July 2020 Update

It’s been a busy few months in Commander, so let’s start with the easy bit: there are no changes to the Banned list this quarter.

We know that, for many players, keeping up with rapid changes can be frustrating.  A number of other things have changed since our last quarterly update, so we’ll recap those events below and strive to stick with scheduled updates in the future.  The world is in flux though and Magic is no exception; we’ll continue to monitor the experiences of Commander players and adapt if necessary.

Two events which don’t impact the format but we hope will be of benefit to the community are

  1. The introduction of regularly streamed games by the RC (http://twitch.com/CommanderRC) where we chat with the audience and play games on camera. We play every Thursday evening (8pm EDT), with pickup games throughout the week as time permits. The primary focus is to increase visibility and two-way communication with the player base, talking about how and why we do the things we do. We also host special guests from Wizards of the Coast and the Commander community.
  2. The creation of a Commander RC Patreon through which players can contribute funds towards both the costs of running the format, and a number of great 3rd-party content creators.

Both are part of our 2020 focus on building connections between the RC, the CAG, and you… the players who make Commander the great format it is!

Rules changes since April 1st, 2020:

Commanders now “die” like other creatures.

TL;DR – Commanders being put into the graveyard from the battlefield trigger “dies” abilities.

Previously, the “Commanders go the command zone when they die” was handled using a replacement effect — a piece of MTG technology which entirely replaces one event with another. A side effect of that rule was that cards like Grave Pact wouldn’t trigger if someone’s commander was destroyed.  This was played incorrectly by many players, so we’d been looking for a way for commanders to behave “more normally” for many years.  It turns out the templating for that rule was tricky… more-so than 99.9% of us realized. Fortunately, the RC’s Toby Elliott and WotC’s Eli Shiffrin are really good at clear, clean rules and working with Sheldon Menery (at the time with a foot in both worlds), they found a way to make “dies” triggers work correctly without any significant corner cases. 

Technically speaking, the solution is a stated-based action (SBA), the things the game does to “clean up” each time someone would get priority, like exiling a token from the graveyard or destroying creatures which have lethal damage.  The new SBA now says “if a commander is in a graveyard or exile, and was put there since the last time SBAs were checked, its owner may choose to put it in the Command zone.”  

This means a commander first goes to the graveyard, triggering abilities (of itself or other cards which say “Whenever X dies”), then goes to the command zone.

Some clarifications

  1. The owner only gets to make this choice once… if your Commander is being exiled “temporarily” (e.g. by Oblivion Ring) you have to choose immediately if it is going to the CZ or staying in exile, in hopes of being brought back by whatever card put it there.
  2. The replacement effect remains in effect for zones like the hand or library, so the commander will never arrive.

Commander no longer uses the Vintage banned list as a basis for our banned list.

TL;DR – Lurrus is still legal, nothing else changed.

The Companion mechanic has made waves in every format, and Commander was no exception.  When they were first released, we removed Lutri because its lack of additional deck building restriction made it a “free card”. As sad as it made us, we hoped that would be the end of it.  Unfortunately, Companion was so impactful on Vintage that it resulted in the Wizards banning a card in that format for a combination of mechanical and power-level reasons, something which hasn’t happened in more than a decade.  

While it’s a big deal for Vintage, Lurrus is just fine in Commander. In fact, it’s probably one of the stronger handicaps in a format with an average mana cost near 4, so it doesn’t make sense for it to be banned in the format.  That raised the question of whether we should continue using the Vintage banned list as the basis for Commander, with other cards banned over-and-above.  

Historically, The Vintage (nee Type I) banned list has been used as a shorthand for “Cards which aren’t viable because of practical, physical-world considerations.” With the addition of Lurrus this wasn’t true anymore so we needed to make a philosophical decision.  Where possible, we prefer to let people to play their cards in Commander, so we decided to sever Commander from its Vintage roots and instead explicitly call out:

  • All oversized cards
  • All cards which don’t have black or white borders
  • All cards which mention the Ante Mechanic
  • All subgame and conspiracy cards

Shortly thereafter, Wizards removed some culturally offensive cards from constructed magic.

There are some cards which just shouldn’t be played around, or by, friends — they can be unnecessarily, even if accidentally, hurtful. Wizards of the Coast took a look at the message some of its cards were sending, and decided Magic would be a better game if those cards just weren’t around anymore.

Perhaps even more than tournament formats, Commander is about social connections so it only made sense for us to follow WotC’s lead and remove those cards from our format.  

The full list of excluded cards is:

  • Invoke Prejudice
  • Cleanse
  • Stone-Throwing Devils
  • Pradesh Gypsies
  • Jihad
  • Imprison
  • Crusade

As with other cards on the Banned List, we encourage players to avoid these cards, and any others which make your group unhappy.

New Voices: $100 a Deck

by Verdell Shannon

In $100 a Deck, we tackle the the simple concept of a budget brew for Commander. The concept of budget decks is always a slippery slope, with some wanting to aim for the absolute lowest possible price to play, and others thinking budget is whatever a card costs. Generally, I aim for the lowest price point where I can design with flexibility and consistency. Now, let’s dive in.

Part 1: What does the commander do?
Well, we lucked up and got ourselves the most desirable of the new Commander 2020 precons, with a creature that both reduces the cost to cycle cards AND rewards us for doing it. So, any deck we build will be doing a lot of cycling. This is a commander that has a great pedigree with it’s mechanical tie in.

Cycling is a mechanic that has been around in Magic since my favorite block (back when Magic had those) Urza block. It has taken many laps over the years, and appears in all five colors.

Part 2: How do we break this thing?
Thankfully, there is a lot of inspiration to draw from here. We can break him by loading up our deck with cards that are playable and beating our opponents with an interactive game plan… OR we can do a couple of cheap parlou tricks and ruin some fools!

Part 3: What is our inspiration?
I had to dig in a bit to research on cycling in competitive play for this guy. Cycling has come around in tournament decks at least four times, with long time players having seen it do a lot of tricks over the years. So, here are the cliff notes:

Modern: Living End
Game plan is simple, load the graveyard with big, dumb animals, and cast a Living End to reanimate them all. This deck won off the back of cascade spells to control when you could cast the backbreaking spell in a deck that featured no other cards under three CMC. That deck is Jund (black, red, green), so we can’t really rely on it for a direct port. The deck evolved to include an amazing mana denial plan with cards like Avalance Riders, Fulminator Mage, and Beast Within. This is something to note.

Standard: Astral Slide // Lightning Rift (Onslaught standard)
This is a RWX value deck that won the long game through card advantage provided by sticking a powerful enchantment that could match our opponent threat for threat and finally win card advantage. Due to the archetype dating back to 2003/2004 standard, sadly digging into this deck is a bit tougher. You don’t have the same wealth of coverage available to mine, as websites port over content, and the web ages.

Standard UW Control with Drake Haven (Amonkhet standard)
This deck features a suite of UW control options, and wins off the steady stream of creatures a resolved Drake Haven provides, while also controlling the game. This is going to be very important to our build.

Standard Fluctuator (Tempest/Urza standard)
Similar to Living End, but the original. This deck took advantage of the card Living Death out of Tempest block to load up on cards with cycling (that all had the then standard cycling cost of 2 mana), to fill it’s graveyard quickly.

Part 4: What’s the brew? 
Really, the best cycling decks are either blazingly-fast combo reanimator decks with some interaction, or they are slow, grindy incremental advantage decks that win off the value enchantments. Well, in our colors we are doing ourseves a service to go for the long game here. There are two different decks that are long-game driven to draw on in color. Also, I am a strong believer that Commander needs control decks. You don’t need to take every game to one hour length, but sometimes it’s okay to not combo out on turn five.

Here’s the link to the deck list.

Part 5: How does it work?
Cycling is a skill testing mechanic. The deck will reward you for long term play, and getting a feel for what you need in any scenario. You have a lot of grind them out potential. The interaction between blinking your own creature and re-buying one of your board wipes is huge. Also, you will be able to remove threats and stall your opponents by cycling cards.

Essentially, your plan is to slow the game down using a lot of tap out control. Once you have exhausted your opponent’s resources, you can take charge and start to bully the table with your near limitless card advantage available.

Part 6: Upgrades
So, upgrading this deck further is all about retuning your interaction and adding more cards to slow your opponens’ development. Decree of Silence is a free counter anything and Nimble Obstructionist is your Trickbind option. You of course can upgrade the mana base, to minimize the tapped land impact more and make sure you hit your colors.

Part 7: Closing Comments
Gavi, Nest Warden is a fantastic control or combo/tempo commander. You can dictate the pace of the game very well, and are mostly immune to counterspells. Call me nuts, but I think after you cast the same wrath effect for the 5th time, people may scoop in frustration, since they can’t kill you. The best thing about the 2020 Commander decks is a lot of the cards are already packaged in there, so your upgrade money can go much farther.

Verdell has been into magic since Phyrexians roamed the earth during Urza block. He is a tournament scrub turned commander player and loves all manner of broken and classic deck. You can find him hanging around EDH forums and talking about why he draws the line at Boil and Acid Rain, but is perfectly fine with Ruination, Armageddon and Wave of Vitriol in commander. He can be reached on twitter (@VerdellShannon) or Instagram (@res5music).  

June 7 Announcement on Dies Triggers

As you may have heard on the CommandFest charity stream, we’re changing how commanders go to the command zone, effective with the quarterly Commander announcement for Core Set 2021. The short version of it is:

If a commander has an ability which triggers on it dying or going to exile, it will trigger before heading to the command zone. 

The long version (including how we got there and the technical details) is below.


First, new rules (specifically, a new state-based action):

If a commander is in a graveyard or in exile and that card was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone.

If a commander would be put into its owner’s hand or library from anywhere, its owner may put it into the command zone instead. This replacement effect may apply more than once to the same event.

Commander death triggers are a subject that came up over the years, but didn’t get much traction. It’s not that any of us objected, it’s that none of us felt all that strongly about it. The current system worked fine and was elegant. We were happy with it and obvious possible changes had a lot of downsides. There were people out there who thought it was a good idea, and people out there who thought it was a bad idea, and no groundswell for change. You’ll find us defending positions we feel strongly are correct (like hybrid mana color identity during deck construction), but we generally didn’t engage much on Commander death triggers beyond pointing out that the rules to make it happen weren’t nearly as simple as people thought they were. We just didn’t have strong feelings either way.

The tipping point came last October when a CAG member was talking about their Elenda, the Dusk Rose deck and we had to break it to them that it didn’t work the way they thought it did. Turns out a portion of the CAG didn’t understand that commanders dying didn’t trigger death triggers and were quite passionate about the subject. That was motivation to see if we could do something with them that wasn’t a mess.

We came up with a lot of possibilities. Each had various levels of impact on the game. We had a list of a bunch of notable cards so that we could consider the implications of each approach, including Rest in Peace, It That Betrays, Oblivion Ring, Banishing Light, Grave Betrayal, even Skullbriar! If it had a weird interaction with a zone change, we probably talked about it.

In the end, we presented eight options to the CAG for discussion, all of which had different plusses and minuses:

  • Do nothing
  • Redefine the term “dies”
  • Inherent trigger on the commander
  • State trigger on a commander in a graveyard
  • State-based action (mandatory)
  • State-based action (optional)
  • Special action
  • A really crazy one where the Commander made a token copy of itself that went to the graveyard.

And then we talked a bunch. How much weirdness was acceptable? How much were we willing to change core Commander game play? Was not being able to leave your Commander in the graveyard acceptable for a very clean state trigger? For example, the special action (essentially “0: put your Commander into the Command Zone. Activate only in the graveyard, exile or library”) meant it was usually correct to have your commander in the graveyard when it wasn’t on the battlefield. Redefining “dies” to mean “is put into the graveyard or command zone from the battlefield” was super-clean, but meant that blinking a commander would trigger death triggers. Everything had tradeoffs.

After a lot of discussion, we proposed to Wizards the following state-based action:

If a commander is in a library, graveyard or exile, and doesn’t have a choice counter on it, it’s owner may put it into the command zone. If they do not, put a choice counter on it.

That worked intuitively with basically everything (shhhh, Skullbriar).

Rules Manager Eli Shiffrin (because he’s smart and good with the rules) pointed out that we could steal a little technology from, of all things, Deathtouch, to avoid using a counter (yay, Skullbriar):

If a commander is in a graveyard, library or in exile and that card was put into that zone since the last time state-based actions were checked, its owner may put it into the command zone.

We loved this, but there was one small problem. Could this apply in a hidden zone, especially with the existence of Chaos Warp? Chaos Warp targeting a Commander would put the commander into the library, shuffle it, then reveal the top card. Tracking the commander through all of that is stretching the Magic rules, and while I think we could have made it work, it was tricky both rules-wise and physically. In the end, we left the replacement effect in place for hidden zones (hand and library) and now use the state-based action for graveyard and exile. Commanders that go to hand rarely want to be moved, and commanders going to the library is a rare event; wanting to take further action before the State-based Action kicks in is rarer still. Those events working differently won’t matter most of the time.

And that’s how we ended up with the final rules above. Note that the Commander still has to go to the graveyard in order for a dies ability to trigger. If that is replaced by some other effect (such as Rest in Peace), it won’t happen, just as it wouldn’t happen on any other creature.

We’ll obviously be keeping an eye on some of the more powerful commanders with death triggers – looking at you Kokusho and Child of Alara! – but think it will be OK and opens up a few more interesting options. And Elendra the Dusk Rose now works like the CAG and a bunch of other people think it does.

Deal or No Deal?

by Magical Hacker

I have a method for upping your political game that no one is talking about. Once you start using it, you’ll rarely ever make deals again. What comes to mind when you think of “politics” in Commander? Chances are, you’re probably thinking about making a sales pitch to another player for your “mutual benefit” and the destruction of everybody else. Sounds great, right? But there’s a problem.

The Problem with Deals

The problem with deals is that they lock you in to what could be a bad play in order to convince an opponent to do something that is probably beneficial for them anyways. Say I’m playing a game with my friends, Taylor, Spencer, and Jordan, and at 10 life, with no creatures on the board, and just a Path to Exile in hand, I’m tempted to make a deal, especially because Taylor has an Ulamog the Infinite Gyre on the board, while Jordan has four 3/3 Beast tokens. 


If I get attacked by both players, I lose the game even after using my Path to Exile on the Ulamog, so I decide to make a deal with Taylor. “Hey Taylor, if I get rid of the Ulamog, will you attack Jordan with all your creatures for the next two turns?” It might seem like a fair trade: I don’t take damage from the Ulamog or the tokens, I don’t have to annihilate anything, I stay alive, and Taylor gets to attack Jordan without fear of Annihilator retaliation! But by making a deal I lock myself into a course of action.  

What if Spencer plays out a combo like Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Zealous Conscripts, making enough creatures to kill me and all other players at the table? I won’t have my Path to protect me. Also, what if Taylor overestimates how much influence the deal had in stopping them from attacking me, and Taylor attacks me even more than before? This is why instead of making a deal, I like to use the Art of Inception. 

The Art of Inception

The art of inception is to convince your opponents that it’s in their best interest to help you. Sometimes, our goals will align with the goals of our opponents. In fact, sometimes our opponents will also perceive that their goals align with ours.


Instead of making a deal, say I ask, “Hey Taylor, I don’t think I can deal with Jordan on my own, so I guess that means we are allied against them, right?” That simple question launches the entire political move! At this point, I am forcing Taylor to evaluate the board state. Mentally, they have to decide which opponent is the greatest obstacle standing in the way of them winning the game, and to keep the example fundamental, the simple details tell us that they are going to see Jordan as the primary hurdle to overcome. In that way, Taylor will definitely attack Jordan (unless my commander is scary enough that I’m still a threat without a board state, like Golos, Edgar, or Kykar).


As a result, now Jordan will have to make the same decision for themselves, and with someone attacking them for 12 each turn, they certainly have to start annihilating their board before things get uncontrollable. So, how did I manage to do all this with just a simple question?

The concept behind inception is using the board state to my advantage, and leveraging my unthreatening appearance and the threatening appearances of my opponents to lead them to their own conclusions that they should use their resources to fight back against the biggest threat. In this way, I get what I wanted to make a deal for, but at the same time without having to use any resources of my own! It’s free real estate.

Now that I have performed the political move of inception, I can continue to prepare for whatever happens by waiting to use my Path to Exile, both Taylor and Jordan will use their resources to diminish each other’s life total, and once the dust settles, I’ll know exactly who to use my resources on! But of course, there’s an exception to every rule.

An Exception to Every Rule

There are still times where you know that inception won’t work, and that a deal is your best shot at winning. Sometimes, it’s a hail mary. Sometimes, it’s just the least risky path to victory. Let’s add a few more details to the example and we can see where it might be better to go for the deal instead. Let’s say I also have Heartless Hidetsugu and Loxodon Warhammer in hand, but I have to cast Heartless Hidetsugu this turn in order to cast and equip the Warhammer, tap Hidetsugu, and gain a bunch of life on my next turn. At the same time, I know that playing it down would immediately make my opponents attack me. 

In this situation, I can lock in a deal before the game state changes, allowing me to have a better chance at victory. In fact, this is the most common example of when I’ve seen deals being necessary: when you know you need to become threatening in order to secure a good position, but becoming threatening would kill you.

At the end of the day, politics are key to winning games when all hope seems lost, and I know that using this strategy of inception will be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal to get there.

So what do you say, deal or no deal?

MagicalHacker is a thinker, a philosopher, and a scientist, constantly searching for the needles of truth in the haystack of what we assume to be true. You might know him from his plethora of YouTube videos (including multiplayer game play, deck techs for commanders previewed within the past week, top 10s featuring only cards he plays in multiple decks, live deckbuilding of underplayed commanders, or even his monthly deck doctor or game play videos for each of his patrons.