Name a card on the reserve list that you must play in every commander deck. A card becoming expensive has nothing to do with why it's banned. It's no Library of Alexandria or Moxen.

Let me do share with you.
I living in Malaysia.
I start play magic at 8th edition, after long quiting when i when back at 2015.
There no shop selling any old single.
You need get all your old commander cards from oversea or from old player.
All shipment above $150 will get 30% tax.
Whit out proper reprint is super expensive and hard to finding old card for your commander deck

Now the truth comes out. Sorry, but the ban list isn't going to change to save you money. Either budget properly, or pay the extra. The format isn't changing for any one person.

Jeeze, and here I thought you were thinking of the format as a while instead of yourself.

I do not thing you able see what the future going to look like when you found your local community is running commander event with pre con commender deck only.

I not just play a single TCG only, I do saw the grow and downfall of other TCG and the same issue is start showing out in MTG for pass 2 year.

3 year ago commander consider more easy to enter than getting in standard.

How you going bring a new player to grow the games. Only Cheap entry point and card available will able help grow new player.

Please try bring a few friend in to commander today and fire a league in local LGS.

1. The cards on the reserve list aren't even really sought after, with a few exceptions.

2. You can't compare any other TCG to magic. 25 years of the game and a player base in the tens of millions worldwide. Other TCGs die primarily to a small player base.

3. Commander is still much easier and cheaper to get into than standard, and the reserve list doesn't change that.

4. Most of the cards regularly played in commander (>99%) aren't on the reserve list. Most of the decks I've built have zero cards from the reserve list, and that has nothing to do with price or availability.

5. My local store has people playing commander nearly every day.

Try again.

And it still is? Standard you buy 4 of every card you need, you almost always have to play a tier 1 or two deck, and your investment is going to plummet the minute standard rotates out. EDH is a much more casual environment where you don't have to spend tons of money, and even if you do half your deck isn't going to become illegal with the release of a new set.

The nice thing about EDH is that you can make a functional and dare I say even powerful deck without jamming it full of expensive staples. From my experience playing EDH for about 7 years now, the difference in power between Tundra and Hallowed Fountain is negligible, and in a deck without fetches Ardakar Wastes is easily as good.


This is by far the most relevant point in the entire discussion. EDHREC, a site that takes EDH decks from across the internet into one big database, that only two cards (Sol Ring and Cyclonic Rift) even break the 50% point. And looking at the entire list of the top 100 most popular cards, roughly one out of every seven even breaks the $10 mark and not a single one is on the reserved list.

From the sounds of things -- it seems like you want to build the "best version" of your deck/commander that you can.

Well... if you can't afford a specific card, then the "best version" that you can build for that commander just doesn't include that card, does it?

Also - if you can't afford that card, can the other people you play with? If not -- then nobody is really at a disadvantage are they?

Plus, for the expensive cards that you do have (or current cheap cards you have that become expensive) - being the only one (or one of them) around who has that card ... that actually seems like a pretty cool environment. It's almost like having a signature card. Or being a wizard with their own personalized spell that nobody else can figure out.

That sounds pretty cool to me.

Fair enough. I felt confident that "it won't happen" and "seems hard to envision" was close enough it wouldn't be necessarily wrong for the sake of being concise. I didn't want to get into explaining exactly why it's hard to envision.

Fair enough.

Tuknir is... what 6 dollars? Pheldy is about the same? City of Solitude is also... about 6 american dollars?

I'm just thrilled my City of Shadows is up to about 15 now. I bought that sucker for... like a quarter.

yeah it sucks a bit when awesome cards like Replenish are going to cost you $30 bucks, but a lot of it is still easily affordable or replicated using other effects.

Commander isn't in any peril should there be a buyout of the reserve list. There is no need for a ban on anything in that regards.

We can stop here and review it after few more year later.
maybe 1 day we will see Angus Mackenzie going up to $500
If you check all the product for pass 2 year, you can easy find that Wiz is changing their product to target commander player such as master peace and the coming iconic mater.
Why a casual format need to stay with a list that are not able reprint and not been use 99% of the deck ?

Even if Angus does hit $500, so what? There are 17.000 Magic cards, in those few years we're probably closer to 20.000, why do you either have to own Angus or not allow others to play with him if they do?

Yes, Wizards is targetting Commander; this actually makes the format cheaper as many cards get reprinted and you can buy the decks with the fancy new cards you want rather than having to crack packs or buy from retailers. The decks are pretty cheap for what you get.

The question you should be answering is why a format should exclude the Reserved List? There are plenty of arguments provided that address why the format should include them that you are not addressing, yet you provide no convincing argument on why it should exclude those cards. There is no benefit to the format as a whole to adjust based on your local situation when there are easy workarounds for you.

How about address our rebuttals? Your insistence to not do so and repeat your arguments makes me think you're a troll at this point.

Does this work both ways? Is there chance, however small, that you remove PBtE?

I live in London, and I play at a local gaming store with a dozen or two people playing Commander most days and varying people each time. I also play at a local commander group of a couple of dozen members that has biweekly meetups. I've never yet seen anyone play a card from the reserved list, either in my own games or glancing at other peoples' games. That isn't to say people never do, but it's not really a common thing that I've seen, let alone a necessary thing.

Many people play with the precons -- those are about £30 retail in London, or $50-60 in Australia when I was living there. Maybe they've modified them a bit to do something they like better.

The last deck I built (this Mathas one) is valued at $150, specifically just because I had some more expensive cards available. I then swapped some cards out for equivalents to reduce it to $85 for others wanting to build a cheaper version. Some of the most expensive cards were there just because I had them: I had a Blood Crypt instead of a Bloodfell Caves, and a Ravos, Soultender instead of a Palace Siege, Needle Spires instead of an Ancient Amphitheater. I don't consider the substitutions to modify its power level that much: Ravos is easier to get back, but Palace Siege is harder to remove in the first place, etc. If I owned absolutely none of its cards I think I'd tune it to something worth about $100 before buying it, give or take $10, because I just wouldn't include the shocklands or manlands and that immediately chops off $20+.

When I build Commander decks I specifically avoid needing more than one or two cards in the deck that are worth more than $5, unless I happen to already have them. I've been playing since ~2013 so I only have a handful of those, and not these crazily expensive old cards. I have bought a very small number of cards worth approximately $10 for deckbuilding (like Contagion Engine for a -1/-1 counters deck). I have bought, I think, three cards total that were $20-40 -- one of those was Animar, Soul of the Elements -- and I changed my mind about using the other two and plan on selling them. The only other expensive-ish card I have any plans to buy is Monastery Mentor, the price of which has finally fallen to around £10.

Some people have fairly powerful decks. They don't need to spend a lot to do it -- Zurgo, Helmsmasher or Scion of the Ur-Dragon or Sheoldred, Whispering One can get pretty bonkers in a deck valued only ~$100. One of the most brokenly powerful cards in a Zurgo deck is Worldslayer and that costs fifty cents.

The commander players at the places I mentioned are conscious that decks have power levels (we say the precons are mostly something like a 2-2.5 out of 5, and then from there manage to gauge how much more or less likely our deck is to win than any precon). If there's a lot of people we can consciously self-arrange to play with decks of a similar power level, and I personally have the most fun playing around that precon strength level. People with a significantly more powerful deck at the table quickly turn a 4-person free-for-all into a 3v1 match with the target on themselves. If I'm playing against someone with a far too powerful deck for me, then after I lose I thank them for the game, shake their hand, and get up to find a table more suitable for my decks' power level and/or find a new table.

----

Basically what I'm getting at here is I've never seen or experienced a real price barrier here in Commander, nor is the Reserved List a barrier or even relevant (because its cards aren't important). If someone does spend crazy amounts to make their deck crazily powerful powerful, that's not necessarily better for them -- they won't have many people willing to play with them a second time, except perhaps people with similarly powerful decks. If someone played a Volcanic Island against me, I wouldn't bat an eye any more than if they'd played a Sulfur Falls or a Swiftwater Cliffs. There are no Reserved cards I have ever needed. If a deck needs crazily expensive cards to function and there are genuinely no alternatives, I don't build that deck and instead refocus on the thousands of reasonably affordable cards.

Price and power isn't even a real issue on the reserved list. Donate (reserved) is cheaper than Tarmogoyf (not reserved). And I've never seen anyone play Tarmogoyf in Commander either and don't expect to. There are some crazily powerful cards on the reserved list, but e.g. the Mox Anything cards are banned in Commander.

If Angus Mackenzie became $500+ I wouldn't care. I don't need him to play. If anyone else has him and uses him as their commander, great, that'll be fun to see -- but I'm not really worried about him being required. He's not something crazily powerful. He dies to a Terminate like any other creature.

If you think you need to buy Reserved cards or expensive cards... well, you don't. If you think everyone else is doing so, they probably aren't. If you think your deck has to be crazily powerful, it really doesn't.

Just to weigh in with some anecdotal evidence...

I have been playing since 1997, I just moved and one of my new neighbors has been playing since Origins. He came over one day and wanted to play 1v1, he had been bragging about how good his one deck was (Atraxa, Praetors' Voice, so I built Vial Smasher the Fierce/Kraum, Ludevic's Opus deck. I easily had over $2,000 worth of cards on the battlefield/in my graveyard at the end and lost.

I have many decks that have expensive cards in them, but I would still estimate my win/loss percentage as 1/x where x is how many players there are (so about 20-25%). If anything when I drop original Duals, they are at a disadvantage, they get blown up way more than my shocks or pain lands... but I still play them as I want to justify still keeping them around.

Are you really going to remove Bartel Runeaxe or Boris Devilboon from the list of playable (somewhat debatable) commanders? I mean Gosta Dirk and Granite Gargoyle are pretty broken, right?

I personally would love to see Singing Tree get played, or Elephant Graveyard. Two-Headed Giant of Foriys is very underplayed too!