Wizards of the Coast takes control of competitive commander – Magic: The Gathering

The Chickens….

Magic the Gathering is by far the longest-running and most popular TCG in history. One could even argue 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 fully recognizable in and outside of card game nerd circles.

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

And it was around that time that Commander arrived like a gift from heaven. This new system changed some of the classic concepts of the game (such as the inclusion of the figure of the commander, the limitation of only one card of each in the deck or that a free for all four players was played), but it gained popularity in a very short time. Despite the fact that the same format had been created by a group of Canadian players, Wizards was quick to adopt it and in fact began selling ready-made 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.

Similarly, and somewhat reluctantly, WotC included on its official website a list of cards banned from the format, lest an already chaotic system turn into a real mess. It should be noted that this list came from the players who somehow invented the format, and that Hasbro bosses explained from the beginning that they were on borrowed time for a bit, so it would not be a very active list. They would just adapt it to larger needs.

From there, Commander grew like 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 wonderful cash flow that cards made for Commander mean for the company. To this day, Commander is by far the most popular Magic format out there.

… have come home to sleep

And so things went pretty well over these years, especially for Wizards, who managed to find something that made the structure viable and also kept the majority of users happy. The key was simple, Commander was not intended to be a Wizards-style “competitive” format. That is, it was not included in the professional circuits and, truth be told, it didn’t need to be. One of Commander’s peculiarities is its short list of banned cards. Of the nearly 14,000 Magic cards out there, 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 other hand, this large pool means that few people have all the cards they need, especially considering that some of the legal cards in Commander are worth thousands, the cost of a deck can easily reach ridiculous amounts if we want to bring the best.

But we said before that Wizards gave 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 divide between casual players and true tryhards who took the format to the extreme and participated in increasingly popular “unofficial” tournaments under the moniker CEDH, the most extreme facet of Commander. The funny thing is that being unofficial solved another problem, the high cost of some cards, since this was nothing more than an organizer putting his rules behind Wizards’ back, in the vast majority of cases the use of proxies, i.e. unofficial cards replacing them, was allowed.

The CEDH championships have grown tremendously, with Portugal hosting a popular tournament with hundreds of players for years and recently announcing its intention to become a full European circuit, which already came to Spain last year in the form of a national CEDH tournament in Valencia with over a hundred players.

The recent ban on key cards in Commander by Wizards of the Coast has led to player unrest and significant financial losses.

In the meantime, the list of banned cards didn’t change much – to give you an idea, it hadn’t changed in three years – and the general feeling among players was that WOTC was onto other things, and as long as the flow of sold cardboard 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 changes were made to that list in accordance with what the players demanded.

But since 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 realized that they could no longer ignore the elephant in the fine china shop that was the competitive commander, it made no sense to leave their most popular and lucrative format out of their circuits altogether, and so they slowly but surely decided to get their heads in the game to be a part of the decisions being made. They knew that when Wizards arrived, tournament proxies would end and therefore a large group of players would be left out of the game. This had been a rumor in the Commander threads for a while, but it was the kind of news that dragged 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 among the most expensive cards in the format, were a cornerstone of the 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 euros, which lost much of their market value after the ban. The fandom’s anger was enormous, because not only had the existing meta changed in one fell swoop, but 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, as we are talking about a card made specifically for the Commander format that Wizards has promoted and reprinted ad nauseam, and which cannot be played anywhere else after the ban.

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

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the “ban committee” of wise men began to be the target of insults and threats, in some cases very serious, and some members decided to leave because they were against what was being done. A very convulsive week that led to the current state of affairs.

And now?

To get out of a terrible situation, Wizards decided to dig itself into the hole and solve it in its own style. That is, with a total intervention of the format, without giving too many details. It is fascinating how it could have come to this in the way it was done, because we are sure that the damage is measurable on an economic level, but it is certainly much worse on a reputational level, because when a company that already hates its customers takes such an unpopular step, the first thing we wonder is what they were thinking when they decided to accept bans that would shake their format. There are conspiracy theories that suggest it was done intentionally as a prelude to taking over Commander, which Wizards itself has tried to deny by issuing a long and ambiguous statement that really clarifies almost nothing. If you ask us, we believe that when something can be the result of incompetence, you should not look for further causes.

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

Now no one knows what the future holds, the scene is more troubled than ever and more people are angry and swearing they are leaving Magic, but this has happened to a lesser extent naturally in the past and the blood has not flowed to the river. The most likely scenario is that Wizards will indeed take over Commander with all the good and bad this means, but that in the short term the crazy bans will change to more moderate ones. We truly hope that the waters will calm down and that Commander will remain the haven of peace it has been so far in a disconnected TCG world such as the one we live in.