In the recently published Modern Horizon Release Notes, I noticed something peculiar regarding the card-specific notes for Winds of Abandon.

I shall quote the card text and the note that has me bothered/concerned/confused.

Winds of Abandon 1W
Sorcery
Exile target creature you don't control. For each creature exiled this way, its controller searches their library for a basic land card. Those players put those cards onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle their libraries.
Overload 4WW (You may cast this spell for its overload cost. If you do, change its text by replacing all instances of “target” with “each.”)

And the following is the note being alluded to:
If a creature is exiled but ends up in another zone (most likely because it's a player's commander in the Commander variant), it's still a “creature exiled this way” for Winds of Abandon.

Now, until reading that note, my understanding regarding the Commander rule has always been that it was/is a replacement effect. So I checked it out, just in case my memory wasn't what it used to be, and saw the following:
903.9. If a commander would be exiled from anywhere or put into its owner’s hand, graveyard, or library from anywhere, its owner may put it into the command zone instead. This replacement effect may apply more than once to the same event. This is an exception to rule 614.5.

So my question is as follows:
Why, according to the notes, does Winds of Abandon see the Commander as a “creature exiled this way”.
The assumption here is that the Commander's owner has decided to replace the act of exiling their creature and has put it into the Command Zone instead.

Would the same also be true of Decree of Pain? In prior scenarios with other judges, a Commander going to their Command Zone would not count as a “creature destroyed this way”.

Other prior similar examples include:
https://magicjudge.tumblr.com/post/164934908637/if-ixalans-binding-exiles-someones-commander-and
https://magicjudge.tumblr.com/post/181142779478/hey-judge-if-i-exile-my-commander-to-azors

However, looking up another similar effect, Warp World, shows that it too has received a recent Gatherer update that mentions:
03/05/2019 If a permanent leaves the battlefield this way but ends up in a zone other than a library (most likely because it’s a player’s commander in the Commander variant), it’s still counted to determine how many cards to reveal.

So do all of these effects count the Commander? And if so, has this always been the way or has something changed regarding the Commander replacement effect?

Thanks in advance.

The rulings you found for Winds of Abandon and Warp World are correct, and the answers Charlotte gave on the Ask A Magic Judge tumblr are also correct. The two rulings differ because there's two fundamentally different scenarios at work here.

This is a relatively common confusion, since Magic uses the word “exile” as both a noun (the name of a zone) and a verb (put something in the exile zone). The two usages are distinct, however–thanks to replacement effects, it's possible to “exile” something and have that thing end up in, say, the command zone, just as it's possible to “destroy” something (which means “put it into a graveyard”) and have it end up in a zone other than the graveyard. Regardless of where the card ended up, you still performed the action upon it.

Winds of Abandon, Warp World, and yes, Decree of Pain are all at their core fundamentally telling you to do the same basic thing. First, they tell you to perform some action on some specified set of objects. Then, they tell you to perform some other action for each object that was in the aforementioned set. When Winds of Abandon says “for each creature exiled this way”, it means “for each creature that you performed the action ‘exiling’ upon”–it does not mean “for each card or token that was put into the exile zone this way”.*

Ixalan's Binding and Azor's Gateway, on the other hand, are doing something different. They have an ability that exiles object(s), and then they reference a set of cards that exist in the exile zone in order to check their characteristics. If no cards actually ended up in the exile zone, there's no object(s) for them to reference and therefore they don't do anything.


*For an example of a card that does care where the objects it acts upon have ended up, see Necromantic Selection–you can see that it specifies “creature card” (because just “creatures” aren't something that exists in the graveyard), and that said card must be one that ended up being put into a graveyard, so in that case a Commander that was exiled instead would not be eligible.

Edited Callum Milne (June 27, 2019 03:02:10 PM)