Wednesday, December 7, 2016

Commander stepping stone to guidelines of engagement 

Commander is a wide open format for its own health and enjoyment, but even among accommodating and regular players, finding a standard of play that everybody enjoys is a communication challenge. This post contains a list of cards for the purpose of a thought experiment, but is not yet a draft for an amended banlist. The thought experiment consists of two questions

How many cards are there in commander that win the game by themselves in reasonable circumstances? Does identifying these cards form an effective stepping stone toward establishing guidelines? The list is subjective and assumes that these cards are capable of instantly winning by themselves in reasonable circumstances.

The chain veil
Food chain
Tooth and nail
Enter the infinite
Omniscience
Time stretch
Expropriate

Now for the second question, does this help form guidelines? It may be too early to tell, but I have my doubts. Some of these cards are only degenerate when played in narrowly selected decks, such as food chain in prossh. There are two main problems I would like to solve before suggesting this list be used as a guideline.

#1 If we list every card that becomes a problem with a specific commander, it may be more elegant to handle these cards as a category. This would be highly subjective and up for discussion.

#2 Strictly listing cards that behave as one-card combos ignores a gray area I would like to call "1.5 card combos." These are cards that don't typically win the game by themselves when resolved, but the number of ways they accidentally win the game means that they do not need specific combo pieces to go off. An example of such a card is palinchron. Time stretch and its ilk would be better described as 1.5 card combos because they typically need some help or setup to secure the game. This category could easily become bloated if the criteria is interpreted loosely.

Taking both of these ideas into account, here is a revised list of cards.

any card degenerate to a specific commander:
case-by-case.

1-card wins:
Tooth and nail
Enter the infinite
Omniscience

1.5-card wins
Time stretch
Expropriate
Palinchron
The chain veil

I have many more thoughts on this topic, but I want to know what the players think before moving forward. Is pushing away from cards that have a tendency to end the game with little interaction the direction to go? How could we, or should we expand on this? What is the cutoff point for how good a card can be, and how do we define it?


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