After a brief tease during last week’s episode, today’s Weekly MTG delivered the promised Commander Bracket update. Looking back now, the tease definitely underplayed its significance. This was a large-scale update, featuring several structural changes to the brackets themselves. More importantly, it also took a hatchet to the current Game Changers list, removing 10 of its 60 cards. As a result, the Commander of tomorrow is going to look quite a bit different to the Commander of today.
Game Changers No More
To address the 10 shiny elephants in the room first, today’s Commander Bracket update removed 10 MTG cards from the Game Changers list. These cards are now free to be played in decks of any bracket.
The most exciting removals here are definitely Food Chain and Deflecting Swat. Both are very popular cards in bracket three and above, the former as a combo enabler and the latter as an interaction piece. The pair also see a good amount of cEDH play, which is testament to their power. Both of these cards were actually only added to the Game Changers list back in April, so they haven’t spent very long there at all.
According to Gavin Verhey, Food Chain is coming off the Game Changers list because of the restrictions on combos already in place in the bracket system, while Deflecting Swat was simply overvalued by the panel in terms of power level due to being a free spell.
A lot of the other Game Changer removals today are on the chunky side. Two of the original Phyrexian Praetors, Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger and Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur, have been freed from their prisons. Both are extremely powerful once they hit the board, but both are held back by their huge mana costs. The same is true for Sway of the Stars and Expropriate, which clock in at nine and 10 mana, respectively.
While Verhey acknowledged the power of these cards on today’s stream, he also noted that cards this expensive really should have such impactful effects. There are endless cards in the format with massive mana values that do a splashy thing, so keeping these on the list doesn’t make a ton of sense. With this batch now loose in the format, we may see other pricey Game Changers like Coalition Victory and Consecrated Sphinx follow suit at some point.
Legends Unleashed
On top of the above cards for the 99, today’s announcement also saw four legendary creatures removed from the Game Changer list. These are fairly surprising changes, in all honesty. All four of these legends have proven to be viable Commanders all the way up in cEDH, at one point or another.
Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow is perhaps the least competitive of the four. It’s an absolute menace at bracket three and four tables, mind you. Commander Ninjutsu is a fundamentally broken ability, so much so that Wizards developed a whole new mechanic to address its issues.
Urza, High Lord Artificer is another kettle of fish entirely. As a single creature that provides a threat, ramp, and card advantage in one, it’s terrifying to face down in the command zone. Verhey noted on the stream that Urza was the most “on the edge” of all the legend unbans today. We may, therefore, see it return to the Game Changers list before long.
The other two legends that got freed today were Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy and Winota, Joiner of Forces. If you know cEDH at all, you’ll know both of these Commanders for sure. While Winota has fallen out of favor recently, Kinnan remains one of the best overall Commanders in the format.
Unbanning such powerful legends seems like a reckless move, but Verhey laid out some solid reasoning for it on the stream. He noted that these legends, while overpowered in the command zone, are all reasonable additions to the 99 of decks. He also mentioned that in cases where players are running them as Commanders, their overall strategies are generally obvious enough for opponents to mount a counter-plan. In any case, it’ll be interesting to see how these removals play out.
The October 2025 MTG Commander Bracket Update
Huge Game Changer shifts aside, today’s update also included a few significant changes to the MTG Commander Bracket system itself. A lot of detail has been added to each bracket, as you can tell from the image above. The system, overall, is now more useful as a tool for tailoring your games.
Among these changes, a few are particularly noteworthy. For starters, restrictions on tutors are no longer present in any bracket. This means you can play as many non-Game Changer tutors as you want, all the way down in bracket one. As a change, this seems odd given Wizards’ anti-tutor stance on the format before. As Verhey said on stream, however, a lot of the better tutors are Game Changers now anyway, so a separate rule wasn’t really necessary.
In a similar vein, bracket two is no longer tied to “precon power level” as it was in the past. This was a confusing aspect of the bracket system, given the significant power disparity in precon decks. Decoupling this also frees Wizards up to deliver much-needed Game Changer reprints in precons, so overall it’s a great move.
Finally, each bracket now has a target “minimum game length” attached. Bracket one games should last at least nine turns for example, while bracket three games should last at least six. This is a really interesting way to balance the format, if perhaps a bit unwieldy in practice.
Overall, today’s Commander changes seem very positive. As Verhey noted on the stream, the Bracket system has been a big success so far. With regular maintenance like this, I expect it to stay that way.
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