MTG

1905 readers

54 users here now

Magic: the Gathering discussion

General discussion, questions, and media related to Magic: the Gathering that doesn't fit within a more specific community. Our equivalent of /r/magicTCG!

Type [[Card name]] in your posts and comments and CardBot will reply with a link to the card! More info here.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

andrew@mtgzone.com

mike@mtgzone.com

On the Future of Commander (WotC taking over management of the format, considering adding more concrete power level rankings) (magic.wizards.com)

submitted 1 month ago by MysticKetchup@lemmy.world to c/mtg@mtgzone.com

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] mike@mtgzone.com 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

Here's the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we'll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.

Ok... I'm listening 🤔

In this system, your deck would be defined by its highest-bracket card or cards.

This now becomes an eternal battle over which cards are in Tier 3 and which cards are in Tier 4 imo.

For example, if Ancient Tomb is a bracket-four card, your deck would generally be considered a four. But if it's part of a Tomb-themed deck, the conversation may be "My deck is a four with Ancient Tomb but a two without it. Is that okay with everyone?"

This seems kinda gnarly to me. Perhaps it can work though by farming this decision out to every single play group.

[–] luxyr42@lemmy.dormedas.com 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I get the idea, but I don't see how that works effectively in practice. There are a lot of cards that are not good on their own, and only good in the context of a combo. Does having one of those cards in your deck make it better? No, it probably makes it worse. You need the entire combo for one of those cards to matter.

It works for those 1 off value piece cards like Dockside, Tomb, Sol Ring, etc. But multi card combos is where I think it will fail(or at least over score a deck that doesn't include a full combo).

[–] Artemis201@mstdn.social 4 points 1 month ago

@luxyr42 @mike Obviously we haven't seen this enacted yet, but I wonder if it'll end up being similar to the Arena Historic Brawl ranking system.
I know Amazonian has run into issues where including a high-power card in a low-power deck bumps her up to a high-power tier despite playing a pile of durdle cards.
I guess that's what the conversation is for.
But also, there's never been a good way to rank commander deck power so *shrug* can't be worse than what we already have

[–] mike@mtgzone.com 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah I completely agree. There is so much context with all the cards that I don't know how they do this. It's really just four different ban lists they're now managing. And that I think sucks so much fun out of the decks that it almost becomes what's the point even.

[–] lovestha@mtgjudge.social 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

@luxyr42 @mike It gives a ceiling, not a floor or average power level.

Treating such system as not informing deck building is ignoring human behaviour. People will avoid including a single card from a higher tier than they enjoy playing. Unless it is worth bringing up in Rule 0 conversations and explaining that it isn't a good way to think about this deck in particular.

And players will treat a single card from +1 tier more kindly than they will treat a tier 1 deck including a tier 4 card.

[–] luxyr42@lemmy.dormedas.com 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

I am also wondering who is going to actually handle ranking the tens of thousands of existing cards(gatherer says 28712 legal in commander at this moment), plus hundreds more from each set as they release. Might need to be crowdsourced to be done in a reasonable time. Every deckbuilding website is also going to want to implement that info in their database.

load more comments (3 replies)