ASK THE COMMITTEE: METAGAME

Your question:

"Hello. With the recent ban of Raffine, Scheming Seer, it seems that Aragorn King of Gonder and Eris, Roar of the Storm took its place as a tempo commanders of choice and it starts to feel like an archetype problem, rather than commander problem. Would you consider bans of certain staple cards (such as free counterspells for instance) that these decks use, instead of banning individual commanders, to keep these decks in check?"

Our answer:

Skipping the part where individual cards are mentioned, as this would expire over time, and skipping the terms used to qualify archetypes, that lack consensuality, the last part regarding structural views over the progressive solving of the global metagame is a very important question. It has been addressed in our 2024 panel, with a lot of data and explanations regarding the polarization of the card pool due to progressive competitive-based natural selection.

The way we handle game rules is now probably deprecated, notably our use of a simple list of banned/restricted cards, that might become unsufficient over time to handle the new problematics, such as the increased number of new prints, average power creeping to fuel marketing results (which happens in every single game, physical or video games), emerging powerful combinations, or products that directly disrupt the very bases our game is built on, and alter once supposed containing rules which now became underlying or competing against new rules.

In the mean time, choosing particular cards for their recurring inclusions, despite a lesser individual power or escaping our usual way of considering the excessive cards has indeed been raised as a topic since at least 2015. Such a metagame shape would strongly affect the nostalgia emblem that surrounds Duel Commander. We are rather currently looking at different ways of handling that creeping problem, but so far no idea has won over the other ones.