EFFECTIVE 20 MARCH, 2011

BANNED
No changes

UNBANNED
No changes

We see no compelling evidence that there are new cards which are warping the format, nor any cards whose unbanning would significantly improve things. There are cards RC members like and dislike more than others, but our personal likes and dislikes are not primary reasons for bannings. We struggle to maintain a balance for the overall health of the format.

One of the concerns we discussed is Commander’s current growth and its additional attraction of newer players, especially when the new materials are released in June. We considered if we needed to ban additional cards in order to provide less of a social barrier-to-entry to those new players. In the end, we came to the conclusion that while a few of the less social cards might provide suboptimal experiences for some of those new players, they also might not, and some of those cards provide a positive experience for veterans and Johnnies as premium win conditions. Attempting to over-engineer the way players have fun in the format by banning a few cards that we consider anti-social would lead to a cascade of bannings (“If you ban X, you have to ban Y”), creating a large, unmanageable, and undesirable Banned List, which we believe is extremely unhealthy.

All in all, the format seems quite healthy. We'll continue to work with playgroups, individuals and the wider Commander community in an effort to keep it that way.

I'll also be talking about this more in-depth next week on SCG.