Summary
I am not kidding you when I say I spent a lot of my teenage years playingMagic: The Gathering. One time I was at a big event playing for, like, four days straight, and I dreamed about mulligans and flooding lands every game. That was when I decided I was spending too much time playingMagic: The Gatheringat the cost of my sanity, and I quit a couple of days later.MTG’s cuteBloomburrowset got me back into the game 15 years later, and theorycrafting Commander decks hooked me again.
Commander is a fantastic format - I absolutely love the endless possibilities with each deck, though there’s no chance you’ll see me spending $850 on a Mox Diamond to slightly improve my builds, I’m sorry. Speaking of expensive cards, let’s just address the elephant in the room:MTG’s Commander bans. Some people love them, some people hate them, but the point is that the last wave of bans was extremely controversial and sparked a chain reaction that led to theCommander Rules Committee quittingand dissolving within WotC. In the aftermath, I’m worrying over whether I should just “go for it” and make my idealMagic: The GatheringCommander deck with Flubs, The Fool at the helm or make a different deck.
Magic: The Gathering May Ban More Time-Monopolizing Cards in Commander in The Future
For starters, why is Flubs my idealCommander inMTG? There are a few reasons, but the biggest ones are:
In case you haven’t gotten the chance to see it in action, Flubs, The Fool is a very peculiar commander that came withMagic: The Gathering’sBloomburrowexpansion. Flubsy (I’ll call it Flubsy cause it’s my friend) costs 1 Red, 1 Blue, and 1 Green for a 0/5 frog that allows you to play an additional land on your turn and then throws a monkey wrench, or possibly a froggy wrench, into your card draw. With Flubsy, you draw a card each time you play a land or cast a spell while you have no cards in hand; otherwise, you discard a card.
This silly froggo is essentially a “play what you draw” Temur commander that lets you ramp very fast and then go infinite with some Landfall triggers or other win conditions. What doMTG’s Commander banshave to do with Flubs? The answer is a lot. The original blog post explains the bans of huge Commander staples in the form of Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, Mana Crypt, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom. What is particularly relevant here is the fact that Nadu was banned for monopolizing time at a Commander table, among other things.
Flubsy is very much like Nadu in this scenario, as all it cares about is playing a bunch of cards until you’re able to’t anymore on a given turn. It also comes with a built-in mechanic that lets you discard to 0 cards in hand, meaning there is likely to be a point when you just start playing your entire deck back to back off topdecks. This can include infinite turn combos with Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait + Walk the Aeons + Mystic Sanctuary + Conduit of Worlds, or maybe some Landfall strategy with Scute Swarm + Tireless Provisioner + Perilous Forays.MTG’s Commander deckstypically need an engine, and Flubs is not playing around.
The wording on therecent bans postforMTG’s Simic Commander Nadu is the following: “Part of the problem is the way in which Nadu wins, where it takes a really long time to do non-deterministic sequences that can’t be shortcut and might eventually fizzle out. […] Decks where it gets thrown into without abuse intent can still create a situation where the player is monopolizing all the time in the game.” This is exactly what Flubs, The Fool does.
Should Flubs, The Fool Be Banned in Magic: The Gathering After Nadu?
Should Flubs, The Fool be banned? I am probably not the right person to ask partly because I am biased, but also because I think banning cards on the same grounds as the last wave may snowball into the argument for banning a lot of popular picks. What I am saying here is that regardless of whether the frog should be banned, Nadu’s ban created a precedent for Commanders that have a tendency to monopolize time at a table, and now it’s inevitable to think about which other cards that behave like this are or can be problematic. Flubs is still relatively new, so even ifWotC’s new Commander committeeends up banning it, it’s not going to be soon.
Nadu, similarly to Flubs, can go infinite with its combos in a lot of different ways, and both use a non-deterministic approach, with the latter living off topdecks for the most part.
However, the possibility is there, and there wouldn’t be much to argue about the reasoning when Nadu was banned on the exact same grounds. Sure, they play differently and have different win conditions, and Nadu was arguably less limited because Simic can be splashed into more decks than Temur in terms ofMagic: The Gatheringcolors. Still, Flubsy can and will take a lot of time to play some turns where it allows you to have over 20 lands on the field and play pretty much anything from your deck.
So should I invest in a deck I love at the risk that it gets wrecked by future bans because its centerpiece is no longer usable? Maybe, since I do really like it, but at the same time, I think it would be much safer to just get a copy of Flubs to put in my living room and build a different deck. I’m sure I’m not the only one here whose decision-making was unsettled by the bans. WhileMTG’s future setsand decisions regarding Commander may improve things for a lot of people, it’s equally hard not to think that cards like Mana Vault could be next on the chopping block. As it stands, Flubs' situation seems too awfully similar to Nadu’s to simply ignore.
Magic The Gathering
Magic the Gathering is a tabletop and digital collectable card game created by Richard Garfield and released in 1993 by Wizards of the Coast. Players take on the role of a Planeswalker and use various cards to battle other players by casting spells, summoning creatures, or utilizing artifacts. It features two main rule categories, constructed or limited, and can be played by two or more players at a time.
