Changes to the Commander Ban List

by David Rowell, Contributing Writer

For some reason, the official Commander Ban Committee has decided to forgo the “banned as a commander” list from their Commander Banlist, and ban the cards entirely or unban them entirely. You can find the OP here.

I’m just going to quickly go over the cards and then I’ll talk about what I think of the new banlist.

Braids, Cabal Minion has been banned as long as I’ve been playing Commander, but this banning entirely is the only one I don’t really disagree with. The card has always been oppressive, and i can understand getting rid of it completely. I don’t think they really needed to go out of the way and hit this with the banhammer, though.

People are very unhappy that Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary has been banned. While  he definitely needed to be banned as a commander, I don’t believe he had to be banned completely. As a 25 dollar card, a lot of people just bought this for their mono-green decks, and now they have 25 dollar cards that can’t be played in anything relevant.

This one I don’t really disagree with, seeing as I’m not a fan of this card anyway. Erayo, Soratami Ascendant and the flip side Erayo Essence probably should have been banned already with cards like Arcane Laboratory being around. It’s oppressive as Braids is, but I don’t really think it deserved the complete banhammer.

Kokusho, the Evening Star has now been unbanned completely, which I’m not looking forward to. While I usually would be happy about this, there’s too many loops that involve Kokusho, and the consistency of him being in the Command Zone bothers me a little bit.

Metalworker is now unbanned. This is actually a pretty relevant card in a lot of artifact-based Commander decks, and I’m happy to see it unbanned, though I also would plan on playing a deck with it, and not against it.

To me, this change in banlist just feels lazy. The main justification seems to be that people were too stupid to understand there are two ban lists, which is ridiculous. It wasn’t confusing in the slightest, and I have no idea what getting rid of that list has to do with unbanning Metalworker.

I mostly want to hear what you guys have to say about these bannings, and what changes you think it’ll have on the format.

Until next time,
- SolemnParty (David Rowell)