MTG Commander updates for April 22 - banned list and gamechangers updates
There are two relevant articles, both of which provide insight into why these changes were made.; they are relatively lengthy, but I have provided summaries of the changes.
Commander Banned and Restricted Announcement – April 22, 2025
Summary: 5 cards have been unbanned and are now on the game changers list
- Gifts Ungiven
- Sway of the Stars
- Braids, Cabal Minion
- Coalition Victory
- Panoptic Mirror
Commander Brackets Beta Update – April 22, 2025
Summary: no major changes to the mechanics of how brackets function. Two cards have been removed from the game changers list and 18 cards have been added.
- Trouble in Pairs removed
- Trinisphere removed
The following cards have been added to the game changer list: Teferi's Protection, Humility, Narset, Parter of Veils, Intuition, Consecrated Sphinx, Necropotence, Orcish Bowmasters, Notion Thief, Deflecting Swat, Gamble, Worldly Tutor, Crop Rotation, Seedborn Muse, Natural Order, Food Chain, Aura Shards, Field of the Dead, Mishra's Workshop
Some other things from the articles that I didn't put as a top level summary:
There are a ton of other tidbits in there about why some cards were chosen and why some were not. Both articles are great.
I really like the transparency and depth they've given us with their announcements. I felt similarly about the Pauper announcements, so I wonder how much of this is due to Gavin's involvement, and what might happen if Gavin ever leaves WotC.
I think everything is headed in the right direction, and the biggest want for me is some clarifications about what "few tutors" actually means, and it seems like they'll be trying to figure that out for a future announcement.
That's a great point - I do like how Gavin relays these and the detail and thought that goes into the announcements. He's doing a great job showcasing the good side of WotC taking over the rules committee. They're also avoiding what I would consider obvious pitfalls - like unbanning the bans that happened just before they took over. My brother was convinced that at the very least Lotus was going to be unbanned because of how it's kind of a flagship card and because of pressure from Hasbro leadership. I was happy to see that it wasn't really on the table, at least for the next year.
/offtopic tag / meta discussion
I put this as a single text post with links to both the articles because I don't think we really need to sustain two separate discussions about this. From a functionality of tags point of view, if I were a reader that was generally interested in this, I would expect to be able to navigate to it via the source.wizards tag - this should likely appear along all of these other announcements; this is functionally the same as the other items in that list. So forgive me @mycketforvirrad, but I've added that tag that you removed back.
I guess it's about how Wizards of the Coast put these out as separate announcements, and the size of the community here that is likely to discuss it; I think it doesn't feel to me like we need two topics on it, when all the discussion is likely to be either a) minimal or b) woven together between the topics. But we don't have a way to have two links other than as a text post.
Edit: if someone could #noise this, that would be lovely.