Game Changers & Brackets
Commander (EDH) forum
Posted on March 3, 2025, 10:45 a.m. by Goldberserkerdragon
So we've all come into a new year with a new set of rules and power level tiers; "brackets" if you will. Accompanied are the so called "game changer" cards, usually among the highest powered cards playable in commander/MTG today.
Everyone seems on board with it and it does have a nice ring to it in terms of trying to fix it so players can play well together. However, I would have to argue against some of these concepts.
No one card is going to change the game on its own. Certain nuances and momentums have to be going in your favor. Cards can alter your position and maybe put a target on your back. 9 times out of 10, that card will be checked, countered, removed, etc.
The game of Commander is 3 v 1, so no matter what "bracket" or what "game changers" might be in the deck, it's a balanced and well calibrated game. Removal. Removal. Removal. "Oh you've cast Craterhoof Behemoth, allow me to Counterspell, awesome... we dont die." Hoof doesn't win the game--so is Counterspell not a game changer? Can someone lie about their bracket level by saying it's a 3 when really it's a 4 or 5? Yes.
Myriad issues arise from people trying to one-ify a very cadenced, complex and tuned game. Magic the Gathering is as strong as it is from being an immersive and complex game, yet easy enough for people to play. Player experience and many other factors dictate what a game's outcome might be at any given night with any given deck.
Leaving argument: Say Timmy sits down with 100% Mono-Blue Urza, Lord High Artificer
and everyone else is playing normal midrange commander--Urza will be getting all eyes and hammers. Everyone will take him out. He has a chance to actually win and pull it off, but 3 other decks packed with removal wont allow this.
I just wish when asked, power level is the obvious--"I've been playing X years." Or also acceptable, "I did my best to make the deck as good as possible." Because that's what we all do, on whatever budget it may be.
Anyway, let me know your thoughts on the matter, I may have potentially left out areas of topic but feel I covered most of this new trend that caters to newer players rather than older, sometimes more experienced ones. And overall just want the guise of "power level" and "brackets" and "game changers" so be re-understood as many varying factors and that maybe, just maybe, they don't exist at all.
- Cheers!
Goldberserkerdragon says... #3
It's 3 v 1. You versus 3 others. The guy to your right is against 3 others, etc. Each person is only themselves.
March 3, 2025 11:42 a.m.
Sliverguy420 says... #4
thats not 3 v 1 though, thats a 4 person free for all. the difference is that 3 v 1 would mean the 3 players are on a team.
also keep in mind not every commander game starts with 4 players. it may be 3 or even just 2.
March 3, 2025 11:46 a.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #5
You're saying the same thing I am just in a slightly different way I think. And yes but we are speaking in a general sense with 4 players. What does "free for all" mean to you in this context? Help me understand. That to me still doesn't mean it's not you versus the guy to your right and in front of you and adjacent to you. And so everyone is doing the same, everyone is 3 v 1 in a 4 person setting. But this is hardly the main argument of the post.
March 3, 2025 11:53 a.m.
Yea there's a big difference between a free for all and a 3 v 1 game. Edh is a free for all unless you are playing Archenemy.
I see what you are getting at but I think Game Changer is an excellent way to refer to these cards. A great example imo is Drannith Magistrate. Once people play this commanders can no longer be cast until it is removed. It instantly changes the course of the game by demanding your removal or denying you your commander. Craterhoof Behemoth is big, but doesn't instantly change the game on its own the DM does.
March 3, 2025 11:54 a.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #7
3 v 1, as in, again, you are your own person, so is each person at the table (if it's a reg game of 4 man). Think existentially. Again, removal exists. I'm not in any way saying situations can be against your favor, of course they will, that's just the game. Drannith does suck, BUT if one person removes it, then it's not so much about any one card anymore. That's the short and sweat of it all. People just seem to forget about player power level, removal, and the random variances to the game.
March 3, 2025 12:02 p.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #8
Sorry, and no one is playing craterhoof until it's time. So you are only confirming my point here :P
March 3, 2025 12:03 p.m.
Crow_Umbra says... #9
Idk what MtG content you consume, but I'd suggest checking out the EDHRecast episode where they talk to Gavin Verhey about the Bracket system, and some of the current shortcomings of the system. A general TL;DW, since the video is 1.5 hours (you can start around the 10 min mark tbh):
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They are very aware about Bad Actors who may misrepresent their deck, which will always be an issue regardless of these types of systems and their intentions. Some people just suck.
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The Bracket system is intended more so as a "common language" for matchmaking with people that are outside of our typical play groups and LGSs. Players with consistent play groups tend to have a sense of who & what they'll commonly play against, & (hopefully) assess threats accordingly.
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The Game Changer list is subject to change, and will hopefully be evaluated and updated every 3-6 months. The list could shrink if feedback from players is strong enough that certain cards aren't as impactful, or to your point, that players have a collective threat assessment to deal with cards on the list.
I think that Brackets are a decent starting point, and we are still only 3 weeks into collectively thinking about and implementing this beta version of this tool. I think that the differentiation between Brackets 3 & 4 need a bit more work, and will hopefully be addressed in the update/launch at the end of April. Generally speaking, I think this is less vague and subjective than the "Power level 1-10" scale which was commonly thrown around.
March 3, 2025 12:04 p.m.
Sliverguy420 says... #10
no offense, but im not saying the same thing. "battle royale" with 4 people is not the same as 3 v 1. 3v1 literally means the 3 are on the same team. it would mean that once the "1" lost, the other 3 all win together. "free for all" means each person is on their own, whereas "3v1" means the 3 are in it together. Archenemy is an example of true 3v1 because it's 3 players working together to bring down 1 player.
March 3, 2025 12:06 p.m.
"Drannith does suck, BUT if one person removes it, then it's not so much about any one card anymore. . . People just seem to forget about player power level, removal, and the random variances to the game."
You are kind of proving the point others are trying to make here and that you seem to disagree with - Someone HAS to remove it or the course of the game is changed significantly. Other cards like Craterhoof can change the course of the game sure, almost every single card played will do that to some extent. But Drannith Magistrate HAS to be removed by someone ASAP or you are playing a completely different kind of EDH game.
And no one is forgetting about these things, the consideration of removal is right there in the evaluation of Drannith Magistrate.
March 3, 2025 12:12 p.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #12
This post was about debating power level titles and attempted fixes, misunderstandings. Maybe you're thinking about it too hard. It's not about archenemy or outcomes, or teams. What? You are only you lol. That's all. You have three opponents, do you not? You can't be all 4 people either. So is this true for every other person sitting with you. It's just about numbers. And again, not the focus of the argument lol. Come on guys, focus.
March 3, 2025 12:13 p.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #13
Yeah you HAVE to play the game to play the game. What? Craterhoof is the same caliber... he ends the game. No one will drop him with only him on board. You're splitting hairs. You seem to have taken the side of the negative, bad outcome, and not understanding these things aren't what they seem. Hoops, have to be jumped through, that's the game. It's give and take, up and down, almost creating a perfectly equal opportunity for everyone--hence power levels and brackets and game changers are misleading. You've chosen Drannith, probably one of the only cards that can stop a game from doing much (sans removal), along most stax pieces. But that's stax. Stax is arbitrarily powerful, maybe the most powerful--should we say the stax theme should have a power bracket on it?
March 3, 2025 12:17 p.m.
Sliverguy420 says... #14
one of your main points against brackets was that its 3v1, hence why people are saying its not 3v1. nobody is saying 1 person can be 4. but 3v1 literally is the opposite of "everyone for themselves". 3 opponents is not the same as 3v1 because those 3 opponents are not on a team. team being the key word you keep ignoring. when the idea of 3 v 1 was literally one of your main points against brackets, it literally became the focus of the discussion.
March 3, 2025 12:18 p.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #15
It did inadvertently bc someone didn't like what I said, hence a counter argument arose. This wouldn't have carried on this long if the focus was about why are there even brackets and power levels at all when player experience is king, knowing your deck, cadences and nuances. Not necessarily if its 3 v 1 or 1 v1 or anything, that was more of a glaze over for how you are always going to have 3 opponents, THEREFORE no matter what "power level" your deck, you could win or you could lose. Its all random for the most part. We build decks to mitigate these variances but the natural construction of a deck plus shuffling and the prior all take effect.
Back to Drannith; is he a strong card that shuts the game down? Yes. Will there always be removal? No. Wil there always be a Drannith? No. Will there be removal then, probably.
One of the main reasons I made this post at all was bc someone at my lgs came and played with us, a usually "high powered" table as commander is naturally the strongest format with access to nearly any card. However, he claimed a Bracket 2/3 and plays Survival of the Fittest T3 and proceeded to win the next couple turns. Now, I did just mention a higher powered card yet that's not what won him the game. What won him the game was none of us seemed to have any removal for turn after turn. Reinstating how important removal is. Had we had it, he would have not won. At least not like that, that early. Also, dude lied... how do we trust anything until we simply see the deck? And just my own peculation about the new changes. Player level is a whole thing.
Guy wound up winning bc he knew the variances and cadences of the game well--and i was watching it. Told us he'd been playing since 2005. Go figure--proving my point it should almost always just be about player power and we should all just have that Rule-0.
March 3, 2025 12:36 p.m.
Sliverguy420 says... #16
my original post made multiple points, yet you only responded to one. saying "the game is random therefore balanced" is simply not true. thats like saying, well, a pauper deck "could" beat a vintage deck because the vintage deck could draw all lands. i wouldn't go as far as saying the dude lied based on 1 card in 99.
i'm also gonna adamantly disagree that commander is the "strongest" format. i'd bet my bottom dollar that a commander deck would usually lose to a modern deck, and certainly legacy or vintage, purely based on consistency. 1 in 99 is not as consistent as 4 in 60.
March 3, 2025 12:44 p.m.
plakjekaas says... #17
The brackets are a tool to start the conversation about what you expect out of a game of commander. You expect everyone to maximize their deck and play removal for everything, that means you'd probably like to play around bracket 4.
There's people who don't want to bother with deckbuilding much, and just play precons out of the box, sounds like they would have a bad time at your table. They'd like to play against other 2s.
There's also a lot about intent, Survival of the Fittest is a card that's never intended for honest play. It's ideal to use for tutoring combo pieces and winning early and consistent. That's not a bracket 2, low 3 mindset.
And it's not always 3v1 in a four-player game, but for every player it will feel like 1v3. Yourself versus the others. There's no guarantee anyone is going to help you do your thing, but you can be sure everyone will try to stop you if you do something that looks dangerous. And because that goes for everyone, the table is never a team of 3 players against just the other 1 player unless you're playing the Archenemy game variant. It's every single player, on its own, versus the others at the table. That's what free-for-all means. No set teams, but you can form and break alliances a you see fit for the situations, with all their consequences taken for granted.
Now the Gamechanger card list is not exhaustive or final, but for the introduction of the concept it has been a short list with the most unfair or annoying or powerful offenders as a start.
March 3, 2025 12:58 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #18
For starters: this is coming from someone who has almost zero of the game changers in his decks. I try to be generous in their attempt to build SOME kind of sort-of-consistent structure for use in organizing decks into some sort of approachable non-mess. I hadn’t expected and was pleased with the game changers idea; they’re not a ban, but just a flag that a deck has been bumped up in power a little. We’ve lived in a “ban or not banned” universe for a LONG time, so it’s reasonable to have an initial semi-negative response to the game changers. You are 100% correct that a HUGE portion of cards are VERY close to the game changers. One could easily argue that almost every card is a game changer, or half of a “problematic” combo. I’ve focused on remembering that things like combos and asymmetrical board wipes are really what M:tG is all about and if we’re too thorough on flagging all of the game changers we’ll end up with just one giant list that has all the cards that aren’t Orcish Oriflamme or vanilla creatures on it… which is effectively no list at all. There may be more cards to add to the list, but it should definitely be tough to get on the list. Counterspells should stay off the list, even though I often grumble when they get cast, because that’s a narrowly-targeted spell that is core to the color’s identity. Wrath of God effect? Pretty white-specific aesthetic, not necessarily great for all white decks, and not one-sided, so it probably should stay off the list too. If we complain too much then we’ll be back to everything being a seven.
March 3, 2025 1:17 p.m.
Some thoughts:
People can and will lie to gain an advantage. That's a problem with the person, not the system. The only foolproof method to prevent this is to have a full deck review for everyone before each match. And even then, it's possible to cheat mid game.
Time spent playing isn't the best indicator of deck strength. Who would win--the person who's been playing one deck casually twice a month for twenty years and once went to a Grand Prix to check it out, or the hardcore cEDH-er who started six years ago and puts in hundreds of hours with each of their five $7,000+ decks? "As good as possible" also has limits, with very different meanings for people with $20, $200, and $2,000.
A expertly piloted, strongly synergistic deck with no game changers can reliably win over three mega-decks that were bought online yesterday, sure. But I understand the bracket system to be a starting point for comparisons, and notes like "Six game changers, but this is my first time using it" or "No game changers, but highly refined and optimized" should still be included in the conversation.
I have to admit, I'm slightly on the outside. I haven't played an EDH match in months. But the meme that every single deck was "about a 7" wan't completely unjustified, and the bracket system is still just an educated first swing at letting comparisons be a little more objective.
March 3, 2025 8:44 p.m.
DeinoStinkus says... #20
I don't think that the Bracket system is a bad idea, but I also don't think it was built to solve Commander's problems, just put a Healing Salve on them, so to speak. It gives us some basic guidelines to work with, and while people may misrepresent themselves intentionally or "game the system" by making OP decks without any game changers, it's a good starting point to help organize the format and alleviate some of the contention and confusion there is, especially for new players.
As others have said, it helps establish that common language to make Commander more accessible for new players and I think that's a good thing, even if it needs refinition over time.
March 3, 2025 10:07 p.m.
I don’t think you understand what is meant by “game changer”.
It sounds as though you think it means “game winner”.
A Cyclonic Rift changes the game on the spot. That may not mean that the person who playe it instantly wins.
However it does mean that the board state instantly changes.
This idea constantly gets put about in Magic that everything is fine, because everything can be countered.
StuBi and I were talking this morning about our exoerience as new Commander players.
Once people found out that he had counterspells in his deck, they pressured him to counter every spell THEY didn’t like, saying it would make him win.
Not everybody abouid be forced to play
players shouldn’t be pressured to use their counterspells for the whole table. That is remarkably unfair to them.
March 4, 2025 3:24 p.m.
DeinoStinkus says... #22
Agreed - in fact, out of the 20 game changers, only about 7 can arguably end the game (and most of these, like Underworld Breach, are reliant on existing board state).
March 4, 2025 3:31 p.m.
The other thing which is actually the most problematic for making sure everyone gets the game they want, is players only turning up with one deck.
StuBi and I were ready to play at our LGS.
A bloke asked if we could make a pod of 3. We knew him very well.
This is no nice way to say this nicely. He was a damn liar.
We did the usual asking him how powerful he thought his decks were. We were told (as per usual) they weren’t powerful at all.
We asked if we could see his Commanders, so we could choose one we thought would be the fairest. He only had one deck, which we could tell immediately would be too powerful for ours.
This is actually one of the biggest problems. People turning up with only one extremely over powered deck.
I always take at least three different powered decks with me to any Commander night.
The info given about Brackets speaks as though people will have a couple of decks to use. That has not been my experience.
March 4, 2025 4:09 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #24
I think, once you boil it down, the actual real-world implication of this new bracket system is this: there are really only two groups of decks. Bracket one and two are similarly casual, and three & four are (when you actually build a well-functioning deck) indistinguishable. You may not even need a game changer to make a level three or four strength deck. And as for five- that’s just a higher degree of tuning of a three or four, and maybe some more cash spent. When I think about the decks that I see every week, it really just comes down to “is this a precon/casual deck?” Some are, but most are a three. This could change if they expand the list of game changers, but now that the concept is out there (and the people making the cards have a point of reference to work from) I would almost expect the list to shrink before it grows.
March 5, 2025 3:36 p.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #25
I think you're pretty spot on FormOverFunction. Ultimately the word on the street is ALL of this is because the commander ruling committee effed up and so this is how Wizard's repairs slowly. They told them NOT to ban those cards, apparently. So I can see how doing so lost Wizards/Hasbro over a calculated $150 million +. They want to unban cards as opposed to banning them. And if it's a powerful card and needs "banning' then it just goes into bracket 5. Don't want to play against Coalition and Jeweled Lotus, ok, don't play bracket 5. I get it. It's a way of restoration and overall health of what commander was supposed to be--a free for all format (in the sense of playing any card you want).
Rule zero conversations will always be your ultimate go to.
March 5, 2025 4:39 p.m.
Crow_Umbra says... #26
"Rule zero conversations will always be your ultimate go to."
I'm not making this point to be disparaging or condescending, but to point out an aspect of this whole thread exchange where we have been talking past each other a bit. I think that Brackets are intended to facilitate Rule 0 conversations, not replace them. Since the intention here is to give players a more common and better defined set of parameters to describe their deck building intentions with strangers, the intent should be for this to add some better definition to those pre-game discussions.
Ideally Brackets are meant to be a part of Rule 0/pre-game discussions.
March 5, 2025 4:57 p.m.
Goldberserkerdragon says... #27
True. However, I never said anything about replacing brackets brother Crow_Umbra. The brackets help and we will always usually just play with someone, feel it out and adjust as we go. Unless you have a pod already and you guys know what you're doing lol.
March 5, 2025 5:03 p.m. Edited.
Crow_Umbra they even talk about Ruie 0 in the brackets discussion.
Although Rule 0 means very very different things to different people.
The five different brackets make a lot of sense, because there are many more deck variants than just two.
In particular, the first bracket allows people to just piss fart around with theme decks that they find fun.
The very good example given was playing with a theme deck where every card has a four on it.
As pointed out, this will be a deck that is too weak to play against precons.
I was glad to see preçons given their own bracket. There is a lot of fun to be had, just playing those.
As long as everyone realises that playing precons means playing them as is. I was involved and in a precon match when somebody played a card I knew wasn’t in that deck.
When I pointed that out, the player said they had adjusted the deck “a little bit”.
I took a look at the deck at the end of the match. 20 cards had been swapped, which I call cheating.
March 5, 2025 10:48 p.m.
Crow_Umbra says... #29
All good Argy, I misinterpreted the part of Goldberserkerdragon's post that I highlighted in mine.
I think the Brackets are a good starting point and I'm looking forward to the updates in April.
March 5, 2025 11:31 p.m.
FormOverFunction says... #30
I 100% agree with Crow - if you’re going to be irritated or upset about deck balance, you owe it to other people to talk to them about it first (this goes for most things with people). I think having “official” rules is extremely important for competitive games (and even semi-cooperative ones like D&D) so that when someone pushes the limits it’s easier for people to push back. It’s extremely difficult for some to push back at all, so being able to point to the official rules is huge. Can you just do what’s cool in your D&D campaign? Of course. Can it be hard to tell one of your players “I know you think it’s cool, but we’re not doing that…”? Definitely. It’s much easier to point to the book and say “sorry, you can only pick so many feats when you level up.”
Sliverguy420 says... #2
its not 3 v 1, its 4 person free for all. the fact that you'd have to go 3 v 1 to take out a deck, proves that the deck is overpowered, not that the format is balanced. every card may have "an answer", but that doesn't mean the opponent will have that answer when they need it. they might not even be playing the color that has that answer. there will always be certain cards (and by extension, decks) that are more powerful than others. it makes sense to want to regulate and "quantify" a decks power level. its why we have multiple formats, and why cards get banned in each format. if there were a 4 person game with 3 pauper decks and 1 vintage deck, theres a high probability the vintage deck comes out on top if alliances aren't made.
March 3, 2025 11:40 a.m.