The Gathering Commander Ban Meltdown

A week ago, the independent Rules Committee for Magic: The Gathering Commander, the collectible card game’s most popular format in recent years, announced a surprise ban of three of its most popular and expensive cards. The reaction from some fans was swift, loud, and in some cases escalated to violent threats against the people involved. The company that makes the game, Wizards of the Coast, has now responded with more shocking news: the Rules Committee has been voluntarily dissolved and the future of the Commander format will now be decided in house.

The controversial card bans that kicked off the backlash on September 23 included Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt, two cards that offer players mana cheap and early to ramp up their game winning arsenal quickly, as well as Dockside Extortionist and Nadu, Winged Wisdom, two creatures with powerful effects depending on when and how they’re deployed. While Nadu is relatively cheap, the rest go for anywhere between $50 and $150 a piece.

Most of them are banned in other MTG formats, but some of them were created specifically for Commander, a variant rule set where players have more health and can’t have more than one copy of any given card in their deck. And as that format has exploded in popularity in recent years, with Wizards of the Coast printing multiple Commander-specific sets a year, the meta around the most strategic cards has made them more sought after than ever.

But the target of many fans’ ire wasn’t the company itself, but rather the independent Rules Committee and its player advisory group who were blamed for the decision. Some of the members tried to explain their logic online while others set their social media accounts to private due to the firehose of complaints and vitriol aimed at them. In response to the escalation of the backlash, Wizards announced on September 30 that it’s getting rid of the Rules Committee entirely and taking ownership of the future of MTG Commander.

“Nobody deserves to feel unsafe for supporting the game they love,” the company wrote in a statement published on its website. “Unfortunately, the task of managing Commander has far outgrown the scope and safety of being attached to any five people. So today, in partnership with members of the existing Rules Committee, we are announcing that the Rules Committee is giving management of the Commander format to the game design team of Wizards of the Coast.”

Instead of reversing course and unbanning the cards in the immediate aftermath of the controversy, Wizards outlined a new way for players’ Commander decks to be graded along various tiers based on the highest rated cards in their decks. The goal would be to provide some sort of numbering system so that players can have competitive games with one another, rather than worrying about getting pitted against someone who’s poured hundreds of dollars into their Commander deck.

“We will also be evaluating the current banned card list alongside both the Commander Rules Committee and the community,” Wizards wrote, adding that it will continue to seek player feedback on Discord and other forums about the ban list and its suggested tier system. “We will not ban additional cards as part of this evaluation. While discussion of the banned list started this, immediate changes to the list are not our priority.”

So far at least, the latest announcements appear to be going over just as poorly as the original card bans that ignited the firestorm in the first place. One of the virtues of the existing Rules Committee was that, in theory at least, it wasn’t beholden to Wizards of the Coast and was thus independent from the profit motive that might drive its broader decision making around MTG rules. Some fans also feel that the tier system is mostly unworkable, and requires too much additional work and input from the community to submit, monitor, and rate deck lists. And then there’s the general frustration that the most belligerent fans who engaged in personal threats or harassment ended up upstaging more civil complaints and driving the Rules Committee into hiding.

“The harassers got what they wanted, delegitimization of the targets they harassed,” wrote one player on the MTG subreddit. “They effectively killed the RC, I’m sure they’re happy.” Another wrote, “It sends the signal that creating drama, harassing people and sending threats ‘works.’ Honestly I’m ashamed to be a Magic player right now, these kind of things are bound to happen again.”