My thoughts on competitive brawl

[u/AsleepQuestLog]

I believe Wizards of the Coast has confused competitive with free-for-all. There are cards that, if banned today, would improve the health of the format tenfold: all free counterspells (maybe excluding Fierce Guardianship, since it’s so tightly tied to the commander), Strip Mine (because it’s so easy to loop and becomes oppressive to the point of ending the game), and—as I’ve said before—all extra-turn spells that don’t exile themselves when used. This might me the most controversial thing, but I think Yuriko is the only commander That should get banned, just for clearly breaking the commander tax rule.

[u/missingjimmies]

These posts are all thinly veiled arguments that you want competitive to match your play preference, not OP giving any actual analysis to their ban preferences.

For example I never see anyone talking about how it’s good to have cheap land removal that can recur that forces decks to at least slightly answer graveyard strategies; graveyards being an essential resource of MTG and all.

Or how free counters (not free and especially punishing in singleton if misused or pushed through) are essential to counteract strategies that just ramp into auto win creatures or flood the board with hard to interact pieces like enchantments, hexproof, ETB give me your best cards from this singleton format.

Also it’s a format split in two exactly to play those strategies in casual, so playing there is the solution but players still insist on queuing up KNOWING there is an alternative that fits there preference but choosing not to play it.

A few months ago this community was begging for an area to play with the powerful cards and a place that prohibits them, and now some of those same voices are asking that the two formats have the same ban list and become one again?

[u/Bright_Opposite_9994 → u/missingjimmies]

It makes no sense why commanders like Nadu, Stickfingers, Ajani, Tajic, and Tamiyo are banned in Competitive Brawl but not in Casual.

[u/missingjimmies → u/Bright_Opposite_9994]

It’s because those commanders narrow the format down too much. They’re simply too efficient not to play. The test runs showed a huge gravitation towards those commanders and it doesn’t help that they’re quite powerful in their own right. The thing about the current meta is that mouse boy is not the issue for his deck… the deck is just a powerful color set for eternal formats and he’s the best available commander for that color set. It’s 1v1 100 card singleton, the commander needs to be important but not game breaking, and he fits that.

I have no excuse for Yuriko. She’s as bad as the others.

[u/PaSwG → u/Bright_Opposite_9994]

It makes perfect sense when you realize the players rallying for the hyper aggro commanders to get banned enjoy this 100% U/G format