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Magic: The Gathering

Wizards of the Coast takes control of competitive Commander

With the banning of certain cards from tournaments, the current competitive format of Magic: The Gathering hangs in the balance.

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The chickens....

Magic the Gathering is by far the longest running and most-popular TCG in history. Indeed, it could even be argued that the industry is what it is today, thanks to the invention of mathematician Richard Garfield, who decided to turn his expertise in board games into a product that today is totally recognisable in and out of card game geek circles.

But, like all great milestones in history, Magic has experienced ups and downs in its popularity that have obviously had an impact on its sales. Let's not kid ourselves, MTG's health is enviable and has been so since its launch 30 years ago, but within that idyll with players, a few years ago there was what we'll call a downward drift that made Hasbro executives (who had bought Wizards of the Coast, creators of the game) arch an eyebrow. For the first time, Magic was showing signs of exhaustion among users, perhaps jaded by an excess of collections one after the other or by the corset of formats that dispersed the focus of the game too much and distanced it from those who had traditionally been its customers.

Magic: The Gathering

And it was around that time that Commander arrived as a godsend. This new system changed some of the classic concepts of the game (such as the inclusion of the figure of the commander, the restriction of only one card of each in the deck or that a free for all of four players was played) but it was gaining a lot of popularity in a very short time. Despite the fact that the same format had been made by a group of Canadian players, Wizards was quick to adopt it and in fact started selling pre-built decks for this system and designing ad hoc cards to give it more power.

Commander has become the most popular and profitable format in Magic: The Gathering.

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In the same way, and somewhat reluctantly, WotC included on its official website a list of cards banned from the format so that an already chaotic system wouldn't turn into a real mess. It should be noted that this list came from the players who somehow invented the format, and that from the beginning the Hasbro bosses explained that they were a little bit on borrowed time, so it wouldn't be a very active list. They would simply adapt it according to greater needs.

From there, Commander grew as no one expected and over the years, it has become Magic's biggest source of revenue, which in turn is Hasbro's biggest source of revenue, so you can get an idea of the magnificent cash flow that cards made for Commander mean to the company. To this day, Commander is by far the most popular Magic format in existence.

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...have come home to roost

And so, in these years things have gone quite well, especially for Wizards, which managed to find something that made its structure viable and also kept the majority of users happy. The key was simple, Commander was not intended to be a "competitive" format in the Wizards style. That is to say, it was not included in the professional circuits and the truth is that it didn't need to be. One of the peculiarities of Commander is its short list of banned cards. Of the almost 14,000 Magic cards that exist, only a few are banned in this format, and this is something that has both good and bad side effects. On the positive side, we have an almost infinite variety of decks, we can make a thousand different ones, and small changes have a big impact on the game. But on the downside, this large pool means that few people have all the cards they need, especially if we consider that some of the legal cards in Commander are worth thousands, the cost of a deck can easily go up to ridiculous amounts if we want to bring the best.

Magic: The Gathering

But we said before that Wizards was giving up on the competitive side of Commander, does that mean it doesn't exist? Not at all. As the format evolved, there was a thick dividing line between casual players and true tryhards who pushed the format to its limits and competed in increasingly popular "unofficial" tournaments under the nickname of CEDH, the most extreme facet of Commander. The funny thing is that it being unofficial solved another problem, the high cost of some cards, as this was nothing more than an organiser putting his rules behind Wizards' back, in the vast majority of cases, the use of proxies, that is, unofficial cards that replace these, was allowed.

The CEDH championships have grown a lot and in Portugal a popular tournament with hundreds of players has been held for years and recently announced its intention to become a full European circuit, which last year already came to Spain in the form of a national CEDH tournament in Valencia with more than a hundred players.

The recent banning of key cards in Commander by Wizards of the Coast has generated unrest among players and significant financial losses.

In the meantime, the list of banned cards did not change much - to give you an idea, it had not changed in three years - and the general feeling among players was that WOTC was on to other things, and as long as the flow of cardboard sold didn't stop, it would continue to do so. Moreover, their backs were covered, because a committee of "wise men" had been appointed to ensure that the changes to that list were made according to what the players demanded.

But as all good things must come to an end, this could not be an exception. That European circuit began to attract the attention of the coastal wizards, who realised that they could no longer ignore the elephant in the fine china shop that was the competitive Commander, it made no sense for their most popular and lucrative format to be left out of their circuits altogether and so they decided to slowly but surely get their heads in the game to be part of the decisions that were made. They knew that when Wizards arrived, tournament proxies would end and therefore a huge group of players would be left out of the game. This had been a rumour for some time in the Commander threads, but it was the kind of news that had been dragging on for a long time and never really seemed to happen until last September.

And then came the big ban

A few weeks ago, without warning, Wizards added four new additions to its banned list for Commander, which sounds like a small thing, but believe me it's not at all. The supposedly wise committee had banned four cards that, aside from being some of the most expensive cards in the format, were a cornerstone of most competitive decks. Namely: Nadu, Dockside Extortionist, Mana Crypt and Jewelled Lotus. In the case of the last three, we are talking about cards costing around €100, which, after the ban, have lost much of their market value. The anger of the fandom was enormous, because not only had the existing meta been changed in one fell swoop, but also their wallets had taken a hit of between €200 and €900 depending on the edition. In the case of Jewelled Lotus it was especially gory, because we're talking about a card made specifically for the Commander format that Wizards has promoted and reprinted ad nauseam, and that after the ban is no longer playable anywhere else.

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And here we are only talking about the case of the players, if we look at some shops the drama is much bigger. In recent days, videos have gone viral of sellers with more than 60 mana crypts who have lost more than 10,000 euros in one go. One Reddit user calculated that this expulsion had cost players (not counting shops or vendors) an estimated $80 million in depreciation of their card pool, the largest Magic breakdown in history.

Sadly, but to no one's surprise, the 'banning' committee of wise men began to be the target of insults and threats, in some cases very serious, and some of the members decided to leave because they were against what was being done. A very convulsive week that led to the current state of affairs.

Magic: The Gathering

And now what?

In order to get out of a horrible situation, Wizards has decided to dig itself into the hole and solve it in its own style. That is to say with a total intervention of the format, without giving too many details. It is fascinating how it has come to this in the way it has been done, because we are sure that the damage on an economic level is quantifiable, but on a reputational level it is certainly much worse, because when a company that is already disliked by its customers makes such an unpopular move, the first thing we ask ourselves is what they were thinking when they decided to accept bans that would shake their format. There are conspiracy theories that point to it being done on purpose as a prelude to taking over Commander, which Wizards itself has taken pains to deny by issuing a lengthy and ambiguous statement that really clarifies almost nothing. If you ask us, our opinion is that when something can be the result of incompetence, don't look for further causes.

It is likely that Wizards will take direct control of the Commander format, creating uncertainty about its future and possible changes to its structure.

Now no one knows what the future holds, the scene is more unsettled than ever and more people are angry and swearing that they are leaving Magic, but this has happened, to a lesser extent of course, in the past and the blood has not run to the river. The most likely scenario is that Wizards will indeed take over Commander with all the good and bad that this means, but that in the short term the crazy bans will turn to more moderate ones. We really hope that the waters will calm down and Commander will continue to be the haven of peace that it has been so far in an unhinged TCG world like the one we live in.

Magic: The Gathering

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