#116 - Rules Committee Check In: Arena, Initiative, and Website

This article is playing catchup, sharing some of what we’ve been paying attention to in the last 7 months.

TL;DR: 

• Arena-only releases, such as Alchemy sets, will not make cards legal in Pauper Commander; we are remaining in alignment with 60-card Pauper.
• No action being taken and no serious concerns yet about the initiative mechanic.
• Site overhaul is finished, and old articles are available again.

Arena Downshifts

Previously, we have stated that Arena releases WOULD make any new commons or uncommons legal in Pauper Commander (excluding the “A-” cards with altered rules text, since they are separate cards that don’t exist in paper). You can read about some of the headaches that Arena cards have created in our two rules update articles from 2021 (1, 2). 

When Alchemy Horizons: Baldur’s Gate (HBG) came out on Arena was when we actually saw our first ever Arena downshifts in the form of Demogorgon’s Clutches, Iron Golem, and You Find Some Prisoners all being downshifted from uncommon to common. This was first pointed out by Sprout on the Home Base Discord, and I spread it to Twitter and Reddit the next day, excited to talk about these 3 new commons in Pauper Commander. The 60-card Pauper community on both sites quickly got a hold of the news and was speculating on whether the cards would be legal in Pauper. It was unclear, so everyone was trying to get attention from the Pauper Format Panel and Gavin Verhey. At the time, The WotC Pauper format page simply said, “If a common version of a particular card was ever released in Magic, any version of that card is legal in this format.” That combined with all of the previous Wizards rhetoric about Arena being real magic in the vein of MTGO was exactly why the PDH RC had been explicitly saying Arena downshifts would be legal. Within 7 hours, Gavin Verhey cleared up the question with this short tweet. He followed up 2 days later with this more comprehensive response, saying that, “When Pauper was created, Arena didn't exist. Arena will do all sorts of things with commons, and our intent is for those… to not be added.” In addition, he showed that the WotC Pauper format page had been edited to clearly reflect that. This is awesome because an issue discovered by the Pauper Commander led to a major rules clarification in one of its parent formats, resulting in more transparency for the whole MtG community.

With 60-card Pauper making its stance on these downshifts clear, we had a new problem. For the first time since the Unification of Pauper, the pool of cards considered common in Pauper was different from the pool of cards considered common in Pauper Commander. Making Arena releases not effect Pauper Commander would get rid of this mismatch, and there were several good arguments in favor of this:

• Maintaining parity with the 60-card Pauper definition of commons is better for the continued growth of the format, making the card pool less confusing for those entering the format and making searches on databases like Scryfall more understandable.

• The original decision to accept Arena releases in Pauper Commander was made with the intention of matching what we thought 60-card Pauper was going to do in the future.

• Whenever Arena caused issues with Pauper Commander legality in the past, the RC has always reached out to WotC for input or clarification. 
• Cutting out Arena releases would reduce rule changes in the future, making our rule set more stable and giving the RC more time to focus on gameplay within the format.

Meanwhile, the arguments for keeping Arena releases relevant in Pauper Commander mainly boiled down to one point: when the Pauper Unification happened in 2019, it was actually the 60-card Pauper card pool that was changing to match the standard that Pauper Commander had already been using for years. By that reasoning, separating from 60-card Pauper now would have simply been a continuation of the stance that Pauper Commander held long before the Unification, by continuing to see all digital printings as valid (as long as the digital card had a paper equivalent).

In the end, the prevailing sentiment was that matching 60-card Pauper’s definition of what makes a card common was important for the format’s continued growth, and that factor dwarfed the other arguments involved. With a vote of 9-1, Arena releases will no longer impact whether Pauper Commander considers a card common or legal.

Initiative

Since the initiative mechanic came out in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate (CLB), it has made waves, both in casual and competitive Pauper Commander games. When both monarch and initiative are in the game and move around together, it can result in large power swings, as decks that didn’t pay any mana to play initiative or monarch cards gain access to sizable card advantage and board-state-boosting effects. At the casual level, this has amped up politics and sped up some games, while also enabling midrange decks in colors that previously struggled with card advantage. At the competitive level, the combat focus of the initiative mechanic has had a more noticeable effect, sustaining aggro and midrange combat decks that previously would have run out of resources against the engines of combo/control decks. This has resulted in a pretty sizable meta shift towards proactive combat decks.

Right now, we don’t think that the initiative is causing any unhealthy trends on either end of the format. To some extent, the mechanic is still in the honeymoon period and may drop back off as more new sets come out. If it does not, though, we will continue to keep an eye on the impact initiative is having, with a specific concern as to whether it is pushing out previously viable midrange strategies and/or decreasing diversity. Once again, we don’t see anything demonstrably problematic at the moment, but with the high amount of play the cards are seeing, we wanted to reassure everyone that we are paying close attention.

The Website

The PDH Home Base site has been going through a lot of work recently. Since moving from the .ca domain to a .com domain, we’ve also broken away from the Wix subscription for formatting the site, allowing us to have a lot more customization options with how the site is structured. This move also saves the site money so that it’s less of a burden to maintain with no advertisements. Our amazing site manager and RC member, Podkomorka (AKA Pod), has been completing the huge amount of work involved. Now that the move away from Wix is complete, we’re able to tag articles, so you can view just rules updates, or just card-focused articles like set reviews and deck techs. We also now have all of our old articles available again through the archived articles page. (This page is accessible through the bottom of the regular articles page as well, I just wanted to explicitly point it out here for anyone wanting to dive back into the history of the site and format, since it’s easy to miss.)

We’ve also added entries in the About Us section for Oak Tree (Oakley), and Nero64 (Chev from the Hexdrinkers podcast). These wonderful gentlemen are responsible for the coding and automation that ensures we’re giving the right data to Scryfall about what cards are PDH-legal every time a new set comes out. With the rules changes over the past year and a half, there’s been plenty of curveballs thrown their way, and PDH could not have expanded like it has in that time without their hard work. 

As always, thank you for reading! If you have any questions or concerns, we’d love to hear them, whether it’s through Facebook, Reddit, Discord, or Twitter.

-Paul (Scarecrow1779)