Magic the Gathering: October 2025 Commander Bracket Update Hot Takes

On October 21st, we had Blake and Gavin give us an update on WeeklyMTG regarding some updates to the Game Changers list as well as some updates to the Bracket list for Commander. They also discussed a few proposals and ideas from the team regarding hybrid mana and a few other problem cards in the format they're keeping an eye on. We're going to jump right into the changes and some of our thoughts on each one. Notably, there are no new Bans/Unbans this year from the banlist.

The Commander Bracket Changes

There are some key updates here that are worth noting, besides just a new infographic. First and foremost, Bracket 2 has been detached from Preconstructed decks (now called "Core" and is being more defined as a sort of "baseline" power level that Preconstructed decks will often fall into. Bracket 1 is now labelled "Exhibition" and is now more used to describe its intent for thematic decks. Tutors have been removed from the bracketing as well - Gavin noted that many of the stronger tutors are already Game Changers, so other tutors are fair game now. They also now have game length expectations in regards to how many turns games at each bracket should typically take before someone can close it out.

Loxi: Overall, I'm happy with these changes. The infographic nicely now shows their thought process with how they envision each bracket and the little tabs showing the differences moving between brackets is handy. Bracket 2 being marketed as what the power baseline is for casual Commander makes a lot more sense and doesn't really pigeonhole them into making preconstructed decks fit exactly within that one bracket, as well as making sure players can play that bracket without feeling like their deck has to be equivalent in power to a preconstructed deck. I think the game duration stuff is a little meaningless besides setting expectations for newer players.

Tutors being removed I'm neutral on, I think tutors have a place in Commander, but I'm a believer that the variance in a 100-card singleton format is what keeps it interesting. That being said, I think there are a lot of times when having a "wild card" that you can use to tutor up utility pieces is handy (something like Open the Armory in Equipment decks), even if you aren't just tutoring up a win condition. Not having to make the distinction on what tutors are and aren't acceptable is handy as I think the logic that "if you want to use a strong tutor they take up a Game Changer slot" in Bracket 3 is solid. I do think the real win there is people asking what tutors did/didn't count in terms of lands and such, so just having that be gone and relegating tutor balance to the game changer list is fine.

Saffgor: I think the things unsaid here are the most damning, because I'm overall fairly negative on the changes to the bracket system. One of the thrusts of this system, and Wizards taking control of the format on the whole, was to create a schema that reduced the burden of pregame conversations on individual players. I want to stress, this didn't remove the pregame conversation, but instead gave us a common language with which to discuss our decks. I would argue that, while Brackets 1 & 5 didn't exist at all for most players, the differences between 2-4 were substantial enough to result in differing game feel and deck design. What the previous version achieved was a reduction of bad actors, and guidance for combo players; as you traipsed up the Brackets, you moved from 'no 2 card combos' to 'slow 2 card combos' to 'go wild', and for 99% of players that was enough. Bracket 2 restricting tutors also meant that, even if you did pack a late game 3 card combo, it would likely be inaccessible unless one of your pieces was in the Command Zone.

As a combo player by trade, I had expected clearer guidelines for what constituted a combo, perhaps even an outright strike against tutors in the Command Zone in Bracket 2. Ensuring players know that something like Basalt Monolith & Rings of Brighthearth is a 2-card combo despite needing an outlet would be great, and qualifying combos as disregarding outlets as combo pieces would do a ton to help. Instead, they've opened the floodgates for consistency in combos while preventing them from going off before a number of 'target turns' are played. Not to spoil the Game Changer updates, but there are a host of powerful tutors that were fine enough to be limited at lower power, but not worth becoming Game Changers, like Entomb & Finale of Devastation.

What this does is reduce variance, even if you can't force a win early, and given you're broadly dissuaded from making anyone lose the game before the target turn it's ripe to let the worst combo offenders thrive. To me this feels designed by people who don't actively play combo, and certainly don't play aggro/Voltron. Even though 'target turns' aren't hard & fast, they're an arguing chip for players eliminated early by someone whose deck is playing as it must. Social pressure in a social format is strong, and in Wizards making this suggestion but not committing to it, I worry we're left with the worst of both worlds. In short, combo is insulated and provided consistency in the lower Brackets, and aggro/Voltron is kenneled by the social mores of these new expected turn counts. The differences between Brackets 2 & 3 now are fewer than before, and with a huge swath of Game Changers available it feels to me that the guardrails for Bracket 2 now come down to arbitrary vibes ascribed in the infographic above.

FromTheShire: I definitely am getting some of the same vibes that this feels bad for Voltron and aggressive decks. Usually for those strategies to have a chance to work you have to dump your hand quickly and start taking people out, and if you're not set up to kill the first person until turn 7 in a bracket 3 game they have a whole lot of time to deploy defenses and value engines to bury you in advantage and leave you with no chance to win. If anything instituting a 5 minute no rush policy seems like it will incentivize running less early interaction (as does the bracket 2 "let each deck showcase its plan" policy) and more combo turns once the timer is up. This has the knock on effect of further reducing the playability of something like Voltron when you know you can't kill anyone until turn 7 and then have to kill the whole table or get combo'd before you ever get turn 8.

I think I understand where this speed of play idea is coming from when Wizards has previously talked about deliberately trying to keep say Modern as a turn 3 or 4 format, but it feels wrong to consider Commander in the same way on a gut level.

BPhillipYork: I think moving away from precons as a power level was was good change off the bat. There's a tremendous variety of power levels in precons over the years, things like the Prosper, Tome-Bound precon are remarkably consistent and can play through board wipes due to the massive resource advantage he generates as a commander. Comparing that to the usual pile of enters tapped lands, bad board clears, and clumsy mechanics leads to a confusing impression that precons sit at a stable and consistent power level, but they very much do not.

Game length expectations are a different thing entirely. On the one hand they are a very useful metric to understand player expectations. On the other hand, these are some murderously slow games. Getting taken out of the game after 8 turns means you just played for probably in excess of an hour, unless your pod is very rapid fire and focused. Truth be told that's longer than I want to play a Commander game for, as for the most part by that point I feel most decks have either fired or misfired, or we're in the late stage attrition grind and someone is just slowly beating other players down, or has some kind of soft-lock. In and of itself that is a pretty useful thing to understand, that I largely don't expect to play bracket 2 games because I don't want to. So looking at pods, I'd just avoid those tables.

The trouble I would say is those game length expectations are based on how much interaction from the table exactly? Is it fair to build a deck that starts doing lots of damage around turn 5 or 6, expecting that your opponents will have some say in the matter? Or is this the vanilla creature test, and your opponents have no expectation of agency or interaction, and if you dare to deal combat damage to them, they won't be able to do anything about it?

Where this game length troubles me even more is at bracket 3. At bracket 3 I expect a ramp into value or combo engine to occur on turns 3 and 4 and significant things to happen on turn 5 or earlier with a good draw. Maybe that's fair if you are assuming, against, bracket 3 decks, they'll stop you. But I worry that this game length expectation will be set in peoples minds also, not so much as "I will have taken less than 40 damage by turn X", to be more of a "I will be left alone until turn X". Which is hardly even playing a group game at all, but I've been in plenty of pods where daring to attack the highest life player lead to a bout of whining and finger pointing for seemingly no reason at all, and I hope this kind of toxic player is not being enabled by a "no attacks until turn 6" rule.

For Bracket 4 and 5 there seems to be some kind of distinction being drawn that is escaping me. "Not the meta" and "the meta" means what? To me it largely seems slightly sub-par game plans or non-standard commanders, but largely running the same staples list. Maybe mucking about with Tymna the Weaver and Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix with a plan to draw into infinite mana or something like that, rather than bog standard Tymna/Thrasios. For a lot of players not serious about cEDH what is "the meta" may also vary considerably, and the meta of cEDH itself shifts about at least somewhat as people just want to try out new commanders and strategies to have fun, since the prize money isn't large enough, in my opinion, to drive true min maxxing behavior.

Cards Removed From the Game Changer List

We have a few cards being removed from the GC list as they tweak it and tune things around the bracket system. Worth mentioning that they have mentioned some of these being things they'll still keep an eye on in case they end up being an issue in the future.

Batch 1: Big Splashy Cards

These are cards they have removed for being so large and expensive that they warrant being off the GC list, even if they do have ways to discount/cheat them out. Sway of the Stars, which was recently unbanned, was mentioned to be comparable to Worldfire, a card that isn't on the GC list and serves a very similar role.

Loxi: Expropriate I think is fair game, even though it's a pretty brutal card it's basically only often cheated out and you can't really loop it. Since it can effectively chain extra turns, you're only running it at Bracket 4 minimum where it really would be an issue. Jinny-G is also fine, it's super oppressive but it's another body that's very expensive and dies to removal, it's basically a brutal control piece that you really have to set up to make the best use out of. It's a really good card still, but I think the type of decks that want to run it will be decks in higher power brackets anyway. Sway I agree with their logic on - it's fine, if you cast a 10 mana spell it should warp the game in a way you can try to win, and that requires a lot of setup to be able to really do something with that which you can leverage more than other players.

Vorinclex is the one I have the biggest issue with, as being a green creature makes it typically easier to cast naturally with ramp and often is in colors where you can more easily tutor it and/or reanimate it pretty aggressively. Currently (as far as I'm aware) this isn't on the Mass Land Denial list as well, so I think some decks in the middle brackets might be seeing him a bit more often. I don't think it's format-blowing-up-bad but being a card players typically loathe playing against, I think this is one I don't agree with the logic of as much.

Saffgor: This is basically all fine, though I think the idea of 'playing an expensive card should win the game' is perhaps a bit disingenuous. Who's casting these for their actual mana cost? They're being cheated, reanimated, etc 9 times out of 10, so their expressed purpose as 'big mana game enders' is a bit rich. The larger issue is that for a few of these, it could be argued they're not playable in Bracket 3 anyway depending on your reading of the infographic. As Loxi outlined, if everyone gives you a time vote with Expropriate, are you even allowed to take those 4 extra turns sequentially? Is Vorinclex technically mass land denial per his last ability? This speaks to a larger issue of Wizards being a bit wishy-washy on definitions, akin to their reasoning surrounding the removal of tutor restrictions in Bracket 2. The same people getting questions about whether Expedition Map counted as a tutor, when that was deliberately outlined as only counting for nonlands, are now fine with turning free the questions of Vorinclex & Expropriate to a far wider number of players.

You could play them before, but the Game Changer list also distilled decks towards including only the optimal picks, not splashy cards like these. Notice that you rarely see people jamming their Mox Diamonds & Grim Monoliths in Bracket 3 outside of Colorless decks; in forcing players to select 3 from the pool of legal options, the annoying, expensive, or otherwise suboptimal picks get sidelined hard. I haven't played against Jin in Bracket 3 since the previous update—players were too busy jamming Rhystic Study, Cyclonic Rift, and The One Ring. The power of the Game Changer list is as strong as its strongest 3 members in a color identity, and functionally a banlist for those beyond it. Releasing the restraints on those pseudo-banned cards might seem fine, but who's really having fun staring down a turn 4 Vorinclex?

FromTheShire: So many of these big mana cards feel like they are either completely fine because you let someone hard cast an 8+ mana spell and then resolve it with no interaction which is kind of communally the fault of the table, or it was cheated out for much cheaper by something in which case that enabler is probably the actual problem. There are LOTS of 8+ mana things that are a problem if they get cheated out on turn 3, are we slowly going to ban all of them?

BPhillipYork: These largely seem like a good but unimportant changes. These cards are so so expensive that unless you are cheating them out they shouldn't be super swingy, and if you are, and are doing so in a bracket 3 game or below, then you're probably a jerk trying to skate the power rules and people just shouldn't play Commander with you, rather than worrying about making these Game Changers. It is fair to say though that cheating out big creatures is much easier than cheating out huge spells, and two of these are serious stax creatures that can massively slow the game down, and lock some decks out almost completely. Nonetheless, if you are getting locked out by Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur getting Animate Dead cast on him, then run more interaction.

Batch 2: Legendary Creatures

These are legendary creatures which are being removed from the Game Changer list due to their nature as being potential commander options. Gavin's explanation here is that commanders are a piece of information you know before the game, so being a game changer isn't as necessary due to typical rule 0 conversations that tables can have, and being off the Game Changer list makes them more viable to show up in the 99 in other brackets.

Loxi: This batch is the one I'm least on board with. While I agree the difference between always having the card and it being just a piece in the deck is very distinct, some of these are really powerful cards regardless of where they show up. Like I don't think I've seen Yuriko or Urza used in a reasonable way literally ever, even in lower power decks. I can get on board with Winota a little bit only because she can help enable some interesting typal strategies, but the other three just are powerful cards that I think are often generically powerful enough that they're game warping regardless of where they show up.

Again, I don't think any of these are going to be format boogeymen at lower brackets or anything all of the sudden, but I do think that banking on rule 0 discussion being the gate for if you see these cards or not at lower power brackets slightly defeats some of the point of having a system like this in the first place.

Saffgor: Well this is disastrous. As I stated, the sell of the Bracket system was to reduce the burden of the pregame conversation, but these changes stand opposed to that very idea. Wizards isn't allowed to say this, but every card listed on the Game Changer list has seen a rise in price higher than market average since its debut; I mention this not because you should pay those prices (proxy, people) but because of visibility. The average Commander player who's going to the game store is not nearly as plugged-in to the format as anyone writing or even potentially reading about it, and arriving to the assumption that you can just declare these verboten in Rule 0 is laughable. Quoting the article: "The easiest thing to opt out of is someone's commander. If someone says, "I want to play Yuriko," you know exactly what that means and it's easy to prompt a conversation.", but this assumes someone is aware of her infamy at the table.

This not only relies on the overestimation of everyone's familiarity with the format and its boogeymen, but also now allows them, in theory, to be played in Bracket 2. Now people can say 'well, no Yuriko deck fits in to the intent of Bracket 2' but if that were the case, why isn't she on the Game Changer list? People read it, the money speaking to that truth, and if we've grown so complacent as to believe the power of Yuriko's ilk to be self-evident their leaving the Game Changer list will be a dire lesson. It costs nothing for Commanders like them to be there, displayed in broad daylight as dangerous. It teaches threat assessment, and provides a safe haven Bracket where they cannot appear, but that sanctuary has been breached when it should have been bolstered. They talked about never implementing 'banned as Commander', which is fine, but 'restricted to Bracket 3+ as Commander' was an incredibly welcome facet of the previous update.

FromTheShire: If the whole point of the bracket system is to provide a framework for rule 0 discussions at a pickup game at an LGS, it seems pretty wild to remove the checkbox from these cards that said hey we HAVE to have a conversation about this and instead rely on the owner's good nature or the threat assessment of a pod that may never have played against them before to spark that conversation.

BPhillipYork: I'm not sure I entirely agree with this change. One of these commanders is a serious stax / combo commander (Urza, Lord High Artificer) and the other three tend to dump out resources at an outrageous rate. Yes, maybe you can just know that Yuriko is mean, and Winota can generate massive force quickly, and reading Kinnan's text box should tell you what his deck is likely to do in any case. It feels like there needs to be some kind of rule about commanders. Admittedly you can just play a great commander with garbage cards, or even cards that are anti-synergistic, but in general I'd be okay with commanders having minimum bracket ratings. All these commanders would probably slot into 3+, unless you are deliberately making a funny deck.

Batch 3: Other Cards

Two more cards round out the GC removals:

Food Chain - as combos are already regulated by the brackets, this allows you to use Food Chain for some other interesting combo potential (or even non-combo use if you're inclined) at other brackets.
Deflecting Swat - Red having access to really efficient interaction isn't as much of an issue as things like blue getting free counterspells, and really it sounds like this is intended to give a little boost for mono-red.

Loxi: Food Chain change is fine, I'm a firm believer in combo being essential to helping actually end games in the format and assembling some weird multiple card combos with Food Chain is neat, the bans on tutors and combos early in the game will hold it back enough that I don't expect it to be too silly outside of the usual suspects like Prossh, and at that point you're defeating the spirit of playing brackets where that would matter anyway.

Deflecting Swat on the other hand, even as someone who plays a lot of mono-red, I disagree with just because I have a vendetta against free spells. I don't like casting spells for free with basically no stipulation, and while I agree this isn't as warping as some other free spells, I don't really like any of the cards from this cycle. I'm not up in arms about it - in the end I don't think it's a big deal and really just helps Red decks get some more interaction in, I think I just don't really want cards like this to see widespread use, especially since they all end up being a billion dollars.

Saffgor: I wish I could give Wizards props for unrestricting Food Chain, because their words on it are right: It's the exact kind of card quashed by other existing combo restrictions. It still won't be used fairly, though, and now Bracket 3 decks going infinite with Eternal Scourge or similar will just get to do so with an extra free Game Changer slot. Those this affects get a power boost to a known combo that sees play up through cEDH, and for those this doesn't affect it still isn't a card with good play patterns. I just don't see what the benefit is in removing it.

You'll have noticed I am pretty pro-Game Changer, and this comes from a background of highly regulated formats like Canlander, and games like Yu-Gi-Oh. What the Game Changer list does well is force players to make choices, and pay opportunity costs regardless of how many colors they have. I personally choose only to play weird Monocolor decks, because I like playing around the limited card pool, but as you add colors to your identity the propensity for decks to simply play 'the best cards' grows. However, whether Monoblue or 5 Color, you get 3 Game Changers in Bracket 3. This does a surprising amount of work in reducing the ceiling of goodstuff color soup, and it was noticeable from a design standpoint. I say this because, in spite of my love of Red, the unrestriction of Swat doesn't help the Monored decks that need it most. It was one of the maybe ~5 Game Changers they'd choose from, but still often made it in! Rarely was it, though, a card played by 3+ color decks with Red because of their wealth of options. The power equity of it being free now favors the decks that were already better by virtue of a wider pool, and this is often true of Game Changers in general.

BPhillipYork: These seem fine; Deflecting Swat is really really strong, but red has taken a hammering in the last year for cards getting banned, so it's a bone to throw. The Swat is less crazy than blue's bevy of free counterspells, since they can both protect a win and stop a win, whereas Swat is a lot less able to interact with many win cons, virtually anything that is dependent on consistent or repeated interaction with permanents, whereas a counterspell just stops the last combo piece from hitting the board. Food Chain is generally a dedicated combo card, and taking it off the list seems fine. You could do some fun decks that rely on copying permanents and then exiling them for mana, which would be strong but extremely clunky, and in any case Food Chain is a one of a kind card that can just be blown up.

Overall Thoughts

Loxi: I'm pretty neutral on these changes as a whole; I think it's good to see them tweak the format and try to actually bounce some ideas around. They mentioned considering opening up hybrid mana to allow for using them in decks with just access to one of their colors, and even if that change doesn't actually come, I think it's cool to see them discussing things to help keep the format alive and well. The Game Changers list I think won't really drastically change the games we play day to day, but I think some of them have a bit of logic I'm not 100% sure I'm behind. I do think this is positive overall, but I'm hoping they'll be receptive to if some of these changes don't work and need to be revised in the future.

Gavin and Blake had a great discussion as a whole though and I like the transparency about why they make the decisions they made, so overall I'm pleased enough with the attitude towards the format even if the specific changes are hit or miss for me.

Saffgor: I'm firmly in the negative camp for this update, as it feels to me that the format panel has washed their hands a bit of actively managing expectations. We've seen a swath of deregulation across the most played Brackets, and while greater freedoms might be enjoyed by control & midrange pilots, I worry the switch to intended combo turn versus hits to their consistency will backfire. Moreover, I believe the Game Changer list being drastically pared down is a negative for reasons I described above, and on the whole this update seems to cater to enfranchised players more than casual ones. Commander is a social format, but few people have the luxury of a truly dedicated playgroup that can iron out exactly what they want from a Commander game. It feels as though we've been told the 9 most terrifying words in a format update are "I'm from the Panel, and I'm here to help", just as many of the guardrails taken for granted by the previous update have been stripped away.

I want to touch on a few of the smaller notes in this stream as we finish up the discussion, because I feel they're quietly very important. Precons are no longer all Bracket 2, which for anyone who's tried to play one in a higher bracket seems...surprising! Yes, if your unadulterated precon contains a Game Changer, you're now thrust into the cold dark of Bracket 3; their justification was that not all precons are the same power level, which is absolutely true, but by that same token I would contend not a single one is so different as to shoot up a Bracket. If you're winning with Deadly Disguise (2 Game Changers in there) against 3 reasonably-built B3 decks, check your opponents' houses for carbon monoxide. Rhystic Study and Thassa's Oracle remain unbanned, one for being 'iconic' and the other for having some 'fair uses'. As someone who plays from B2-cEDH, Rhystic either snowballs advantage or kingmakes following a failed combo turn, and Thoracle has never been resolved fairly at one of my pods. These feel like weird justifications for two contentious cards remaining in the format, but given their wont to deregulate I didn't expect differently by that point in the stream. I know I can be dramatic in how I phrase my opinions, but in short, I expect this version of the Bracket system to feel worse than the previous. It's a shame, too, because lord knows I was an early advocate.

FromTheShire: Maybe after jamming a bunch of games and tracking what turn my games end on the new speed-based brackets work fine, or even well, it's hard to say. That seems like a whole lot of experimentation required to get an assessment for even one deck much less 20 or more of them. Then you have to consider what your average opponent was doing, how much interaction they had, how much interaction and protection YOU had, how the table politics broke down... it seems like such an alien way to categorize my deck at first blush. I really don't feel like encouraging players to build the average deck to end the game on turn 7 is beneficial, either from a deck building or psychological standpoint. Overall I thought they did a pretty good though imperfect job with the first bracket system, and this seems strictly worse than fine tuning that framework. With the previous brackets it was usually quite smooth to ballpark where an existing deck fell between number of Game Changers and your intent, but this iteration doesn't feel that way at all. I also have quite a few decks that don't fit well within this system and little enough desire to figure out where on the sliding scale my others do that I probably simply won't engage with it. I suspect I won't be alone, and that is a problem.

BPhillipYork: In and of themselves these changes seem fine, but they're pretty slow. Brackets have been out for a year, and we've been promised updates and changes repeatedly, yet the changes when they come don't really clarify the blurry distances between brackets 2, 3, and 4 very well, nor the extremely unclear boundary between 4 and 5. So while the changes are fine, they're kind of in too little, too late territory, and the Commander guys should really get in gear and fix some of the latent ambiguities in the bracket system, rather than worrying so much about tweaking edge cases.

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