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Banlist Update & much more

 
Okay… some months have passed, and there were no news. Actuallay, though you might be surprised, this is good news:
When there aren’t any changes, it means that the game is running smoothly as intended, and no bans were necessary.
 
While we know that Adventures in the Forgotten Realms will be available in the next couple of weeks, we don’t see any problematic cards yet, so we will give you the possibility to make and share your own experiences for now.
 

Nevertheless, we do of course look at our friends from duelcommander, Leviathan and the official free-for-all commander sites and look what is going on there, and discuss and react accordingly.

1. Mulligan Clarification
 
We like to point out our „starting the game sequence“ a little bit:
3.5 Commander cards and Compagnion cards are revealed after taking the mulligan.
While not anyone will agree, and we might annoy some players with our rules which differ from the original rules, we think with our mulligan it would be too devestating to allow a selection of cards once you know against which kind of decks you will play against.
 
(The rules haven’t changed, but we changed the wording and rules numbers a bit to point this out even more and make it easier to understand)
2. Paradox engine. Finally banned.
 
While this peticular card wasn’t that problematic for our format, it didn’t enrich it either but leading to long solitaire turns and quite boring gameplay sequences. Also, some players who aren’t used to Teamcommander could easily adept their decks by drawing new cards for banned cards when joining the Teamcommander community – but including cards which may feel necessary then is much more complicated. So we like to avoid heated up discussion (this card is banned and this is allowed?!) but match up our banned list a bit; this card won’t hurt our community this much.
 
We also ban Necrologia, as it is mostly used as a combo searchpiece or a non scaling carddraw piece (the lifeloss can be neglected in 2HG), Life isn’t that important as a ressource as it is in a 1vs1 duel, and therefore we rate such cards a bit harder than other formats would do. As we also banned instant tutors, we do ban instant „about unlimited carddraw“. We know that there are a lot of other instant multiple carddraw cards, but these require huge amounts of mana at least, which therefore require more cards or turns.
  
3. Hullbreacher anyone ?
 
Yes, Hullbreacher (and in our list, other functional similar cards like Narset, Parter of Veils and Notion Thief) are already banned, so this is not a news for us, BUT we are happy and a bit proud to see that even in free-for-all Magic, where the implications of these cards are much less devestating than in a Team format like Teamcommander, the finally banned this cards and „follow our decision“. While other cards are still „under observance“, we think this is the right way. [And yes, we know that the free-for-all RC won’t even read our banned list, and their decision wasn’t inspired by us at all, but let us just bathe in the illusion that we saw this problem before them 😉 ]

 

4. Unbans. A lot. Are we serious ?!
 
Some may argue that we don’t have a strict line, and we ban or unban by pure coincidence or arbitrary. Sometimes players are irritated that we seem to undo our decision – so were they necessary in the first place ?
 
Yes, we do try to ban or unban as few as possible and we also don’t like to undo decisions, but we don’t see this as a weakness but rather as the effort to keep up with the always evolving world of magic. New cards, new commanders and new interactions do require a constant adjustment, and sometimes, while in the first time a card was having a too big impact, the same card can vanish over time. As a lame example we might try to remind you that creatures had a lower bang for their cmc 20 years ago than they do have now.
 
While we do also like you to have friendly, rememberworthy and epic Teamcommander games, and we want to differ from cEDH play. We do think that by banning most of the fast mana accelerators and the common combo pieces or tutors for these cards we have accomplished our job quite good. We point out that we don’t want to eliminate all comboplay (which is impossible) nor ramp per se but we want games to be more of an epic fight but a turn 3 win.
 
Our commander unbannings may seem contraproductive, as duelcommander just takes the opposite direction and bans most of the powerful commanders. While allowing these commanders might lead to aggressive and oppressing decks, we think that strong commanders should be possible, and exist, and you can adjust your deck to your meta (especially with the rule change mentioned above) or try indiviual agreements for commanders in your group.
 
An example might be Maelstrom Wanderer, once feared and overdominating, he now suffers from the faster and faster manacurve and gameplay, and isn’t that predominant as he was some years ago, so we are fine with our unbanning here, and the meta analysis of games showed us that we were about right.

Some cards are still under consideration: especially Fierce Guardianship and thelike. They are banned in Duelcommander, they are banned in Leviathan, and they are a „must include card“ if you play the right colors. Even a Force of Will as a free counterspell has more drawbacks, so these cards are extremely powerful, maybe a bit too much. No ban yet, though.
The following cards are unbanned:
 
The following cards are newly banned:
 

Some additional information though to our unbannings:

Brink of Madness We think that the unbanning of this card reflects good that we don’t want to completely disallow or disable discard. We do think that a Kroxa, reanimiated severals times, is much worse and easier to accomplish and less punishing for oneself to play than a Brink of Madness. We want to keep in mind that combinations, synergies and interactions of cards can archieve the multiple discard of cards, even resulting in „Mass Discard“. We slowly want to show you that the game evolves, and you should be aware that these mechanisms do exist, though our rules and bannings still make them hard to archieve.

Rite of Ruin and Ember Swallower follow the same thoughts: we will allow the most unusual and hard to accomplish mass land-Destruction cards. We think they will still see limited to no play at all, and are too few in numbers that you could build themes or strategies around them, but they at least enable some limited options to destroy several lands and enable such a possibility which players should be aware of.

Prossh, Skyraider of Kher is still a commander who scales very efficient and has lots of combo and synergy power to end a game once he hits the board, but costing 6 Mana will make him quite expansive and he will at least have to fight to be top tier. We will watch this closely.

The Chain Veil is a combo card for sure, and also with the unbanning of Teferi, Temporal Archmage it can get mad and will be used as a combo, but in cEDH Super friends and the Chain Veil don’t have that high of an impact anymore, so we dare to see if it is also true for Teamcommander: strong but not overpowered anymore.

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is not the same as the newly printed Yavimaya, Cradle of Growth, as the interaction with Cabal Coffers is immense. To be honest, actually in all Decks including Urborg Coffers is the only reason to play it. While we see the Abuse not just in Monoblack decks, which we aren’t afraid of that much at top tier Levels in Teamcommander and are rarely seen here, we were more concerned with Hour of Promise and green Ramp Decks, which were already too strong and dominant recently. But with the new unbannings of faster or more controllish decks we think it will be in balance once again. We’ll have an eye on this.

We didn’t unban Sidisi, Undead Vizier and Arcum Dagsson, as we are afraid that a Commander which enables tutoring multiple times will enable too fast and too often a combo win. Edric and Nekusar are also still banned as they scale with 2HG rules too much. Azusa, Lost but Seeking is also a sheer unavaidable fast mana ramp which leads too undesireable game states – Selvala, Heart of the Wild has summoning sickness and needs a big creature to do its magic, being a big difference. We think Selvala mostly resembles Kinnan, but Kinnan is a lot stronger due to blue and a cmc of 2.

A side note: we already banned Alrund’s Epiphany with Kaldheim some time ago, but we didn’t mention it clear enough so you may have overseen that, though it should be clear that such a card is unplayable in Team-Commander as we have a total nonallowance for extra turns.

Have Fun and Good Games ! – The Teamcommander-Team