A Tucking Controversy.

Yesterday the Rules Committee put forth an update that changed the rules regarding moving your commander into your library or your hand. They adopted the rule from French 1v1 where if your commander would go to your hand or library you may put it into your command zone instead. This has caused a ton of controversy, and, while I am not wearing a tinfoil hat, I do believe this is a change for the worse overall. When I first read the announcement my initial reaction was positive. That lasted for about a minute while I digested the ramifications. I think this stems from a well meaning intention to solidify what happens when your commander would leave the battlefield while also removing the "feel bad" nature of losing access to your general, but in reality they are going to move in the opposite direction. Commander is a casual format. There are no official tournaments or contests. However, that means that the format has no good definition. I'm going to post a quote here from Aaron Forsythe that I think accurately summarizes the problem,

"Casual play is inherently flawed. I am, if it isn't obvious, referring to playing Magic with "fun decks" that are either not tournament legal or worthy. Winning is supposed to take a backseat to having fun, but the object of the game you are playing is to win. So you have to win while pretending like you aren't trying to win, because if you're trying to win, you aren't having fun. But if you aren't trying to win… why are you playing? So everyone builds goofy decks that they each think "aren't very good" or "are lots of fun." Everyone has different opinions on what "good" and "fun" are, so disputes usually ensue. For example, if you are playing a Chimera deck (2/2 Visions artifact dudes, not Nicholas Labarre's Worlds monstrosity) and I'm playing my jewelry-packed "fun" infinite turns deck that wins with a lone Headstone, you're bound to get a little annoyed. But we're just playing for fun, right? I mean, no one would ever play with Headstone in a tournament, let alone build a whole deck around it. So it must be fun. I'm sure you can see the problem." - Aaron Forsythe


EDH is many different things to different people, and while you can always retort that you just don't play with the people who are doing degenerate things, the format allows for degenerate things. There are so many strategies that can be labeled cheap or be soft-banned. I recently played with someone that conceded when an opponent played Iona. The Iona wasn't called on his colors but he just refuses to play a game with that card. Soft-banning things is the worst way to manage an environment since it makes the waters muddy. That was fine when the format was something that they played in their spare time, but its become a massive institution with a yearly product. WotC has basically put their stamp on the format and said, "This is our official casual format." The RC can't just bury their heads in the sand and think that what they do doesn't affect thousands of people. Nowadays people build their EDH decks and they go to tournaments at other stores and they want to play EDH with new people. The easiest way is to just default to the official rules. I bring this up because the RC gave us no warning that it was even going to happen, or opportunity to debate them on the issue. All of the points that they raised are easily disputed as well. Removing tuck does nothing to discourage tutors. A 100 card singleton format does everything possible to encourage tutors. Your deck is enormous and you have a number of powerful synergistic, or situational cards that you want to be able to get in short order. The point about tuck being in white and blue is also easily pushed aside by the nature of the color pie. Red doesn't have enchantment removal, blue is bad at creature removal, etc. The more galling part of this point was saying that they are trying to promote a diverse field when this change will likely narrow the field to generals that are linearly powerful now that they can be cast willy nilly. The last point is also totally irrelevant. Stating that you aren't going to have to worry about manifesting your commander now that you can move the general to your command zone does literally nothing to address that problem. Not clarifying the rules and using this to cover the gap regarding commander identity is like putting a board over a broken window. Sure it'll do but it doesn't actually fix the problem. Finally we come to their first point,

 "1) We want to engender as positive an experience as we can for players. Nothing runs the feel-bads worse than having your commander unavailable to you for the whole game." 

On the surface this sounds positive but it is powerfully incorrect. The math is quite easy to see as well. I will use an example from another genre of gaming. In a MOBA such as League of Legends it is entirely possible to get shut out of a game by being repeatedly killed or denied gold. That makes the game quite unfun for you personally. It is still a punishable offense to quit that game. The reasoning is that while the game might no longer be fun for you, you negatively impact the fun of the rest of your team by leaving. The same can be said of EDH though from a slightly different angle. Playing some of the linear commander strategies can be unfun for your opponents. Playing Kaalia or Deveri demands an answer of some sort, but prior to this ruling you could play one of these decks without being inherently overpowered. A lot came down to deck construction, but a large component of what was keeping you from being oppressive is the presence of a permanent answer to your shenanigans. It meant that your opponent still had options and you had to have a plan B or risk losing. By removing the ability to tuck a problem at the table you make life better for the people playing strong strategies and simultaneously make life worse for the people playing the game you want them to play. Life is worse for Zur's three opponents and better for Zur. We don't need to make Zur's life any better, he's already strong. You need to look at the table as a whole instead of each individual player. In this scenario you are +1 and -3, which is not a positive change. These rules work in French EDH. That format is more competitive and its a duel format. Losing your commander would be a huge disadvantage to one side, and the color restriction is more meaningful in 1v1. At a multiplayer table one of the three/four players is likely to be able to play some amount of tuck and even if they don't the threat of tuck is often enough to alter deck construction or play patterns of the guy playing Sharuum or whomever.

This is all just my opinion, and honestly the number of games I see with tuck effects are small. Most people only run them when they make sense as a response to something that exists in their local metagame or when they go off to another store and don't know the landscape. In other words, most players that play tuck only do so when they are unaware of the level of Bullshit that other groups play with. Mature groups rarely need to play much, if any, tuck. The new rule is going to change that as more players discover the power of voltron and combo and don't run into any real resistance. Others are predicting more resource denial to put the general tax out of reach for problematic commanders. I think that is nowhere near as likely as more people moving to non-interactive combo and games coming down to the first player to do their thing. That is the opposite intention of the RC. 

Also of note is that one of the intentions of this change is to make the format accessible to new players. If a new player buys the Derevi precon and sits down at a table he is going to take a ton of hate. The only way to get that general off the table is to ruthlessly attack its owner. This makes certain generals more likely to be attacked than others. That's always been the case, but this exacerbates the problem and is more likely to make new players reticent to play if they get hated out by their commander choice. The simple solution would be to keep the new rule and then ban a bunch of legendary creatures. However, the problems with banning are monumental as well. Banning creatures means that they are banned period since thee decision to only have one list, depriving people of cards that would be totally fine as part of the 99, like Narset. The other problem is banning out decks that people have built to be non-degenerate versions of established "bad" decks. If someone builds Jhoira with Eldrazi and so forth than their deck is really unhealthy. If they build it as Time Shenanigans with lots of Time Spiral cards and neat interactions with suspend then its totally fine. The changes risk necessitating the ban of Jhoira for the oppressive deck, and that splashes the people who intentionally break the mold. Banning is also the most "feel bad" of all when people spend hundreds of dollars on alters and foils for their deck. Soft banning, as mentioned above, only makes things muddier and more obtuse for people trying to get into the format. 

I suppose that the largest problem is that while EDH is a non-competitive format, its impossible to completely excise Spike from the equation. Timmy and Johnny run rampant in EDH but everyone prefers winning to losing if given the option. This change helps Spike in a format not designed for Spike. It does so under the surface by causing people to put less effort into a plan B and play more linear powerful strategies with less defense and fewer back ups. Its intended to make people less afraid to cast their general and it succeeds. You should want to cast your general, but in doing so they removed a fundamental check on the format and its likely not going to have a positive effect. I doubt that it will ruin anything, but not considering all of these points and making their decision based on a tiny sample of their own playgroup speaks to the RC being disconnected and wielding too much power. They really need to reach out to other pillars of the community and ask for their input. To test their changes with a wider selection of the public, or, if they already do that, to be more transparent about their process since none of their stated reasons really account for this change or why it happened so abruptly.