Individual card changes:
Edric, Spymaster of Trest is banned as a commander
Ancient Tomb is banned
Fastbond is unbanned
Further individual explanations:
Edric, Spymaster of Trest is banned as a commander
This is a decision that we made a lot of time to take, because banning a commander means banning a whole deck and it should always be done carefully. We have been discussing this card for months, analyzing tournament results with care and checking how the metagame evolved.
First, we saw that Edric decks left no space for decks that aren't built to specifically answer very quick starts. This dismissed many kind of decks to be played and was bad for the metagame, where you had to choose between playing a (net-)deck built to destroy Edric (thus having a reasonable chance to get a 50-50 matchup against it), and playing the deck you wanted to craft yourself (thus having little to no chance of beating Edric at all). Edric can be beaten, but it requires a huge changing to most decks which doesn't benefit to the game's diversity.
Second, Edric decks create a very bad feeling for players, who feel overwhelmed by a deck that is so powerful they can't even do anything. Edric's strength relies in the fact it stays hidden in the command zone, being unreachable. Either you play normally and when you get full tapped Edric appears and ensures massive free cards for his player. Or you play carefully and Edric still plays his threats and grinds your life totals with fast threats while staying behind his counterspells. With Edric, the more you draw, the more you draw : once it connects it sends you so far ahead in the game your opponent is likely to be unable to recover. Aggro-control strategies are very strong in Commander, and for example
Geist of Saint Traft is a very strong deck. But while you can battle to recover from a good Geist start, recovering after the moment Edric has started to draw several cards is unlikely to happen.
Last, Edric doesn't have a specific card in the deck that makes it so strong. So we can't just ban one or two cards to get this deck weaker while staying fine to be played.
For those reasons, and after massive playtestings and tournament results analyzis, we finally decided to ban Edric, Spymaster of Trest, as a commander. We hope that it will grant the metagame a new breath, allowing other decks to exist.
Note that you can still play Edric, Spymaster of Trest as a normal card in your deck.
Ancient Tomb is banned
Ancient Tomb has always been a very powerful card, but Commander is also about playing powerful cards. The problem is due to the specific rules of the format. Starting with 30 life, Ancient Tomb has almost no downside to playing it. Coupled with the many “signets” available, it often leads to explosive starts (like
Jace, the Mind Sculptor on turn two) with absolutely no restrictions. Where
Chrome Mox trades cards in hand for speed, where
Lotus Petal and
City of Traitors make your late game vulnerable, Ancient Tomb is extremely strong while being almost painless to play. We believe that extreme speed enablers can be good, provided you take a risk by playing them.
Fastbond is unbanned
This card has a potential of big acceleration coupled to a potential of combo-abuse. But the situations in which you can abuse it are extremely narrow, and today we think that those situations are likely to never happen, and building a specific deck to abuse this card wouldn't be competitive.
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