On the Future of Commander (WotC taking over management of the format, considering adding more concrete power level rankings)
On the Future of Commander (WotC taking over management of the format, considering adding more concrete power level rankings)
A statement on Commander and our vision for the future of the format.
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Here's the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we'll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.
Ok... I'm listening 🤔
In this system, your deck would be defined by its highest-bracket card or cards.
This now becomes an eternal battle over which cards are in Tier 3 and which cards are in Tier 4 imo.
This sounds terrible.
My plan back in the day was to use a % of synergy to rank decks with a hypothetical perfect mana base (all land enters untapped and tap for half your deck colors) being worth 20% and the remaining 80% being calculated by the amount of your deck that contribute to your win condition and the efficiency of those spells.
This won't necessarily describe "power" in the sense we use now as much as the efficiency of success, cheaper spells, functional duplicates, and perfect mana well inherently be more likely to do what they do than the same deck with pet cards and filler.
I get the idea, but I don't see how that works effectively in practice. There are a lot of cards that are not good on their own, and only good in the context of a combo. Does having one of those cards in your deck make it better? No, it probably makes it worse. You need the entire combo for one of those cards to matter.
It works for those 1 off value piece cards like Dockside, Tomb, Sol Ring, etc. But multi card combos is where I think it will fail(or at least over score a deck that doesn't include a full combo).
@luxyr42 @mike It gives a ceiling, not a floor or average power level.
Treating such system as not informing deck building is ignoring human behaviour. People will avoid including a single card from a higher tier than they enjoy playing. Unless it is worth bringing up in Rule 0 conversations and explaining that it isn't a good way to think about this deck in particular.
And players will treat a single card from +1 tier more kindly than they will treat a tier 1 deck including a tier 4 card.
I am also wondering who is going to actually handle ranking the tens of thousands of existing cards(gatherer says 28712 legal in commander at this moment), plus hundreds more from each set as they release. Might need to be crowdsourced to be done in a reasonable time. Every deckbuilding website is also going to want to implement that info in their database.
@luxyr42 @mike Obviously we haven't seen this enacted yet, but I wonder if it'll end up being similar to the Arena Historic Brawl ranking system.
I know Amazonian has run into issues where including a high-power card in a low-power deck bumps her up to a high-power tier despite playing a pile of durdle cards.
I guess that's what the conversation is for.
But also, there's never been a good way to rank commander deck power so *shrug* can't be worse than what we already haveYeah I completely agree. There is so much context with all the cards that I don't know how they do this. It's really just four different ban lists they're now managing. And that I think sucks so much fun out of the decks that it almost becomes what's the point even.