To be tier 4 the general should have an ability that has some utility if built around properly. Braids can win the occassional game in a semi competitive meta with the right political environment. On that note I believe that Phage the Untouchable should also be tier 4. There are more than enough ways to get around her suicide clause and, she like braids has an extremely potent ability.

Yeah agreed. Phage is a lot of fun and definitely kills when built around

I can second that!

i also agree that phage is amazing when built right.

Well Phage and Braids I could definitely see moving up to 4!

I might argue that Blind Seer could be moved up. There are a lot of really shitty color change or color specific cards that suddenly become playable if put in a Blind Seer deck.

Blue Elemental Blast

Douse

Hydroblast

Wash Out

Hibernation

Tidal Control

Mind Harness

...

Yeah Idk, he can be built around and still provides access to mono blue control regardless. You can also troll people to death with any kind of color protection in play, so that's fun.

Geist of Saint Traft -- definitely worse in multiplayer than in duel... but... really? Him and Barktooth Warbeard share a category?

Geist is flat out terrible in multiplayer.

really? there's no way to make a control deck that is better than unplayable garbage with geist at the helm?

Giest does nothing particularly useful though. I suppose you could harvest value from his tokens with a sac outlet and Skullclamp. But really what is the point? Theres no upside with him besides chump blocking and putting people on a 7 turn clock (on an empty board)...With Braids and Phage there is a point why you would want to get around their significant drawbacks. Dont get me wrong giest is a great creature, but he scales horribly.

Nothing useful? I mean, he's not great, I agree, but he is UW and hexproof. A good combo for voltron -- even with that being bad in multiplayer.

You say "7 turn clock" as if a Geist deck would just be attacking with him alone -- UW has great aura support and great control support. Not the best for multiplayer, but unequivocally better than Tier 5, I think. Can definitely build an effective (if not very competitive) voltron deck for multiplayer games.

Again, to reiterate, I get that he sucks in multiplayer, but "janky"? I don't know.

I could definitely see Giest aura/ equipment voltron beating down tier 3 commanders with some regularity. You might be on to something

A few things that I think we should do to avoid unnecessary hassle:

Add tier 6 in again, for the following commanders.

• Vanilla commanders (Tobias Andrion)

• French Vanilla commanders (Ramirez DiPietro)

• Commanders from Portal, sometimes with Horsemanship, and maybe a combat ability that only affects themselves (Zhao Zilong, Tiger General)

That being said, here's a bunch of changes that I think should be made. I'm going to try to be more concise with these, and only ramble on ones I have some experience with.

• Bassandra tier 4

• Blind Seer tier 4

• Braids tier 4

• Circu tier 4: I've actually been testing out a weird brew. I doubt it'll pan out to higher than tier 4, but it's certainly interesting. If you make an infinite loop, but without infinite mana, you can exile your opponents' libraries. It's like a worse Oona, but that still is decent enough for tier 4. Worst-case scenario, it's just UB High Tide without a general.

• Geist tier 4: Might kill people occasionally.

• Karona tier 3: Decent deck, will probably win some games.

• Avacyn, Guardian Angel tier 5: Bad colors, bad ability, too expensive.

Later, I'll write about tier 2.

Not the Tier 6 nonsense again....

Then just get rid of them. They'll almost never be used, except as bad jokes.

I don't know that there needs to be a tier 6, I also don't understand that reasoning behind 5 tiers. It seems like an arbitrary number rather than an actual attempt at finding the right number of clusters for the commanders. I guess sometimes an arbitrary number of groups is necessary and that 5 tiers fits the extremely qualitative spectrum pretty well, but that's not saying much.

It's hardly fair to call the idea of Tier 6 "nonsense" when there was absolutely no reasoning behind the current tier system besides "arguing over perceived expert knowledge"

It might be worthwhile to actually find a set of features for all commanders, judge each commander on a scale based on those features, and then cluster the resulting data accordingly.

It's nonsense in that the discussion has been beaten to death so many times that it's nonsensical to bring it up again for the umpteenth time. I can't attest for the rest of the list contributors, but I for one am sick and tired of the number of Tiers discussion. It wastes time and detracts from real progress.

Wasn't there someone some time ago who made a 6 tier list and then tried advertising it on this thread?

I believe Prime_Time had made a six tier list some time ago.

The problem is the sixth tier adds nothing. Pretty much all the commanders in tier five are equal garbage regardless of whether they have a text box or not, so having two tiers of equal unplayables is just a waste of time. This debate was also driven into the molten core of the earth and resolved already, so please, let's not do it again.

Yea, please don't bring back 6 tiers, really... We have tried it and it wasn't useful... Please keep on going about improvements in a 5 tiers system instead.

On another note, what happened to the comments?!? Would you guyz like a reset? All the comments just went back...

Even as the person who suggested a 6 tier system in the first place, I'm sick and tired of it too.

The whole reason I suggested it originally was that T5's upper bound was too low, which was making T3 and T4 a mess of mismatched power levels. Adding a sixth tier gave the middle some room to breath, but now that all the commanders that were in T5 and T6 have been combined into one giant T5, that issue really isn't a problem any more. So long as we remember that T5 has a high ceiling and keep from bumping lots of commanders out of out of it, the list will be fine as is.

If we ever want to tease out the exact difference between a a janky-fun commander and a complete garbage commander, it might have a little bit of merit, but the discussion recently has been very focused on the top two tiers, and now that we're adding deck lists there are better ways to improve the list than arguing about what's jank and what's more jank, so until then we should just stick with five.

Speaking of Tier lists, it looks like a few links broke after I changed thief names. Here are the fixed links.

Sisay: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/stop-being-such-a-sisay-1/

Mizzix: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/25-04-16-mizzix-spellslinger/

Teneb: http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/teneb-midrange-1/

Yeah, gonna need a comment reset. Not sure what happened, but it was on profiles too it seems.

The list is pretty stable at the moment. With this being one of the more active threads around, I suspect that people want there to be something to debate/discuss.

The new commander cycle will be released soon, and I hear they will be 4 color. That should be fun to discuss. Has anyone seen anything spoiler-like about them yet?

Maybe we should have SEVEN tiers instead!