I'm Brawling, I'm Brawling, I'm Brawling For You

You’ve no doubt recently heard about the new Magic format, Brawl. Last
week,

Gavin Verhey released the announcement on the mothership

, to quite a bit of discussion, and a day later

Katie Allison did the same

, to even more discussion. I have a few things to say about the format I’ve
already heard folks calling “Commander Lite.” They’re almost all entirely
positive. First, let’s review the mechanics:

Standard Legal
: Seems okay so far.

Legendary Creature or
Planeswalker
as Commander
: Also seems okay, but you bet we’ll talk about that a little more.

Same Color Restrictions as Commander
: I would hope so; otherwise it seems silly to have a commander.

Same rules for the commander
: It costs two more each time you cast it from the command zone, and if it
would go to other zones (graveyard, library, exile), you can choose to put
it back into the command zone. Again, it’s silly to designate a commander
without having special rules for it.

30 Life
: Not unreasonable.

No Commander Damage
: This is where we may call Houston.

Let’s work on the details a little. Standard legality seems to be the
biggest draw so far. In terms of card availability, cost, and
accessibility, this is a strong choice. We aren’t in the days of Standard
when your playset of Primeval Titan or Baneslayer Angel would cost you
$200. A quick search of the site shows that only four cards (Rekindling
Phoenix; The Scarab God; Search for Azcanta; Chandra, Torch of Defiance;
and Carnage Tyrant cost over $20). That’s a huge plus in my book. Being
Standard legal means familiarity is better for players as well. These are
the cards they’re drafting and building the FNM decks with. There are 1371
cards between the sets (not counting duplicates, like basic land), so the
card pool is pretty tight. It’s not like regular Commander in which you
have to pore over lists of cards, some of which are older than you are. You
don’t have the broad and (admittedly) broken stuff that Commander is famous
for. The sandbox you’re playing in is quite a bit smaller, although that
doesn’t mean you have to be less creative; in fact, you probably have to be
moreso. You can’t necessarily rely on old staples to fill out your decklist
with (”

okay, let’s start with Solemn Simulacrum, Burnished Hart, and see if I
have any Sol Rings laying around

“), you have to be thinking from the first card choice about how you’re
going to sculpt the whole thing.

Over on the Premium side earlier this week,
Chas Andres highlighted how inexpensive some of cards which are likely
to be top Brawl commanders might be
, from the $7 Gishath down to the 79 cent Captain Lannery Storm. Chas’ most
lingering point is that cards which will be good in Brawl might be
excellent speculative choices, since there’s always going to be demand for
them from the Commander crowd. You’re welcome.

One of the things that’s both good and bad is that there will probably be a
limited number of viable archetypes. The bad is that you’re going to see
the same stuff over and over, way more than you might in Big Commander. The
good is that you’re going to know more about what other people might be
playing, so as to be adequately prepared. I’m pretty sure that even though
it’s called casual, Brawl is going to be end up a competitive format. On
the Elder Dragon Statesmen podcast this week, Anthony and I picked which
pros we’d like to see build decks. I’ll let you tune in to hear Anthony’s
(sort of fanboyish) choice, but mine own, Sam Black, told him that he’s
hip-deep as we speak in an article with five decks in it. If Sam’s that far
in, we know it’s going to have a good competitive side, while it can
probably still support some casual.

The downside that I see to being Standard legal is of course that cards
rotate out. One of the draws to Commander is that you can build a cool
deck, carry it around with you for a long time, occasionally update it, and
still have something ready for action. With maybe a third to a half of the
cards moving out of your deck annually, it’ll be something that you have to
pay closer attention to; I’m not saying that it’s a fatal flaw or anything,
but when one has limited time already for Magic, adding something onto the
pile which is more time-consuming can be a negative. Honestly, it’s hardly
a big one.

To me, the real upside of the Standard card pool is that infinite combos
are pretty hard to find-although Magic players are pretty good at finding
them, wherever they are. It feels like this format will be much more about
playing the game and interactivity, which is always an upside. The biggest
upside I see to the Standard card pool is that when your cards rotate out,
you can just add those other 40 to the deck, and boom, you have a Big
Commander masterpiece (props to Niels Bars-Roosemalen on Facebook for
offering me that suggestion).

As far as choosing your commander goes, there’s the big thing we have to
talk about: Planeswalkers being legal choices. Surprisingly, given the
Commander Rules Committee’s stance that we’re not going to make PWs legal,
I’m on board with this decision. For one, I think recent Planeswalkers are
much less likely to be broken as commanders than older ones. One of the
reasons the RC has chosen to not make this particular leap is that we’d
have to ban some number of them, and we’d really like to keep the list as
short as possible, as well as keeping as much message clarity as we can.
I’ve been asked numerous times if Brawl allowing Planeswalkers will open
the door to us reconsidering it. The first thing I’ll say is that we try to
never close doors. The second thing is that the presence of them as
available commanders in Brawl probably makes us less likely to
pull the trigger on making a change, since now there’s an option for folks
who want to try it out (beyond the normal option of convincing your
playgroup to give it a whirl). I’m obviously quite curious about how it
works out, although my current thought is that it can be good for Brawl and
not good for Commander at the same time.

Strategically, having a planeswalker as the commander suffers from the fact
that it tends to be vulnerable. Generally, they have a tough time defending
themselves, so you’ll need to build in some sort of defense, assuming you
want to get to that emblem. If you’re defending, you’re not attacking, and
attacking is the way to win. I suspect that the lion’s share (no Ajani puns
intended) of new decks we see try to work in Planeswalkers as commanders,
since it’s the new, shinier feature.

As far as choices for commanders go, you currently have 88 choices.
Eliminating the mono-color ones, you have 34 (as a public service, listed
here):

I’m sure that some of the mono-color ones will be really good, but I have
trouble seeing it. When you limit yourself to one color, you constrict
yourself a great deal (which might be great creatively, but strategically
it can be quite awkward).

There’s a broad selection of commanders available to suit every taste, it
seems-although classic control might be tough. Perhaps with Azor, the
Lawbringer, but it’s expensive enough that you had really better
be ready to defend your board position. In the 30-life game, multiple
castings of a commander are going to happen far less often, since games
will be faster (which is what I suspect will be one of the draws to it).

I’m about a month from the end of the semester at the moment and have a
major research project and Digital Humanities prototype project to build (

check out the brief description of it here

), so I haven’t gone into deep thought yet about which of these cool
commanders I’d build a deck from this pretty spicy list. Off the top of my
head, Gishath, Sun’s Avatar seems attractive, because, you know, Dinosaurs,
but with the lack of quality ramp in Standard (not necessarily a downside
in the bigger picture of the format), it might be tricky. What I can
already see as problematic is that the Dinosaurs that you’ll want to have
in the deck can be nearly as pricey as their boss, so you won’t have too
much early action.

My first real thought is Rashmi, Eternities Crafter. She’s at the right
cost, and she gives you free stuff. With the relative lack of ramp, card
draw will likely be of heightened importance in Brawl, and Rashmi is happy
to help you in that regard-and she’s in the proper colors to help even
more.

My second off-the-cuff choice is Elenda, the Dusk Rose, because I think
life gain is going to be huge in the format. Huge. More on that, in a bit,
though. Elenda gets pretty huge rather quickly, and can be gaining tons of
life for you in short order. And you can play Victory’s Herald, which may
end up a format all-star.

I have to go with The Scarab God as the third choice, somewhat just because
Zombies, but mostly because it’s a thoroughly awesome card. First looks
like the Zombies aren’t all that great, but there are a few hits, like
Nantuko Husk, Fleshbag Marauder, and Lord of the Accursed. I wonder if Dominaria will have any Zombies in it…

As far as the format having the same color restrictions as Commander, I’m
completely on board. The format is identifiable from those (as discussed,
creativity-enhancing) restrictions; Commander and Brawl will be forever
linked by them. And since there aren’t any hybrid mana cards in Standard,
we won’t have to make Mark Rosewater sad.

Thirty life has the distinct purpose of making games faster and making
hyper-aggressive strategies more viable, which is eminently reasonable in a
format called Brawl (40 life makes it more of a chess match). You’re going
to have to be careful that your life isn’t in a precarious position on what
could be some early turns. The card pool isn’t going to allow those
200-damage turns that we’ve all come to know and love from Commander, so
you can still feel generally safe that no one is going to do the big
wipeout-but there’s more than enough power available to kill one person
easily enough. When you’re the one getting killed, it’s a small solace that
not everyone else did, too.

My largest concern, which has not yet developed into a full criticism,
since I haven’t played the format yet, regards the lack of Commander
damage. With the life totals set at 30, it feels like life gain will be the
biggest of deals. If you’re capable of gaining it faster than people are
dishing it out, there’s no downside. Even if you’re just keeping pace,
you’ll have quite a bit of advantage. In a format that’s meant to be faster
and more aggressive, making life gain sufficiently important seems to be at
counter purposes to getting games done in a timely fashion. In fact, the
idea of commander damage was one of the first things which I realized would
be great about the format, back when it was called EDH. Multiplayer games,
even those which started at 20 life, tended to bog down as life gain took
center stage, and no one was ever in any danger of dying. You have to
understand that back then creatures weren’t anywhere near as good as they
are today (by orders of magnitude), and control strategies ruled the day.
What we used to call General Damage mitigated the idea that you could just
pillow fort your way through a game. Some of my fondest memories of
Commander games have involved getting hit for 21. One was when Anthony from
my local group killed me by attacking with Riku of Two Reflections then
casting Mercadia’s Downfall, and copying it with Riku’s ability. Never did
a shrug-worthy “I’ll take two” turn so fast to screams. The other epic
commander damage win was when one of the locals killed me with damage from
Zedruu, the Greathearted-over about 10 turns, finally getting the last bit
through by jumping Zedruu with Elspeth, Knight-Errant. Again, I want to
reserve judgment until I see the format play out, but my early take is that
the lack of commander damage might end up as problematic for the format. We
shall see.

I’m certainly going to play Brawl. I might even build four or five
(hopefully balanced) decks so that I can gather with the local gang and
play some, even if they haven’t had the chance to build one yet. New
formats breed excitement about the game in general and bring in new
players, so they’re never bad things. In fact, one of the things I keep
hearing people say about the format is that it seems like that even at its
worst, nothing really bad can happen. I suppose we’ll find out.

This Week’s Deck Without Comment is Borrowing Stuff, led by one of those
Standard-legal Commanders.

Commander: Admiral Beckett Brass

Borrowing Stuff At Cutlass Point

Sheldon Menery

Test deck on 03-29-2018

Commander

Creatures (34)

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Dack Fayden

Lands (37)

Check out our comprehensive Deck List Database for lists of all my decks:

SIGNATURE DECKS

Purple Hippos and Maro Sorcerers

;

Kresh Into the Red Zone

;

Halloween with Karador

;

Dreaming of Intet

;

You Did This to Yourself

.

THE CHROMATIC PROJECT

Mono-Color

Heliod, God of Enchantments

;

Thassa, God of Merfolk

;

Erebos and the Halls Of The Dead

;

Forge of Purphoros

;

Nylea of the Woodland Realm

;

Karn

Evil No. 9.

Guilds

Lavinia Blinks

;

Obzedat, Ghost Killer

;

Aurelia Goes to War

;

Trostani and Her Angels

;

Lazav, Shapeshifting Mastermind

;

Zegana and a Dice Bag

;

Rakdos Reimagined

;

Glissa, Glissa

;

Ruric Thar and His Beastly Fight Club

;

Gisa and Geralf Together Forever

.

Shards and Wedges

Adun’s Toolbox

;

Angry, Angry Dinos

;

Animar’s Swarm

;

Borrowing Stuff at Cutlass Point

;

Ikra and Kydele

;

Karrthus, Who Rains Fire From The Sky

;

Demons of Kaalia

;

Merieke’s Esper Dragons

;

Nath of the Value Leaf

;

Rith’s Tokens

;

The Mill-Meoplasm

;

The Altar of Thraximundar

;

The Threat of Yasova

;

Zombies of Tresserhorn

.

Four Color

Yidris: Money for Nothing, Cards for Free

;

Saskia Unyielding

;

Breya Reshaped

.

Five-Color

Children of a Greater God

Partners

Tana and Kydele

;

Kynaios and Tiro

;

Ikra and Kydele

.

THE DO-OVER PROJECT

Adun Oakenshield Do-Over

;

Animar Do-Over

;

Glissa Do-Over

;

Karador Do-Over

;

Karador Version 3

;

Karrthus Do-Over

;

Kresh Do-Over

;

Steam-Powered Merieke

Do-Over;

Lord of Tresserhorn Do-Over

;

Mimeoplasm Do-Over

;

Phelddagrif Do-Over

;

Rith Do-Over

;

Ruhan Do-Over

.

If you’d like to follow the adventures of my Monday Night RPG group (in a
campaign that’s been alive since 1987) which is just beginning the saga The Lost Cities of Nevinor, ask for an invitation to the Facebook
group “Sheldon Menery’s
Monday Night Gamers.”

I’m Brawling, I’m Brawling, I’m Brawling For You