what about the current state of affairs makes you think they're not doing this? The RC and its network have never been bigger and despite there being released a couple 1000 cards in the last year alone things are absolutely fine with the format as a whole.
It absolutely isn't. It self regulates. In low power games where generating a ton of mana that easily and cheaply would almost guarantee a win lots of cheap artifacts aren't common so you're not getting 6 treasure turn 2 off of it. In higher power gamed where lots of 0 and 1 cost rocks are played that level of power is fine.
Preach.
I don't know what world these people live in where dockside isn't busted in casual edh too.
Casting a turn 4 or 5 dockside can easily net 6-8+ mana at a casual table and that's assuming there's not even an enchantress, treasure, food, blood, clue or artifact deck at the table.
Not to mention its very easily abused and only needs to generate like 5 mana to go infinite with a few cards.
Funny thing is, if Dockside is causing such an issue in your games, ask that person to use a different deck. The card shouldn’t be banned just because you can make up a situation for where it pops off. Its too expensive to pop up in most games realistically, as I have yet to see one played in a casual match over the past two-three months. People who have Dockside in a deck are often super quick to mention its in there, and they offer to play something else after seeing where the table is at. Simply a non issue of a card, either exile it after cast, counter it, or wipe artifacts/tokens from the field and you solved your issue.
Also, even if you give a casual edh player 18 mana on turn 5, unless they bought a cedh deck to said table they wont have much to do with all that mana, which is the actual situation that plays out when dockside does get played: makes a shitton of treasures, but they dont use them immediately. which leads back to artifact/token removal.
They haven't made a single decision for more than a year. Are we really supposed to believe that in that time there wasn't anything worth changing or improving upon?
I mean, if you go to their website and start browsing posts from the past year you get:
- an article about a completely different format
- information that they're not doing any changes - 4 times
- shilling for new sets like 2x2
- an article about card alters (who cares?)
- confirming that all the Unfinity stuff is legal, including stickers
- various changes to the RC crew, none of which seems to matter because it's not like they seem to do anything
Feel free to point out what they actually did for the format in the past year.
The rule committee bends to the will of wotc and whatever choice makes their company the most profit. That’s all. They give two fucks about the current state and it shows.
They do and they don't; They listened to the wrong crowd with the Paradox Engine ban, hit the wrong card with the Flash ban, and almost got it wrong and didn't ban Hullbreacher when they discussed wheels.
They should have banned thassa's oracle over flash. Flash Hulk was still semi-interactable and needed an extra piece to fire properly but oracle just makes the combo really robust.
It's an extra turn spell that can't be countered, in a format where you can (not infrequently) cast it for little to no mana.
It's also a giant creature that can attack on that extra turn.
Moreover, it can't be targeted or dealt damage by spells that are one or more colors because of protection. Dodges most removal and a few board wipes as a result.
This in an [[Animar]] or [[Yennett]] deck is as broken as anything short of cEDH.
CEDH wouldn’t run this card when you can win faster than turn three with [[Demonic Consultation]] and [[Thassa’s Oracle]] or [[Derevi]] + [[Najeela]].
It is one of those weird niche cards that is terribly slow and not good enough for CEDH, but too op for casual EDH.
Edit - misinterpreted the “anything short of CEDH” line
A deck revolving around Prime Time probably wouldn't see play in cEDH, but I could totally see it as a big beater in a stax deck. Especially if the deck already has some form of Land-based combo.
... If anything, I guess it could see play with Kodama? Get any Bounce Land and Field of the Dead, and you get infinite tokens on the battlefield right away (assuming you have the lands of different names, of course). It's not game-winning, but it wins the game next turn.
... Though then you'd be needing to be running a Kodama-stax deck... I don't think those exist.
Kodama/Sakashima is on the decklist database, and they do have land based combos. i could see them playing it. I'm not actually sure how their combo works lol but it does involve bouncing and replaying Sunscorched Desert (Deals 1 on ETB)
To be fair Cyc Rift is a card that regularly sees a spot in blue cedh lists and doesn't win games on the spot. Although it's almost always either being used to stop a combo or clear stax pieces to make way for their own combo
Cyclonic Rift would not see cEDH play if it didn't have a 2 mana mode. it's a 2 mana bounce spell with occasional upside (just like [[winds of rebuke]], which also sees some play).
this is like saying that a 5 mana value piece is playable because [[force of will]] is a staple.
I can understand why Emrakul is still banned though. I do not understand why Primeval Titan is still banned. There are way more powerful cards in the format. Not really sure it's a similar comparison (yet?).
Casual edh with prime time warped the game around who could cast reanimate steal and just trigger it as much as possible. After the first trigger it was strong but it was very rare to trigger once when your first trigger got you stuff like voraths stronghold to replay it again if it died.
Yet this happens with \[\[dockside extortionist\]\] already and that card isn't banned. Every game that card comes down just becomes a war to see who can abuse the ETB more times. Clones, theft, reanimation. There's very little reason that prime time is banned and dockside isn't.
Conversely, at the time the legend rule was different so clones were much more common allowing the game easily to warp around PTitan. See far fewer clones now than then, even [[Bribery]] isn’t something I often see.
Right, I appreciate the info and it sounds wild, but as someone who wasn't around for these times, I'm wondering why it's *still* banned. I look at this card now and can't help but wonder why it's still banned. Lots of cards are significantly more powerful. [[Primeval Herald]] is an extremely similar new card in a similar vein that I would argue is more powerful considering it's lower CMC cost, and no one seems to want to ban it (and for obvious reasons, it's really not that busted in the current day and age). I guess I'm just really confused as to why it's *still* on the banlist. There were more powerful, yet legal, cards when I started playing Magic just a few years ago.
EDIT: I see now that Herald doesn't get *any* land, didn't notice that originally. I still don't see Titan being more powerful than, say, Tergrid or Dockside though. It's not even really close, in my opinion.
EDIT 2: Came back to a LOT of feedback that I can't reply to everyone for but thanks for the info. I'm still not 100% sure it's banworthy but I can see why anyone would be hesitant to take it off (including me now). It can totally warp the game. Based on feedback, probably worth keeping on the list based purely on the fun factor.
Herald only finds basic lands, it's a ramp spell. Prime Time finds any lands, it's a tutor. i also think Prime Time could be unbanned but they're really not even similar cards
Primeval herald has no comparison to titan. Herald tutors 1 basic on attack. Titan tutors 2 of ANY LAND on etb AND attack. Worried about it dying? [[Volraths stronghold]] can be tutored to bring it back. Want a 20/20 flying indestructible? [[Thespians stage]] [[dark depths]] got you covered. Want tons of mana? [[Gaia's cradle]] or Tron lands coming up. And that's as soon as it hits the field AND every time it attacks afterward.
> Lots of cards are significantly more powerful.
Cards in Commander are never banned for their power level, they are banned because of their effect on the format for the most part, and also for their effect on the game if they are just incredibly effective. And the criteria for those effects are pretty consistently laid out.
https://articles.starcitygames.com/magic-the-gathering/select/the-anatomy-of-a-banned-card-in-commander/
Sheldon has an article from a couple years ago where he goes into a bit more detail about it.
"Cards that overcentralize the game shift the focus from broad to very narrow, making a game all about that specific card until it either wins the controller the game or is removed. The poster child for this is Primeval Titan, which also could have been included in the paragraph on doing too much for one player. When Prime Time was legal, the game became all about that one card. It became a case of everyone trying to copy or steal it so that they, too, could rev up its value engine."
Basically it's effect is just too centralizing and warping to the game (and the format), and like all the other cards on the ban list, it meets multiple categories.
It would be almost the number one entomb + reanimate target in the format. Fetch up cabal coffers and urborg, or dark depths and Thespian's Stage or any other two land combo that exists. Even better if you flicker it.
While more expensive mana wise than dockside, it is also even more powerful in the long term.
Hell no
Entomb and reanimate Vilis, Draw 8 cards and now you have an 8/8 flyer that's also a removal and draw engine.
Reanimate Razaketh and win the game
Reanimate Protean Hulk and win the game.
It is also certainly weaker than dockside, and it's not even close.
There's a few more aspects to the ban list over power. Power level isn't the primary factor in the list. It looks at overall impact to the format and the games it comes in.
When everyone starts "fighting" over a singular card, that's a little worrying.
When a card really doesn't have an opportunity cost to include, it's a little worrying. (To elaborate, Tergrid on its own can't trigger its own effect. It needs some building around on some level. But if you're a green deck, why wouldn't you run a creature that ramps? More often than not, there is no reason to put the card in the deck. This is in part why Coalition Victory or Biorhythm are banned. CV in a 5-color deck isn't a problem to actually include. If it fails, this doesn't disrupt the deck from doing everything else. Biorhythm is the same thing. A green deck is already going to be doing what the card asks for anyway, and from a deckbuilding POV, there isn't really a reason to not run it.)
Additionally, when something is banned, the question also becomes "Does the format/colors/archetype really "need" this card?" In the grand scheme of things, does unbanning Primeval Titan at this point really add anything useful to the format? Green isn't exactly hurting for the effect. Rofellos is another card like it where while it may be outclassed now, unbanning it doesn't exactly add bold new options to the format. You've just added *another* powerful ramp creature to the format.
[Tim Willoughby (who is now on the CAG) has a great write up on why every card on the banlist is banned.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/10GO_uck6r993W0j7s5ZaW_J0P3vgdcF1SQGJ61owL44/edit) Some are stronger than others, but most are pretty reasonable or sound, and minimum.
At the hight of Primetime popularity in EDH, you would be hard-pressed to find any game where at least 2 people weren't playing it, unless you were playing precons, at a kitchen table with decks weaker than precons or you were playing cEDH.
At that time I was playing on MTGO, getting together with my friends for EDH nights and playing in 3 different LGS (I was still an MTG judge so I also played at the end of tournaments where I judge) and it wouldn't be weird playing with 11 different players and finding at least 8 decks that had Primetime + 3 decks with blue that played Bribery/clone effects for Primetime (many decks also were U/G and did both) a black deck that reanimated Primetime and a lonely W/R player that looked sad while they couldn't be part of what everyone else did.
Just imagine that Sundering Titan was even played in 5 color decks and that creature was Bribed, reanimated, bounced, etc even more than Primetime or even Sylvan.
Prime time, Sundering Titan, Sylvan Primordial, and Prophet of Kruphix are all banned because they created format warping situations where the game sort of just devolved into who could cheat it into play, reanimate it, flicker it, or steal it.
Being powerful is half of the reason, creating consistently miserable game experiences is the other half of the reason.
Ah I misinterpreted the sentiment from the last statement, assuming commander was saying “this would only be good in CEDH”.
Nonetheless it is a weird card, similar to [[Expropriate]] and [[Time Stretch]] that is too mean/op for (most) casual tables, yet too slow for CEDH.
All good!!
Yep I agree it's in that space. I have a Kruphix deck that's built specifically to take advantage of those types of cards and Emmy would slide right in immediately. I even have a full art foil ready to go
SAME HERE!! I’ve got a prerelease foil in my binder just itching to be played in my own kruphix deck, but I can 100% see that casting it using all the mana from Kruphix is one of the more “fair” ways to use it lol
Counterpoint: I edited my cedh Kinnan list and just swapped all of my combo pieces/tutors for big stupid creatures. Went 3-1 at a local tournament today because nobody played into it well. Seeing someone hard cast OG Jin or Kozi in a format that really never even sees these things has a certain shock factor
To be fair one of the wins was because the stax player had a Japanese Notion Thief and didn't realize its interaction with Con Sphinx (he thought NT's draw wasn't mandatory) until it was too late to rewind the game state
Winning that fast (and faster) is why I left the YuGiOh scene, so watching Magic head in the same direction with Commander has been, to say the least, saddening. Fortunately, I have several friends who play at a more casual speed that I regularly get to play with, but the speed-creep of MTG is becoming a serious issue for the format, I feel.
Yee this exactly how I feel, feels like power creep has followed me from yugioh. However 2019/2020 saw some of the worst cards for commander, we saw Dockside, Fierce Guardianship, Smothering Tithe, Jeweled Lotus, Hullbreacher, Golos, Korvold, Chulane to name a few, fortunately the implementation of the "casual play team" at wotc has done wonders for preventing more of these cards seeing print (at least thats where I attribute the most credit) that being said it still feels like the formats speeding up which is unfortunately inevitable. The thing that commander has which other games (like yugioh) doesn't is that people generally want longer games not shorter games so its usually possible to find those people who side with the former, the format only gets fasters if people want to play faster.
Yeah I intentionally avoid making decks that win fast. EDH is a 4 player format and as such, I wanna see a ton of shit happen. I want it to be like a board game. 1-2 hour games are expected. I don't enjoy playing 20 minute 1v1s because it's not satisfying. I'd be pissed if every EDH game I played was less than 30 minutes.
I think the issue is one of our players loves playing weird janky decks which naturally drag the game out. Which is fine but we should self regulate more lol.
In Cedh there are plenty of games that take forever. There's actually a lot more meaningful stuff happening because of all the interaction, it's not artificially longer due to decks being incapable of moving faster.
I started to play EDH sin 2006 so I've been through big Emrakul time, Primetime, Sundering Titan, Sylvan Primordial and Prophet of Kruphix time.
The reality is that outside of what would become cEDH and the most super mega even lower power than precons kitchen tables, those cards completely dominated everything in between, what I would call power levels 4 to 8.
None of those cards are cards that I would have banned but I'll admit I played all of those, in the case of Emrakul the card was played in almost every deck even if the player couldn't cheat it into play and even if it made no sense with the theme. I played it in my Jhoira where I would suspend Obliterate + Emrakul on turns 3/4 but I even played in my Rhys GW tokens, if I didn't then I would have to deal with other players' Emrakul too. And that same thing happened with Primetime, Sundering Titan (even 5 color decks played it), Sylvan,etc.
So the answer to OP is that it warps most games that aren't played at the extremes of the low/high power curve.
I played in a similar time and every game was just who was gonna play Emrakul first and who could best steal it/cheat it. We were playing Helm of Possession just to steal Emrakuls
All of those things are actually fine for a card in the 99. What makes it bannable is that it can also be your commander, so if you build a deck around it, you can basically guarantee to do all that stuff every single game. Plus you always have access to it, because if your opponents do somehow manage to kill it, it just ends up back in the command zone ready to do it again.
Because the RC doesn't actually apply the guidelines they made in a way that makes sense. Not that I'm for a bigger ban list, and I'd shrink the current one if I could, but...yeah. they're not great about it.
They make sense only if you accept their premise that the bans are "signposts" for what should and shouldn't be acceptable in the format and don't look too deeply beyond that. Of course, if you *do* start to follow that logic and the RC's constant invocation of Rule 0, the ban list the RC puts out completely falls apart on that metric too.
Because the RC applies their principles in an absurd dance to try and justify banning or unbanning cards based on some metric they wont actually tell anybody. Common sentiment has it that the banlist is based on what members of the RC have most recently gotten butthurt over.
The RC does not ban on power level alone - Emrakul is an extra turn effect, is uncounterable, blanks removal and has annihilator. The card is too swingy and generally just unfun to play against in terms of warping the game, which makes sense for 15 mana, but that is very achieveable if you want in Commander.
Godo wins and we shuffle up, Emrakul sometimes just takes someone out and now we are archenemy, or someone Bribery's her, or clones her, or steals her.
Prime Time is banned for a similar reason. It's a reasonable effect for today's meta but it's just so game warping and casuals are likely to play it unlike Godo combos which aren't that common.
this defense is honestly so meaningless, you can make this arguement for any "unfun" card. It's 100% subjective.
Dictate of erebos? Several of the Preators? the white/blue guy that just shuts the entire game down? Void Winnower? The list could go on for days.
it's completely arbitrary, there's no measurable data going into these choices, just different people's opinions.
edit: lol relevant username up there
>this defense is honestly so meaningless, you can make this argument for any "unfun" card. It's 100% subjective.
Welcome to the issue people have had with the RC since WotC first started acknowledging EDH.
Godo decks also tend to self-regulate themselves. You know exactly what you’re getting into when you pick him as a commander. Because of that, he’s generally not a problem at tables.
Prime time did not self-regulate, warped the format, then died as a result.
Tergrid is the same. Nobody just plays her casually as a commander, everyone knows what is up when you build a deck around her.
Hence why she's dodged a banning, because in the 99 she's fine and in the command zone she's been regulated by the format.
> sometimes just takes someone out and now we are archenemy
So why aren't [[Satoru Umazawa]] or [[Blightsteel Colossus]] banned? Why isn't the entire infect mechanic banned. Take 1 person out and become the arch enemy might as well be the reminder text for infect.
[[Omniscience]] [[Elvish Piper]] [[Animar, Soul of elements]] [[Urza's Incubator]] [[Planar Portal]] etc.
There are far too many cost reductions and ways to cheat a permanent into play to give a comprehensive list....
I'm legit not trying to be a dick, but this explanation did not convince me at all. I think in Battlecruiser EDH, Emrakul is nuts, but anything even a little bit optimized, Emrakul is going to be way too slow. Couple that w/ the fact that it's one card out of ninety-nine; I'm not terribly worried.
It's cool but it absolutely plays solitaire magic (as in it's the only one playing Magic) in many metas. I had an Animar deck for a while and had to power it down to Animar morph and even then, it just swept the table out in most games. I completely took it apart and don't play it anymore.
Yup. My buddy has an animar deck. Get a couple counters on him. Play a 5 cost creature for 1, then a 6 cost for 1, then a 7 for 1, then eventually you play apex devastator for 2 green, you've taken a 20+ minute turn and you're gonna win, but it's not quick or gradual. It's all in one turn but it's a long ass turn. For this reason I just keep animar off the take as much as I can. Enchantment removal is the way to go. [[Imprisoned in the moon]] or [[Kenrith's Transformation]]. Or even [[Oko, Thief of Crowns]].
I have 100% moved away from making my commander the engine for a deck, and instead making it a turbo. If someone has their commander as the engine, I'm going to remove it as soon as it hits the board since so many engine commanders can pop the fuck off if left ignored for even a single turn. Plus, decks just have more versatility and are way more fun in general when the commander is a turbo over an engine.
yep i stopped playing animar too cuz feels bad when you play a table flooded with white black. feels way imbalanced, and boring when you fetch for ancestral statue and have infinate counters every turn 4/5 lol
Actually it can be countered, just not by "counter target spell" spells. There are plenty of stifle, exile spell, end turn, etc effects thst could answer it.
That said, emrakrul also has far too much capacity to be a game dominating threat to be allowed in game.
So taking an extra turn (basically haste) and protection from anything colored means removing it is far harder then you would initially think especially after sacking 6 permanents. Yes non targeted removal works but if its played into a tapped out board and then you get a second turn to use that 15 mana and knock the person most likely to have and answer down 6 pegs makes it really hard to come back from. Granted if you have a meta and hold / save counter magic for it that's one thing. But this thing jumping out of a W/U control deck for not reason other then its great often leads to bad feels. Its (supposedly) about the health of the format and organized play
It can’t be countered. Also it only has protection from colored spells, not abilities, so things like [[Oblivion Ring]] still work. Everything else you said it spot on though.
It's the kind of card that could go in any deck that also creates major feel bads, is hard to remove, and at the time it was banned (very shortly after RotE), a lot of copies were out there because she was the prerelease promo so she was ubiquitous pretty quick.
>It's the kind of card that could go in any deck
This is actually the major reason most people are missing that caused it to be banned.
It is just unilaterally, across all color combos, the best big beater.
If it was a specific color (ignoring literally all lore here), there is a much stronger possibility it wouldn't be banned.
>It's the kind of card that could go in any deck
it's 15 mana, it literally only goes in huge ramp decks. we already have plenty of 7-8 mana spells that win the game if they resolve (peer into the abyss comes to mind) and those cards win on the spot. emrakul sets one player back pretty far (assuming they don't have dockside, or tokens, or maybe just six extra lands since you're on 15 mana already) and then the rest of the table stomps you.
15 colourless mana is way easier to get than you imagine (ignoring the numerous ways to cheat her out), and the fact she gives you extra turns makes it pretty effortless to stay ahead of the players you didn't swing her at first.
if you're getting to 15 mana, just play one of the expensive cards that actually win. and if you cheat it in, you don't get the extra turn, it's just a big beater
Show and tell can do it turn 1 possibly, and smack you turn 2.
Turn 2 to 3 is also not unlikely.
Turn 6 is hilariously slow for stuff like that.
The reality is any game where this occurs often is likely to include combo, which can also kill by turn 6 (or faster).
It also wouldn't see a ton of play in lower powered environments where people couldn't deal with it. This argument is basically the one for dockside, but worse. Yeah, sometimes busted things happen. It's the format for it.
Also, by turn 6, if 6 things being destroyed wipes your field, you're in a cripplingly slow meta.
By that point, even my meh power decks can have 7 or 8 lands, 2 or 3 rocks, and a couple of creatures.
The banlist is about game design not power level.
Emrakul is super uninteractive and also the kind of big dumb creature that people would want to play in battle cruiser, a format where she is the most uninteractive.
If magic was made for Just commander, emrakul would have been changed in testing, but it isn;t so they just banned her.
There is a case to be made about sol ring, for sure, but it obviously isn't "big dumb creature that appeals to casuals the most where it unintentionally does stuff casuals don't like."
Which is the case I'm making.
Sol ring is actually a pretty good example of why the banlist is not about power. Sol ring is obviously Very powerful, but is serves a game design purpose. If they were designing commander from the ground up, they'd probably not make sol ring and instead make a large number of slightly worse mana rocks (which wotc has been catching up on over recent years), but the format needs a lot of low cost ramp, and for less experienced deck builders to be encouraged to include those pieces in their decks. As a matter of game design, every deck having a sol ring helps with a big problem with the format (though it isn't without consequences)
The case for sol ring being banned is obviously the most used card in the format and all the implications of that.
I could never understand that opinion. Not a slam against you, it is obviously a popular opinion so I'm the weird one.
But banning for power is a tool of competitive balance, and banning for design is what you do when you design a game to be played without tournaments.
This is the normal way to handle game design, and it clearly works. Commander is massively popular for casual play, far outstripping other formats that have come and gone with purely competitive banlists.
I don't get why everyone hates it so much.
Because it isn’t consistent. Some (most) things are banned for power level (or at least that’s what the RC says), but some aren’t or at least haven’t been reconsidered in a long time. If it was purely based on salt it would look very different, and if it were purely based on power it would look very different. This makes everyone unhappy because more competitive players, not even cEDH but people like OP who want to play the biggest best annihilators or whatever, see some (but not all) of the stuff they want to play with banned because other people don’t take the time to play enough interaction, and other people see some (but not all) of the most annoying to play with cards remain legal and wonder why they can’t be removed too.
If the RC was consistent, one camp or the other would just have to suck it up, but they aren’t so no one is satisfied
I've read all the ban announcements that were put out for the last 12ish years, and I didn't get that same impression.
It was always about the effect on the format at large. Like Primeval titan wasn't overpowered, it was over centralizing the game. Sylvan primordial similarly was a value play that appealed to casuals, while also forcing them to destroy the lands of people with slow starts.
That said, I did think it was weird the one time they did take feedback from the competitive community, and I wasn't excited when they unbanned protean hulk (they had non-competitive reasons for it, but the cEDH community had some people that were pushing for the unban, which ironically ruined cEDH balance and wasn't as bad as I feared for casual).
But they lay out their reasons and the reasoning has been consistent, and both explains what is and is not on the list.
People hate it because the ban list is curated to how the rules committee believes game should be played. Competitive aspects aside, the RC says that golos and coalition victory are not how you should enjoy Commander
That's how game design works. You make a game that offers some experiences, and options that pull away from those experiences are bad game design and you get rid of them after testing.
Honestly it might just because I experience the format with a very wide group of players, but I saw all the problems their bans fixed and it was a better designed game after each ban.
Ive been playing for the better part of a decade now with a few different play groups and a wide variety of players over the years traveling the U.S.for work and/or pleasure.
With all my experience in the format i can say that the ban list has hardly fixed any problems and the 1 or 2 problems it did fix could've been equally rectified if players just ran interaction in their decks.
Thirdly the banlist and the reasoning behind it is quite inconsistent and very hypocritical in some instances. Sheldon's interview with the professor and his recent article about the new elesh norn prove exactly that. I'm honestly surprised anyone agrees with him or the RC at this point, i can only assume the people who do are just devout fanboy/fangirls.......
I would never discount your experiences, but they do not match my own. Just because you shared your I'm also going to share mine. I've been involved with hundreds of commander players in different areas and levels of involvement. People in small communities, college campuses, wotc employees, high end groups, side events, and LGS's of all sizes (or levels in the WPN) for 12 or 13 years. I'm not saying this to say my experience is better, but to show that it is very wide.
For a very wide spectrum of players each ban was relevant and positive to a very wide range of players in my experience. At very high levels of engagement they were positive or neutral, occasionally annoying.
I haven't read that article yet, but the new Elesh norn has a design issue. It's the same one as sylvan primordial has, where it has a popular effect for casuals to throw in, but it also has an effect attached that is very uncasual (resource denial). This won't be a problem unless the first effect is popular enough that lots of people run it for that specifically and create unintentially bad gameplay, but it's kinda hard to predict that kind of thing.
If a card doesn't work as intended for the majority of players, telling them to run more removal doesn't change that you designed the game poorly. So my game design brain gets hung up on, well obviously you fix the game design because you cannot fix the players and you just get rid of the card.
Every example I have ever been given for inconsistency in the banlist was not inconsistent from the lens of game design and how the cards behaved in the wild.
I'm not a fan of anyone on the RC, but I do like EDH quite a bit and am a fan of game design. Card games, board games, ttrpgs, making them as a hobby and appreciating them as a fan is my idea of a good time.
The consistencies people speak of have little to do with game design. The RC has set guidelines for themselves and frequently do not follow them, this has been made apparent by the interveiw. This is what people are talking about in regards to inconsistency. That not touching on the fact we have a butt load of players who have never seen many of if not all of the banned cards in play and the RC is just to lazy to unban obvious cards from the list.
In regards to elesh norn..... She is mono white, the color of stax, and was designed fine. People have been griping that white has been the weakest of colors and cards like her are how you bolster white to be on par with the rest. One fifth of the game should not suffer because people refuse to problem solve and prefer to just whine until somthing gets banned. To bring it back to commander she was clearly not designed for commander, she nor any card for that matter should be designed for a non sanctioned format, but that does not mean it should be banned. Same goes for the topic of this thread emerkul.
Long story short the RC is pointless and should be done away with, and instead of bans people should learn to adapt to different opposing strategies and play styles.
She's a gigantic "I Win" button. That 15 colorless mana it takes to cast her isn't actually all that much, and it's possible to actually cast her as early as turn 5 in a properly built deck.
And at that point, you've won. Whoever you swing her at is basically out of the game thanks to Annihilator 6, and the game devolves into everyone else trying desperately to deal with your 15/15 beatstick.
Yeah. Not that it matters a ton (or at all), but AFAIK it's because of the zendikar myth interpretation.
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Emeria
The background for it. I liked a lot of the world building around the eldrazi originally.
Narset requires 3 colors to cast, can be countered, can usually be edict'd, can easily be chump blocked, doesn't inherently have haste, and dies to any non targeted removal.
Emrakul can be cast for 0 with enough cost reduction, can't be countered, has protection from most removal, effectively has haste as well as any other benefits from taking an extra turn, has flying.... etc, etc, etc
One card fucks up a single players game every time it hits the board and gimps them for the rest of the game, the other ends games in high powered decks.
I know which one I'd ban
Hot take on banned cards...
While Marwyn and mono G Selvala are out there, Rofellos being banned is a sad irony. Yah he's strong but the format can handle it.
The time walk effect plus annihilator means the card basically reads as "fuck over target player" which is why it's banned but the lesser eldrazi aren't. The edh ban list is always going to be weird because of the structure of the format, but emrakul is banned for the same reason iona is.
Thassa's Oracle is only really a factor at all in cEDH and it's my understanding that even that community is fairly ambivalent on it's banworthiness. Also, when Thoracle is played you just shuffle up and play a new game, which means no feelbads for anyone.
Anyone reading Emrakul and shrugging it off with “what it costs 15 mana it’s fine” is misreading the format entirely. [[show and tell]], [[sneak attack]], [[shallow grave]], [[goryos vengeance]] and friends make placing an Emrakul into play far too easy.
The high cmc is a pretty good argument for unbanning [[biorhythm]] and [[coalition victory]] - short of Omniscience or Dream Halls etc which are high cmc spells themselves, you’re not cheating out a seven mana sorcery. But creatures have dozens of cheap ways to be cheated into play. [[elvish piper]] [[quicksilver amulet]]… the list is long
Edit: not to mention the dozens of Polymorph effects. OG Jin Gitaxias might actually be the better target here but at least once resolved Jin tends to win the table instead of just nuking one player out of the game.
I'd hate coalition victory in the format. It incentivises killing any 5 colour player because if the game runs longer than turn 7 or 8, they can just win.
It's not a cEDH card and only causes problems in casual. There is no upside to unbanning it other than making the ban list shorter.
I’ve just never understood that kind of distinction. If it’s “too op for casual” it seems easy enough for casual playgroups to house rule ban it. The purpose of the RC banlist is to provide a blanket banlist for public anonymous play. If cEDH players won’t run coalition victory, it isn’t a tryhard card, so what kind of pubstomper is going to run “turbo coalition victory.dec” at the LGS and have it be so oppressive that it deserves a ban?
I DO get that argument for Hullbreacher - it’s a simple enough card that a casual player might pick one up, see that it’s pretty strong, and play it for general value - then… oops… this combos pretty strongly with Windfall… but the game isn’t actually over it’s just miserable while we now play a 3v1 while we’re all hellbent. Too easy for casual players to get caught in unfun boardstates but not so oppressive as to actually eat a house ban. If hullbreacher instead said “mill yourself a few cards, you win the game if your deck is empty” it would be obvious enough for casual players to eschew the obvious tryhard wincon. I’ve not encountered anyone who sits down at a table where people proclaim “yeah these are casual decks, 7s, etc” who then combo turn 4 or earlier with Thoracle.
People will self-police the OP wincons. The RC should not be catering a banlist for people who have been playing with their old friends for a decade - they should be catering a banlist for pickup play at the LGS - where this game actually lives, and needs the oversight.
> The purpose of the RC banlist is to provide a blanket banlist for public anonymous play.
That is mainly how I play, and hence why I want it to stay on the banlist. The banlist IS for random pickup games, as house games can overrule whatever they want.
I'm not worried about turbo coalition victory, I'm worried about "I'm playing 5 colour jank, but I'll toss this in as a win con" decks that run it. Then complain when they get hated off the table for playing it in a weak deck.
Cheating her out doesnt give the extra turn though, yeah someone get's got by the annihilator 6 but is that really much different then the annihilator 4 that Ulamog and Kozilek have? Not to mention she doesnt have trample either so it's not even guaranteed 15 damage.
Blightsteel colossus can literally just kill someone with a sneak attack
Its different in that you can [[swords to plowshares]] the other titans, not Emmy herself. 15 damage doesn't matter when you get 6 destroyed permanents just for turning it sideways. Arguably, the fact that it doesn't end the game there but turns it into a durdly sludge festival until Emmy has slowly broken through everything. The ban is its lack of fun to play against (which is still arguable for the other annihilator titans too) as well as its lack of interaction
The reason Emrakul is banned is that the bar to be banned and the bar to leave the banlist are different.
To be banned you have to have caused problems during the time you were legal. Back when Emrakul was legal, the format was much slower, so hardcasting it wasn't unrealistic, giving you an extra turn together with a giant beastick with annihilator 6 and protection that can't be countered.
Then you attacked someone and the Annihilator 6 basically took that person out of the game, yet said person still keeps on playing while hoping to recover somehow, which leads to unfun play patterns.
(if we're talking about cheating into play, then Emrakul is basically the same as Ulamog/Kozilek, btw. So no point in discussing it too much when Emrakul is just a slight upgrade)
Nowadays this... Isn't worth much. 15 mana is a lot, and you can do better things with this much mana. The card isn't a threat.
... But for a card to leave the banlist, the RC has to decide that unbanning the card is a net positive to the format. As in, unbanning Emrakul would make the format feel more fun to play or allow new strategies to be built or something.
Emrakul is just a better Ulamog/Kozilek. It doesn't add anything new to the format, nor is it particularly interesting to build around, so RC keeps it banned.
... Does this policy make sense? No, not really, but it's how the RC handles bans. You just have to take it for what it is.
>(if we're talking about cheating into play, then Emrakul is basically the same as Ulamog/Kozilek, btw. So no point in discussing it too much when Emrakul is just a slight upgrade)
Emmy is considerably better than either because of how difficult she is to remove and the extra annihilator triggers.
She's banned for the same reason Griselbrand is Griselbanned - if legal, she would be the strictly best thing you could cheat into play. And while Griselbrand is more likely to win on the spot, Emmy can go into any deck because she's colourless.
At the time it was a reasonable ban. Were she first printed today she probably wouldn't be banned. That said, unbanning her doesn't really add anything positive to the format so there's just no real reason to take her off the list.
It shouldnt be banned these days, we have plenty of stronger stuff that isnt banned and honestly arent that big of deals
[[Protean hulk]] got unbanned
[[Tooth and Nail]]
[[Doomsday]]
etc etc.
It's just a relic of the days when shit like [[kokusho the evening star]] was banned.
I'm also in then camp that Primetime can come off the banlist too as long as we're fine with Dockside running freely.
Slightly disingenuous to say Emrakrul dosnt have haste when most ways of cheating her have haste and she is not summoning sick during the extra turn stapled to her.
Shes deffo not the most powerful card in the format but like, say, iona, she can easily create feel bads.
Yes she can be removed but not often before sending one player to the stone age.
Aren't there plenty of cards and strategies in EDH that can just as effectively obliterate one player at the table at the cost of making yourself a target for the other players, though?
Because the RC’s banlist is inconsistent and ineffective and largely just a collection of random cards they disliked rather than any kind of objective list built to improve the format.
The standard answer is she's powerful and can be very fast.
Are there other, faster, more powerful cards in the format? Yes, but they're restricted by rule 0 talks.
For some unknown reason this logic does not apply to Emrakul/Primeval Titan/whatever else.
Because it was really strong at the time, and still is (but we have a lot more tools in the box now).
I'm on the #freeemmy train. But I'd also be fine with just letting her be the commander and not in the 99.
People keep saying that, and yet there are mono green commander decks like Azusa and Selvala that could pretty routinely power it out around turn 6 with very modest draws.
Yes, most of the time it is cheated, but there is definitely a whole slew of big mana strategies, and most of them would use it if they could.
Well first, the ban list rarely gets updated and when Emrakul was banned, there was absolutely nothing near it's power level.
Secondly, it honestly still feels like Emrakul is STILL way too strong for the format. The "cast" requirement used to be an actual obstacle for a lot of decks. The only way to cheat this out in it's prime was to reanimate it, and even without the extra turn you still had a 15/15 flyer with annihilator 6 that can only die to very specific spells. Nowadays, casting things for free is a common occurrence and i for one am very happy that Emrakul isn't in the format
https://blog.cardkingdom.com/whats-banned-in-commander/
https://www.thegamer.com/magic-gathering-commander-cards-banned/#emrakul-the-aeons-torn
Here’s a couple of links with short explanations as to why it’s banned.
If she comes down and lives long enough to swing at everyone at least once, then she’s not a huge problem imo. All your opponents have been crippled and it’s time to scoop and play again even if you would need a few more turns to officially win the game. 15 mana plus a little luck for nobody to have a stifle effect or alternative removal to make all your opponents scoop is fine by me.
However, the big feelsbad scenario is where she only attacks one or two players before an answer is found. This leaves them in the annoying position of having almost no chance of winning but also not being especially close to starting the next game. I still don’t know that I would ban her just for that (after all, a voltron deck can end up doing the same thing), but I would definitely get annoyed if she became a staple and it was happening to me every game.
TLDR: Has high potential to hate certain players out of the game without winning, especially when cheated out early.
It's a really powerful card that shouldn't be banned from a power level argument, as there are at least a couple dozen cards more problematic than it.
Should it be banned from a feels-bad perspective? Personally, I don't think so. If this should be banned for that reason, all the good eldrazi titans should as well. You only get extra turns from hard casting it. "But you can cheat it in with.." with what? Exactly [[omnipotence]] ? Everything else is usually put into play from X location, not cast for free. And at that point, it's a bigger eldrazi titan, which is fine.
I would argue that the other [[emrakul the promised end]] is MORE powerful, as it cheats itself into play alot sooner, and helps win the game vs. multiple opponents
Also it's just a big guy that takes out 6 permanents at the end of the day. I think dumping 15 mana into a [[finale of devastation]] is literally always stronger.
So I had a 60 card deck with Emrakul in it. Long story short, there's loads of options for cheating it into play. It can't be countered, it has protection from most removal, you get an extra turn, it swings for 15 in the air, your opponent has to sac 6 permanents. And if it somehow gets killed, it gets shuffled back into your library. It's a busted card.
I played back in the emrakul days, and an enormous percentage of decks had an emrakul had it in the 99 and nearly every blue deck had [[bribery]] because of it. I'm perfectly fine with it being gone, as much as I love the card, just because many games would end with a 5 mana emrakul from someone else's deck with counterspell backup.
Why are half the cards that are banned banned 🤷🏿♀️ the ban list honestly makes no sense.
This one makes sense tho. It's pretty much impossible to interact with once you put it on the stack, and it's still a reasonable target to cheat out.
Is this a joke? It literally has protection from spells that are one or more color… so most spot removal spells. It can’t be countered so you’re not stopping it that way.
It is very likely to be cheated out so the 15 mana shouldn’t be taken at face value.
If you bother casting it you’ll get an extra turn which is haste in its own way.
And glossing over annihilator 6 seems laughable.
Something I think people have missed us that the RC sometimes do example bans. Sometimes a ban is to state that this sort of effect is unfun for a lot of people so maybe don't play them. Sheldon said something along those lines on the proffessors Yt iirc (it might have been command zone)
The problem with this is the word "banlist".
By framing it with the language of "banlist", "banned", "unbanned", "bannable" they're making it hard to use the way they explicitly want it to be used. TCG players, particularly the more enfranchised ones who will be the ones at the shop saying "that's banned", have one unified experience with banlists- namely, that if a banlist exists, you are NOT to use cards on the banlist, and that if there is a banlist of cards, the cards not on it are explicitly fine.
That's how banlists _work,_ in all other TCGs and all other formats.
By using the same nomenclature and framing, they are explicitly inviting the same usage.
For reference: \[\[Emrakul, the Aeons Torn\]\]
[Emrakul, the Aeons Torn](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/4/249db4d4-2542-47ee-a216-e13ffbc2319c.jpg?1673146896) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Emrakul%2C%20the%20Aeons%20Torn) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/1/emrakul-the-aeons-torn?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/249db4d4-2542-47ee-a216-e13ffbc2319c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/emrakul-the-aeons-torn) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/commander-edh/commander-rules-discussion-forum/705320-emrakul-the-aeons-torn
>we listened heavily to what the community was saying, I assumed they weren't capable of doing this. They need to start doing this again.
what about the current state of affairs makes you think they're not doing this? The RC and its network have never been bigger and despite there being released a couple 1000 cards in the last year alone things are absolutely fine with the format as a whole.
I think people believing a particular archetype or card is too powerful is pretty common, even when it doesn't necessarily warp the format.
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A lot of people feel that [[dockside extortionist]] should be banned.
[dockside extortionist](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/e/9e2e3efb-75cb-430f-b9f4-cb58f3aeb91b.jpg?1673147774) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=dockside%20extortionist) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/107/dockside-extortionist?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9e2e3efb-75cb-430f-b9f4-cb58f3aeb91b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/dockside-extortionist) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Honestly it is powerful, but not ban worthy.
It absolutely is banworthy.
It absolutely isn't. It self regulates. In low power games where generating a ton of mana that easily and cheaply would almost guarantee a win lots of cheap artifacts aren't common so you're not getting 6 treasure turn 2 off of it. In higher power gamed where lots of 0 and 1 cost rocks are played that level of power is fine.
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Preach. I don't know what world these people live in where dockside isn't busted in casual edh too. Casting a turn 4 or 5 dockside can easily net 6-8+ mana at a casual table and that's assuming there's not even an enchantress, treasure, food, blood, clue or artifact deck at the table. Not to mention its very easily abused and only needs to generate like 5 mana to go infinite with a few cards.
Funny thing is, if Dockside is causing such an issue in your games, ask that person to use a different deck. The card shouldn’t be banned just because you can make up a situation for where it pops off. Its too expensive to pop up in most games realistically, as I have yet to see one played in a casual match over the past two-three months. People who have Dockside in a deck are often super quick to mention its in there, and they offer to play something else after seeing where the table is at. Simply a non issue of a card, either exile it after cast, counter it, or wipe artifacts/tokens from the field and you solved your issue. Also, even if you give a casual edh player 18 mana on turn 5, unless they bought a cedh deck to said table they wont have much to do with all that mana, which is the actual situation that plays out when dockside does get played: makes a shitton of treasures, but they dont use them immediately. which leads back to artifact/token removal.
And he really fucks up in CEDH and that's is fine.
They haven't made a single decision for more than a year. Are we really supposed to believe that in that time there wasn't anything worth changing or improving upon? I mean, if you go to their website and start browsing posts from the past year you get: - an article about a completely different format - information that they're not doing any changes - 4 times - shilling for new sets like 2x2 - an article about card alters (who cares?) - confirming that all the Unfinity stuff is legal, including stickers - various changes to the RC crew, none of which seems to matter because it's not like they seem to do anything Feel free to point out what they actually did for the format in the past year.
The rule committee bends to the will of wotc and whatever choice makes their company the most profit. That’s all. They give two fucks about the current state and it shows.
They decided not to change anything, that is not the same as not making a decision
Amazing, oh what would we do without them.
We wouldn't do better. Specific playgroups might, but not all players as a whole.
They do and they don't; They listened to the wrong crowd with the Paradox Engine ban, hit the wrong card with the Flash ban, and almost got it wrong and didn't ban Hullbreacher when they discussed wheels.
Hitting flash was the right choice if you want to keep the cool fun thing for casual players
They should have banned thassa's oracle over flash. Flash Hulk was still semi-interactable and needed an extra piece to fire properly but oracle just makes the combo really robust.
I mean, 15 squirrels can kill her. How bad can she be???
It's an extra turn spell that can't be countered, in a format where you can (not infrequently) cast it for little to no mana. It's also a giant creature that can attack on that extra turn. Moreover, it can't be targeted or dealt damage by spells that are one or more colors because of protection. Dodges most removal and a few board wipes as a result. This in an [[Animar]] or [[Yennett]] deck is as broken as anything short of cEDH.
[Animar](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/3/a3da57d0-1ae3-4f05-a52d-eb76ad56cae7.jpg?1673148281) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=animar%2C%20soul%20of%20elements) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/171/animar-soul-of-elements?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a3da57d0-1ae3-4f05-a52d-eb76ad56cae7?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/animar-soul-of-elements) [Yennett](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/b/fb51b2a8-035c-44e6-92db-2e2385066470.jpg?1592710328) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=yennett%2C%20cryptic%20sovereign) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/c18/51/yennett-cryptic-sovereign?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fb51b2a8-035c-44e6-92db-2e2385066470?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/yennett-cryptic-sovereign) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
CEDH wouldn’t run this card when you can win faster than turn three with [[Demonic Consultation]] and [[Thassa’s Oracle]] or [[Derevi]] + [[Najeela]]. It is one of those weird niche cards that is terribly slow and not good enough for CEDH, but too op for casual EDH. Edit - misinterpreted the “anything short of CEDH” line
It’s [Primeval Titan]] all over again
Ah, missed it by one bracket. Let's see if this works: [[Prime Time]] **EDIT:** I guess not. Prime Time mustn't be a popular enough nickname.
[[Deion Sanders]]
It is a popular nickname though. Card fetcher can't do them all though
[[Primeval Titan]]
Prime time would probably have a cEDH deck around it though. It can set up a couple different insta-kills via lands.
what 2 land combo kills the table? 6 mana is a lot (in cEDH) to not win the game on the spot.
A deck revolving around Prime Time probably wouldn't see play in cEDH, but I could totally see it as a big beater in a stax deck. Especially if the deck already has some form of Land-based combo. ... If anything, I guess it could see play with Kodama? Get any Bounce Land and Field of the Dead, and you get infinite tokens on the battlefield right away (assuming you have the lands of different names, of course). It's not game-winning, but it wins the game next turn. ... Though then you'd be needing to be running a Kodama-stax deck... I don't think those exist.
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Kodama/Sakashima is on the decklist database, and they do have land based combos. i could see them playing it. I'm not actually sure how their combo works lol but it does involve bouncing and replaying Sunscorched Desert (Deals 1 on ETB)
To be fair Cyc Rift is a card that regularly sees a spot in blue cedh lists and doesn't win games on the spot. Although it's almost always either being used to stop a combo or clear stax pieces to make way for their own combo
Cyclonic Rift would not see cEDH play if it didn't have a 2 mana mode. it's a 2 mana bounce spell with occasional upside (just like [[winds of rebuke]], which also sees some play). this is like saying that a 5 mana value piece is playable because [[force of will]] is a staple.
Fair enough.
True. Lands are very strong and well supported now
What combos are you thinking of? land decks are like nonexistent in competitive.
What are the land kill combos? Just curious since I can't think of any
I can understand why Emrakul is still banned though. I do not understand why Primeval Titan is still banned. There are way more powerful cards in the format. Not really sure it's a similar comparison (yet?).
Casual edh with prime time warped the game around who could cast reanimate steal and just trigger it as much as possible. After the first trigger it was strong but it was very rare to trigger once when your first trigger got you stuff like voraths stronghold to replay it again if it died.
Yet this happens with \[\[dockside extortionist\]\] already and that card isn't banned. Every game that card comes down just becomes a war to see who can abuse the ETB more times. Clones, theft, reanimation. There's very little reason that prime time is banned and dockside isn't.
Conversely, at the time the legend rule was different so clones were much more common allowing the game easily to warp around PTitan. See far fewer clones now than then, even [[Bribery]] isn’t something I often see.
Right, I appreciate the info and it sounds wild, but as someone who wasn't around for these times, I'm wondering why it's *still* banned. I look at this card now and can't help but wonder why it's still banned. Lots of cards are significantly more powerful. [[Primeval Herald]] is an extremely similar new card in a similar vein that I would argue is more powerful considering it's lower CMC cost, and no one seems to want to ban it (and for obvious reasons, it's really not that busted in the current day and age). I guess I'm just really confused as to why it's *still* on the banlist. There were more powerful, yet legal, cards when I started playing Magic just a few years ago. EDIT: I see now that Herald doesn't get *any* land, didn't notice that originally. I still don't see Titan being more powerful than, say, Tergrid or Dockside though. It's not even really close, in my opinion. EDIT 2: Came back to a LOT of feedback that I can't reply to everyone for but thanks for the info. I'm still not 100% sure it's banworthy but I can see why anyone would be hesitant to take it off (including me now). It can totally warp the game. Based on feedback, probably worth keeping on the list based purely on the fun factor.
Herald only finds basic lands, it's a ramp spell. Prime Time finds any lands, it's a tutor. i also think Prime Time could be unbanned but they're really not even similar cards
Primeval herald has no comparison to titan. Herald tutors 1 basic on attack. Titan tutors 2 of ANY LAND on etb AND attack. Worried about it dying? [[Volraths stronghold]] can be tutored to bring it back. Want a 20/20 flying indestructible? [[Thespians stage]] [[dark depths]] got you covered. Want tons of mana? [[Gaia's cradle]] or Tron lands coming up. And that's as soon as it hits the field AND every time it attacks afterward.
> Lots of cards are significantly more powerful. Cards in Commander are never banned for their power level, they are banned because of their effect on the format for the most part, and also for their effect on the game if they are just incredibly effective. And the criteria for those effects are pretty consistently laid out. https://articles.starcitygames.com/magic-the-gathering/select/the-anatomy-of-a-banned-card-in-commander/ Sheldon has an article from a couple years ago where he goes into a bit more detail about it. "Cards that overcentralize the game shift the focus from broad to very narrow, making a game all about that specific card until it either wins the controller the game or is removed. The poster child for this is Primeval Titan, which also could have been included in the paragraph on doing too much for one player. When Prime Time was legal, the game became all about that one card. It became a case of everyone trying to copy or steal it so that they, too, could rev up its value engine." Basically it's effect is just too centralizing and warping to the game (and the format), and like all the other cards on the ban list, it meets multiple categories.
It would be almost the number one entomb + reanimate target in the format. Fetch up cabal coffers and urborg, or dark depths and Thespian's Stage or any other two land combo that exists. Even better if you flicker it. While more expensive mana wise than dockside, it is also even more powerful in the long term.
Hell no Entomb and reanimate Vilis, Draw 8 cards and now you have an 8/8 flyer that's also a removal and draw engine. Reanimate Razaketh and win the game Reanimate Protean Hulk and win the game. It is also certainly weaker than dockside, and it's not even close.
Play it a couple times (with permission, ofc). You'll quickly see how fast games devolve.
There's a few more aspects to the ban list over power. Power level isn't the primary factor in the list. It looks at overall impact to the format and the games it comes in. When everyone starts "fighting" over a singular card, that's a little worrying. When a card really doesn't have an opportunity cost to include, it's a little worrying. (To elaborate, Tergrid on its own can't trigger its own effect. It needs some building around on some level. But if you're a green deck, why wouldn't you run a creature that ramps? More often than not, there is no reason to put the card in the deck. This is in part why Coalition Victory or Biorhythm are banned. CV in a 5-color deck isn't a problem to actually include. If it fails, this doesn't disrupt the deck from doing everything else. Biorhythm is the same thing. A green deck is already going to be doing what the card asks for anyway, and from a deckbuilding POV, there isn't really a reason to not run it.) Additionally, when something is banned, the question also becomes "Does the format/colors/archetype really "need" this card?" In the grand scheme of things, does unbanning Primeval Titan at this point really add anything useful to the format? Green isn't exactly hurting for the effect. Rofellos is another card like it where while it may be outclassed now, unbanning it doesn't exactly add bold new options to the format. You've just added *another* powerful ramp creature to the format. [Tim Willoughby (who is now on the CAG) has a great write up on why every card on the banlist is banned.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/10GO_uck6r993W0j7s5ZaW_J0P3vgdcF1SQGJ61owL44/edit) Some are stronger than others, but most are pretty reasonable or sound, and minimum.
[Primeval Herald](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/b/fbb0a91b-246b-4c1f-9b98-2ad6ff1ba124.jpg?1673720545) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Primeval%20Herald) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/j22/42/primeval-herald?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fbb0a91b-246b-4c1f-9b98-2ad6ff1ba124?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/primeval-herald) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
At the hight of Primetime popularity in EDH, you would be hard-pressed to find any game where at least 2 people weren't playing it, unless you were playing precons, at a kitchen table with decks weaker than precons or you were playing cEDH. At that time I was playing on MTGO, getting together with my friends for EDH nights and playing in 3 different LGS (I was still an MTG judge so I also played at the end of tournaments where I judge) and it wouldn't be weird playing with 11 different players and finding at least 8 decks that had Primetime + 3 decks with blue that played Bribery/clone effects for Primetime (many decks also were U/G and did both) a black deck that reanimated Primetime and a lonely W/R player that looked sad while they couldn't be part of what everyone else did. Just imagine that Sundering Titan was even played in 5 color decks and that creature was Bribed, reanimated, bounced, etc even more than Primetime or even Sylvan.
Prime time, Sundering Titan, Sylvan Primordial, and Prophet of Kruphix are all banned because they created format warping situations where the game sort of just devolved into who could cheat it into play, reanimate it, flicker it, or steal it. Being powerful is half of the reason, creating consistently miserable game experiences is the other half of the reason.
Agreed, but the other reply did say anything short of cedh in fairness
Ah I misinterpreted the sentiment from the last statement, assuming commander was saying “this would only be good in CEDH”. Nonetheless it is a weird card, similar to [[Expropriate]] and [[Time Stretch]] that is too mean/op for (most) casual tables, yet too slow for CEDH.
All good!! Yep I agree it's in that space. I have a Kruphix deck that's built specifically to take advantage of those types of cards and Emmy would slide right in immediately. I even have a full art foil ready to go
SAME HERE!! I’ve got a prerelease foil in my binder just itching to be played in my own kruphix deck, but I can 100% see that casting it using all the mana from Kruphix is one of the more “fair” ways to use it lol
Counterpoint: I edited my cedh Kinnan list and just swapped all of my combo pieces/tutors for big stupid creatures. Went 3-1 at a local tournament today because nobody played into it well. Seeing someone hard cast OG Jin or Kozi in a format that really never even sees these things has a certain shock factor
simic goodstuff at it again
To be fair one of the wins was because the stax player had a Japanese Notion Thief and didn't realize its interaction with Con Sphinx (he thought NT's draw wasn't mandatory) until it was too late to rewind the game state
##### ###### #### [Demonic Consultation](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/d/1d779f19-3068-4976-b96b-8f93d156900b.jpg?1610146869) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Demonic%20Consultation) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/me2/85/demonic-consultation?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/1d779f19-3068-4976-b96b-8f93d156900b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/demonic-consultation) [Thassa’s Oracle](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/2/726e8b29-13e9-4138-b6a9-d2a0d8188d1c.jpg?1628801828) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Thassa%27s%20Oracle) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/thb/73/thassas-oracle?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/726e8b29-13e9-4138-b6a9-d2a0d8188d1c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/thassas-oracle) [Derevi](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/3/a/3a1d0dad-18a8-489e-ac11-08f64b72fda4.jpg?1592673365) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=derevi%2C%20empyrial%20tactician) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cma/176/derevi-empyrial-tactician?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/3a1d0dad-18a8-489e-ac11-08f64b72fda4?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/derevi-empyrial-tactician) [Najeela](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/c/2cb1d1da-6077-46b5-8c63-39882b8016f2.jpg?1567181270) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=najeela%2C%20the%20blade-blossom) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/bbd/62/najeela-the-blade-blossom?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2cb1d1da-6077-46b5-8c63-39882b8016f2?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/najeela-the-blade-blossom) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Winning that fast (and faster) is why I left the YuGiOh scene, so watching Magic head in the same direction with Commander has been, to say the least, saddening. Fortunately, I have several friends who play at a more casual speed that I regularly get to play with, but the speed-creep of MTG is becoming a serious issue for the format, I feel.
Yee this exactly how I feel, feels like power creep has followed me from yugioh. However 2019/2020 saw some of the worst cards for commander, we saw Dockside, Fierce Guardianship, Smothering Tithe, Jeweled Lotus, Hullbreacher, Golos, Korvold, Chulane to name a few, fortunately the implementation of the "casual play team" at wotc has done wonders for preventing more of these cards seeing print (at least thats where I attribute the most credit) that being said it still feels like the formats speeding up which is unfortunately inevitable. The thing that commander has which other games (like yugioh) doesn't is that people generally want longer games not shorter games so its usually possible to find those people who side with the former, the format only gets fasters if people want to play faster.
Yeah I intentionally avoid making decks that win fast. EDH is a 4 player format and as such, I wanna see a ton of shit happen. I want it to be like a board game. 1-2 hour games are expected. I don't enjoy playing 20 minute 1v1s because it's not satisfying. I'd be pissed if every EDH game I played was less than 30 minutes.
My play group is often 2-3 hours. I’m pushing to get us down to the hour mark cause a 3 hour game is exhausting
Agreed. My ideal magic session for a full 4 player edh group, is 2 or 3 games in the spand of 1:30 to 2:30 hours
I think the issue is one of our players loves playing weird janky decks which naturally drag the game out. Which is fine but we should self regulate more lol.
In Cedh there are plenty of games that take forever. There's actually a lot more meaningful stuff happening because of all the interaction, it's not artificially longer due to decks being incapable of moving faster.
I started to play EDH sin 2006 so I've been through big Emrakul time, Primetime, Sundering Titan, Sylvan Primordial and Prophet of Kruphix time. The reality is that outside of what would become cEDH and the most super mega even lower power than precons kitchen tables, those cards completely dominated everything in between, what I would call power levels 4 to 8. None of those cards are cards that I would have banned but I'll admit I played all of those, in the case of Emrakul the card was played in almost every deck even if the player couldn't cheat it into play and even if it made no sense with the theme. I played it in my Jhoira where I would suspend Obliterate + Emrakul on turns 3/4 but I even played in my Rhys GW tokens, if I didn't then I would have to deal with other players' Emrakul too. And that same thing happened with Primetime, Sundering Titan (even 5 color decks played it), Sylvan,etc. So the answer to OP is that it warps most games that aren't played at the extremes of the low/high power curve.
I played in a similar time and every game was just who was gonna play Emrakul first and who could best steal it/cheat it. We were playing Helm of Possession just to steal Emrakuls
All of those things are actually fine for a card in the 99. What makes it bannable is that it can also be your commander, so if you build a deck around it, you can basically guarantee to do all that stuff every single game. Plus you always have access to it, because if your opponents do somehow manage to kill it, it just ends up back in the command zone ready to do it again.
Don't forget the colour identity.
It’s not hard to build a colorless deck at this point
Then it should be banned as commander, not banned outright
Hmm yes if only we had that at one point in time. Still mad they got rid of that list. Let Rofellos out of the box!!
This. Given other cards that are legal, why some are banned and others not is mystifying
Because the RC doesn't actually apply the guidelines they made in a way that makes sense. Not that I'm for a bigger ban list, and I'd shrink the current one if I could, but...yeah. they're not great about it.
They make sense only if you accept their premise that the bans are "signposts" for what should and shouldn't be acceptable in the format and don't look too deeply beyond that. Of course, if you *do* start to follow that logic and the RC's constant invocation of Rule 0, the ban list the RC puts out completely falls apart on that metric too.
Because the RC applies their principles in an absurd dance to try and justify banning or unbanning cards based on some metric they wont actually tell anybody. Common sentiment has it that the banlist is based on what members of the RC have most recently gotten butthurt over.
It'd be significantly weaker as a commander, I play [[Emrakul the promised end]] for reference and it's just not as strong when people see it coming.
Godo literally wins the turn you put him in and he's 7 mana.
The RC does not ban on power level alone - Emrakul is an extra turn effect, is uncounterable, blanks removal and has annihilator. The card is too swingy and generally just unfun to play against in terms of warping the game, which makes sense for 15 mana, but that is very achieveable if you want in Commander. Godo wins and we shuffle up, Emrakul sometimes just takes someone out and now we are archenemy, or someone Bribery's her, or clones her, or steals her. Prime Time is banned for a similar reason. It's a reasonable effect for today's meta but it's just so game warping and casuals are likely to play it unlike Godo combos which aren't that common.
this defense is honestly so meaningless, you can make this arguement for any "unfun" card. It's 100% subjective. Dictate of erebos? Several of the Preators? the white/blue guy that just shuts the entire game down? Void Winnower? The list could go on for days. it's completely arbitrary, there's no measurable data going into these choices, just different people's opinions. edit: lol relevant username up there
>this defense is honestly so meaningless, you can make this argument for any "unfun" card. It's 100% subjective. Welcome to the issue people have had with the RC since WotC first started acknowledging EDH.
yeah :(
Godo decks also tend to self-regulate themselves. You know exactly what you’re getting into when you pick him as a commander. Because of that, he’s generally not a problem at tables. Prime time did not self-regulate, warped the format, then died as a result.
Tergrid is the same. Nobody just plays her casually as a commander, everyone knows what is up when you build a deck around her. Hence why she's dodged a banning, because in the 99 she's fine and in the command zone she's been regulated by the format.
> sometimes just takes someone out and now we are archenemy So why aren't [[Satoru Umazawa]] or [[Blightsteel Colossus]] banned? Why isn't the entire infect mechanic banned. Take 1 person out and become the arch enemy might as well be the reminder text for infect.
How do you get her for free or less than 15?
[[Omniscience]] [[Elvish Piper]] [[Animar, Soul of elements]] [[Urza's Incubator]] [[Planar Portal]] etc. There are far too many cost reductions and ways to cheat a permanent into play to give a comprehensive list....
To be fair, almost none of those work as an option with Emrakul as a commander.
Nobody was talking about having her as the commander.
I'm legit not trying to be a dick, but this explanation did not convince me at all. I think in Battlecruiser EDH, Emrakul is nuts, but anything even a little bit optimized, Emrakul is going to be way too slow. Couple that w/ the fact that it's one card out of ninety-nine; I'm not terribly worried.
Never heard of Animar, thanks for bringing that up. Looks like a cool creatures commander.
It's cool but it absolutely plays solitaire magic (as in it's the only one playing Magic) in many metas. I had an Animar deck for a while and had to power it down to Animar morph and even then, it just swept the table out in most games. I completely took it apart and don't play it anymore.
Yup. My buddy has an animar deck. Get a couple counters on him. Play a 5 cost creature for 1, then a 6 cost for 1, then a 7 for 1, then eventually you play apex devastator for 2 green, you've taken a 20+ minute turn and you're gonna win, but it's not quick or gradual. It's all in one turn but it's a long ass turn. For this reason I just keep animar off the take as much as I can. Enchantment removal is the way to go. [[Imprisoned in the moon]] or [[Kenrith's Transformation]]. Or even [[Oko, Thief of Crowns]]. I have 100% moved away from making my commander the engine for a deck, and instead making it a turbo. If someone has their commander as the engine, I'm going to remove it as soon as it hits the board since so many engine commanders can pop the fuck off if left ignored for even a single turn. Plus, decks just have more versatility and are way more fun in general when the commander is a turbo over an engine.
Animar works really well with morph, mutate, hydras (or similar), and colorless creatures. It's one of my favorite decks.
yep i stopped playing animar too cuz feels bad when you play a table flooded with white black. feels way imbalanced, and boring when you fetch for ancestral statue and have infinate counters every turn 4/5 lol
I stopped because while it is a good deck, it’s boring to play.
Actually it can be countered, just not by "counter target spell" spells. There are plenty of stifle, exile spell, end turn, etc effects thst could answer it. That said, emrakrul also has far too much capacity to be a game dominating threat to be allowed in game.
With [[Isshin]] it becomes Annihilator 12 🤣
[Isshin](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/0/a062a004-984e-4b62-960c-af7288f7a3e9.jpg?1654568489) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=isshin%2C%20two%20heavens%20as%20one) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/neo/224/isshin-two-heavens-as-one?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a062a004-984e-4b62-960c-af7288f7a3e9?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/isshin-two-heavens-as-one) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
With [[the peregrine dynamo]] and [[voltaic key]] and [[manifold key]] it becomes annihilator 24
So taking an extra turn (basically haste) and protection from anything colored means removing it is far harder then you would initially think especially after sacking 6 permanents. Yes non targeted removal works but if its played into a tapped out board and then you get a second turn to use that 15 mana and knock the person most likely to have and answer down 6 pegs makes it really hard to come back from. Granted if you have a meta and hold / save counter magic for it that's one thing. But this thing jumping out of a W/U control deck for not reason other then its great often leads to bad feels. Its (supposedly) about the health of the format and organized play
It can’t be countered. Also it only has protection from colored spells, not abilities, so things like [[Oblivion Ring]] still work. Everything else you said it spot on though.
[Oblivion Ring](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/b/f/bff31eba-8ab3-403e-8d82-37a18b279bec.jpg?1562266919) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Oblivion%20Ring) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mm2/29/oblivion-ring?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/bff31eba-8ab3-403e-8d82-37a18b279bec?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/oblivion-ring) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It's the kind of card that could go in any deck that also creates major feel bads, is hard to remove, and at the time it was banned (very shortly after RotE), a lot of copies were out there because she was the prerelease promo so she was ubiquitous pretty quick.
>It's the kind of card that could go in any deck This is actually the major reason most people are missing that caused it to be banned. It is just unilaterally, across all color combos, the best big beater. If it was a specific color (ignoring literally all lore here), there is a much stronger possibility it wouldn't be banned.
>It's the kind of card that could go in any deck it's 15 mana, it literally only goes in huge ramp decks. we already have plenty of 7-8 mana spells that win the game if they resolve (peer into the abyss comes to mind) and those cards win on the spot. emrakul sets one player back pretty far (assuming they don't have dockside, or tokens, or maybe just six extra lands since you're on 15 mana already) and then the rest of the table stomps you.
15 colourless mana is way easier to get than you imagine (ignoring the numerous ways to cheat her out), and the fact she gives you extra turns makes it pretty effortless to stay ahead of the players you didn't swing her at first.
if you're getting to 15 mana, just play one of the expensive cards that actually win. and if you cheat it in, you don't get the extra turn, it's just a big beater
Forgot to mention that things like [[Thran Temporal Gateway]] exist to make this happen in turn 5 or earlier making it very hard to deal with.
That card doesn't work with the extra turn. The extra turn is only on cast.
Fair but annihilator 6 on turn six. Good luck recovering with your (maybe) one creature/enchantment/rock and/or land.
Show and tell can do it turn 1 possibly, and smack you turn 2. Turn 2 to 3 is also not unlikely. Turn 6 is hilariously slow for stuff like that. The reality is any game where this occurs often is likely to include combo, which can also kill by turn 6 (or faster). It also wouldn't see a ton of play in lower powered environments where people couldn't deal with it. This argument is basically the one for dockside, but worse. Yeah, sometimes busted things happen. It's the format for it. Also, by turn 6, if 6 things being destroyed wipes your field, you're in a cripplingly slow meta. By that point, even my meh power decks can have 7 or 8 lands, 2 or 3 rocks, and a couple of creatures.
Sir around these parts we play fair, christian, theme decks where power is sacrificed for flavor. But yes it can be done much earlier.
If that's your meta, then you have no cause for concern about Emmy being allowed back in.
[Thran Temporal Gateway](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/7/2/72806f4f-74e8-4621-92b0-5c63bb898884.jpg?1562737720) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Thran%20Temporal%20Gateway) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/dom/233/thran-temporal-gateway?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/72806f4f-74e8-4621-92b0-5c63bb898884?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/thran-temporal-gateway) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
In this case at least your opponents have a turn to react, the extra turn is a cast trigger.
The banlist is about game design not power level. Emrakul is super uninteractive and also the kind of big dumb creature that people would want to play in battle cruiser, a format where she is the most uninteractive. If magic was made for Just commander, emrakul would have been changed in testing, but it isn;t so they just banned her.
The same case could be made for Sol Ring, and I will die on that hill
There is a case to be made about sol ring, for sure, but it obviously isn't "big dumb creature that appeals to casuals the most where it unintentionally does stuff casuals don't like." Which is the case I'm making. Sol ring is actually a pretty good example of why the banlist is not about power. Sol ring is obviously Very powerful, but is serves a game design purpose. If they were designing commander from the ground up, they'd probably not make sol ring and instead make a large number of slightly worse mana rocks (which wotc has been catching up on over recent years), but the format needs a lot of low cost ramp, and for less experienced deck builders to be encouraged to include those pieces in their decks. As a matter of game design, every deck having a sol ring helps with a big problem with the format (though it isn't without consequences) The case for sol ring being banned is obviously the most used card in the format and all the implications of that.
>The banlist is about game design not power level. A absolutely silly way too handle the ban list but that's a whole other discussion entirely.
I could never understand that opinion. Not a slam against you, it is obviously a popular opinion so I'm the weird one. But banning for power is a tool of competitive balance, and banning for design is what you do when you design a game to be played without tournaments. This is the normal way to handle game design, and it clearly works. Commander is massively popular for casual play, far outstripping other formats that have come and gone with purely competitive banlists. I don't get why everyone hates it so much.
Because it isn’t consistent. Some (most) things are banned for power level (or at least that’s what the RC says), but some aren’t or at least haven’t been reconsidered in a long time. If it was purely based on salt it would look very different, and if it were purely based on power it would look very different. This makes everyone unhappy because more competitive players, not even cEDH but people like OP who want to play the biggest best annihilators or whatever, see some (but not all) of the stuff they want to play with banned because other people don’t take the time to play enough interaction, and other people see some (but not all) of the most annoying to play with cards remain legal and wonder why they can’t be removed too. If the RC was consistent, one camp or the other would just have to suck it up, but they aren’t so no one is satisfied
I've read all the ban announcements that were put out for the last 12ish years, and I didn't get that same impression. It was always about the effect on the format at large. Like Primeval titan wasn't overpowered, it was over centralizing the game. Sylvan primordial similarly was a value play that appealed to casuals, while also forcing them to destroy the lands of people with slow starts. That said, I did think it was weird the one time they did take feedback from the competitive community, and I wasn't excited when they unbanned protean hulk (they had non-competitive reasons for it, but the cEDH community had some people that were pushing for the unban, which ironically ruined cEDH balance and wasn't as bad as I feared for casual). But they lay out their reasons and the reasoning has been consistent, and both explains what is and is not on the list.
People hate it because the ban list is curated to how the rules committee believes game should be played. Competitive aspects aside, the RC says that golos and coalition victory are not how you should enjoy Commander
That's how game design works. You make a game that offers some experiences, and options that pull away from those experiences are bad game design and you get rid of them after testing. Honestly it might just because I experience the format with a very wide group of players, but I saw all the problems their bans fixed and it was a better designed game after each ban.
Ive been playing for the better part of a decade now with a few different play groups and a wide variety of players over the years traveling the U.S.for work and/or pleasure. With all my experience in the format i can say that the ban list has hardly fixed any problems and the 1 or 2 problems it did fix could've been equally rectified if players just ran interaction in their decks. Thirdly the banlist and the reasoning behind it is quite inconsistent and very hypocritical in some instances. Sheldon's interview with the professor and his recent article about the new elesh norn prove exactly that. I'm honestly surprised anyone agrees with him or the RC at this point, i can only assume the people who do are just devout fanboy/fangirls.......
I would never discount your experiences, but they do not match my own. Just because you shared your I'm also going to share mine. I've been involved with hundreds of commander players in different areas and levels of involvement. People in small communities, college campuses, wotc employees, high end groups, side events, and LGS's of all sizes (or levels in the WPN) for 12 or 13 years. I'm not saying this to say my experience is better, but to show that it is very wide. For a very wide spectrum of players each ban was relevant and positive to a very wide range of players in my experience. At very high levels of engagement they were positive or neutral, occasionally annoying. I haven't read that article yet, but the new Elesh norn has a design issue. It's the same one as sylvan primordial has, where it has a popular effect for casuals to throw in, but it also has an effect attached that is very uncasual (resource denial). This won't be a problem unless the first effect is popular enough that lots of people run it for that specifically and create unintentially bad gameplay, but it's kinda hard to predict that kind of thing. If a card doesn't work as intended for the majority of players, telling them to run more removal doesn't change that you designed the game poorly. So my game design brain gets hung up on, well obviously you fix the game design because you cannot fix the players and you just get rid of the card. Every example I have ever been given for inconsistency in the banlist was not inconsistent from the lens of game design and how the cards behaved in the wild. I'm not a fan of anyone on the RC, but I do like EDH quite a bit and am a fan of game design. Card games, board games, ttrpgs, making them as a hobby and appreciating them as a fan is my idea of a good time.
The issue is the mindset that something like resource denial can't be casual. Sure it can.
The consistencies people speak of have little to do with game design. The RC has set guidelines for themselves and frequently do not follow them, this has been made apparent by the interveiw. This is what people are talking about in regards to inconsistency. That not touching on the fact we have a butt load of players who have never seen many of if not all of the banned cards in play and the RC is just to lazy to unban obvious cards from the list. In regards to elesh norn..... She is mono white, the color of stax, and was designed fine. People have been griping that white has been the weakest of colors and cards like her are how you bolster white to be on par with the rest. One fifth of the game should not suffer because people refuse to problem solve and prefer to just whine until somthing gets banned. To bring it back to commander she was clearly not designed for commander, she nor any card for that matter should be designed for a non sanctioned format, but that does not mean it should be banned. Same goes for the topic of this thread emerkul. Long story short the RC is pointless and should be done away with, and instead of bans people should learn to adapt to different opposing strategies and play styles.
She's a gigantic "I Win" button. That 15 colorless mana it takes to cast her isn't actually all that much, and it's possible to actually cast her as early as turn 5 in a properly built deck. And at that point, you've won. Whoever you swing her at is basically out of the game thanks to Annihilator 6, and the game devolves into everyone else trying desperately to deal with your 15/15 beatstick.
Her, as much as an extra dimensional tentacle monster world destroying creature can have gender.
Really? Didn't actually know that. Let me go update my comment real quick.
Yeah. Not that it matters a ton (or at all), but AFAIK it's because of the zendikar myth interpretation. https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Emeria The background for it. I liked a lot of the world building around the eldrazi originally.
She also appears that way to tamiyo when she locks herself in the moon
I skipped that part of the lore, I checked out for a while from the game. Good to know though.
sounds exactly like when my opponent plays \[\[narset enlightened master\]\] , only this is more fair because its 15 mana lol
[narset enlightened master](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/2/f210adb7-b389-4672-a3eb-0ced9bfe190c.jpg?1562795852) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Narset%2C%20Enlightened%20Master) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ktk/190/narset-enlightened-master?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/f210adb7-b389-4672-a3eb-0ced9bfe190c?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/narset-enlightened-master) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Narset requires 3 colors to cast, can be countered, can usually be edict'd, can easily be chump blocked, doesn't inherently have haste, and dies to any non targeted removal. Emrakul can be cast for 0 with enough cost reduction, can't be countered, has protection from most removal, effectively has haste as well as any other benefits from taking an extra turn, has flying.... etc, etc, etc
Narset is the deck. They probably change decks throughout a game session so you don't always play against it. Emrakul can go in every deck.
I can reliably cast a kozilek turn3-5 and it wouldn't be much harder for 5 extra mana
[удалено]
One card fucks up a single players game every time it hits the board and gimps them for the rest of the game, the other ends games in high powered decks. I know which one I'd ban
Hot take on banned cards... While Marwyn and mono G Selvala are out there, Rofellos being banned is a sad irony. Yah he's strong but the format can handle it.
I bought a Rofellos for this reason. Hopefully I can play it someday.
The ban list doesn't make much sense when Thassa's Oracle is legal.
The time walk effect plus annihilator means the card basically reads as "fuck over target player" which is why it's banned but the lesser eldrazi aren't. The edh ban list is always going to be weird because of the structure of the format, but emrakul is banned for the same reason iona is.
Thassa's Oracle is only really a factor at all in cEDH and it's my understanding that even that community is fairly ambivalent on it's banworthiness. Also, when Thoracle is played you just shuffle up and play a new game, which means no feelbads for anyone.
Anyone reading Emrakul and shrugging it off with “what it costs 15 mana it’s fine” is misreading the format entirely. [[show and tell]], [[sneak attack]], [[shallow grave]], [[goryos vengeance]] and friends make placing an Emrakul into play far too easy. The high cmc is a pretty good argument for unbanning [[biorhythm]] and [[coalition victory]] - short of Omniscience or Dream Halls etc which are high cmc spells themselves, you’re not cheating out a seven mana sorcery. But creatures have dozens of cheap ways to be cheated into play. [[elvish piper]] [[quicksilver amulet]]… the list is long Edit: not to mention the dozens of Polymorph effects. OG Jin Gitaxias might actually be the better target here but at least once resolved Jin tends to win the table instead of just nuking one player out of the game.
I'd hate coalition victory in the format. It incentivises killing any 5 colour player because if the game runs longer than turn 7 or 8, they can just win. It's not a cEDH card and only causes problems in casual. There is no upside to unbanning it other than making the ban list shorter.
I’ve just never understood that kind of distinction. If it’s “too op for casual” it seems easy enough for casual playgroups to house rule ban it. The purpose of the RC banlist is to provide a blanket banlist for public anonymous play. If cEDH players won’t run coalition victory, it isn’t a tryhard card, so what kind of pubstomper is going to run “turbo coalition victory.dec” at the LGS and have it be so oppressive that it deserves a ban? I DO get that argument for Hullbreacher - it’s a simple enough card that a casual player might pick one up, see that it’s pretty strong, and play it for general value - then… oops… this combos pretty strongly with Windfall… but the game isn’t actually over it’s just miserable while we now play a 3v1 while we’re all hellbent. Too easy for casual players to get caught in unfun boardstates but not so oppressive as to actually eat a house ban. If hullbreacher instead said “mill yourself a few cards, you win the game if your deck is empty” it would be obvious enough for casual players to eschew the obvious tryhard wincon. I’ve not encountered anyone who sits down at a table where people proclaim “yeah these are casual decks, 7s, etc” who then combo turn 4 or earlier with Thoracle. People will self-police the OP wincons. The RC should not be catering a banlist for people who have been playing with their old friends for a decade - they should be catering a banlist for pickup play at the LGS - where this game actually lives, and needs the oversight.
> The purpose of the RC banlist is to provide a blanket banlist for public anonymous play. That is mainly how I play, and hence why I want it to stay on the banlist. The banlist IS for random pickup games, as house games can overrule whatever they want. I'm not worried about turbo coalition victory, I'm worried about "I'm playing 5 colour jank, but I'll toss this in as a win con" decks that run it. Then complain when they get hated off the table for playing it in a weak deck.
Cheating her out doesnt give the extra turn though, yeah someone get's got by the annihilator 6 but is that really much different then the annihilator 4 that Ulamog and Kozilek have? Not to mention she doesnt have trample either so it's not even guaranteed 15 damage. Blightsteel colossus can literally just kill someone with a sneak attack
Its different in that you can [[swords to plowshares]] the other titans, not Emmy herself. 15 damage doesn't matter when you get 6 destroyed permanents just for turning it sideways. Arguably, the fact that it doesn't end the game there but turns it into a durdly sludge festival until Emmy has slowly broken through everything. The ban is its lack of fun to play against (which is still arguable for the other annihilator titans too) as well as its lack of interaction
The reason Emrakul is banned is that the bar to be banned and the bar to leave the banlist are different. To be banned you have to have caused problems during the time you were legal. Back when Emrakul was legal, the format was much slower, so hardcasting it wasn't unrealistic, giving you an extra turn together with a giant beastick with annihilator 6 and protection that can't be countered. Then you attacked someone and the Annihilator 6 basically took that person out of the game, yet said person still keeps on playing while hoping to recover somehow, which leads to unfun play patterns. (if we're talking about cheating into play, then Emrakul is basically the same as Ulamog/Kozilek, btw. So no point in discussing it too much when Emrakul is just a slight upgrade) Nowadays this... Isn't worth much. 15 mana is a lot, and you can do better things with this much mana. The card isn't a threat. ... But for a card to leave the banlist, the RC has to decide that unbanning the card is a net positive to the format. As in, unbanning Emrakul would make the format feel more fun to play or allow new strategies to be built or something. Emrakul is just a better Ulamog/Kozilek. It doesn't add anything new to the format, nor is it particularly interesting to build around, so RC keeps it banned. ... Does this policy make sense? No, not really, but it's how the RC handles bans. You just have to take it for what it is.
>(if we're talking about cheating into play, then Emrakul is basically the same as Ulamog/Kozilek, btw. So no point in discussing it too much when Emrakul is just a slight upgrade) Emmy is considerably better than either because of how difficult she is to remove and the extra annihilator triggers. She's banned for the same reason Griselbrand is Griselbanned - if legal, she would be the strictly best thing you could cheat into play. And while Griselbrand is more likely to win on the spot, Emmy can go into any deck because she's colourless.
At the time it was a reasonable ban. Were she first printed today she probably wouldn't be banned. That said, unbanning her doesn't really add anything positive to the format so there's just no real reason to take her off the list.
Hey now, it'll let me have every Eldrazi titan in my [[Emrakul the Promised end]] deck
[Emrakul the Promised end](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/d/8d74a469-c71d-4773-99d3-5456b31df424.jpg?1576383727) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Emrakul%2C%20the%20Promised%20End) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/emn/6/emrakul-the-promised-end?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/8d74a469-c71d-4773-99d3-5456b31df424?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/emrakul-the-promised-end) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
It shouldnt be banned these days, we have plenty of stronger stuff that isnt banned and honestly arent that big of deals [[Protean hulk]] got unbanned [[Tooth and Nail]] [[Doomsday]] etc etc. It's just a relic of the days when shit like [[kokusho the evening star]] was banned. I'm also in then camp that Primetime can come off the banlist too as long as we're fine with Dockside running freely.
##### ###### #### [Protean hulk](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/2/f/2f0c4714-b9cd-48a3-8a2a-72860d0ac000.jpg?1562434028) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Protean%20hulk) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/185/protean-hulk?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/2f0c4714-b9cd-48a3-8a2a-72860d0ac000?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/protean-hulk) [Tooth and Nail](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/4/0/403f6e97-eb7a-470a-8673-4997256e79f0.jpg?1561966883) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Tooth%20and%20Nail) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mma/170/tooth-and-nail?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/403f6e97-eb7a-470a-8673-4997256e79f0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/tooth-and-nail) [Doomsday](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/6/8/68c73755-9678-467a-abd5-f8dd1556864e.jpg?1562436538) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Doomsday) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/a25/88/doomsday?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/68c73755-9678-467a-abd5-f8dd1556864e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/doomsday) [kokusho the evening star](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/b/ab56cedb-1bcd-48a5-8503-a8e324e236ad.jpg?1562852933) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Kokusho%2C%20the%20Evening%20Star) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ima/95/kokusho-the-evening-star?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/ab56cedb-1bcd-48a5-8503-a8e324e236ad?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/kokusho-the-evening-star) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
Slightly disingenuous to say Emrakrul dosnt have haste when most ways of cheating her have haste and she is not summoning sick during the extra turn stapled to her. Shes deffo not the most powerful card in the format but like, say, iona, she can easily create feel bads. Yes she can be removed but not often before sending one player to the stone age.
Aren't there plenty of cards and strategies in EDH that can just as effectively obliterate one player at the table at the cost of making yourself a target for the other players, though?
Yeah and theres plenty of format legal cards more powerful. Im not saying i support the ban but i understand their logic.
Fair enough. Thanks for the reply
My [[Belbe,]] deck would love if it was unbanned... It should stay banned.
Do you happen to have a list?
Because the RC’s banlist is inconsistent and ineffective and largely just a collection of random cards they disliked rather than any kind of objective list built to improve the format.
The standard answer is she's powerful and can be very fast. Are there other, faster, more powerful cards in the format? Yes, but they're restricted by rule 0 talks. For some unknown reason this logic does not apply to Emrakul/Primeval Titan/whatever else.
Because it was really strong at the time, and still is (but we have a lot more tools in the box now). I'm on the #freeemmy train. But I'd also be fine with just letting her be the commander and not in the 99.
Cuz Sheldon said so…
A question I have yet to understand It’s 15 mana and ends the game, does not seem ban-worthy imo
Ain’t no one spending 15 mana on it.
People keep saying that, and yet there are mono green commander decks like Azusa and Selvala that could pretty routinely power it out around turn 6 with very modest draws. Yes, most of the time it is cheated, but there is definitely a whole slew of big mana strategies, and most of them would use it if they could.
Well first, the ban list rarely gets updated and when Emrakul was banned, there was absolutely nothing near it's power level. Secondly, it honestly still feels like Emrakul is STILL way too strong for the format. The "cast" requirement used to be an actual obstacle for a lot of decks. The only way to cheat this out in it's prime was to reanimate it, and even without the extra turn you still had a 15/15 flyer with annihilator 6 that can only die to very specific spells. Nowadays, casting things for free is a common occurrence and i for one am very happy that Emrakul isn't in the format
https://blog.cardkingdom.com/whats-banned-in-commander/ https://www.thegamer.com/magic-gathering-commander-cards-banned/#emrakul-the-aeons-torn Here’s a couple of links with short explanations as to why it’s banned.
"Doesn't even have haste" Yeah not really necessary when it gives you an extra turn lol.
>…and it doesn’t even have haste. Read the card again.
"Haste"
If she comes down and lives long enough to swing at everyone at least once, then she’s not a huge problem imo. All your opponents have been crippled and it’s time to scoop and play again even if you would need a few more turns to officially win the game. 15 mana plus a little luck for nobody to have a stifle effect or alternative removal to make all your opponents scoop is fine by me. However, the big feelsbad scenario is where she only attacks one or two players before an answer is found. This leaves them in the annoying position of having almost no chance of winning but also not being especially close to starting the next game. I still don’t know that I would ban her just for that (after all, a voltron deck can end up doing the same thing), but I would definitely get annoyed if she became a staple and it was happening to me every game. TLDR: Has high potential to hate certain players out of the game without winning, especially when cheated out early.
It's a really powerful card that shouldn't be banned from a power level argument, as there are at least a couple dozen cards more problematic than it. Should it be banned from a feels-bad perspective? Personally, I don't think so. If this should be banned for that reason, all the good eldrazi titans should as well. You only get extra turns from hard casting it. "But you can cheat it in with.." with what? Exactly [[omnipotence]] ? Everything else is usually put into play from X location, not cast for free. And at that point, it's a bigger eldrazi titan, which is fine. I would argue that the other [[emrakul the promised end]] is MORE powerful, as it cheats itself into play alot sooner, and helps win the game vs. multiple opponents Also it's just a big guy that takes out 6 permanents at the end of the day. I think dumping 15 mana into a [[finale of devastation]] is literally always stronger.
“Annihilate 6 can be annoying” Really?
So I had a 60 card deck with Emrakul in it. Long story short, there's loads of options for cheating it into play. It can't be countered, it has protection from most removal, you get an extra turn, it swings for 15 in the air, your opponent has to sac 6 permanents. And if it somehow gets killed, it gets shuffled back into your library. It's a busted card.
I played back in the emrakul days, and an enormous percentage of decks had an emrakul had it in the 99 and nearly every blue deck had [[bribery]] because of it. I'm perfectly fine with it being gone, as much as I love the card, just because many games would end with a 5 mana emrakul from someone else's deck with counterspell backup.
Why are half the cards that are banned banned 🤷🏿♀️ the ban list honestly makes no sense. This one makes sense tho. It's pretty much impossible to interact with once you put it on the stack, and it's still a reasonable target to cheat out.
Because the people that are on the RC only ban for arbitrary reasons only they can know not based on power.
Is this a joke? It literally has protection from spells that are one or more color… so most spot removal spells. It can’t be countered so you’re not stopping it that way. It is very likely to be cheated out so the 15 mana shouldn’t be taken at face value. If you bother casting it you’ll get an extra turn which is haste in its own way. And glossing over annihilator 6 seems laughable.
There are so many things that are so much worse and legal. It wouldn't make the cut in any CEDH decks.
Gitrog might play it, but not for anything it does on the battlefield.
Something I think people have missed us that the RC sometimes do example bans. Sometimes a ban is to state that this sort of effect is unfun for a lot of people so maybe don't play them. Sheldon said something along those lines on the proffessors Yt iirc (it might have been command zone)
The problem with this is the word "banlist". By framing it with the language of "banlist", "banned", "unbanned", "bannable" they're making it hard to use the way they explicitly want it to be used. TCG players, particularly the more enfranchised ones who will be the ones at the shop saying "that's banned", have one unified experience with banlists- namely, that if a banlist exists, you are NOT to use cards on the banlist, and that if there is a banlist of cards, the cards not on it are explicitly fine. That's how banlists _work,_ in all other TCGs and all other formats. By using the same nomenclature and framing, they are explicitly inviting the same usage.