We React to the Official Ban List Official Explanations | Commander Clash Podcast 134 

Do itttt

I second this. Everyone play high power degeneracy for a season and see what is actually the most broken. My bets are one ring

I see 2 issues with this: 1) it would all just be about moxes/lotus/ancestral, and a majority of the cards wouldn't really get to shine. Like sure that primeval titan took over the game, but that is because you black lotus it out turn 1. 2) They would need to do the entire season in paper with proxies (which is maybe fine, but I enjoy the MODO games as well). I wouldn't mind seeing a season where each person came up with their own ban list for an episode, and everyone abided by that.

@@AustinMerfeld i guess yeah keep fast mana out. Fast mana leans towards cedh. I want just high power midrange casual. Thatd be the entertaining part. Using everything strong but not necessarily making it cedh. Would be very interesting to see imo

I'd say it'd be good to play no-banlist EDH with these contentious cards like Primeval Titan or something, not the Moxen or like Limited Resources.

i read it as El Mothered lmao

capitalize your tags kids

Seth I could see but Richard?

As someone who has been a bystander and on the receiving end of Iona, I completely agree. As a bystander there isn't any reason to remove it because it effectively knocks out one player and as the mono-color player it effectively prevents you from playing the game completely. While the other cards mentioned are powerful, they all follow the 'dies to doom blade' mentality where you can still interact with them. Unless you are running colorless removal (which in most decks is in small amounts if at all), you can't do anything other then use what you currently have on board which is often times not enough.

Yeah, Iona is in the sweet spot of not immediately winning the game while also arbitrarily making it awful. If it won the game on the spot it would be less miserable.

As someone who loves to play mono black and played in California with highly competitive players, I learned to live with it for years. There are enough colorless answers that each cost about 7 mana to cast/activate that answer Iona and many other problems before she was banned. From memory, there was unstable Obelisk, the Eldrazi spell, and Karn. I think there were more. Iona 💯 is a "feels bad" card, but by being a mono black player, I dove head first into the lore of being the evil bad guy at the table [in character] and built my deck with answers for the problems the "hero" decks tried to use against me.

?? "It just stops one player from playing the game", and this makes her deserve to be banned??

You are incorrect. They banned it because they merged the "banned as commander" and "banned in the 99" together. Iona being in the command zone cannot be reanimated for 3 mana and isn't a problem. Similarly Braids in the command zone is a problem but in the 99 is fine. #freebraids.

Not only that, but it's a prime reanimation target. This is the 2nd or 3rd time Goldfish has had an in depth conversation regarding Iona, yet everyone fails to mention reanimation as an option.

@@Jethro_Wilkins Really just any way to cheat it out. i played it in a Kaalia deck and if it hit the battlefield it just shuts off a fair amount of interaction. Happened to hit it on a friend while he was playing a mono deck and he was absolutly miserable for the rest of the game being shut out.

Should have kept Iona instead of unbanning Painters 😂

@@GomuRoux The issue with that is getting rid of Painter gets rid of the combo but not the times when someone just plays Iona and screws over a mono color deck. The typical use case for Iona is still bad by that metric.

It was also banned after the formation of the CAG iirc. The CAG doesn't ban cards, but they do advocate for things. And Shivam was very vocally anti-Iona.

Also not a huge fan of the "Blood Moon" argument (which I think someone else mentioned the last time the crew talked about Iona). Yeah, it's a kind of lock, but they are diametrically opposed in how they lock players. Blood Moon taxes greedy mana bases with no basics, while Iona decidedly locks a mono-colored player out of the game (unless they politic around that somehow, like Phil mentioned).

Also combines nicely with Gifts

Ban list conversations are rarely actually thought about critically, it always just ends up like "but what about this card?" instead

@@Jethro_Wilkins It's the right argument. A turn 3 bloodmoon can ruin 3 peoples gameplan, because who plays more than a couple of basics in a decently powerleveled EDH deck? Except for mono colored decks obviously. So...a turn 3 bloodmoon can be even more devastating than a cheated in Iona. ANd that's what the argument is about. If Iona is a problem and needs to be banned, why not bloodmoon (which is btw harder to remove than Iona)? Why not NEO Jin? Thalia? You can name so many cards, which can just ruin entire decks from turn 2 onwards.

right, this would get sped out by kaaalia of the vast. no one wanted to spend 9 on a mono white commander ;D

Gaea's craddle would be an auto include in any green deck if it wasn't 2000$ and it isn't banned

Yeah that was wild. I was surprised the other two didn't react to him saying that.

I don’t think he was implying they are equal but just commenting that you can similarly put the game away with other broken ramp like Open the Way. What are people going to do to slow you down when they have like 6 mana and you have like 15 from casting an Open the way, recur it and cast again next turn… in a Simic Deck, where you likely draw cards for all those lands… It’s probably GG.

@@Dragon_Fyre but Open the Way is not even close to being "broken" ramp.

@@Blacklodge_Willy Neither is prime time. He's not broken when just being used to ramp and if Gaea's cradle is in your pods then the power level is presumably high enough to deal with a prime time. What makes him broken are lands like Field of the Dead. If someone paying 6 mana to grab 2 random 1-mana generating lands that's a fair rate. They even come in tapped.

@@Blacklodge_Willy It can be…

And the point is: You can say that about MANY cards. There so many cards that if flickered are just super degenerate. So many cards, that if played/reanimated are super degenerate.

​@@neros_sorenyes and they normally win the game. Its like a deterministic combo versus nondeterministic. One wins the game the other makes you take 30 mins playing with yourself

@@donb7519 Nah, there are so many combos that just prolong the game or cannot win deterministically. And because of it...why are those okay but not others?

@@neros_soren name 3 then

Every storm -klark the tumbless deck is one. Any other roll a dice and flip a coin is not deterministic depending of the stipulations.

How is it any worse than terastodon?

@@DiscardatRandomone mana cheaper and it ramps you? Or are you just trolling?

​@@DiscardatRandom one mana cheaper, no reward to opponent for destroying things, can potentially net ramp +3 and -1 everyone else

They didn't play during that time period and it shows. They're so focused on the flicker aspect that they're missing the fact that it strip mines everyone else while putting the caster up 3 lands, which that alone could change the flow of the game. The moment you start flickering or reanimating it and it was over. Especially brutal if you cheated it out turn 2 or 3, which i saw happen a lot

yeah primetime could easily be taken off the ban list but primordial is degenerate AF.

Same reason the prophet of kruphix was banned...

I looked at hulk while watching this video and realized it can find two whole infinite combos at the same time that are in my Azban combo deck. Card is wild.

Another highly popular grab was: nomads en-kor + cephalid illusionist + Thoracle

Along with the sacrifice is not immediate.

It's also gonna be played in the majority of decks WITH green, meaning the 2 and 3 color decks, maybe even 5.

It’s also LD and they want the player base to have fun and some folks think LD is not fun

Yeah, I don't get why they are talking about the mana cost like people aren't able to cheat creatures in.

@@lovelylemonfactory or we dont have a ton of 1 or 2 mana rocks causing this to just come out t4 or 5 consistently with moderate ramp, theyre acting like this only comes out turn 9

Master of Cruelties make Kaalia go brrrrrr

There, especially nowadays. But yes, having to put suboptimal colorless removal cards in a mono colored deck just in case you get Iona'd isn't fun.

Plus, it's not gonna be the commander. In the 99 it will hit the field for way less than 9 mana

Adding on to this i can kind of see why the rules committee bans cards, what they kind of do is ban the cards that are really powerful but look casual. Yes obviously really efficient cards are way more powerful but people kind of see that its not casual. So things like thassa's oracle and dockside don't get banned but things like golos, primeval titan, coalition victory do. Like these second ones seem really casual, big splashy value cards. But as you've seen with golos, it didn't really matter what you did it was the strongest at the table and the best 5 color commander out there. So they try to operate in this grey area of not banning things just because its powerful from a competitive standpoint. They try and ban things that look casual level but aren't.

I recall Sheldon also explaining once that at the start they wanted to somewhat distinguish EDH from what would become Vintage as well.

@@jaspertenhaken9751 This is a really good way of explaining it, yeah. Ban cards all players will want to play with, but that only the highest power or most competitive players will want to play *against*

Honestly during those times I rarely encountered mono colored decks, especially because Iona was a thing. Most people I played against who ran mono color decks were either pure control, tried to combo early, or focus aggro'd players out of the game one at a time. I'd say at least 40% of the time, people either didn't care or were glad that I dropped an Iona. But I agree that this means the rest of the time it was oppressive and unfun, and it's a valid ban, especially since it gave us Painter's Servant.

The way they talk about Prime Time and Sylvan Primordial every time they talk about the ban list drives me a bit nuts. I remember when those cards were legal and yes they completely took over the game, every deck with green ran them and the thing I think is the most important is that I never EVER saw them played for 6 and 7 mana, at most they got cheated in for 3 mana, often less on really early turns as they where the best possible reanimation or tutor target 99 times out of 100. Then you get what happened to you and have the game last ages as everyone at the table uses them. Both cards are nightmares to play against.

I stopped playing commander when Sylvan Primordial was legal for like a year, it was such a miserable card, it would always be cloned, flickered and reanimated. If you had no way to stop it or join in on the misery then you would be left with nothing in play.

@@jwnrwdWasn’t it banned before blink decks were even really a thing ?

Sol Ring is worse.

​@@josephpayton7522this gotta be bait

& outdated reasoning. that's pretty much the brunt of it.

Yep. Bang on.

Primetime: we want people to win with a big spell Coalition Victory: we don't want people to win with a big spell

Yeah, it’s cobbled together from stuff over the years. Things have definitely changed over time but it’s hard to revisit without stirring some pot or other.

Yeah it's the same thing they said the last two times they made this video

They're probably just thinking of her as the commander where reanimating isn't really an option since there's no good way of getting your commander into the graveyard. But yeah, she's stupid with any "normal" reanimate strategy. She should have "If you played it from your hand" added to her, then she would be more balanced.

Jut put a meteor golem in every monocolored deck to deal with Iona /s

Hulk also lets you get Thoracle + Nomads En-Kor and Cephalid Illusionist which lets you win without casting any more spells. Still, based on the few tests cEDH players have done with trying out Flash Hulk even though it's banned the takeaway is that in 2024 Flash Hulk is probably fine because we have so many good compact wincons now with essentially zero bad cards... but of course that is hard to tell while it's banned. Also, I 100000% agree that it makes no sense that Gift's Ungiven is banned and Intuition is not. I feel either both or none should be banned.

Intuition doesn't let you choose the exact two cards you want in the yard, gifts does.

I'm just glad the mic doesn't pick it up in the new setting

Conjurer's Closet or Panharmonicon come to mind.

They explicitly mention multiple times that it can destroy lands and even said that it's more oppressive than primeval titan

I only heard once, then they didn't really regard it as that much different. They kept equating them, as if the land destruction did not matter.@@jerryseinfeld6283

Agreed. Thematics matter. Most 8 mana spells do something within the mechanics of the game. Crazy creatures, powerful spells, overwhelming resource engines, whatever; it all still involves actually playing Magic, whether any opponent can do much about it. "I win literally right now if no one counters this, just cos the card says so" is not a mechanic. That said, the ideal of the card is that you have to set up the conditions for it to work, and that was at the time thematically interesting. But as you point out, that no longer is the case.

Yes, Richard kept saying it was banned because Wizards "don't like combo wins", but that's not the problem at all. The problem occurs when people just chuck it into a random casual 5 color commander deck and then proceed to win in the most anticlimactic way possible.

Like Craterhoof. Or the Cavalry Flier. Or Expripriate. Or…

@@draftmagicagain1000 No, these are not even comparable at all, like not at all.

the new leyline basically means CV will never get unbanned now. One land and a creature just needs to stick with it in play...yes you need to be able to pay the WUBRG but still not that hard now a days.

It should be a finisher since blue has phasing and exile until the next end step cards. It is a high cast card and such should be fair.

"As a 5-color player, Blood Moon, Back to Basics and Ruination (and the upcoming Winter Moon) are always brutal. Need to be banned." See the problem?

@@MihaelGeng No, I don't. You don't comprehend balance

@@AtlRopeGuy Ah so you think mono

@@MihaelGeng Read the ban announcement jackwaggon. It's all about mono

@@AtlRopeGuy LOL who said it's not about mono? So THIS is all you're arguing about?? 🤣Have you ever heard of the phrase "double standard"? To multicolor decks, Back to Basic is their Iona. Was BtB banned? This is double standard. RC's ban list is full of this - Mirari's Wake is WAY stronger than Primeval Titan! Guided Passage is a "one mana cheaper and you get to keep one more card" Gifts Ungiven! Insidious Dreams can let you tutor any amount of cards provided you discard the equal amount, without colluding with an opponent!! Were these banned? The whole list is an insult to any sane player's logic, while there're dumbarses like you who would willingly defend it. Just because RC banned your most hated card doesn't mean the whole list is 👍, you know? 🤣🤣🤣

"More fun"? I haven't seen a 2-card infinite combo with Iona in it that kills all 3 opponents.

You can also float mana and deploy before everybody else

@@redram9 Another thing is that you can easily combo with worldfire if you have an oblivion ring effect, but sway shuffles all cards owned by players, which includes exiled cards

@@redram9 Not 'also". This is the sole reason that Sway of the Stars and Upheaval get banned. OP missed the point hard for there're many permanent sweeper out there.

Did they cheat to get that opening hand? lol

I don't think so, but if recall he mulliganed 2-3 times@@totakekeslider3835

It was a tuned up deck, he even bragged it was like $3k-4k worth of cards

Sway of the star can be a finisher in a blue deck: assume you phase a big creature (or any exile until end of turn) and you cheat the sway of the star. Also commander is the format where most of the cards are legal so making them playable is more important than it sounds.

@@dariocampanella7992 you know, fair enough on the sway of stars with phasing/exile. The argument there I guess would be that blue doesn’t really *need* a finisher, it already has plenty. But Red Burn decks didn’t really have anything, thanks in no small part to commander having a collective 120 life you have to burn through instead of 20.

/woooosh The point is, Farewell, Upheaval, Cyclone, Sway of the Stars all have the same text: prolong the game instead of winning it. Also, Worldfire doesn't, and is not banned?

I'm totally with Richard on that one. I can't stand Farewell because of the hour tax it adds to the game. The worst part is it's usually getting cast by the player who is furthest behind and needs to catch up, so it effectively does reset the game. Sure you have lands and maybe some cards, but all the progress everyone made before then was invalidated. I'm a huge advocate that if you're in that position, just don't cast the Farewell and we can finish and move onto another game.

My position isn't that I want the RC to be notably active, but consistent. If they want to keep a light touch it's fine, but they eventually need to do a pass over the ban list and pull some of the questionable bans off.

Back in those days it was also a better format where decks didn't always have commanders in the CZ and chaos warp and oblation effects ticked them away so decks had to be more resilient and built for midrange+ games or combos that didn't rely on commander as a piece. And yeah any clone effect was a great removal+ options package those were the golden days of the format. Now it's everywhere but watered down and oversimplified

They are even worse in multicolored decks. Golgari can reanimate them and cheat them into play for 3/4 mana. Simic and Selesnya can flicker them as many times as they want

The *entire* reason for laws and rules is that people don't have self control. We wouldn't need to make murder or theft illegal if everyone exercised control not to do these things!

For the 0.1% of players that play it with self control, there is Rule 0 😅

That’s weak sauce ngl

Which is, unfortunately, why it remains banned. @@JD-gk7eh

Coffers is the worse way to play it with Field of the Dead being legal in the format.

just not all at once :P

@@someguy1ification EVERY ONE !!!!!! - Senor Chang

It's a fair comment but there are so many other cards that fit this description that aren't banned. I'm not saying unban it, but there needs to be consistency or they need to give solid examples of common play patterns that are not being discouraged enough via Rule 0, so it needs to be banned outright for the health of the format. If you stick an early Jin Gataxias and start copying it, it's going to be just as gross. This is a 9 mana triple white card.

​@@webbc99 It's more so the fact that in most cases it makes one player just unable to do anything and probably hinderers another player. An early Jin Gataxais is definitely tricky to deal with depending on which one it is but at the end of the day at least you have the ability to deal with it. If its the one where each opponents hand is reduced by 7 or the one where it counters an artifact, instant, or sorcery, or even the one that flips you still have the ability to do things and deal with it. Yes you might take some form of card loss to do this but it's the fact that you can. It's also important to note that the 2 "main" Jin's I see (card draw one, and counter one) played the most affect all of your opponents, so each of them is incentivized to try and deal with it. With Iona unless all of your opponents are playing the chosen color and are affected by it a lot then they don't really care about it being out. For example a 4/5 color deck might hurt a little with an Iona out but if it completely locks one of their other opponents out of the game they will wait until it is absolutely necessary to get rid of it. It mainly hurts the 1 color and 2 color decks. So it essentially reads "if you are playing a mono colored deck skip your next x turns." and "if you are playing a duo colored decks remove 50% of the cards of your deck from the game". It makes the game to where 1 person at the table has 0 fun just because they decided to play a mono colored deck. They are at the complete mercy of other players taking pity on them and removing Iona. Yes there are many other cards that are not banned but you will be hard pressed to find a card among those that punishes a player to the extent Iona does for the sheer fact they chose to play a mono colored deck. I'm not saying that Iona is super busted and would be run in every game (cough cough the one ring) but by unbanning it you open the door for people to use it whenever they want and open up the conversation as to why other super annoying cards should be unbanned too. Thank you for your comment btw and I would love to hear your thoughts on this :D.

In 2005 I was offered a full 40 revised duals for around 300 bucks. They were pretty cheap for a long time.

Nice to see Phil generally 👀🔥🔥

Exactly, and with a much more "sigh-inducing" play pattern.

In the longterm, yes.

With wotc being cool with proxy I would say the power 9 could be unbanned since reality is they cost a few pennies

imagine if mass non basic land destruction or if you could force players to not be able to pull lands out of deck. Green always has the advantage with ramp and draw. Every other color has hate against what it can do.

Well put about Sylvan Primordial. The 6/8 Reach body on a creature in THE color that ramps - With even just a mana dork and a ramp spell, Sylvan Primordial is coming down turn 5, it's kicking my opponents back to 4 mana or less, it's ramping me to 8, and I'll keep a lock on the game from there if possible. Flickering is the obvious mechanic, but reanimating is another; green's not bad at getting cards out of the graveyard itself, especially creatures. If one wants to get really degenerate with it, it's not hard to imagine something like: T1 Land & Llanowar Elf, T2 Land & Dork & Ramp spell, T3 Land & anything at all to mana accelerate into a T4 Primordial at a point in the game where other people have probably just been ramping & mana rocking. Primordial resolves and I ramp myself to 8+ mana while also putting a big body into play, and undo a land, rock, value enchantment or anything else. It never needs to swing, it just sits there as a big dumb blocker that can tank even a lot of the dragons of the game, grinds away your opponent's mana base or other things, and then pushes its controller further ahead. It's just a race to resolve it before someone else can.

I fortunately have 20 from those days that I held onto; They were $10-12 each $CAD. Too bad I didn’t play Blue too much so no Volcanic or Tropical Islands.

They said this several times.

They banned Iona at the exact same time they decided unban Painter's Servant.

Exactly. Was pure hell.

Love his expression at about that time. And he is correct. Theres too many combos with other good stuff cards in the deck that wants Sylvan Primordial that if it resolves, everyone else is probably down to half their resources before their next turn.

atraxa? dockside?

@@ClubbingSealCub I said green creature (meaning mono green) fam dockside is mono red and atraxa is 4c

@@IzzetTempo cloning and flickering in mono green, lmao

@@ClubbingSealCub My man. The deck doesn't have to be mono green. But in commander, the same decks that could access Prime Time could access other mono green creatures, so I'm asking, are there creatures in mono green that are better to flicker? You haven't named any yet.

"problematic" lololol

@@FearOgre uh what?

Excellent explanation of why those two are problematic for a largely casual format

No it doesnt scale. Ppl can play lots of low power level artifact and enchantments. Even in lower power games, it can give a lot of treasures.

Casual player play more mana rock 😅

Well here we see people crying about dockside when you explained it perfectly

Doesn’t change why it shouldn’t be banned

Two card 8 mana combo

not really. Leyline is weak unless it is in your opening hand and most 5 color is using a lot of dual or triomes and a lot of land ramp. By the time you have 8 mana, you have all the land types out. If your deck requires the leyline to pull it off then it makes the combo easier to stop and less likely you even pull it off leaving that spell dead in your hand.

@@DiscardatRandom 4 cards

I was going to comment this as well. Dockside’s power comes from leveraging your opponents board state. Prime time’s value is independent of your opponent’s board state. The best anti-treasure card in the format is Dockside.

Dockside should just be banned already, thats the actual problem.

@Tvboy777 I disagree. I think the RC are correct in saying that it's power scales with the table, and it's unproblematic for mid to lower power levels

As opposed to the one ring, tergrid, atraxa, or any combo piece? The game has changed significantly since titan and primordial were released. There are more powerful cards that can be put in the command zone. Aesi is 6 mana and gives you up to 2 lands a turn. They might have belonged there at one time, but it's not the same game anymore.

@@jacobhirsch9762 True, but I don't see how adding more fuel to the fire make it easier to manage.

No! cEDH is proxy friendly and if playing in a store that doesn't allow it to be proxied I'd question that store and find a local scene because it's not a sanctioned format anyways

Still one of the worst ideas people still parrot.

@@syndicate5357 more and more stores are going proxy-less as commander becomes the dominate format, with wizards choosing to make commander the flagship format as well this will only increase over time. 2 of the 3 stores near where i live now have a no proxy rule for commander.