Oversoul
The Tentacled One
One year ago, WotC published the announcement for the "Beta" rollout of the Commander Format Panel's "Bracket System." For some time now, I've been contemplating the idea of an "anniversary rant" breaking down my qualms with this system. As I'd originally envisioned it, I'd go through the history of the now-defunct Commander Rules Committee and their plans for a partnership with WotC to introduce a system like this, the early (perhaps "Alpha") examples of what the system might look like, the dismissive rejection of a point-based system, the creation of the Commander Format Panel, the full "Beta" rollout of the Bracket System, and changes that the system saw as it evolved during its first year. But that would make this article too long and would detract from my main point. The historical nuances that laid the groundwork for this could be their own topic. The controversies and drama surrounding them don't need to pollute my analysis of the system itself.
There's just one bit of history that I need to lean on here. In the era EDH just before the Brackets were rolled out one year ago, a time I'll refer to as the Antebracket Period, there was a clumsy, yet popular metric known generally as the "Power Level" scale, which attempted to classify decks based on their power level on a simple scale from 1 to 10, with 1 referring to artistic theme decks with no mechanical cohesion and 10 referring to to the most finely tuned competitive decks. This system was vague, controversial, unofficial, and drew considerable criticism. Compounding this, most early guides and descriptions grouped pairs of numbers into levels, so what was theoretically a 10-point system was effectively 5-point, with 1 and 2 constituting the lowest levek, then 3 and 4 after that, and so on. Most famously, because the ratings of 9 and 10 were associated with competitive decks while 5 and 6 were supposed to be reserved for decks that were slower, lacked powerful combos, and were generally closer to what a precon might look like, the majority of players simply designated their own deck as having a power level of 7 Saying "My deck is a 6" risked underselling it as being like a precon and "My deck is an 8" was like saying it was just below the power level of competitive decks. This led to a lot of "everything is a 7" memes.
In the popular understanding of the Bracket System, there was an expectation that it would replace the old power-scaling system, giving players something more useful to work with. But the foundational problem with this is that the Bracket System, despite being used to talk about power level, doesn't measure power level at all and doesn't even try to.
The Bracket System essentially consists of three components that interact with each other.
The Words and Numbers:
Decoupling the system that looks like it is describing power from measurement of power or even attempts at measuring power is enough to make this system headache-inducing. But there's a more subtle problem. Out of the five brackets, only three of them are categorized using technical criteria. Two of the numbers (and their brackets) use the same technical criteria as used by others, but distinguish themselves based on the intention of the deck-builder. Bracket 1 "Exhbition" uses the exact same technical criteria as Bracket 2 "Core." It is distinguished by the idea that "winning is not the primary goal." The idea is that a Bracket 1 deck is not a powered-down Bracket 2 deck, but that a deck built for either bracket has an entirely different philosophy in mind. Bracket 1 decks are silly explorations of some artistic expression. A deck that is actually trying to maybe win the game is, by definition, not in the scope of Bracket 1.
On the other end of this scale, Bracket 5 has all the same technical criteria as Bracket 4. From the description itself, "It's not just no holds barred, where you play your most powerful cards like in Bracket 4. It requires careful planning: There is care paid into following and paying attention to a metagame and tournament structure, and no sacrifices are made in deck building as you try to be the one to win the pod. " The difference between a Bracket 4 deck and a Bracket 5 deck is that one is built for the cEDH metagame and the other is not.
So really, although there are officially five "brackets", there are only three relevant levels in this system: Core, Upgraded, and Optimized. Bracket 1 is just a specialized subset of Bracket 2, and Bracket 5 is just a specialized subset of Bracket 4. Brackets 2, 3, and 4 all have rigorously defined boundaries that separate them from each other, based on the taboos and the Game Changer list.
Sacred Cows:
I said "rigorously defined boundaries." But that is only partially the case. What seems to have happened is that the Commander Format Panel used player surveys to establish certain sacred cows, conditions that casual EDH players ostensibly don't want to see violated in their games. These don't really correlate to anything. They're not reasonable approximations of power level. They're not criteria that have historically defined EDH as a format. At best, they're things that annoy a vocal minority. While I have gripes with the Game Changers list and while I think the deeper fundamental flaw in the Bracket System is that it looks like it is meant to describe power level while not actually doing so, this aspect of the Bracket System is the one that personally offends me the most. Here are the taboo mechanics and interactions...
Bracket 2: no intentional two-card infinite combos, no mass land denial, "few" tutors, no Game Changers, no chaining extra turns.
Bracket 3: no early game intentional two-card infinite combos (late game combos are OK), no mass land denial, as many tutors as you want, up to 3 Game Changers, no chaining extra turns.
Bracket 4: infinite combos are fine, mass land denial is fine, tutors are fine, no cap on Game Changers, chaining extra turns is fine.
Something that readers might already notice and be pointing out is that these technical criteria do establish ceilings on the power level of the individual brackets. And if we're building decks to the Brackets, that's relevant. But in the Antebracket Period, essentially everyone was playing in Bracket 4, as these artificial restrictions were unknown at the time. Sure, not every Antebracket deck would qualify as Bracket 4. But almost all of mine would, by definition.
An interesting quirk of this system is that because Bracket 4 is the home for high-powered "no holds barred" decks, most online content produced for the format focuses on Bracket 3 as a kind of "default" space. But it's actually Bracket 4 that is, by far, the biggest tent. The ceiling on Bracket 4 is essentially any deck that isn't specifically tuned to fight in the cEDH metagame, which means that some absurdly powerful decks are Bracket 4. The floor on Bracket 4 is any deck, no matter how weak, which violates one of the sacred cows of the other Brackets. If you build a deck with all of the old Fallen Empires tide counters and uses a gimmick of running a bunch of blue effects that let you get more upkeeps to tick those counters up, so you run Time Stretch, then sorry, but your deck is automatically Bracket 4. If your Santa's Reindeer deck is running a bunch of tutors so that you can always find Caribou Range and a way to give your 0/1 tokens flying, then that's also Bracket 4. You could throw together a gimmicky "Tolling of the Bells" deck, but that's not an Exhbition deck if it has Kormus Bell. It's Bracket 4. And so on.
When this system was first rolled out a year ago, I had hoped that it wouldn't be prevalent enough to affect my own games. But now I sit down at tables and do run into players who built their decks specifically for Bracket 2 or Bracket 3, and who now believe they're entitled to only play against other decks in the appropriate bracket. But if I say that I'm playing Bracket 4, I'll usually only see high-powered decks. The prescription for this, as any advocate for the Bracket System would tell me, is "conversation." Well, here we are. We're having a conversation now. It's a conversation about how crappy your system is.
I flagged tutors and mass land denial from among these criteria and put them in the title of the article. That's not just because they're catchy. It's because they are commonplace parts of the format that were universally accepted as part of the format in the good old days, but which started to see opposition by a vocal minority in the Antebracket era. These weren't added to the criteria by the Commander Format Panel as an afterthought. Those who haven't followed EDH-focused content online could be forgiven for assuming that they're just things players complained about, or which the panel decided ran counter to the "spirit of the format." Nope. I mean, in the case of land destruction, it's something that players get salty about in any format, but the same could be said for countermagic, poison counters, prison decks, combo decks, and plenty of other things. But what sets "mass land denial" and tutors apart from other complaints is that gaming sites propped up articles and videos that acted as opinion pieces on why even though these things aren't banned, we should all just voluntarily not use them. Mass land destruction was seen as bogging games down too much by forcing everyone to rebuild, while tutors were derided as ways to make otherwise inconsistent strategies work more consistently (something that is apparently offensive to these dorks).
The Games They Are A-Changin':
A key component of the Bracket System, and certainly the most iconic part, is the list of 53 "Game Changers." 30 of these are "premodern" cards from within the first ten years of Magic's existence, and these are roughly evenly split between Reserved List rare staples and uncommons that have merely not been reprinted enough to bring their prices out of the stratosphere (Ancient Tomb, an uncommon, has been reprinted multiple times, but it still goes for over $100). Now, one might think that this is because there were so many broken cards in early Magic, and this list is correcting for that. Nope. The broken cards are mostly already banned. The Game Changer list and the ban list are mutually exclusive.
Many of the format's most powerful bombs are not on this list at all. While the obvious outlier is Sol Ring, I shan't open that can of worms. Lotus Petal, Finale of Devastation, Wheel of Fortune, Windfall, Wishclaw Talisman, Reanimate, Hullbreaker Horror, Swords to Plowshares, Timetwister, Peer into the Abyss, Birds of Paradise, Urza's Saga, Song of Creation, Blasphemous Act, Lightning Greaves, Brainstorm, Skullclamp, Mystic Remora, etc. The list of broken cards that are not on the Game Changers list is profound. And that's the main reason that it's so easy to construct a super-broken "Bracket 2" deck if one is so inclined. The other reason is that the the Game Changer list and the anti-tutor criteria used by the Bracket System doesn't really restrict certain kinds of power. Decks with many redundant components or ones for which the commander strongly mitigates inconsistency can easily do without tutors, and some of them are still quite potent even with no Game Changers.
Some of the expansion of the Game Changer list (which was originally only 40 cards) has been due to the WotC policy of adding a card to the Game Changer list as part of the deal if that card becomes unbanned in EDH. Most recently, Biorhythm was unbanned. So now it's a Game Changer. When I first saw this policy, I was kind of optimistic about it. I figured WotC would never normally unban stuff like Library of Alexandria (which should totally be legal in EDH). But now that they had a tool that let them unban cards from the format as a whole while keeping those cards out of lower brackets, I thought maybe that it would free up a bunch of cards in Bracket 4, and I could just continue ignoring the lower brackets anyway. But in practice, it doesn't work that way. Players have started to expect Bracket 4 to mean high-powered, borderline cEDH. And most of the fresh unbans are not viable in that environment. Against truly "optimized" decks or against cEDH decks, Biorhythm is garbage and it would be foolish to run the card. But it would be equally foolish to use one of your three Game Changer slots on the card in a Bracket 3 deck, and the card is effectively banned in Bracket 2. For a few cards, being put on the Game Changers list is tantamount to deleting them from EDH. They're not banned, but the Bracket System doesn't make room for them anywhere.
The Rule Zero Conversation:
While I haven't coalesced all of these criticisms into a single longform rant until now, I've put just about all of them individually to some interlocutor out there at some more pro-Bracket bent at some point the past year. And the responses I've seen in favor of the Bracket System have almost never been rebuttals or even attempted rebuttals of my points. Instead, advocates of the Bracket System take pains to emphasize how it's a tool that must be used properly. It isn't meant to be some ironclad set of rules for all decks ever, but rather a framework to help "assist" The Rule Zero Conversation. This is a very convenient position to argue from because the whole concept of a Rule Zero conversation is so vague that there's no way to challenge the claim in a a debate.
Essentially, Bracket System advocates seem to adopt a motte-and-bailey style of argument. When the Bracket System isn't coming under criticism or when the criticism is ineffective, they promote the Bracket System. But when it comes under heavy criticism, they shift their emphasis to Rule Zero and hide behind it. If this were a good system, it could stand on its own merits, and wouldn't need to come with the caveat that it only works if everyone involved takes the proper steps to have a conversation in all the right ways to make this system an effective tool.
There's just one bit of history that I need to lean on here. In the era EDH just before the Brackets were rolled out one year ago, a time I'll refer to as the Antebracket Period, there was a clumsy, yet popular metric known generally as the "Power Level" scale, which attempted to classify decks based on their power level on a simple scale from 1 to 10, with 1 referring to artistic theme decks with no mechanical cohesion and 10 referring to to the most finely tuned competitive decks. This system was vague, controversial, unofficial, and drew considerable criticism. Compounding this, most early guides and descriptions grouped pairs of numbers into levels, so what was theoretically a 10-point system was effectively 5-point, with 1 and 2 constituting the lowest levek, then 3 and 4 after that, and so on. Most famously, because the ratings of 9 and 10 were associated with competitive decks while 5 and 6 were supposed to be reserved for decks that were slower, lacked powerful combos, and were generally closer to what a precon might look like, the majority of players simply designated their own deck as having a power level of 7 Saying "My deck is a 6" risked underselling it as being like a precon and "My deck is an 8" was like saying it was just below the power level of competitive decks. This led to a lot of "everything is a 7" memes.
In the popular understanding of the Bracket System, there was an expectation that it would replace the old power-scaling system, giving players something more useful to work with. But the foundational problem with this is that the Bracket System, despite being used to talk about power level, doesn't measure power level at all and doesn't even try to.
The Bracket System essentially consists of three components that interact with each other.
- A set of five keywords that each connect to a number and a philosophy: Exhibition, Core, Upgraded, Optimized, Competitive.
- A list of taboo mechanics and interactions describing things that have always been legal in the format and still are, but which some players cry about.
- A list of "Game Changer" cards.
The Words and Numbers:
Decoupling the system that looks like it is describing power from measurement of power or even attempts at measuring power is enough to make this system headache-inducing. But there's a more subtle problem. Out of the five brackets, only three of them are categorized using technical criteria. Two of the numbers (and their brackets) use the same technical criteria as used by others, but distinguish themselves based on the intention of the deck-builder. Bracket 1 "Exhbition" uses the exact same technical criteria as Bracket 2 "Core." It is distinguished by the idea that "winning is not the primary goal." The idea is that a Bracket 1 deck is not a powered-down Bracket 2 deck, but that a deck built for either bracket has an entirely different philosophy in mind. Bracket 1 decks are silly explorations of some artistic expression. A deck that is actually trying to maybe win the game is, by definition, not in the scope of Bracket 1.
On the other end of this scale, Bracket 5 has all the same technical criteria as Bracket 4. From the description itself, "It's not just no holds barred, where you play your most powerful cards like in Bracket 4. It requires careful planning: There is care paid into following and paying attention to a metagame and tournament structure, and no sacrifices are made in deck building as you try to be the one to win the pod. " The difference between a Bracket 4 deck and a Bracket 5 deck is that one is built for the cEDH metagame and the other is not.
So really, although there are officially five "brackets", there are only three relevant levels in this system: Core, Upgraded, and Optimized. Bracket 1 is just a specialized subset of Bracket 2, and Bracket 5 is just a specialized subset of Bracket 4. Brackets 2, 3, and 4 all have rigorously defined boundaries that separate them from each other, based on the taboos and the Game Changer list.
Sacred Cows:
I said "rigorously defined boundaries." But that is only partially the case. What seems to have happened is that the Commander Format Panel used player surveys to establish certain sacred cows, conditions that casual EDH players ostensibly don't want to see violated in their games. These don't really correlate to anything. They're not reasonable approximations of power level. They're not criteria that have historically defined EDH as a format. At best, they're things that annoy a vocal minority. While I have gripes with the Game Changers list and while I think the deeper fundamental flaw in the Bracket System is that it looks like it is meant to describe power level while not actually doing so, this aspect of the Bracket System is the one that personally offends me the most. Here are the taboo mechanics and interactions...
- "Intentional two-card infinite combos"
- "Early game intentional two-card infinite combos"
- Extra turns
- "Mass land denial"
- Tutors
- The use of cards from the Game Changers list
- "Chaining" extra turns
Bracket 2: no intentional two-card infinite combos, no mass land denial, "few" tutors, no Game Changers, no chaining extra turns.
Bracket 3: no early game intentional two-card infinite combos (late game combos are OK), no mass land denial, as many tutors as you want, up to 3 Game Changers, no chaining extra turns.
Bracket 4: infinite combos are fine, mass land denial is fine, tutors are fine, no cap on Game Changers, chaining extra turns is fine.
Something that readers might already notice and be pointing out is that these technical criteria do establish ceilings on the power level of the individual brackets. And if we're building decks to the Brackets, that's relevant. But in the Antebracket Period, essentially everyone was playing in Bracket 4, as these artificial restrictions were unknown at the time. Sure, not every Antebracket deck would qualify as Bracket 4. But almost all of mine would, by definition.
An interesting quirk of this system is that because Bracket 4 is the home for high-powered "no holds barred" decks, most online content produced for the format focuses on Bracket 3 as a kind of "default" space. But it's actually Bracket 4 that is, by far, the biggest tent. The ceiling on Bracket 4 is essentially any deck that isn't specifically tuned to fight in the cEDH metagame, which means that some absurdly powerful decks are Bracket 4. The floor on Bracket 4 is any deck, no matter how weak, which violates one of the sacred cows of the other Brackets. If you build a deck with all of the old Fallen Empires tide counters and uses a gimmick of running a bunch of blue effects that let you get more upkeeps to tick those counters up, so you run Time Stretch, then sorry, but your deck is automatically Bracket 4. If your Santa's Reindeer deck is running a bunch of tutors so that you can always find Caribou Range and a way to give your 0/1 tokens flying, then that's also Bracket 4. You could throw together a gimmicky "Tolling of the Bells" deck, but that's not an Exhbition deck if it has Kormus Bell. It's Bracket 4. And so on.
When this system was first rolled out a year ago, I had hoped that it wouldn't be prevalent enough to affect my own games. But now I sit down at tables and do run into players who built their decks specifically for Bracket 2 or Bracket 3, and who now believe they're entitled to only play against other decks in the appropriate bracket. But if I say that I'm playing Bracket 4, I'll usually only see high-powered decks. The prescription for this, as any advocate for the Bracket System would tell me, is "conversation." Well, here we are. We're having a conversation now. It's a conversation about how crappy your system is.
I flagged tutors and mass land denial from among these criteria and put them in the title of the article. That's not just because they're catchy. It's because they are commonplace parts of the format that were universally accepted as part of the format in the good old days, but which started to see opposition by a vocal minority in the Antebracket era. These weren't added to the criteria by the Commander Format Panel as an afterthought. Those who haven't followed EDH-focused content online could be forgiven for assuming that they're just things players complained about, or which the panel decided ran counter to the "spirit of the format." Nope. I mean, in the case of land destruction, it's something that players get salty about in any format, but the same could be said for countermagic, poison counters, prison decks, combo decks, and plenty of other things. But what sets "mass land denial" and tutors apart from other complaints is that gaming sites propped up articles and videos that acted as opinion pieces on why even though these things aren't banned, we should all just voluntarily not use them. Mass land destruction was seen as bogging games down too much by forcing everyone to rebuild, while tutors were derided as ways to make otherwise inconsistent strategies work more consistently (something that is apparently offensive to these dorks).
The Games They Are A-Changin':
A key component of the Bracket System, and certainly the most iconic part, is the list of 53 "Game Changers." 30 of these are "premodern" cards from within the first ten years of Magic's existence, and these are roughly evenly split between Reserved List rare staples and uncommons that have merely not been reprinted enough to bring their prices out of the stratosphere (Ancient Tomb, an uncommon, has been reprinted multiple times, but it still goes for over $100). Now, one might think that this is because there were so many broken cards in early Magic, and this list is correcting for that. Nope. The broken cards are mostly already banned. The Game Changer list and the ban list are mutually exclusive.
Many of the format's most powerful bombs are not on this list at all. While the obvious outlier is Sol Ring, I shan't open that can of worms. Lotus Petal, Finale of Devastation, Wheel of Fortune, Windfall, Wishclaw Talisman, Reanimate, Hullbreaker Horror, Swords to Plowshares, Timetwister, Peer into the Abyss, Birds of Paradise, Urza's Saga, Song of Creation, Blasphemous Act, Lightning Greaves, Brainstorm, Skullclamp, Mystic Remora, etc. The list of broken cards that are not on the Game Changers list is profound. And that's the main reason that it's so easy to construct a super-broken "Bracket 2" deck if one is so inclined. The other reason is that the the Game Changer list and the anti-tutor criteria used by the Bracket System doesn't really restrict certain kinds of power. Decks with many redundant components or ones for which the commander strongly mitigates inconsistency can easily do without tutors, and some of them are still quite potent even with no Game Changers.
Some of the expansion of the Game Changer list (which was originally only 40 cards) has been due to the WotC policy of adding a card to the Game Changer list as part of the deal if that card becomes unbanned in EDH. Most recently, Biorhythm was unbanned. So now it's a Game Changer. When I first saw this policy, I was kind of optimistic about it. I figured WotC would never normally unban stuff like Library of Alexandria (which should totally be legal in EDH). But now that they had a tool that let them unban cards from the format as a whole while keeping those cards out of lower brackets, I thought maybe that it would free up a bunch of cards in Bracket 4, and I could just continue ignoring the lower brackets anyway. But in practice, it doesn't work that way. Players have started to expect Bracket 4 to mean high-powered, borderline cEDH. And most of the fresh unbans are not viable in that environment. Against truly "optimized" decks or against cEDH decks, Biorhythm is garbage and it would be foolish to run the card. But it would be equally foolish to use one of your three Game Changer slots on the card in a Bracket 3 deck, and the card is effectively banned in Bracket 2. For a few cards, being put on the Game Changers list is tantamount to deleting them from EDH. They're not banned, but the Bracket System doesn't make room for them anywhere.
The Rule Zero Conversation:
While I haven't coalesced all of these criticisms into a single longform rant until now, I've put just about all of them individually to some interlocutor out there at some more pro-Bracket bent at some point the past year. And the responses I've seen in favor of the Bracket System have almost never been rebuttals or even attempted rebuttals of my points. Instead, advocates of the Bracket System take pains to emphasize how it's a tool that must be used properly. It isn't meant to be some ironclad set of rules for all decks ever, but rather a framework to help "assist" The Rule Zero Conversation. This is a very convenient position to argue from because the whole concept of a Rule Zero conversation is so vague that there's no way to challenge the claim in a a debate.
Essentially, Bracket System advocates seem to adopt a motte-and-bailey style of argument. When the Bracket System isn't coming under criticism or when the criticism is ineffective, they promote the Bracket System. But when it comes under heavy criticism, they shift their emphasis to Rule Zero and hide behind it. If this were a good system, it could stand on its own merits, and wouldn't need to come with the caveat that it only works if everyone involved takes the proper steps to have a conversation in all the right ways to make this system an effective tool.