I find the addition of the Conspiracy set to be strange, especially for a "conceptualize" phase operation. Even if you think the plan will be to eventually allow all set that offer new cards, but are not a regular set (ie. Planechase 2012, Conspiracy and Commander sets), it just seems weird to add Conspiracy now. If you want to keep a simple system to start, I would go for just Modern + whatever was printed in the Commander sets. I know that Conspiracy has a good number of multiplayer friendly cards, but adding it just seems too specific.
That said, I like this idea overall, but I don't think you should come close to the "if you can find it in a modern frame than it's ok" method. There have been modern frame printings of Force of Will and a few other powerful old cards. The point of the FtV series is to showcase powerful cards and they all have modern frames. A number of old cards are randomly thrown in duel decks and similar products. To me, it would be better to eventually get to Modern legal sets plus supplementary sets that include new cards (ie. Commander, Conspiracy, and Planechase 2012).
IF Ugin was merely one (of a few) card that prevents Painter's Servant from being unbanned, the same logic can be applied to the tuck rule changes.
Did the rule change affect certain cards/strategies? Yes.
Are people still playing EDH? Yes.
I'm pretty sure EDH will still be fine with a Painter's Servant unban. People who are gonna abuse cards are already doing so with unbanned cards already. We're arguing based on #responsibleusage here.
I think an important difference in this case though is that with Painter's Servant, you have a card that looks like it could be used fairly, but for every deck using the servant with Crusade, there will be more decks using it with colour-hosing cards. This is why cards like Protean Hulk and Tinker are banned. Sure, you could play them fairly, but as time goes on, more and more people are drawn into playing them in an unfair manner and the card even encourages that sort of play because of how easy it is.
Honestly, the main thing I want out of the banlist is more consistency.
I think everyone agrees that consistency would be nice, but I imagine that the RC believes that they are being pretty consistent within the guidelines that they've set up.
Painter's servant strikes me as a card that can be used in fair, fun ways.
I'm actually not sure about this. When you think of the cards that Painter's Servant interacts with, it is either going to generate a large advantage for you, say by drawing cards for every permanent you control of the specified colour, or a big disadvantage for your opponents, say by destroying all of their cards since they are of the specified colour. Once you start reaching past the early game, the sheer number of permanents on the battlefield that are suddenly going to become the chosen colour is going to be giving a huge swing that will only benefit the owner of the painter's servant. Maybe that isn't enough to get it banned by itself, but I doubt that it will feel especially fair to anyone but the owner of the Painter's Servant.
I hate it when people call this a loophole. Following the instructions on the card is not a "loophole", it's the norm. This change hasn't closed a loophole found on cards in multiple colors, it has created a loophole in Chaos Warp.
A few things here. The change created a "loophole" only as far as one already existed for every destroy, sacrifice, and exile effect that could it Commanders and that's not so much a "loophole" as an intended rule.
Perhaps people are being a little loose in using the word "loophole", but there is a difference between a planned and crafted rule and what happened with tuck effects in this format. At the time the format was created, there were only a tiny handful of tuck effects, but as time as moved on, more and more were printed and their place in the Commander metagame became more established. This was not a planned role, the RC didn't sit around a table when creating this format and carve out a specific niche for tuck effects, it just fell into there as more tuck effects were printed.
This is sort of like the old colour identity rule (before it was called colour identity) where legendary creatures like Memnarch could not be a commander. That whole situation was not a planned occurrence. The RC did not sit down and purposely craft a rule to exclude Daughter of Autumn from being a commander, but opponents of changing the rule spent many posts explaining why that old rule made sense to them and why it should not be changed. But there was no special origin to that rule and how it handles those legendary creatures, it was an oversight and the same logic applies to tuck effects.
A lot of the nonsense about the tuck rule is about how it affects "new players".
Most commander games get players by experienced players.
I think your assumption is heavily flawed. I don't have numbers, but I imagine that WotC does (from their pre-con sales and surveys taken after those were released) and they would have shared that information with the RC. This format is quite popular among casual players.
I hate the new rule, but there are plenty of people on this board and elsewhere who have cogent arguments in its favor. What leaves me unsatisfied is that none of them have come from the RC.
So the RC doesn't get points for having a good writer / change explainer. It's not that big of a deal, they expressed enough of their perspective to allow people with better explanation skills to step in and do a better job than they did. Large companies have a PR department or hire a PR firm for a reason: it takes skill to explain something in the best way possible.
Only specific colors take extra turns.
Only specific colors ramp.
Only specific colors mess with the stack.
Part of the glory of MtG is balance through asymmetry; Not every color can do everything.
And the RC didn't add any of those to the game. In fact, they didn't even add tuck to the format other than allowing it to continue to exist from a tiny handful of cards to an increasingly larger number of cards as WotC printed new cards. Mechanics are currently given to a specific colour or colours with a clear eye to how it balances the overall colour pie, and this consideration was not done with tuck.
Tuck is a huge effect given the parameters of the format and it is not really comparable to most colour-specific limitations and advantages. For example, Green is great at destroying artifacts, better than any other colour, but there is no guarantee that any given deck is going to feature enough artifacts for this to matter. However, every deck in this format has a commander and even when it is not in play, all tuck spells also function as decent, if sometimes over-costed, creature removal, and everyone runs those as well. The opportunity cost of running tuck effects vs. not running tuck effects is quite a bit different than most colour limited mechanics.
But the rules are more consistent and you remove the random hurting of new players, so I cobsider that a plus. It might not be perfect, but few things ever are.
It's arbitrary insofar as there was no call for it, no demand from the community to speak of.
I called for it to change. As did others. Were we thousands of players, certainly not. But there has been persistent calls for this rule to change for years (I should know, I've been part of those threads for years) and if those threads did nothing else, they reminded the RC that this was something to think about.
2) Tuck didn't do much/didn't do enough to combat broken generals anyway.
Rebuttal: This is the perfect solution fallacy. Just because tuck wasn't the perfect weapon to combat them doesn't mean they didn't help combat them in some way.
And if you decide you have the wrong tool for a job you don't just keep using it, you put it down and grab the proper tool. If tuck wasn't doing a proper job of keeping degenerate commanders in check, the proper solution is not to keep using tuck, but to find what would do the job properly.
3) I didn't like getting my general tucked, it's a feel-bad, you should always have access to your commander, etc.
Rebuttal: Nobody does, but nobody likes having any of their permanents or spells get countered or disrupted either.
However, this particular format is called Commander, so things that disrupt your commander is a way that feels worse than any of the other ways around is something to pay attention to. There is a line between what is ok and what is not, where playing Meddling Mage is ok to play and name your Commander, but tucking it is not ok even if the overall effect is the same when you cannot draw a removal spell. Not everything is logical and games play at an emotional level.
Also saying it's a feel-bad is ignoring the fact that there are people who want to be able to disrupt opponents' gameplans by tucking their general and that this nerf is a feel-bad for them.
Yeah, umm, too bad for them I guess. Just like I don't feel much sympathy for people that would just love to play with their Black Lotus and other power cards. When looking at emotional responses to rules decisions you go with the majority and I'm pretty sure the majority is not feeling bad on an emotional level at losing tuck.
4) It's unfair to the colors/color pie/etc., not every color is good at tucking or recovering tucked cards (The RC also said that people gravitated towards white and blue partly for tuck which was a factual error because red and green have tuck too)
Rebuttal: Strengths and weaknesses of the colors happen, that's basically the definition of the color pie.
Even in your full rebuttal you run into problems. Blue doesn't need to be the best / second best colour at tucking, but it is. Red's presence in tucking is tied to basically one card, a nice card, but still just one. Green's tucking is limited to a set of 15 recently printed legendary creatures and a handful of legendary artifact creatures. In the end, this colour distribution is completely random as opposed to purposefully creating balance of strengths and weaknesses between the different colours.
5) Just don't play with or against the broken decks/tell people to play a different format/etc.
Rebuttal: It's elitist to hold this kind of viewpoint, basically picking and choosing who to play with based on their deck.
Tuck effects by themselves are not going to stop degenerate decks from being degenerate. And there are many ways to build degenerate decks that don't care about being tucked or are able to adequately protect themselves from it. And if a player chooses to self-police their power level so that they know that tuck is a balancing effect against their deck, then they can do the same thing against decks that now don't have tuck effects.
6) If you don't like tuck nerf, house rule it away.
Rebuttal: This falls in a similar vein with #5 although it isn't inherently elitist. House rules are common, but have a flaw in that it makes it difficult to play with other groups that have different rules and can potentially promote isolation.
I agree with you here. Promoting house ruling is not a good answer for people that don't like this rule change. Some people are in groups that play by the default rules on purpose and others only play with strangers, and that's just how things are. I have advocated for many rule changes, including this one, because I don't think house rules could work in that direction either (like being told to house rule out the tuck effect instead of having the rules changed).
How is Wizards going to extrapolate the data any better than the Rules Committee when both groups lack hard tournament data in the form of deck lists and wins? I believe it was MaRo who said on Tumblr that if for some reason they did take over the format there would not be people who's full time job it was to manage the format, but rather additional duties assigned to existing employees.
My guess is that if WotC was inclined, they would put out surveys and marketing research groups to gather the information that they need, just like they do for existing set releases. We know they do research for every set to judge how the set was received and what was successful or not about it so that they can try to do those sorts of things or avoid the downsides in the future. They want to get the view of non-tournament players in these results and probably have ways to do that. However, even without being "in control" of the format, WotC might be inclined to do this same research to help improve their Commander products and they would likely share the results with the RC.
This could directly affect what new Commander-specific cards that WotC makes, maybe people hate or love cards with casting cost related effects like Prossh, Skyraider of Kher, or maybe the results would matter to the RC, like players hate Rule X and it drives away some percent of future customers. At the present, WotC won't force the RC to change a given rule, but that doesn't mean they can't facilitate discussions with them to convince them that it might be a good idea to change something.
Mana Crypt was a $50.00 - $75.00 card for a long time, then one day it got a reprint as a judge promo and it went down to always being a $50.00 card. Then one day for no reason it decided to be a $200.00 card. There was no rhyme or reason for why it jumped considering it jumped after getting an increase in supply.
My guess is that Commander gained in popularity and that's why the price jumped.
1) By saying that the change to the tuck rule can appeal to the players who would otherwise quit the format because they dislike how tuck works, you are effectively trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator
Not the lowest common denominator, just lower than you obviously prefer. The game of Magic already has a significant number of points where a new player could decide not to play again and Commander doesn't need to add any more to that list especially not for the gain that the tuck rule supposedly provides. However, this point would be completely insufficient if you have a high opinion of what tuck brings to the game, so your mileage will vary.
In addition, there may be players who dislike the tuck rule change and leave the format which would basically counteract the players who could stay in the format.
And that's not nothing, but you have to weigh these concerns. The players that are going to leave the format because of this particular change are probably going to leave now, while players that would leave in the future because of a problem that tuck would supposedly fix could be prevented from leaving by a change in the ban list.
3) saying that "oh well if other things pop up as problems from this tuck change just ban them" sounds dangerous.
This is not the only possible solution, others could be tweaks to the death tax rule in combination with selective bannings. The comparison to modern is not quite applicable though. Commander as a format does not ban things for being degenerate because they have a different philosophy.
In addition, you seem to have this preconceived notion that competitive and casual decks cannot coexist in the same playgroup.
I play in an environment like that and the fact that "competitive" players are not already playing the most absolutely broken combo decks says that they self-policing already and they will probably continue to do so with some more adjustments at a lower power level. These players just have to adjust downwards since the density of answers has changed. If they don't, the social contract comes into play and if things become too broadly bad, the ban list will take over. As for people playing a broken commander in a non-broken way, there are plenty of cards on the ban list or could be there that could fall into that category and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Without tuck, it increases the power gap between the two and increases the chances that they cannot play together in the same game, which I fail to see how this could have a positive effect on the format.
Hmm, now that's a decent point. However, it does rely on how many casual players run tuck effects specifically for the purpose of taking down competitive commanders. Especially compared to competitive players doing it for the same purpose. I wonder how many people would consider the fact that you purposely added tuck effects to your deck as one of the dividing lines between what makes a deck casual and what makes a deck trying to be competitive.
4) Your point about color pie has all sorts of problems. First off, there aren't 20 tuck effects available (to my knowledge) so there's no point in speculating this. If 20 tuck effects are eventually printed and people start running 20 of them in their decks and it starts causing problems, THEN you do something about it. You don't preemptively change something that isn't currently a big problem because you THINK it could be a problem down the road depending on what wizards prints.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. If you find something that you think could be a problem in the future in a very predictable manner (WotC printing more playable tuck effects) you should fix it before it becomes a problem. This is especially true since the redundancy effect between 18, 19, or 20 tuck effects is small enough that we could be wrong that 20 is the proper cut-off point, it could have been 19 and we missed it and allowed the format to suffer unnecessarily, so fixing it at 6 (or whatever) is better than getting it wrong at the other end.
why should red and white (the two bottom colors) get their tuck effects neutered, which are among the more powerful things these colors are doing?
The tuck effects between those two colours are in no way comparable to each other. I seriously doubt many people are choosing a red-based commander because of Chaos Warp and Warp World even if they are using these cards in their decks (probably more the latter than the former).
Your arguments that "well tuck is not that special in constructed but is randomly good in EDH because commanders" and that "each color should have the same number of mechanics" are flawed
My example was not to be taken as literally as you seem to have taken it. It was meant to illustrate that the colour pie is meant to be balanced with new releases not with a literal number count of mechanics but with a more abstract balancing. Then Commander came in and affected this balance by how tuck effects work in the format against Commanders without giving the other colours enough or anything to maintain balance.
And its funny you mention Narset as somehow being better. In one game last night it was me with Alesha, Purphorus, and Narset. Purph got him down to 7 but couldn't finish her off. Narset's turn she gets cast for the first time, nails Enter the Infinite. Puts Omniscience back in the library. Uses a free extra attack spell, now has Omniscience in play, casts SoFaF and Aggravated Assault, wins. Now I ask you, new rule or old, how would either of us been able to prevent that?
But I think your overall point is correct. A number of the "broken" commanders are in blue, which is the colour best able to protect itself from all tuck effects. The others tend to be in green and black which are the best able to get their commander back from being tucked.
Slippery slope is the biggest one here (new players build commander deck, commander gets tucked, they rage and potentially quit the format, they potentially quit the entire game)
That's not a slippery slope argument. I suppose you could call it a bit convoluted, but it is a progression of events that lead one to another. By comparison a slippery slope would be a series of escalating events that are similar in nature with one happening after the other, like one rule change leads to another rule change that leads to another rule change. But building a commander deck, getting a commander tucked, and then quitting commander is not an example of a slippery slope.
but I also spot false dilemma (mentioning that such players could potentially leave the format or game but not mention players who instead learn how to get better)
How is this a false dilemma? People quit things that they try all the time for a variety of reasons and this could easily be a reason for some players to quit and it doesn't have to be. And it won't be anymore.
false generalization (all new players must fall into this trap rather than learn about the rules beforehand)
I thought I was pretty clear that I wasn't saying this applied to all new players. I didn't even try to state the number of new players this might effect. The number is obviously higher than zero though and it doesn't have to be. And it won't be anymore.
Sorry, it doesn't work like that. That would be like saying, back when Kokusho wasn't banned, "Kokusho is broken because of this and that", "Well tell them to play something different". Saying they should jump to something else doesn't change the fact that it's a problem.
It has to. As long as the RC doesn't ban cards based on a decided upon power-level, then player choice is only the thing preventing decks from being so incredibly powerful that they win by combo really quickly. Some players will play closer to that line than other players and tuck is not an effective weapon against such players. The only two effective ways are to ask them to play something further from that line or to play closer to the line yourself, tuck effects has never been enough by itself.
it could potentially lead to bannings of multiple generals
I don't see how that is a bad thing. If those commanders were so bad that only tuck effects were keeping them "in check" than any game where players didn't draw or have tuck effects were quite one-sided and probably not very fun, so not that good for the format. We have other commanders that are banned for not being great to have in the format, I don't see any problem with having more banned for the same reason. In fact, it is inevitable that we will have more banned commanders, just like we will have more banned cards in general.
Relying on tuck as a countermeasure is a bad plan and always has been. It was the best that the Rules Committee thought they could do with what they had available to them, but it was always a bad plan.
Bad in what way?
Colour pie reasons, which I'll get into below, and the unreliable nature of how many there would be in the format. When there were two or three of them total, it was very unlikely you'd see one when you needed it making it bad as an answer, if there were twenty good ones in one particular colour it would happen too much and the effect is too powerful to allow a single player to use it against all enemy Commanders every game. The RC has no really good control over how many were going to be in the format and when they would arrive. And of course you can also add onto that that most, but not all, of the Commanders that need to be "kept in check" also had the best ways to either tutor for the tucked Commander (green and black) or had the best ways to protect their commander (blue). Not to mention that its presence to serve as a check on "broken" commanders is quite an explicit statement that the death tax is not doing its job of keeping those commanders in check.
Yes, such things happen with any type of removal or counterspell, but tuck was a very strong threat to generals, and so this would have a stronger impact on mind games and planning than regular removal and counters.
But that's part of the point, the threat for Commanders is too strong especially in format called Commander with rules that support replaying your commander several times during the course of a game.
You are right that every colour has its strengths and weaknesses. White can't discard opponent's cards. Red and black can't deal with enchantments in play. Green can't prevent spells they don't like from resolving. And so on. This was established in Alpha and has been refined since then. I love the colour pie and I'm a firm believer in it, so when you look at all of the new rules that Commander added to a typical game of magic you should look at what it does to the colour pie, what new effects did it add that were not there before.
Tuck effects are not that special in a regular game of magic but are very strong when used against Commanders because of the new rules of the format. Tuck is very restricted in what colours can do it. Did the colours that cannot do tuck effectively get anything extra from the rules that compensates for this? I don't think so, certainly not enough by comparison. Look at it another way, as an example, if each colour has five different different mechanics that we believe are roughly balanced against each other and then I come in and give two of those colours another mechanic, those two colours are no longer balanced against the other three (they have six mechanics to the others' five mechanics) and simply saying each colour has strengths and weaknesses masks what actually happened and what I did to the colour pie.
This isn't little kid softball where everyone wins. If new players will quit the format because they had their generals tucked, maybe magic isn't for them
As a player that can be a reasonable position to take, as a person that wants to sell game product (or wants to see a particular format grow and be popular) it is not a reasonable position to take. Sure, anything can be taken to extremes, but within the framework of a competitive game where one player is going to win and the other player is going to lose, there are many knobs that can be turned and rules that can be tweaked to improve the overall experience for the players involved.
As a good example, take Ante. People could easily say "Hey you don't playing for ante. too bad, toughen up, this isn't little kid softball" or people could recognize it as a bad rule that was right to be removed from the game. Not all rules are good and should be kept.
I know I have learned more of the format from getting my own commanders tucked. You learn to become more aware of the mechanic and if that one blue player is holding up 1UU, then it's pretty easy to convince other players that attacking the "general-tucking blue mage" is the priority. It's a multiplayer game and politics play a big part.
See, I look at that, along with the Condemn and Bant Charm and Chaos Warp and I see a format where if people want to play a Commander-centric deck than they need to either play a Hexproof commander or be playing blue to protect against such spells and that is not exactly the format that the RC wants to encourage.
The nature of Magic is that some colors have access to tools that other colors do not.
It is also the nature of magic that if you want some effect from another colour you can just splash that other colour to do it. If you want to play a red deck but really want to deal with enchantments, then you have to splash white or green, generally speaking. However, Commander is different in that you cannot just splash a colour into any given deck while keeping the Commander that you wanted to play, it just doesn't work that way. Both the singleton nature and size of the decks really push against small splashes and of course you run into the problem that players identify strongly with particular commanders in this format.
Beyond that you have another problem. The colour pie is implemented in a way to be balanced overall, Black can't deal with enchantments, but white can't discard cards out of an opponent's hand, for example. However, the Commander format adds a new element, Commanders, that has a special and powerful answer that is readily available in only a few colours (and by readily I mean with multiple playable cards) but there is no corresponding balance for the colours left out of tuck effects. Black has no tuck effects but the Commander format didn't give it anything to compensate so that it can do something format specific and relevant than White can't do, for example.
1. If new/inexperienced players want to quit the format or MtG because of losing their commander, then let them. An incident like that should be a learning experience, not an opportunity for childish pouting and rage-quitting.
That is a poor attitude and certainly not one supported by WotC as a whole. They try to remove the worst of the feel-bad elements of the game to emphasize the fun. It doesn't mean that you always win, it just means that you have fun while you are playing. The RC is following a similar trend by removing a feel-bad element from the format, the tucking of a commander. You call losing players "pouting", I call it preventing the format from growing and sustaining like it could.
2. Banning more commanders because of this rule is counterproductive, and I'd like to hear some actual evidence as to why tucking was a bad plan.
Some colours had little or no access to tuck effects, but every deck, supposedly, need to have the ability to deal with problematic commands. If you accept that some commanders are so problematic that you need to deal with them in a way beyond the Commander tax then you have to recognize that the Commander format is unique among the major magic formats that individual players can't just splash to find an answer like in Standard or Legacy.
4. I know the format is called "Commander" and one's selection of their commander has a lot to do with that, but that in and of itself shouldn't give carte blanche to people's degenerate commanders to constantly run roughshod in every game. I guess I don't like players feeling so entitled to 100% unencumbered access to their commanders.
But that's not what is happening either. Players will still have mana problems for expensive commanders or ones that are killed repeatedly. Players can still run cards like Nevermore to shut down strategies for a while.
Generally speaking, I understand people don't like getting their commanders tucked. However, I don't believe it was incredibly pervasive, nor do I believe it warped deckbuilding.
How many experienced deck designers thought about building a Commander-centric synergy deck that didn't win right away and then change their mind because of the possibly of having their commander tucked? As for not being pervasive, as time goes on more and more tuck spells will be made and it will become more and more pervasive. If you look at Commanders as a form of card advantage then tucking a commander almost always makes sense since you deny your opponent card advantage. At a certain point enough good tuck spells will exist that it makes sense to try to tuck every commander in every game and that is not good for the format.
There's a difference between "building around your commander" and "building around your commander but having backup plans".
Not really for inexperienced players. How many new / inexperienced players will create what they think are fun and nice built-around Commander decks only to see their commander get tucked either by being in play at the wrong time or because their commander was the most dangerous thing around at the time it was played (and the only answer available was tuck). How many such players will quit the format? How many such players will quit Magic? How does their negative reactions to this situation balance against the supposed up-side of tuck effects?
The problem is that when you play inefficient/narrow answers, it reduces the chances that your answer has an impact on the other players or can be useful against them at all, which is problematic if you are up against competitive decks that can fairly consistently win/lock the game up in 4-5 turns.
So congratulate those players, tell them if they really want to they could win on turns 2 or 3 with certain Commander legal decks and then politely ask them to play something else. Or, alternatively, run the best of the not as perfect answers while other players at the table run their own not as perfect answers and the job will get done just as easily.
Which is something I would advocate for as I feel like balance is important. I would prefer not to have exceptionally good commanders roaming around.
If these commanders are bad then they should not be in the format. Relying on tuck as a countermeasure is a bad plan and always has been. It was the best that the Rules Committee thought they could do with what they had available to them, but it was always a bad plan.
Just ONE blue player holding up 1UU makes everyone else play more cautiously even if that blue player can only spell crumple once (or may not even have it in his hand at all).
And how is that good for that format? How is it good for the format to have every non-blue player sitting there thinking "my opponent might have Spell Crumple, so I better not play my Commander". This format is called Commander and Commanders should be getting played and used. That's the whole point. If that is not happening, then something is going wrong and things need to change and guess what, it was.
One of my problems with tuck effects has always been the randomness of quantity of them. Back when Condemn was basically the only one (aside from a bad artifact and Warp World) it was completely random whether it did anything to not. As time as gone on though, more and more of them have come into the format. With the release of the original Commander set, Red was suddenly in the tuck game in a big way, but there was no real gauge of how many is too many? Would it be bad for the format if there were twenty good blue and white tuck effects? What if every colour had access to a good and relevant tuck effect? It is not sustainable when you have such an important effect tied to randomly released cards.
That said, I like this idea overall, but I don't think you should come close to the "if you can find it in a modern frame than it's ok" method. There have been modern frame printings of Force of Will and a few other powerful old cards. The point of the FtV series is to showcase powerful cards and they all have modern frames. A number of old cards are randomly thrown in duel decks and similar products. To me, it would be better to eventually get to Modern legal sets plus supplementary sets that include new cards (ie. Commander, Conspiracy, and Planechase 2012).
I think an important difference in this case though is that with Painter's Servant, you have a card that looks like it could be used fairly, but for every deck using the servant with Crusade, there will be more decks using it with colour-hosing cards. This is why cards like Protean Hulk and Tinker are banned. Sure, you could play them fairly, but as time goes on, more and more people are drawn into playing them in an unfair manner and the card even encourages that sort of play because of how easy it is.
I think everyone agrees that consistency would be nice, but I imagine that the RC believes that they are being pretty consistent within the guidelines that they've set up.
I'm actually not sure about this. When you think of the cards that Painter's Servant interacts with, it is either going to generate a large advantage for you, say by drawing cards for every permanent you control of the specified colour, or a big disadvantage for your opponents, say by destroying all of their cards since they are of the specified colour. Once you start reaching past the early game, the sheer number of permanents on the battlefield that are suddenly going to become the chosen colour is going to be giving a huge swing that will only benefit the owner of the painter's servant. Maybe that isn't enough to get it banned by itself, but I doubt that it will feel especially fair to anyone but the owner of the Painter's Servant.
A few things here. The change created a "loophole" only as far as one already existed for every destroy, sacrifice, and exile effect that could it Commanders and that's not so much a "loophole" as an intended rule.
Perhaps people are being a little loose in using the word "loophole", but there is a difference between a planned and crafted rule and what happened with tuck effects in this format. At the time the format was created, there were only a tiny handful of tuck effects, but as time as moved on, more and more were printed and their place in the Commander metagame became more established. This was not a planned role, the RC didn't sit around a table when creating this format and carve out a specific niche for tuck effects, it just fell into there as more tuck effects were printed.
This is sort of like the old colour identity rule (before it was called colour identity) where legendary creatures like Memnarch could not be a commander. That whole situation was not a planned occurrence. The RC did not sit down and purposely craft a rule to exclude Daughter of Autumn from being a commander, but opponents of changing the rule spent many posts explaining why that old rule made sense to them and why it should not be changed. But there was no special origin to that rule and how it handles those legendary creatures, it was an oversight and the same logic applies to tuck effects.
I think your assumption is heavily flawed. I don't have numbers, but I imagine that WotC does (from their pre-con sales and surveys taken after those were released) and they would have shared that information with the RC. This format is quite popular among casual players.
So the RC doesn't get points for having a good writer / change explainer. It's not that big of a deal, they expressed enough of their perspective to allow people with better explanation skills to step in and do a better job than they did. Large companies have a PR department or hire a PR firm for a reason: it takes skill to explain something in the best way possible.
And the RC didn't add any of those to the game. In fact, they didn't even add tuck to the format other than allowing it to continue to exist from a tiny handful of cards to an increasingly larger number of cards as WotC printed new cards. Mechanics are currently given to a specific colour or colours with a clear eye to how it balances the overall colour pie, and this consideration was not done with tuck.
Tuck is a huge effect given the parameters of the format and it is not really comparable to most colour-specific limitations and advantages. For example, Green is great at destroying artifacts, better than any other colour, but there is no guarantee that any given deck is going to feature enough artifacts for this to matter. However, every deck in this format has a commander and even when it is not in play, all tuck spells also function as decent, if sometimes over-costed, creature removal, and everyone runs those as well. The opportunity cost of running tuck effects vs. not running tuck effects is quite a bit different than most colour limited mechanics.
Also, I disagree with you that ramp is in any way colour limited in this format. I see Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Grim Monolith, Gilded Lotus, Worn Powerstone, and Thran Dynamo looking around trying to find a home.
I called for it to change. As did others. Were we thousands of players, certainly not. But there has been persistent calls for this rule to change for years (I should know, I've been part of those threads for years) and if those threads did nothing else, they reminded the RC that this was something to think about.
And if you decide you have the wrong tool for a job you don't just keep using it, you put it down and grab the proper tool. If tuck wasn't doing a proper job of keeping degenerate commanders in check, the proper solution is not to keep using tuck, but to find what would do the job properly.
However, this particular format is called Commander, so things that disrupt your commander is a way that feels worse than any of the other ways around is something to pay attention to. There is a line between what is ok and what is not, where playing Meddling Mage is ok to play and name your Commander, but tucking it is not ok even if the overall effect is the same when you cannot draw a removal spell. Not everything is logical and games play at an emotional level.
Yeah, umm, too bad for them I guess. Just like I don't feel much sympathy for people that would just love to play with their Black Lotus and other power cards. When looking at emotional responses to rules decisions you go with the majority and I'm pretty sure the majority is not feeling bad on an emotional level at losing tuck.
Even in your full rebuttal you run into problems. Blue doesn't need to be the best / second best colour at tucking, but it is. Red's presence in tucking is tied to basically one card, a nice card, but still just one. Green's tucking is limited to a set of 15 recently printed legendary creatures and a handful of legendary artifact creatures. In the end, this colour distribution is completely random as opposed to purposefully creating balance of strengths and weaknesses between the different colours.
Tuck effects by themselves are not going to stop degenerate decks from being degenerate. And there are many ways to build degenerate decks that don't care about being tucked or are able to adequately protect themselves from it. And if a player chooses to self-police their power level so that they know that tuck is a balancing effect against their deck, then they can do the same thing against decks that now don't have tuck effects.
I agree with you here. Promoting house ruling is not a good answer for people that don't like this rule change. Some people are in groups that play by the default rules on purpose and others only play with strangers, and that's just how things are. I have advocated for many rule changes, including this one, because I don't think house rules could work in that direction either (like being told to house rule out the tuck effect instead of having the rules changed).
My guess is that if WotC was inclined, they would put out surveys and marketing research groups to gather the information that they need, just like they do for existing set releases. We know they do research for every set to judge how the set was received and what was successful or not about it so that they can try to do those sorts of things or avoid the downsides in the future. They want to get the view of non-tournament players in these results and probably have ways to do that. However, even without being "in control" of the format, WotC might be inclined to do this same research to help improve their Commander products and they would likely share the results with the RC.
This could directly affect what new Commander-specific cards that WotC makes, maybe people hate or love cards with casting cost related effects like Prossh, Skyraider of Kher, or maybe the results would matter to the RC, like players hate Rule X and it drives away some percent of future customers. At the present, WotC won't force the RC to change a given rule, but that doesn't mean they can't facilitate discussions with them to convince them that it might be a good idea to change something.
My guess is that Commander gained in popularity and that's why the price jumped.
Not the lowest common denominator, just lower than you obviously prefer. The game of Magic already has a significant number of points where a new player could decide not to play again and Commander doesn't need to add any more to that list especially not for the gain that the tuck rule supposedly provides. However, this point would be completely insufficient if you have a high opinion of what tuck brings to the game, so your mileage will vary.
And that's not nothing, but you have to weigh these concerns. The players that are going to leave the format because of this particular change are probably going to leave now, while players that would leave in the future because of a problem that tuck would supposedly fix could be prevented from leaving by a change in the ban list.
If you decide you have an ineffective tool, you don't shrug your shoulders and keep trying to use it, you look for a better tool.
I understand it just fine, thank you, I am just coming to a different conclusion than you are.
This is not the only possible solution, others could be tweaks to the death tax rule in combination with selective bannings. The comparison to modern is not quite applicable though. Commander as a format does not ban things for being degenerate because they have a different philosophy.
I play in an environment like that and the fact that "competitive" players are not already playing the most absolutely broken combo decks says that they self-policing already and they will probably continue to do so with some more adjustments at a lower power level. These players just have to adjust downwards since the density of answers has changed. If they don't, the social contract comes into play and if things become too broadly bad, the ban list will take over. As for people playing a broken commander in a non-broken way, there are plenty of cards on the ban list or could be there that could fall into that category and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Hmm, now that's a decent point. However, it does rely on how many casual players run tuck effects specifically for the purpose of taking down competitive commanders. Especially compared to competitive players doing it for the same purpose. I wonder how many people would consider the fact that you purposely added tuck effects to your deck as one of the dividing lines between what makes a deck casual and what makes a deck trying to be competitive.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this. If you find something that you think could be a problem in the future in a very predictable manner (WotC printing more playable tuck effects) you should fix it before it becomes a problem. This is especially true since the redundancy effect between 18, 19, or 20 tuck effects is small enough that we could be wrong that 20 is the proper cut-off point, it could have been 19 and we missed it and allowed the format to suffer unnecessarily, so fixing it at 6 (or whatever) is better than getting it wrong at the other end.
The tuck effects between those two colours are in no way comparable to each other. I seriously doubt many people are choosing a red-based commander because of Chaos Warp and Warp World even if they are using these cards in their decks (probably more the latter than the former).
My example was not to be taken as literally as you seem to have taken it. It was meant to illustrate that the colour pie is meant to be balanced with new releases not with a literal number count of mechanics but with a more abstract balancing. Then Commander came in and affected this balance by how tuck effects work in the format against Commanders without giving the other colours enough or anything to maintain balance.
I suppose Red Elemental Blast.
But I think your overall point is correct. A number of the "broken" commanders are in blue, which is the colour best able to protect itself from all tuck effects. The others tend to be in green and black which are the best able to get their commander back from being tucked.
That's not a slippery slope argument. I suppose you could call it a bit convoluted, but it is a progression of events that lead one to another. By comparison a slippery slope would be a series of escalating events that are similar in nature with one happening after the other, like one rule change leads to another rule change that leads to another rule change. But building a commander deck, getting a commander tucked, and then quitting commander is not an example of a slippery slope.
How is this a false dilemma? People quit things that they try all the time for a variety of reasons and this could easily be a reason for some players to quit and it doesn't have to be. And it won't be anymore.
I thought I was pretty clear that I wasn't saying this applied to all new players. I didn't even try to state the number of new players this might effect. The number is obviously higher than zero though and it doesn't have to be. And it won't be anymore.
It has to. As long as the RC doesn't ban cards based on a decided upon power-level, then player choice is only the thing preventing decks from being so incredibly powerful that they win by combo really quickly. Some players will play closer to that line than other players and tuck is not an effective weapon against such players. The only two effective ways are to ask them to play something further from that line or to play closer to the line yourself, tuck effects has never been enough by itself.
I don't see how that is a bad thing. If those commanders were so bad that only tuck effects were keeping them "in check" than any game where players didn't draw or have tuck effects were quite one-sided and probably not very fun, so not that good for the format. We have other commanders that are banned for not being great to have in the format, I don't see any problem with having more banned for the same reason. In fact, it is inevitable that we will have more banned commanders, just like we will have more banned cards in general.
Colour pie reasons, which I'll get into below, and the unreliable nature of how many there would be in the format. When there were two or three of them total, it was very unlikely you'd see one when you needed it making it bad as an answer, if there were twenty good ones in one particular colour it would happen too much and the effect is too powerful to allow a single player to use it against all enemy Commanders every game. The RC has no really good control over how many were going to be in the format and when they would arrive. And of course you can also add onto that that most, but not all, of the Commanders that need to be "kept in check" also had the best ways to either tutor for the tucked Commander (green and black) or had the best ways to protect their commander (blue). Not to mention that its presence to serve as a check on "broken" commanders is quite an explicit statement that the death tax is not doing its job of keeping those commanders in check.
But that's part of the point, the threat for Commanders is too strong especially in format called Commander with rules that support replaying your commander several times during the course of a game.
You are right that every colour has its strengths and weaknesses. White can't discard opponent's cards. Red and black can't deal with enchantments in play. Green can't prevent spells they don't like from resolving. And so on. This was established in Alpha and has been refined since then. I love the colour pie and I'm a firm believer in it, so when you look at all of the new rules that Commander added to a typical game of magic you should look at what it does to the colour pie, what new effects did it add that were not there before.
Tuck effects are not that special in a regular game of magic but are very strong when used against Commanders because of the new rules of the format. Tuck is very restricted in what colours can do it. Did the colours that cannot do tuck effectively get anything extra from the rules that compensates for this? I don't think so, certainly not enough by comparison. Look at it another way, as an example, if each colour has five different different mechanics that we believe are roughly balanced against each other and then I come in and give two of those colours another mechanic, those two colours are no longer balanced against the other three (they have six mechanics to the others' five mechanics) and simply saying each colour has strengths and weaknesses masks what actually happened and what I did to the colour pie.
As a player that can be a reasonable position to take, as a person that wants to sell game product (or wants to see a particular format grow and be popular) it is not a reasonable position to take. Sure, anything can be taken to extremes, but within the framework of a competitive game where one player is going to win and the other player is going to lose, there are many knobs that can be turned and rules that can be tweaked to improve the overall experience for the players involved.
As a good example, take Ante. People could easily say "Hey you don't playing for ante. too bad, toughen up, this isn't little kid softball" or people could recognize it as a bad rule that was right to be removed from the game. Not all rules are good and should be kept.
See, I look at that, along with the Condemn and Bant Charm and Chaos Warp and I see a format where if people want to play a Commander-centric deck than they need to either play a Hexproof commander or be playing blue to protect against such spells and that is not exactly the format that the RC wants to encourage.
It is also the nature of magic that if you want some effect from another colour you can just splash that other colour to do it. If you want to play a red deck but really want to deal with enchantments, then you have to splash white or green, generally speaking. However, Commander is different in that you cannot just splash a colour into any given deck while keeping the Commander that you wanted to play, it just doesn't work that way. Both the singleton nature and size of the decks really push against small splashes and of course you run into the problem that players identify strongly with particular commanders in this format.
Beyond that you have another problem. The colour pie is implemented in a way to be balanced overall, Black can't deal with enchantments, but white can't discard cards out of an opponent's hand, for example. However, the Commander format adds a new element, Commanders, that has a special and powerful answer that is readily available in only a few colours (and by readily I mean with multiple playable cards) but there is no corresponding balance for the colours left out of tuck effects. Black has no tuck effects but the Commander format didn't give it anything to compensate so that it can do something format specific and relevant than White can't do, for example.
That is a poor attitude and certainly not one supported by WotC as a whole. They try to remove the worst of the feel-bad elements of the game to emphasize the fun. It doesn't mean that you always win, it just means that you have fun while you are playing. The RC is following a similar trend by removing a feel-bad element from the format, the tucking of a commander. You call losing players "pouting", I call it preventing the format from growing and sustaining like it could.
Some colours had little or no access to tuck effects, but every deck, supposedly, need to have the ability to deal with problematic commands. If you accept that some commanders are so problematic that you need to deal with them in a way beyond the Commander tax then you have to recognize that the Commander format is unique among the major magic formats that individual players can't just splash to find an answer like in Standard or Legacy.
But that's not what is happening either. Players will still have mana problems for expensive commanders or ones that are killed repeatedly. Players can still run cards like Nevermore to shut down strategies for a while.
How many experienced deck designers thought about building a Commander-centric synergy deck that didn't win right away and then change their mind because of the possibly of having their commander tucked? As for not being pervasive, as time goes on more and more tuck spells will be made and it will become more and more pervasive. If you look at Commanders as a form of card advantage then tucking a commander almost always makes sense since you deny your opponent card advantage. At a certain point enough good tuck spells will exist that it makes sense to try to tuck every commander in every game and that is not good for the format.
Not really for inexperienced players. How many new / inexperienced players will create what they think are fun and nice built-around Commander decks only to see their commander get tucked either by being in play at the wrong time or because their commander was the most dangerous thing around at the time it was played (and the only answer available was tuck). How many such players will quit the format? How many such players will quit Magic? How does their negative reactions to this situation balance against the supposed up-side of tuck effects?
So congratulate those players, tell them if they really want to they could win on turns 2 or 3 with certain Commander legal decks and then politely ask them to play something else. Or, alternatively, run the best of the not as perfect answers while other players at the table run their own not as perfect answers and the job will get done just as easily.
If these commanders are bad then they should not be in the format. Relying on tuck as a countermeasure is a bad plan and always has been. It was the best that the Rules Committee thought they could do with what they had available to them, but it was always a bad plan.
And how is that good for that format? How is it good for the format to have every non-blue player sitting there thinking "my opponent might have Spell Crumple, so I better not play my Commander". This format is called Commander and Commanders should be getting played and used. That's the whole point. If that is not happening, then something is going wrong and things need to change and guess what, it was.
One of my problems with tuck effects has always been the randomness of quantity of them. Back when Condemn was basically the only one (aside from a bad artifact and Warp World) it was completely random whether it did anything to not. As time as gone on though, more and more of them have come into the format. With the release of the original Commander set, Red was suddenly in the tuck game in a big way, but there was no real gauge of how many is too many? Would it be bad for the format if there were twenty good blue and white tuck effects? What if every colour had access to a good and relevant tuck effect? It is not sustainable when you have such an important effect tied to randomly released cards.