Greetings everyone ,
the Archon Council decided to put several changes to the vote. You can vote on the following change:
Unbanning Edric, Spymaster of Trest
You can had over to our Discord to cast your vote! You have time to do so until 15-May-2022 12:00 CET.
Here are the reasoning for the proposed change:
Edric, Spymaster of Trest has a turbulent history with 1v1 Commander variant banlists. Edric first entered a banlist in 2012 and was unbanned for 3 months in 2019. He got initialy banned for because he “left no space for decks that aren’t built to specifically answer very quick starts“ and because „Edric decks create a very bad feeling for players, who feel overwhelmed by a deck that is so powerful they can’t even do anything. […] Either you play normally and when you get full tapped Edric appears and ensures massive free cards for his player. Or you play carefully and Edric still plays his threats and grinds your life totals with fast threats while staying behind his counterspells.”
(Source)
When banned in 2019 little explanation was given and Edric got banned for being “oppressive”.
After careful testing and debating about this commander, we believe that Edric will not be too strong in the current Archon meta. Nowadays decks are expected to be able to interact with other decks or to present a powerful gameplan in the first few turns. We also believe that the argument that Edric can be cast freely when the opponent taps out, is somewhat unfounded. Nobody forces players to tap out and being the commander makes Edric open information throughout the whole match. Compared to other decks that are part of the Archon metagame Edric feels and looks like a fair addition to the format. The Simic cardpool lacks reach in form of burn spells and is missing efficient true creature removal which will be a disadvantage against aggro lists, which coincidentally will run burn spells themself to kill threatening creatures. For these reasons we propose to unban Edric, Spymaster of Trest in Archon