#535897
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2020-11-30
I think the main issue is a misunderstanding of what the problem is and how R&D is choosing to help solve it. Let's start with the problem. The Commander format was created as a fun, casual Magic variant. It wasn't designed to be the main way people played the game, so we made decisions that maximized letting it be what it wanted to be. Those decisions majorly changed the dynamics of how the game plays out. The life total is different. The number of players is different. The strengths of various abilities are different. How players interact is different. But it was all played with cards and a color pie not designed for the format. Imagine, for example, if there was a new format called Rush where every player started with 10 life. White would be pretty good in that format, whereas blue would really suffer. As Commander has become more popular, we've had to come to terms with how to adapt the color pie to help it in Commander. The good news is the color pie is constantly evolving. There are always opportunities to push it in the direction that the game is evolving. However, the key to doing this correctly is to find ways to change a color that play into its core philosophy. A good example is how we handled red in dealing with Commander. Red needed more card draw, so we created "impulsive draw" (exiling cards that you can cast from exile for the turn), a way for red to get cards that was in-flavor for red. Notice that we didn't just give red an ability from another color. We explored new space to solve the problem in an organically red way. That's what we're currently up to in white. I need to stress two things. First, we change things slowly and carefully. When we want to try out something new, we tend to use it on a weaker spell to gauge how it plays and then strengthen it over time as we get more confident about it. We don't want to change our mind about something only to have a pushed version of it forever living in Eternal formats. Second, Commander uses (almost) all the cards. That's a lot of inertia to fight against. Even when we make good white cards, they have to fight against an existing environment that's weighted against them. What this means is that change takes time and effort. We went through this with red and, over time, managed to see marked improvement. White has proven a little more difficult. Its strengths are less useful in Commander, and its weaknesses are greater vulnerabilities in Commander, so it's a bigger challenge to solve, but I can promise you that we're working on the problem and have been for some time. We're finding possible solutions, but they're going to be things we ramp into slowly, and even when we're comfortable making more powerful versions of those effects, the inertia of fighting against established colors in an Eternal format will take time. This isn't a problem that's just going to be solved in one set.
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