i write about stuff

Ah, the bracket system.

Bracket System? Is it an official name that I need to capitalize like it’s a law that all us filthy peasants must follow to the tee, lest we draw the ire of our card game overlords?

Checking the official post on the system, it appears that they capitalize the “B”, but not the “s”, so Bracket system it is!

The Bracket system is horribly divisive in the Commander community. Some praise it as a way of bringing some measure of order to an otherwise chaotic and confusing system of determining power levels, while others lament it as a greatly limiting system that weakens the level of player’s deckbuilding abilities.

There’s no real reason to fall into either camp, the more realistic answer is that it’s somewhere in the middle. The Commander power level system did need some form of overhaul, lest every deck continue to be labelled as a 7 for the rest of time. On the other hand, it leads to a wide amount of discourse, misunderstandings, and makes some cards nigh unplayable.

We’ll be talking about the last point, if it wasn’t obvious.

So what makes a card suffer from a system that is specifically designed to try and make as many diverse playgroups as possible, and as a result, cards as playable as possible?

To do that, we need to look at what restrictive features there are, just like when you’re checking your – actually, let’s not do that analogy.

There’s three things that separate cards between brackets. Game Changers (GC), Mass Land Disruption (MLD), and 2-turn combos. We’ll mainly be looking at the first two in this discussion.

And before one of you starts to wipe your Dorito-infested fingers and write a hatefully worded “but ACKSHUALLY Commander is a casual format and you don’t have to optimize your deck to that extent”, you’re deliberately missing the point of the article. I can make a deck and slot in Goblin Game if I want to. Is it objectively correct? No. Is it fun? Certainly, and don’t let this get in the way of your fun. But in this scenario, we’re looking at cards that get affected if you’re at all trying to be a competent deckbuilder, to which if I still get that message, I will immediately assume that to not be the case. Enjoy the game as you want to, but optimizing can be part of that enjoyment process.

The thumbnail is clickbait, by the way. Rhystic Study is not on this list.

Panoptic Mirror

Panoptic Mirror was banned in Commander in April 2005, and poetically, two decades later, on April 22 2025, it was unbanned. Also, Panoptic Mirror is a bad card.

Maybe bad isn’t the correct operating word here. At the time of its ban, Panoptic Mirror’s combo lines were very obvious, and they still are to this day. Just Imprint any “take extra turn” spell, and there you have infinite turns, as long as you can make it to your upkeep.

This is hilariously poor by today’s standards. Even looking past GCs, Food Chain lines, IsoRev, Heliod/Ballista, Sanguine Bond/Exquisite Blood lines are just some examples of combos that you’d rather run over this. You have to wait a whole turn cycle, or resolve a separate extra turn spell, for Panoptic Mirror combos to function, giving your opponents a chance to untap and deal with it.

But the main issue is, why is it even a GC? By virtue of being a two-card combo in its most egregious form, play lines with it are already restricted to at minimum Bracket 3, if not 4, unless the game goes abysmally long, but most playgroups tend to not run two-card combos in Bracket 2 anyway.

Not to mention, if you want to run a deck where you do just so happen to run a lot of extra turn cards, you’re likely to want to chain extra turns, of which the very definition slaps you right into Bracket 4.

The answer is that it was unbanned, and all unbanned cards end up on GC for, presumably, monitoring. As long as Panoptic Mirror remains a GC, it will remain nigh unplayable, and all the fun things you potentially want to do with it will not be available until then.

Teferi’s Protection

Let’s briefly talk about GCs and how they affect Brackets.

Ignore that you could just be a functioning human being and discuss with your playgroup (if it exists) what should be and shouldn’t be allowed. You’re making a Bracket 3 deck, and the amount of GCs you can include are limited.

Teferi’s Protection suffers from this. It’s not a bad card by any stretch of the word, but with the massive list of GCs, if you’re trying to properly minmax your deck, you don’t have space to include this card 9 times out of 10. The alternatives are usually just as adequate if not more so, with cards like Flare of Fortitude, Dawn’s Truce, or Flawless Maneuver all potentially costing less mana.

Now what about in Bracket 4 decks? The only real situation where you’d want to put in Teferi’s Protection is if your deck doesn’t contain Blue. The moment it does, you’d rather just run cheaper countermagic to protect your combo or board state. And even if you don’t run Blue, it’s still not a guarantee you’d run it. Teferi’s Protection is a card that benefits you most when you’re ahead, and while it’s probably the safest of its kind, 3 mana is still a hefty cost and not always affordable, especially by faster decks.

Which is a shame, because I really like Teferi, I love the lore behind Teferi’s Protection, and I do truly want to figure out why of all the decks that this card were to make its debut in, it’s the Edgar Markov precon. Not only does that make zero sense lore wise, did no one playtest that deck and think “Hmm, perhaps this isn’t the most absurd Eminence effect we have available, how about we give this to Edgar and not the abysmal Arahbo situational cat buff?”

Signed: A player who split 4-way with friends and received the Arahbo deck back in the day.

Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger

omg it migu

Vorinclex is a card that draws unfair amounts of ire from the playerbase. The insertion of the Hatsune Miku art is not an accident and is rather an attempt to quell the rage you would instinctively feel from seeing the actual Vorinclex card art. Although the Miku art is sure to set an equally weird crowd of people ablaze too, isn’t it? Just can’t win.

Here’s the scoop. Vorinclex is a bad card by today’s standards, and we need to talk about MLD now.

Some cards are very obviously MLD. Armageddon and Jokulhaups are probably the two most famous options. Winter Orb, Stasis, and Blood Moon are also considered MLD, as the definition of the “D” in MLD switched from “Destruction” to “Denial” after the introduction of the Bracket system. Also, you’re a child for your immediate thoughts after reading that.

By the metric of all deckbuilding mediums such as Moxfield, as well as the probable definition of “Denial”, Vorinclex also falls under MLD. This means if you include Vorinclex in your deck, your deck is automatically considered Bracket 4.

And perhaps it is accurate to refer to it as such, but when compared to all the previous cards mentioned, Vorinclex just can’t compare in the slightest.

Firstly, it’s a creature, which is the form of removal most common in Commander, given that creature removal also tends to be Commander removal, as well as most of the best wincons featuring creatures. I mean, creatures are the thing that punch you until you reach 0 life total, so it makes sense. Vorinclex also enters with zero protection, and you can tap your mana before it hits the field so you can remove it without even suffering its penalty.

Secondly, it’s 8 mana. EIGHT. You can’t even pull a Nature’s Lore > Skyshroud Claim line to drop Vorinclex on turn 4. Barring Sol Ring or some other GCs which would warrant a Bracket 3/4 inclusion anyway, you’d have to run methods to cheat it out, by which point your whole deck should already be revolving around that scenario. You could decide that you’re just not a nice person and drop Winter Orb on turn 2 for no other reason than to stall the game. Vorinclex doesn’t have that luxury.

So why do people hate Vorinclex? Back in the day, it was essentially a stax piece that broke parity with itself. Games were slower, and a Vorinclex being dropped was very feasible, and almost necessitated an answer. These days, it still does necessitate an answer, but the speed of the game has made dealing with Vorinclex a far less daunting prospect. Seriously, how could you think someone cheating out Vorinclex could be worse than Void Winnower, Blightsteel Colossus, or any of the Eldrazi Titans, all of which are available to play in any Bracket level?

As an aside, Blood Moon almost made an appearance on this list, but I realised most decks below B4 probably would run a higher amount of basic lands regardless, so I held off on it. Blood Moon mostly sees play at a higher level anyway.

Farewell

Farewell is one of the stranger inclusions of the GC list. The reason for its inclusion is less so because it’s “good” and moreso because it’s “unfun”.

I do suppose an outcome that results in the game being reset into a near-zero board state would be considered unfun, but turning it into a GC has severely restricted the list of decks you would run this in.

The arguments used for Teferi’s Protection apply here nearly identically. In Bracket 3, you’d rather use your GC slots for something else, and in Bracket 4, the card is usually too expensive to actually warrant an inclusion.

The fact of the matter is, sometimes you’re in a position so behind that your best way out is a board reset, and Farewell is usually the best card for those situations. The fact that its causing you to exile instead of destroy is a small but key factor into its strength.

Still, it’s 6 mana. At higher levels, you’re unlikely to want to devote a slot into this card. You’d prefer to run less versatile but cheaper board wipes, like Vanquish the Horde, Out of Time, or Blasphemous Act.

It’s also symmetrical, and I’d rather use board wipes that help maintain my own board state to some degree rather than causing a complete reset.

Farewell does have a space in decks, but that space is unlikely to be found in multicolored Bracket 3 decks, and you’d have to be chasing for a slow gameplan if you want to use it in any level above. And I mean real slow, like that one friend who’s always inexplicably 30 minutes later to a gathering. The Gathering!

Crop Rotation

This one is a doozy to talk about.

In a vacuum, Crop Rotation seems to make sense for its inclusion as a GC. Most one mana cards that tutor, regardless if its for a specific card type or otherwise, end up on the GC list, and rightfully so, as they provide consistent play patterns that we want to avoid in lower Brackets. Crop Rotation isn’t different in that regard.

The versatility of all those tutors, despite only searching for a single card type, cannot be understated as long as you’re a semi-competent deckbuilder. For example, Enlightened Tutor can fish out Sol Ring for ramp, Unstable Glyphbridge for a board wipe, Seal of Cleansing for targeted removal, and all this is assuming that you’re only in White.

Do I really need to provide you an image of Sol Ring? I think I value my reader’s intelligence quite greatly, and so I won’t insult you by doing so. Pretend it’s the 3ED art one, though! I like that one!

Crop Rotation can fish out Ancient Tomb for ramp, Glacial Chasm for protection, Field of the Dead for prime Landfall shenanigans, and Talon Gates of Madara for removal. This isn’t even mentioning the incredible value you could get if you pull out a Gaea’s Cradle or Serra’s Sanctum.

The catch?

Of all the cards I mentioned, only Talon Gates of Madara isn’t already a GC.

Crop Rotation’s inclusion seems like more of a strange case of double dipping to prevent unfun or strong plays, but they’ve already done that with their choices of Lands to include in the GC list. What this results in is that now, you can’t actually do the fun things you would want to do with Crop Rotation.

I’m talking Gate decks, Town decks, getting big mana with Cabal Coffers + Urborg. These decks in general aren’t very busted, and would greatly benefit from Crop Rotation for some level of consistency, or for their lands to come in untapped just so they can play the game without having to feel like a dog on a leash.

The consistency isn’t even really a problem here. The remaining lands that we do have available to us are, for the most part, not game-breaking, and it’s not like land tutors as a whole are unavailable to us. We still have access to cards like Reap and Sow, Tempt with Discovery, and Archdruid’s Charm.

It feels like someone on the team saw all the big 1 mana tutors (Mystical, Enlightened, Worldly, Vampiric, Gamble) were on the GC list, and decided that Crop Rotation too is a 1 mana tutor and should also be on the list, without actually going through the proper logic of including it. Maybe they just didn’t want to have to go through the paperwork of explaining why this specific 1 mana tutor wasn’t on the GC list.

I, for one, think its inclusion is actually an allegory for the folly of man. No, I will not elaborate.