[TCGs - Magic: the Gathering] The Crash: Money, Rage, and Magic: the Gathering
Fandom can be beautiful. Fandom can make something that you already enjoy into something to be built on, engaged with, and fall in love with over again. This is a story about how a fandom was given something wonderful, engaging, and beloved.
And how they murdered it.
This is a story about rage. This is a story about money. This is the story about how fans grip so tight they strangle things.
This is a story about Magic: the Gathering.
WHAT IS MAGIC: THE GATHERING?
Magic: the Gathering (hereafter referred to as Magic) is a trading card game printed by Wizards of the Coast. The game has you casting spells and summoning creatures with the goal of eventually reducing your opponent’s life to zero. The game is one of the earliest examples of TCGs in general, and certainly one of the most successful. It is not a stretch to say that the popularity of the game is at least partially responsible for the proliferation of hobby stores across the United States.
Typically, the game is played in a 1v1, competitive environment, with various formats changing what cards are legal and therefore what strategies are more effective than others. Popular formats include Standard (the last 3 years of printed cards), Modern (all cards after 2003), or Pauper (only cards printed at the lowest possible rarity are allowed), and Commander, the format this will be about.
WHAT IS COMMANDER?
Commander, formerly known as Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH), is a fan-created format attributed to Sheldon Menery1 and popularized by tournament judges.
There are four major differences between Commander and essentially all other formats of Magic. First, players start with double the normal amount of starting life, encouraging longer games. Second, players are only allowed a single copy of a card in their deck, reducing consistency. Third, the game is not played 1v1, but rather 4-player free-for-all. Finally, each player designates a creature card as their “commander,” having essentially guaranteed access to its abilities while restricting the cards in their deck to only those matching their commander’s “color identity”, meaning that players have an upper bound of how many cards they could have access to, and each player knows what general archetype their opponents could have access to before gameplay really begins.
The net result of the format is that it is one that is fundamentally slower, social, and more casual. These are all intentional to the design of the format. On top of actual rule changes, Commander has a large list of somewhat unspoken social rules that tend towards games being at best a fun way to show off your deckbuilding skills and at worst overly slow slugfests.
Commander as a format started as a judge event, where between or after rounds, judges would use it as a way to shoot the shit and socialize. This lasted for a while, but once Wizards of the Coast started to print Commander-specific products, the format rapidly grew until the COVID-19 pandemic solidified Commander as the single most popular way to play Magic at all, and it’s easy to see why: the format is social and low-stakes, with the idea of pushing your deck to an unbeatable state being seen as vaguely tryhard, and while those circles exist, most games are about having fun with the wide card pool and showing off your ability to create interesting or powerful decks rather than going for the throat.2 Combine this with the four-player nature encouraging people to drag down anyone who springs to an early lead, and the format is an enjoyable mess.
WHAT IS THE COMMANDER RULES COMMITTEE?
Remember how I said that Commander was a fan-created format?
More than just the original rules of the format, Commander was a fan-curated format. The Commander Rules Committee, hereafter referred to as the RC, was a group of individuals in charge of monitoring the format, dictating ban lists, rules changes, and otherwise arbitrating the core mechanics of the format since it was established in 2006. The members of the RC were not paid by Wizards of the Coast. They were not chosen by Wizards of the Coast. The format was run by a panel of players, tournament judges, and passionate content creators. This was an unabashed positive for most players. Unlike Wizards of the Coast, who are ultimately a for-profit company, the RC was able to act in whatever way they thought would best serve the format. Sometimes people disagreed with them, but ultimately, the RC was empowered to shape the format.
Wizards of the Coast, for their part, was fairly content with this arrangement. While the RC was not immune to controversy (here is a thread of basically pure bashing, for instance, and it is years old), this essentially allowed them to outsource the blame for any format decisions. The RC was also a talent-rich pool that could be consulted for Commander-specific designs that the company put out.
The RC was a tight group. Members are clear that they considered each other friends as well as essentially volunteer coworkers on a multi-million dollar project that awarded no money outside of sporadic consulting work for Wizards of the Coast (something that all of them as major community figures would have had access to regardless). They were in it for the love of the game.
In early 2019, the RC established the Commander Advisory Group, hereafter referred to as the CAG. Composed primarily of community members like streamers, professional players, YouTubers and judges, the group served as a sounding board for decisions and a way to check community temperature on any potential bans or rules changes.
PART ZERO: ANGUISHED UNMAKING
On September 7th, 2023, Sheldon Menery died after a long battle with cancer.
Menery was, by all accounts, a thoughtful and charming figure. He built the format and was, to many in the community and the company that made it, a dear friend. Fuck cancer.
Menery was the polestar of the format. Historically his decisions had not always been popular with the fandom, but he had a presentation about him that tended to make things blow over. He was beloved. He was gone. Now the RC had to fill the precepted void that he had left as the spokesman and navigator of the format.
The RC would last for one more year.
PART ONE: JEWELED LOTUS
To talk about the death of the RC, we first have to understand three specific cards. I will be explaining them in pretty simple terms that even if you didn’t play the game, you could understand.
Magic is a resource-based game. Each turn, players can play a card from their hand to give themselves access to more and more mana, a renewing resource that allows them to cast spells and summon creatures. Typically, without specific spells, a player can only increase their available mana per turn by 1. Many spells will create things which can provide more mana on future turns. These are called “ramp spells”, and the most powerful of them are what are called “fast mana”, which are essentially spells that put more mana out than it costs to play them. For instance, the card Sol Ring costs 1 mana to play, but can immediately be used to create 2 mana on that turn and on every turn afterwards, meaning you have netted 1 additional mana the turn it was played and are 2 mana ahead on all future turns.
Fast mana is extremely powerful. When played early, these cards can completely warp a game by making one player able to drop mid- or endgame threats onto a table while other players are still trying to start their engines. Sometimes, this can be enjoyable, leading to a three-on-one mentality and an engaging game. Usually, however, this just leads to frustration as someone jumps ahead.
Fast mana is also, generally, extremely expensive. Other than Sol Ring, a card that has been reprinted so often that it is rarely more than a dollar for a copy despite being the most played card in the format, most spells that would be considered fast mana are extremely rare and highly prized for their power, leading to incredible price tags.
The three cards that we are going to be talking about today are some of the most powerful fast mana that the game has ever printed: Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, and Mana Crypt. Frankly, for the purposes of this story, their actual effects are completely interchangeable: they make a lot of mana for little to no resource investment. Well, mana investment. What they cost was a different kind of resource: USD.
Prior to their banning, the average sell price of these cards on TCGPlayer were as follows: Dockside Extortionist, $83; Jeweled Lotus, $86; Mana Crypt, $182. (Dockside’s price history is here, others can be searched) I will also note that these were not premium versions of these cards. This was your entry level ticket into playing with them.
Between their power and their price tag, unless you were playing at a very high-powered table where they were expected, someone playing any of these often elicited groans or outright curses in many playgroups. While Commander decks are often not cheap, the bare price floors on these were so high that they could be worth as much a budget player’s entire deck. Every store was different, of course, so I can’t speak too broadly about experiences, but the general vibe was that they were Too Good, and using them could be seen as acting like a tryhard.
These cards had been a part of the Commander format for years. None of these were new hotness. Anecdotally, when discussing power levels with strangers to ensure a relatively fair fight, these cards were so powerful and felt so bad to play against, I would typically ask about them by name, directly, to see if I needed to bring my more powerful decks. A single copy of Dockside Extortionist in my husband’s deck was so game-warping that several cards in his deck were exclusively there to find it more easily. In my personal opinion, these cards were fundamentally bad for most games.
The last quirk of these cards comes down to format legality. See, while these cards were extremely powerful in Commander, they were banned or were never legal in essentially any other format. Mana Crypt was banned in every other format3. Dockside Extortionist, while legal in other formats, was only strong because of particular design quirks inherent to Commander. Jeweled Lotus had essentially no use outside of Commander at all, as the type of fast mana it provided was literally restricted to the format4. These were, almost exclusively, Commander cards, and their value was fixed to the idea that they were the most powerful things you could do in the most popular format, and always would be, forever.
PART TWO: BLASPHEMOUS ACT
On September 23th, 2024, the RC banned four cards:
Nadu, Winged Wisdom, an overpowered design mistake from the recent Modern Horizon III set that everyone hated…
Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, and Mana Crypt.
In one fell swoop, with little to no warning, all three expensive fast mana cards had been banned. These were foundational cards for high powered decks, and all of them were taken down at once.
The RC gave some pretty specific reasons why these cards were to be banned. Essentially, all of these cards created extreme early advantage states, and with the printing of progressively more powerful cards in general over the past few years, those early advantage states were getting easier and easier to defend.
Some players complained, most just accepted it, and then everyone decided that war was stupid and we solved global warming and…
No. No, people fucking hated it. They weren’t just upset or disappointed. They were angry. They were furious. See, they didn’t see this as a change to format philosophy or a card ban: people saw it as a direct attack on their wallet and an insult to them, directly.
The funny thing about card values is that they are fundamentally tied to the format that you can play it in. A card, no matter how powerful in the abstract, is only as good as how you can use it. Given that all of these cards were only used in commander, people felt like they had been goldbricked. “I paid $180 for this card, and now it’s worthless? How could you do this to me!?”
“I am going to make you pay for it.”
It is impossible to overstate how vitriolic the environment became. Threats were open and repeated. People lost their fucking minds. The bans were, on their face, controversial at minimum and completely unexpected. There had been no obvious discussion about these cards being potentially banned, and no one had expected any cards to be banned other than possibly Nadu.
Accusations and threats against the RC were immediate. Members of the RC and CAG were completely inundated with everything from constant harassment to accusations of insider trading. When I say harassment, I fear that I am making you think it stopped at angry Twitter DMs. I can assure you it did not, though the exact specifics have never been given.
This outburst was not limited to random internet denizens, either. While content creators were, on the whole, less overtly toxic in their disagreement, these bans were not beloved by creators, generally, either. Josh Lee Kwai, CAG member/podcast host/guy who got caught attempting to underpay interns, was outspoken in his frustration with the bans and how they were handled. He said that he felt slighted, as the CAG had not been informed before the banning. He also said that, while all of the bans were probably for the best in the format, the RC had not communicated them to the players ahead of time, so it was a total rugpull.
Wait, what? Rewind that a bit, me, the CAG didn’t know?
Apparently, the decision was made nearly a year before the announcement was made, and the CAG had not been informed about the decision to avoid the information leaking. Weird, but with the increased insularity of the RC, not wholly unexpected. The cards were all historically severe problems. The CAG was just to advise, and I am sure the RC knew about their feelings and considered them in their decision, but decided to move forward anyways. Not telling them was, in my opinion, an undeniably weird move, but I don’t find it to be an insult more than an outgrowth of the RC’s general oeuvre of somewhat self-important stewardship. Kwai took it as an insult, resigned from the CAG almost immediately, and then posted a clip to his YouTube channel of him saying that if they banned the cards, the backlash would be immense, titled “We don’t want to say we told you so, but we kinda did.” in which it opens with the hosts agreeing that the cards were bad for the game. Classy.
Several members of the CAG resigned. This was for a combination of factors. Some were offended they had been left out, like Kwai, and others were just inundated with abuse and found it too much to handle.
To say that the RC was unilaterally attacked is completely incorrect. While each member was harassed to extreme degrees, the absolute worst (of what is publicly available) was pointed at Olivia Goebert-Hicks, a member of the rules committee. She is a cosplayer, jeweler, MTG streamer, and, let’s be frank, a woman. The hatred shot at her was so fierce and hateful that fellow RC member Jim Lapage actually posted information that is normally kept private: her vote. She had been the loudest advocate against the bans and had received the largest and most vicious backlash. We can pretend it’s not because she is a woman with a large internet presence. It is because she is the woman with the largest internet presence of the RC.
Inundated with threats against the individual members and approaching conventions, the RC decides that it’s time to release a rebuttal and response to try and explain what they did, why they did it, and why the RC didn’t talk to the CAG ahead of the announcement. It did not help.
PART THREE: DEFLECTING PALM
The firestorm was so severe that, the following day, the RC put out an FAQ addressing some of the responses. I will link it here, but the bullet points are as follows:
First, the RC didn’t sell off any cards and had internal policy against it, and invited any vendors who could show them doing so to share receipts. No one did, because this accusation was always fucking absurd.
Second, they weren’t taking it back. Not only would this be counter to their mission of running the format well, it would make the financial exploitation worst.
Third, they felt like they had failed to communicate. They had not announced these bans early because doing so risked allowing invested players offloading extremely expensive cardboard onto fans who didn’t realize they were about to be goldbricked. With new players coming in thanks to a series of solid sets and Universes Beyond (read: outside IP crossovers), there were a lot of people that could have bought very expensive bookmarks. They had informed WotC that the cards would be banned roughly a year before the announcement went out, and during that window, the two most expensive cards had been reprinted. This sounds like collusion, and many players were quick to suggest that. This is incorrect. By the time the decision had been made and WotC had been informed of it, well, those cards were all either already printed or so far along in the set construction process that they couldn’t have added or removed them. There simply was no time to collude, as WotC is roughly two years ahead of the present at any given time.
Last point of note is that they didn’t directly consult the CAG for essentially the reasons outlined above: they already knew their positions and were worried about a leak.
This did nothing to calm anyone down. I can’t source this, but from experience, I think that seeing the rationale only made the most frustrated players angrier. Be it sunk-cost fallacy or personal vendetta, the abuse only seemed to intensify and the threats only grew more and more personal and actionable. I have seen multiple now-removed Tweets of people threatening RC and CAG members, mostly Olivia, with specific times and public appearances that they would attack at. This had gone beyond fandom drama. This was, credibly, a matter of life and death.
So they played the only card they had left to them.
PART FIVE: WIZARDS OF THAY (COAST)
On October 1st, only days after the ban announcement, the RC dissolved and turned over the management of the Commander format to WotC. And man, everyone was fucking sad.
The reasons for the turnover were obvious: the members of the RC hoped that this would keep them and their families safe. Fucked if I wouldn’t do the same damn thing. The Professor, arguably the most well-known MtG content creator, noted in a video that the abuse he was aware of (but could not give specifics on) was truly unbelievable, and was worse than anything he had experienced, above and beyond harassment that made him have to move houses.
The community response was, largely, one of mourning. The feral ragehounds shut up because, well, they knew this was the worst outcome for them, too. Many of them went from outright abuse at the RC for making the ban to outright abuse for daring give up the office, but most people were shocked out of it.
Further expensive bans were basically never going to happen again, and even necessary bans that happened to command high “reprint equity”, or valuable cards to put out in product, are less likely than ever. In the months since, other than announcing some sort of formal power level ranking tools to come Soon TM, WotC has made no serious moves, though this is unsurprising. They weren’t ready to take over right away.
Within a few weeks, WotC announced that the replacement for the RC: the Commander Format Panel. This would function as an internal Rules Committee, formed of a few members of WotC staff as well as several other members who would be paid as sort of contractors, consisting of a mix of former RC contributors (of note, Olivia Goebert-Hicks is still a part of the panel, thank god), CAG members (of note, Josh Lee Kwai, who sort of apologized for gloating, but left the video up anyways.), and assorted other content creators, streamers, and professional players.
The formation was not entirely without controversy. Of note was that the contract had a fairly notable non-disparagement clause that persisted even if the panelist was no longer working with WotC. Several people were shocked that WotC would demand this, others called the clause “boilerplate” and “difficult to enforce.” But people were dreading this turnover because WotC was shitty, so complaints went nowhere.
PART SIX: REST IN PEACE
Less than two weeks later, Magic would again be shaken to its core, this time in another controversy that hit more than just commander players, and I am too tired to get into it. Spongebob is involved, and I don't have the energy to get into it beyond that.
Fan enthusiasm is low. People are burned out by bad WotC decisions, and the turnover of the Commander format to their hands is seen by some as the end of an era, by some as the death of the format, the death of the game, or just another step in a shitty march.
No one is happy.
I don’t think that there is anything of value to be learned. If you needed to lose something special like the RC to learn that threatening to kill someone is bad, then I guess here you go.
I suppose if there is a takeaway, it’s that no matter how much we think we are better, we have a long way to go. The outright viciousness here, particularly directed at women, is so blatant that the only thing that I can compare it to is Gamergate.
It’s a story about money, how vicious people will get when they feel slighted. It’s about entitlement, and how quickly certain people are to take it out on others. But who am I kidding?
Really, it’s about ethics in card game rules management.
1 - The specific origin of Commander is more complicated than being something that sprung fully-formed from his mind. The original articles that were published in The Duelyst bear little resemblance to how the format would eventually shake out, and the format can be traced to some groups playing in Alaska. Sheldon was, indisputably, the major force in shaping the format, however, and so simplifying it is necessary for telling the story.
2 - This isn’t to say that no one goes hard on competition. cEDH, or “Competitive EDH”, is a format philosophy that encourages extremely fast wins and power over anything else. Most players, however, are not playing cEDH or even with cEDH players.
3 – Yes, it is technically only Restricted in Vintage, but that is a hair not worth splitting.
4 – Yes, you can do the weird thing with Doubling Cube, but that is niche and ultimately less important to the story.