Commander Brackets, Revisited — Better, Not Perfect

An Overview

On Tuesday, Gavin Verhey posted an update to the Commander Brackets Beta for Magic: The Gathering.

Here are the highlights:

• Brackets 2 and 3 now have a clearer distinction
• Bracket 2's association with preconstructed commander decks has been scrapped
• Turn count and win-condition style expectations make it easier to assess
• As a cEDH player, I can attest to Bracket 5's "The game may end on any turn."
• Tutor restrictions have been removed, using the game changer list to deal with the better tutors
• The game changer list has been pruned and re-focused.

Let's dig a little deeper and see what the changes mean.

What Bracket Are you?

Brackets 2 and 3: The line now exists

The most tangible success, from just reading the Mothership's blog post, is giving a proper separation between bracket 2 and bracket 3.

• Bracket 2: Your deck lives in a world of Fair, Incremental and Telegraphed; winning through disruptable on-board means. Personally, I see this meaning that there should be a turn cycle (at least) between you presenting a game-winning threat and achieving the win.
• Bracket 3: Your win-cons should still be disruptable, but board presence isn't that important. You should still be in a place where your opponents can interact with your win lines, however.

It's not a huge difference, but it does give a proper distinction between the two brackets.

Goodbye, "Precons are Bracket 2"

Precons have a wide range of power levels and ages. In the year we live in, I'd argue that the original Commander 2011 decks are bracket 1 in their power level, while a deck like the Modern Horizons 3 Commander Jeskai Energy deck is borderline bracket 4 (I bought the deck, played it unmodified three times, and won by infinite twice in those three. Then I removed the card which went infinite, and won by infinite a different way. On turn four.)

The original link of Precon and Bracket 2 was definitely one of the weaker parts of the original brackets concept, so its disappearance is very welcome.

Turn Expectations Help. Mostly.

Adding rough guidelines helps. Before the bracket system, it was a somewhat common way of gauging deck power. Now it's codified from Bracket 1's "Turn nine? I guess?" to Bracket 5's "I won't promise that you aren't losing before you get a turn". Sadly, the problems with turn count only tells part of the story, which we'll come back to later.

Bracket 4 - High Powered Casual Commander

Bracket 4 is still the place you can play the most powerful cards in commander with no restrictions on cards outside the deck construction rules of the format itself. 

Bracket 5 - "Any turn" means any turn

If your deck is expecting to try and win or shut down other people winning on turns 1, 2 and 3, then you're in the cEDH bracket. Gavin's phrasing here is wonderfully direct in his post.

Tutors are out. Sanity is in.

The metric of "tutors per deck" are gone. Demonic Tutor and Diabolic Tutor are incomparable in terms of card quality, so it makes a lot of sense that one is a game changer and the other is just... fine. Simplifying the rules this way and leaning on the game changer list to regulate the best tutors is a great change,

"I've Been Here the Whole Time!" - Game Changers and you.

The list of game changers has been refocused, and I like a lot of the changes.

• Blue is (slightly) off the hook. The original game changer list reads like somebody who hated the colour blue got to write it. Cards like the original ten mana Jin-Gitaxis shouldn't have been on it in the first place
• No more Food Chain. I'm not fully sold on this. Especially with cards like Prossh not being came changers, and unlikely to become game changers.
• Commander Game Changers. I'm generally in favour of the logic that "It's easier to say no to a commander than a card in the 99 you see on turn 5", but the fact that I mainly play cEDH means that I don't get to see a lot of the bracket 2 and 3 games that could be warped by an Urza, Lord High Artificier or Kinnan "Bracket 2" deck.
• Removing Million Mana Spells. Seriously. If you're paying ten mana for a sresolving spell that should be the sound of you winning the game. That's not a game changer, that's just you winning.
• Coalition Victory. WotC are cowards. Free it from the GC list. Let me run B1 "Basics and mono-colour creatures only" Coalition victory.
  
• Panoptic Mirror. We're going to talk about turn length later. Thank you for keeping this a game changer.

"Two Great Formats, Divided by a Shared Banlist" - George Bernard Shaw, probably.

The main blur in Commander isn't the distinction between Brackets 2 and 3, but between 4 and 5. Casual commander and cEDH are functionally two different formats, and Gavin touched on this while discussing Thassa's Oracle.

To all intents and purposes, cEDH is a different format to Commander, even though it shares all of the deck construction rules. As somebody who has played both extensively, there are misconceptions from cEDH players about Commander players and misconceptions from Commander players about cEDH players. For the most part, however, the two formats attract different people and there's very little overlap between the communities (despite the Commander community dwarfing the cEDH community).

Neither format is superior to the other, but there have been rumblings for a couple of years about cEDH splitting off to its own format, with a different banlist, tuned to the requirements of the competitive format. The spectacular implosion of the cEDH Rules Committee last year has put a general damper on that notion, but it's still a tempting concept, if anybody were to try.

What's Missing in This Picture?

As solid as these updates are, the Brackets still miss a major gameplay problem: time.

Twenty-minute combo turns aren’t fun for anyone not taking them. Neither are decks that loop through a dozen triggers a turn or cast half their deck with Imoti, Celebrant of Bounty on the field.

There’s currently no guidance for how long your deck takes to play, only how fast it wins. That’s a blind spot - and one that matters a lot at physical tables, where three players end up watching one person play solitaire.

If Commander is a social format, the social contract has to include respecting the time of the people you’re playing with.

Conclusion

The new Commander Brackets are a genuine step forward. The distinctions are clearer, the lists are leaner, and the philosophy feels more confident.

But they’re still baking. They work great for convention pods of four strangers, less so for LGS playgroups with mixed decks and limited opponents.

Still. Progress is progress. And for the first time, it feels like the Brackets are heading toward something that might actually stick.