The last time the MTG Commander ban list was updated was three years ago. The community has constantly complained about the lack of change since then. Commander was meant to be a place where players could play any card they wanted, leaving individual playgroups with the opportunity to curate their play experience as they please. Even then, however, some cards are too powerful.
No one expected four new Commander bans to hit the scene today. All of these bans are absolutely massive, with multiple $90+ cards taking a hit. This day is going to be remembered in the MTG community for years to come.
Mana Crypt Banned in Commander
To begin the absolute slaughterhouse of bans coming to the Commander format, Mana Crypt, one of the most iconic staples in the format, has been banned.
It’s not too difficult to understand why this card has left the Commander format. A zero mana artifact that taps for two mana every turn is a game, and format-warping fast mana effect. Mana Crypt wasn’t just one of the most powerful cards in Commander, it’s one of the most powerful cards in all of Magic: The Gathering.
This essentially lets you skip two turns’ worth of mana generation for little to no cost. The life loss does matter occasionally, but the benefit of Mana Crypt more than outweighs the cost. The Commander Advisory Group demonstrates that Mana Crypt can unlock other plays in your opening hand, easily generating five mana on turn one. This has been deemed too powerful for the Commander format.
Mana Crypt routinely goes for about $200 depending on the variant, which made this card very unrealistic for the average Commander player to run. This ban is more than likely going to crash the value of Mana Crypt since the card is losing its biggest home. It’s banned from play in pretty much every format except for Vintage. This is an absolutely astronomical ban.
Jeweled Lotus Banned in Commander
The ban of Mana Crypt, alone, would have been enough to shake the entire MTG world, but there are three more bans to talk about that are just as shocking as the first.
Jeweled Lotus, an MTG card made specifically for the Commander format, will also be leaving today. An obvious nod to Black Lotus, the most expensive card in all of MTG, Jeweled Lotus offers a free shot of mana that you can use to deploy your Commander ahead of time.
Similar to Mana Crypt, having one of these in the early game will completely warp your Commander experience. Jeweled Lotus can ramp out some absurdly powerful Commanders ahead of time, allowing one player to snowball into a winning position before the rest of the table has any time to react. Similar to Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus can easily generate five mana plays in early turns.
Notably, Jeweled Lotus does see some fringe Legacy play alongside Doubling Cube, but that isn’t going to be enough to save the card’s secondary market value.
Another similarity to Mana Crypt is that Jeweled Lotus is also absurdly expensive. Costing $90 in its cheapest variant, Jeweled Lotus is also going to lose the only format where it sees any play, which means that the card is going to crash. This will likely impact how Wizards of the Coast designs straight-to-Commander cards from now on.
Dockside Extortionist Banned in Commander
Dockside Extortionist is one of the most egregiously problematic cards in the Commander format. This is one of the few MTG cards that the group responsible for maintaining the Commander ban list had on their watchlist for a long time. Despite being slightly less expensive than the previous two bans, Dockside Extortionist is likely the most powerful card in the Commander format that is leaving today.
Like Mana Crypt and Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist is problematic because it provides a ton of free mana. Costing just two mana, it’s not uncommon for Dockside Extortionist to enter in the early game and produce six or more Treasure Tokens. The real issue with this card, however, is that Dockside Extortionist is stupidly easy to abuse. Because it creates Treasure Tokens on entry, all you need to do is find a way to redeploy the card repetitively to net infinite mana. Even without this abuse, Dockside Extortionist can easily provide enough mana to allow for an early win attempt.
The cheapest copy of Dockside Extortionist on the secondary market currently retails for $85. Like the other bans in this announcement, Dockside Extortionist saw almost exclusive play in the Commander format. Expect this card’s price to plummet in the coming days.
Nadu, Winged Wisdom Banned in Commander
It’s ironic to me that, in trying to make Nadu, Winged Wisdom more balanced in the Commander format, Wizards of the Coast actually made Nadu a much bigger problem for multiple formats. After leaving the Modern format thanks to a design mistake, Nadu, Winged Wisdom will now be leaving the Commander format for the same reason.
Initially, Nadu Winged Wisdom was supposed to be a Flash Commander, allowing you to play your permanents at instant speed. The card itself also had Flash and granted all of your nonland permanents the same protection that Nadu provides now. The catch? Only your opponent’s effects triggered Nadu.
Thanks to a last-second change in an attempt to nerf the original design a bit, MTG designers missed a crucial interaction with Nadu, Winged Wisdom: the ability to abuse effects like Shuko to create long combo chains. Players targeting their own cards and triggering Nadu’s effects got it into more trouble across formats than the original design would have caused in any format.
Not only does this create absurdly powerful combo turns, but those turns are incredibly convoluted, create messy board states, and generate long, non-deterministic win attempts that force players to play through the entire loop, only for the combo to sometimes fizzle. This is an incredibly unenjoyable play experience in a social format that is more dedicated to the game’s state than the competitive result of a match.
Even if Nadu, Winged Wisdom isn’t being played as a Commander, the card is powerful (and cheap) enough to warrant a place in many Simic deck’s 99. Nadu, Winged Wisdom interacts problematically with Commander super staples (namely Lightning Greaves), and can therefore create this disgusting play experience in decks where Nadu isn’t even the main focus. This is the reason why Nadu, Winged Wisdom has been banned in the Commander format and, honestly, a lot of people are happy to see it go.
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An Unprecedented Change
These incredibly surprising bans are going to shake Commander players to their core. Not only do these bans heavily impact Commander at every level, but the format has also become a lot more accessible. Almost all of the cards leaving the format were incredibly expensive for the average MTG player, and lowering the barrier to entry, as well as the percentage of games where a player will gain an early advantage that is impossible to beat, is likely going to be a good thing for a majority of Commander players.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of Commander players are going to lose hundreds of dollars in secondary market value today. The banning of Mox Opal in the past was such a heavy blow to some MTG players that they turned away from the Modern format entirely. We don’t expect these bannings to have quite the same effect on Commander, but there will likely be some players upset that their collection took a financial hit.
In our opinion, this is largely a positive for the Commander format. This demonstrates that the Commander ban list can change, and impact Magic’s biggest format in a positive way. That said, it has been stated that the Commander Advisory Group hopes for some quieter updates in the future, so this may end up being a loud anomaly.
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