On Sol Ring: The Second-Best Time for a ban Is Now
Last year, on September 24th, 2024, Commander saw the strongest set of bannings it had in years: Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom. The first three were all about power levels, the latter was to save people's sanity.
Now, I'm a cEDH player these days, and I got to see about a month of play in that format before the bannings came about. The loss of J-Lo killed my Azami deck (not that she or I were any good) and many other fringe commanders that had slowly been losing relevance over the previous few years were taken out back and put down now that they had lost their ticket to fast commanders. cEDH UK Nationals the other week had a pre-banning side event. The general feedback from that event was "Thank goodness we don't need to deal with these cards any more!". All that being said, however, these bans were targeted at the casual players, where power creep was running rampant - let's not forget that we were still in the "My deck is a seven" days as the storm following this ban wave lead to WotC taking over the reigns of the format directly with the highly negative (and often unacceptably hostile) response that some people treated this step with,
In that announcement, the Rules Committee addressed Sol Ring directly: “We’re not banning Sol Ring and have no desire to.” They also admitted that, “based on the criteria we’ve talked about here, it would be banned.” The justification wasn’t power level; it was identity. Sol Ring, they wrote, is “the iconic card of the format,” so much so that removing it would be “fundamentally changing the identity of the format.” They even described it as “sufficiently tied to the identity of the format that it defies the laws of physics.”
My thesis is simple: the best time to ban Sol Ring was when Wizards of the Coast released their first Commander precons, sans Sol Ring. The second-best time is now.
Magic’s Long History of Banning Ubiquity
Magic doesn’t only ban for raw power; it bans when a card is everywhere and warps the baseline.
Legacy, Modern - Mental Misstep “Free,” universal, and an auto-include that flattened archetype diversity. When Mono-Red goblins is running a playset of missteps to deal with their opponent's missteps, you have a problem. Pre-banned when Modern was announced.
Modern – Lurrus of the Dream-Den Good enough to make decks contort themselves to fit the companion clause. If you could play Lurrus, you did.
Legacy, Extended, Modern – Sensei’s Divining Top Omnipresent and format-warping; it wasted everybody's time that it got banned for the same reason that the MH3 Bird was ejected.
Modern – Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath Midrange/control blurred into Uro.deck; it smothered variety until it got the axe.
The throughline: when a single card becomes the default choice across strategies, it gets removed to restore breadth.
Why Sol Ring Is Worse in Commander
In 60-card formats, those cards tilted games; they didn’t single-handedly end them. Commander is different.
The early-game lottery: Opening Sol Ring often sets one player a full lap ahead before turn two. Multiplayer magnifies that swing. For Legacy (or Type 1.5 as it was then known), Sol Ring got banned in the same ban wave as other eminently balanced cards like Black Lotus and Time Walk. Why is this card allowed in Commander?
The only true auto-include: Outside of basic lands and colour identity itself, Sol Ring is the lone “mandatory” card. I hear some of you arguing that some commanders "only" contain Sol Ring in a mere 60% of their decks. That's not exactly helping your point.
A poisoned lesson for new players: Your deck is a commander, a sol ring and 98 cards.
Sol Ring isn’t iconic because it makes Commander better. It’s iconic because it was printed into the format’s DNA—over and over—until the expectation became inevitability. There is a solid argument that both Command Tower and Arcane Signet also fit into this category, with the former being the best land in the whole format (Ask a cEDH player what they Vampiric tutor for when they're searching for a land) and the latter being the best 2-mana rock by far.
The Missed Moment
When Wizards launched the first Commander precons, they had a clean shot to set a healthier baseline by leaving Sol Ring out (and not printing command tower)
They didn’t. Instead, Sol Ring ships in every precon. The format didn’t just inherit a problem; it institutionalized one.
The Second-Best Time
By the RC’s own words, Sol Ring meets their ban criteria; they’re just preserving it for identity: “We’re not banning Sol Ring and have no desire to,” because “Banning Sol Ring would be fundamentally changing the identity of the format.” That’s an aesthetic argument, not a balance one.
Elsewhere, ubiquity (Misstep, Lurrus) and format-warping (Top, Uro) were sufficient grounds for action. Commander shouldn’t be the exception simply because Sol Ring is tradition. Tradition is not a balance philosophy.g
Sol Ring doesn't make the format better, it just makes average hands riskier to keep, when somebody starts the game on turn 4 across from you.