The long-awaited Commander format update has arrived! Gavin Verhey posted two articles, a Good Morning Magic video, and also appeared on an hour-long Weekly MTG stream on Tuesday, going through unbans, new Game Changers, what they considered, what they didn’t, which cards were unbanned, how they’re changing Brackets, and more.

We've gotten a lot of information to go through. However, I’m interested in just one thing: how do these new changes impact Bracket 5 - my beloved Competitive EDH (cEDH)?

The new Game Changers don’t matter much - we’re in a realm that doesn’t care about them, so I’ll keep my commentary on those to another venue. Still, there was a lot we learned this week about the present, so I’m going to do my best to break down what matters and what doesn’t - and what the future may hold.

Cards Unbanned in Commander

First, the overview. The following cards have been unbanned:

• Braids, Cabal MinionBraids, Cabal Minion
• Panoptic MirrorPanoptic Mirror
• Sway of the StarsSway of the Stars
• Coalition VictoryCoalition Victory
• Gifts UngivenGifts Ungiven

In short - this feels a little bit safe. Four of the five are almost certainly not going to have an impact on the Competitive EDH format - and even more so I would guess that they won’t see much play in normal Commander either. Panoptic MirrorPanoptic Mirror, Sway of the StarsSway of the Stars, and Coalition VictoryCoalition Victory are all bits of cardboard that people have asked to come off of the ban list for years now - saying they feel a bit less egregious than in years past. These changes are a bit of safe banlist trimming that’ll also make the crowd at home happy and test the whole “unban to game changers” pipeline thing. Braids, Cabal MinionBraids, Cabal Minion is slightly more of a danger for taking off the ban list, just because it can be a pretty miserable experience in casual games if it resolves.

The Gifts UngivenGifts Ungiven unban though - now that is interesting! Gifts is a situationally better, situationally worse version of IntuitionIntuition (which is why I’ve always been confused as to why it was banned when we had Intuition, etc.) that seems best suited to inclusion in the likes of Blue Farm and other decks that make heavy use of the graveyard. The sidegrade tech of being able to only search up two cards - forcing both to go to your graveyard - could be relevant depending on what you have in hand, but in most situations you'd rather spend one more mana to end up with one more card in hand. If you can get to the said four mana, that’s a pretty good trade.

Also, the most obvious use case of this one is someone who wants a draw searching up four counterspells, targeting the other player who really wants a draw. That ain’t that fun. More about that later, though.

The Rest of the Year for Brackets and Bans

The biggest impact on cEDH from this update, besides what they didn’t unban (more about that in a bit too), was announcing their plans for the rest of the year: a focus on letting the bracket system settle in, a continual refinement of both it and the Game Changer list, and similar before formally taking both out of beta in 2026.

To help settle the waters as they work on that aim, they said there would be no more unbannings or bannings this year - unless there was a “Nadu situation” necessitating a sort of emergency ban. With this knowledge, it starts to become more clear why this unban was on the safer side. If they aren’t wanting to fiddle with the banlist for the next eight months, this instead becomes a test of a theory. Does unbanning something and transitioning it into a Game Changer, even with a more risky card like Braids or Gifts, work out well? Is it a path they can continue going down?

This thought processes and reticence makes some sense to me, and I do think that Brackets and Game Changer tweaks have way more potential to effect the average invested EDH player than straight up banlist changes. But I'm still a bit frustrated that they are committing to no action this far out. There are still plenty of cards that could come off the banlist, and slow rolling the process, while it doesn’t exactly hurt anyone, would keep momentum moving towards a more meaningfully shaken up format. I get it though; stability is king!

The Elephants in the Room - Dockside, Mana Crypt & Jeweled Lotus

Look, I’m not really going to be jumping around moralizing anything here. The Commander Format Panel can unban or keep these cards banned as they see fit. Do I think the specter of what happened surrounding their banning will pretty much forever taint them? Aaaabsolutely!

Regardless, we did get a bit more clarity on the three cards that were basically banned straight out of cEDH top tables several months ago. The light shed on them did point where I expected: we can expect to probably never see Mana CryptMana Crypt and Dockside ExtortionistDockside Extortionist again. Jeweled LotusJeweled Lotus, however, was given an olive branch of hope, with Gavin saying that it resonated more because it shares a kind of iconic design with Black LotusBlack Lotus.

This feels like a weird argument to make; you can just say that WotC likes the card being legal and they enjoy the effects it has on the format. This, independent of my frustrations re: Dockside being banned removing the best non-blue-centric game winning option from the cEDH cardpool, does make some level of sense to me. Jeweled LotusJeweled Lotus is the “safest” of the bunch, given it only speeds up Commander casting (in the format called Commander) rather than providing more widely usable explosive mana production. Dockside ExtortionistDockside Extortionist itself was on and off the radar of the Rules Committee for some time; it was known as an amount of problematic and therefore not that surprising when it was banned. It does strike me as a card that could fall in line with other Game Changers. While the door is closed, I think a window could open.

Mana CryptMana Crypt will remain the sticking point that frustrates people for years to come, and reasonably so. It’s never going to be easy to ban a very expensive card. It’s not easy to unban it either; creating two huge waves of bad feels from one card is not great. I can’t imagine a path to this one coming back.

The Commander Format Panel Probably Can’t Fully Fix cEDH’s Problems

cEDH has a few different prominent problems currently - the peak of which are currently the “midrange hell” meta we find ourselves in, focused around Rhystic StudyRhystic Study, Mystic RemoraMystic Remora, and more. People sit behind their value engines and angle towards forcing a draw, for some reason. I ran into this behavior for the first time ever at the TopDeck Open in 2023 - and since then it’s really taken off to an obnoxious extent.

A lot of people point to the latest bans as a reason for this - and they may have contributed. However, I’m more of the opinion that these play patterns were always prevalent beforehand; players already loved to Demonic TutorDemonic Tutor for their Rhystic StudyRhystic Study and then watched someone Thoracle Combo them with one piece of backup. Playing safe is naturally attractive. People love to not take risks, and risks in cEDH can end up blowing up spectacularly. Turtling up isn’t risky - that’s why people are so biased towards this play pattern. The printing of more flash enablers has obviously also helped - making it even more attractive to sit back and wait rather than taking definitive action at the (perceived) risk of being stopped (and then losing). A single ban or unban won’t fix this; they won’t change a dang thing if people don’t stop convincing themselves that refusing to play the game until they have 15 green lights to win is the easiest way to equity. Just win.

Still, players will continue to do this no matter how much I rant about it. And cards like Rhystic StudyRhystic Study & Valley FloodcallerValley Floodcaller do help enable the problem in the first place as well. A ban of such a card (or an unban to re-Turbo things slightly) would definitely tilt the scale and make it easier for players to, well, play to their outs. That’s something the panel could do to help. But I would, as ever, continue to not expect it as a rule; the focus always will remain on where the vast majority of players live, which is realistically Bracket 2-4.

However, there is some hope. During the Weekly MTG Stream, Gavin answered a question about the format and said they're very aware of where cEDH is and what its players think, referencing the FlashFlash ban as a precedent to taking action that will help Bracket 5 (wink) without affecting the rest of the format much.

I have a hunch that a relatively surgical ban (e.g., Mystic RemoraMystic Remora, which isn't as egregious as Rhystic Study, but still part of the problem and played much less in casual circles) could be the easiest solution.