in order to sell packs, then get the RC to be the scapegoat and ban an oppressive card after that card has already done its job selling those packs.

Secondly, it's somewhat well-known that the late Sheldon Menery, founder of the RC and its most prolific member, hated "Wheel" spells in EDH. He expressed that he thought they were banworthy, but that they were already too popular for the RC to actually ban them. I think that the reason Hullbreacher was targeted instead of something like Opposition Agent is that Sheldon saw the Wheels as the untouchable element of the thing he didn't like, whereas Hullbreacher was unique and didn't have the long history that Wheels did.

There's a meme in the EDH community among some of the more snarky format veterans that the ban list is full of cards that an RC member lost one too many games against. Frankly, I'd prefer that the people regulating the format actually play the format, and a natural consequence of this is that they might be swayed by their own personal tastes and experiences with the game. But it does kind of seem to hilariously apply to some cards we'll come to later.

Thirdly, I don't think that the official blurb accurately describes Hullbreacher. A trend I've noticed with these blurbs and also with historical explanations behind some bans is that the RC love to use verbiage about how a card effectively wins the game without bringing things to a swift conclusion. In thise case, there's the sentence: "Its ability easily combines with several other cards to strip opponents’ hands, and keep them empty. This creates an environment where players don’t have agency, but doesn’t outright end the game." That sounds bad, but the RC repeat concepts like that ad nauseam for whichever cards they decide to ban. The cards that they chose to ban are always the ones that happen to cause games to be effectively over, but then have those games drag on for a long time so that everyone is miserable and waiting for the true end. And when I think of cards that can achieve this effect, in my own experience, Hullbreacher isn't one of them. Like, it's not even top 100. Hullbreacher gives the player using it access to tons of mana, especially when used in a combo that wheels multiple times, uses Prosperity, or whatever. Players that have access to tons of mana and to more cards than their opponents don't usually want to drag the game out. Hullbreacher is better suited to enabling combo wins than it is so locking players out of the game.

 

[Oversoul]

First Printed: 2009-OCT
Banned: 2019-JUL
Iona’s ability to lock entire colors out of the game makes it brutally efficient at removing agency from other players at the table, especially when opponents are playing 1- or 2-color decks. This often has the effect of totally negating one or more players’ involvement in a game and creates unnecessary social friction.

I used to run Iona in a deck, although that was way before the ban. Notably, one of the only games in which I actually used Iona was one in which I named "white" against a mono-white deck, only for the player to almost immediately use Ring of Three Wishes to find an artifact that could get rid of Iona. But I do get why Iona is an issue in a casual setting where many opponents might rely on a single color and be shut out of casting spells by this one 7/7 flying angel.

Strangely, it's been sort of memory-holed, but the Iona ban coincided with the Painter's Servant unban, which was originally implemented in the wake of Iona. I think that there's a very good case to be made that if EDH is going to be regulated in a manner consisted with the purported philosophy of the RC, if the ban list reflects cards that wreak havoc on the social environment and rules structure particular to this format, then Iona is one of the few cards that actually deserves to be banned. The card wasn't a really a problem in my own experience back when I played with and against it, but I'm willing to concede this one. And at least Painter's Servant is an interesting card. So if we only get one or the other, my vote is for Iona to be banned and Painter's Servant to be legal.

A friend of mine pointed out that if Iona runs counter to the philosophy of EDH and needs to be banned, then it makes no sense for Contamination to be legal. And he has a point. Power level set aside, from a strictly philosophical angle, Contamination is easily more egregious than Iona.