Hello everybody,

As a french judge and magic player, I obviously love duel commander. There is a competitive scene with high dotations for many tournaments in France, this is why these events use REL Competitive.

I had a discussion about a situation that looks problematic. We are round one, decklist have been taken, matchs are starting and… someone is playing a banned commander.

My question is, how would you fix it ? You can't really replace the commander by a basic land since it would still be illegal. Would you replace the illegal commander by another one who has the same color identity ?

Second situation : the banned commander is Breya, Etherium Shaper, a 4 colored creature banned as commander in the french format. The only way to keep this color identity is to replace her with a pair of partners. It means that you also have to remove one card of your maindeck to have your two partners in command zone.

The IPG wasn't written with Commander in mind, therefore I think you could apply the “significant and exceptional” line to the situation. While playing a banned card is not in itself significant and exceptional, the fact that the IPG fix just does not work, is a reason to apply “significant and exceptional”, and deviate from the IPG.

So in that case, you could do whatever you like:

(a) Replace with a different Commander
(b) Use partners if required (and remove a main deck card - players choice or last card on the decklist or at random)
© Play with no Commander, but otherwise the 99 card deck remains unchanged.

Personally I think the cleanest fix is ©. You have the player play the event without a commander.

Another option is to allow the replacement to have more colors. Replacing Breya with Progenitus means it's a legal deck and allows Command Tower to retain functionality.

Command Tower could be used to produce {G} then. Which is not possible with Breya, Etherium Shaper as a commander.

Can somebody profits of solution A ? I mean taking a banned commander as Edgar Markov with a midrange deck to switch between Queen Marchesa, Zurgo Helmsmasher and Oros, the Avenger after scouting the field of peek at opponent's commander … I don't really know but I feel uncomfortable with this.

I'm more in solution C as the best.

In order for the player to remain in the event with a legal deck, they must
have a commander whose color identity contains the color identity of the
original commander. We don't care if it's the same or larger.

While there is theoretically an outside chance someone could take advantage
of this to metagame the field, that person should only be able to do this
once (at most) before being caught and DQ'd for Cheating. And the person
would need to somehow read the metagame within the room between deck list
submission and presenting their commander at the start of Round 1, when the
opponent would immediately realize the problem and demand a legal commander
be chosen. I consider this, while not completely impossible, to be
improbable to the point of absurdity.

Commander isn't a valid format for rated Magic, so there isn't such a thing as a tournament which officially applies Competitive REL, the MTR, and the IPG to Commander.

As such, whilst one may declare a tournament to be “Competitive REL Commander”, it is at its core a Casual tournament, and it is up to the TO to decide what to do. The MTR and IPG will not answer this question and should not attempt to.

Thomas, though I agree with you that the MTR and IPG were not written and shouldn't be written with Commander in mind, I strongly disagree with your statement that a “Competitive REL Commander” tournament is at its core a Casual tournament.

Rules Enforcement Levels (REL) are a means to communicate to the players and judges what expectations they can have of the tournament in terms of rigidity of rules enforcement, technically correct play, and procedures used. A 1v1 Commander tournament that offers significant prizes should have the expectations of a Competitive REL event, and should be taken seriously.

Of course, the format will require some deviations, as Mark argues. However, these deviations should be kept to a minimum, to keep the judge decisions predictable. Shifting the responsibility of dealing with Rules violations from the Head Judge to the Tournament Organizer is a needless deviation.

I've written Casual with a capital C because all Commander tournaments, however described, are Casual tournaments (Casual being a tournament that is not a Rated tournament). They award 1 lifetime PWP per player. A Competitive REL Commander tournament is absolutely a Casual tournament, just like an Unstable draft, a Chaos draft, or a Pauper tournament. None of them are required to follow the MTR or the IPG, and whilst the TO may choose to apply those documents to a Casual event, it is then up to them (or the head judge) to bridge the gaps between the documents and the unique issues that apply to each of these types of Casual event. There are not and cannot be “official” rulings on the subject.

Edited Thomas Ralph (Nov. 15, 2017 05:29:27 AM)

Thomas, MTR applies to any sanctioned event. That means even to a casual event. Even if it provides only “a lousy planeswalker point”.

I don't think that can be true, because Commander etc. aren't listed as formats in section 3.2. If MTR applied to casual events, then that section would need to contain details of them.

Section 3.2 is related to rated tournaments only. I believe that the MTR Intro is the most relevant to quote:

Originally posted by MTR:

There are two types of sanctioned Magic tournament: rated and casual. Rated tournaments offer Planeswalker Points for each win, draw, or bye a player earns. Casual tournaments offer a single Planeswalker Point for participation.

The purpose of this document is to provide the infrastructure used to run Magic: The Gathering (“Magic”) tournaments by defining appropriate rules, responsibilities, and procedures to be followed in all DCI-sanctioned Magic tournaments.

I understand the term “DCI-sanctioned Magic tournaments” as any tournament which is sanctioned by a TO via WER (or by WPN themselves in case of specific high level events).



To get back to the original topic:

I am tempted to solve the situation by “an imaginary commander” - a 2/2 vanilla creature with no creature types and name of the original commander which has color identity of the original commander.

However, I would probably go in the direction of the “no commander in your command zone, but you still have color identity of the banned commander” solution.

I'll just point out that, according to Gatherer (i.e., as close as we'll get to an ‘O’fficial source re: Commander format legality), Breya is legal.

Your tournament is following an alternate set of rules, then - so I suggest that you turn to that ruling body for any sort of ‘O’fficial input.

I do like some of the creative ideas presented here, which (I suspect) is really all that Thomas was seeking.

My own (very unofficial) idea? Just play with Sliver Queen. Everything's better with Slivers.

d:^D

Edited Scott Marshall (Nov. 15, 2017 09:27:29 AM)