The Commander Rules Committee announced today that Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom are officially banned in Commander.
These bans come from a philosophy of wanting to slow down the format and enable fewer games to have a player jump out to a massive mana advantage. By hitting Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, and Dockside Extortionist players will have fewer combinations of cards and draws that allow a player to get to five mana or more on the second turn. The announcement calls out one of the core tenets of Commander being creativity and “one of the ways we have historically reflected that in the rules and ban list is to encourage a slower pace of game than traditional formats.”
Notably, Sol Ring and other pieces of fast mana like Mana Vault and other mana rocks were not touched. The Commander RC made it clear it is not planning on banning Sol Ring.
“We’re not banning Sol Ring and have no desire to. Yes, based on the criteria we’ve talked about here, it would be banned. Sol Ring is the iconic card of the format, and it’s sufficiently tied to the identity of the format that it defies the laws of physics in a way that no other card does. Banning Sol Ring would be fundamentally changing the identity of the format. We aren’t trying to eliminate all explosive starts—it happening every once in a while is exciting—and removing the other three cards geometrically reduces the number of hands capable of substantial above-curve mana generation in the first few turns.”
Toby Elliot
Nadu joins the three other cards on the chopping block due its problematic play patterns, showcased in other formats like Modern where it takes an exceedingly high amount of game actions in non-deterministic play sequences that take too long to be acceptable in the format.
“These aren’t dedicated combo lines that you have to build a deck around; dropping Nadu into a “normal” Simic shell still runs the risk of grinding the game down to a slog of resource accrual. It interacts badly with cards that are staples of casual play, most notably Lightning Greaves, meaning that decks it gets thrown into without abuse intent can still create a situation where the player is monopolizing all the time in the game. That’s not an experience we want to risk, so Nadu gets itself another ban.”
Toby Elliot
The Nadu ban is ironic, following the story of how the card was initially designed, changed to not be problematic in Commander, completely warped Modern after its release in Modern Horizons 3, and now finds itself banned in Commander even after its redesign.
The Magic community was shocked by the announcement with many players confused with the process, consistency of its message, and frustrated with the value their collections lost out of nowhere.
Read the official announcement from the Commander RC.
