Our most recent vote finished on Friday. 15th of November 2024, resulting in the following changes:
Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful & Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh are now banned as commander pairing.
These changes apply on 17-11-2024, 12 CET. For further information, see the explanations below.
Of the 80 votes cast to decide whether Yoshimaru and Rograkh, Son of Rohgaah, should be banned as a commander pairing, 65 votes (81%) were in favor, 12 votes (15%) were against the changes, and 3 votes (4%) were filled in blank. Thus, the two commanders were banned as a commander pairing.
Since this is a first of its kind, we would like to explain the underlying considerations made by the Council in the following.
Taking into account the current ruleset of our format up until the vote, the Council initially had only two options to respond adequately to the deck’s dominance and the growing frustration and disapproval among players that came with it. One option was to ban Yoshimaru as a Commander, and the other was to ban Rograkh as a Commander.
However, since both cards can also enable fair combinations with other partners, the Council deemed both approaches ineffective. Therefore, the ultimately chosen — albeit also controversial — option was to allow specific partner combinations to be banned in Archon.
As a result, the existing rules have to be expanded and reconsidered, ensuring that even newer players or those less familiar with the format can easily understand the new rules. They can be summarized as follows:
- “Banned as a pairing” treats a combination of two cards as the banned Commander.
- This rule applies exclusively to combinations of two cards, X and Y, that simultaneously occupy the command zone, thereby forming a banned Commander. This rule can also be applied to other mechanics, such as “Background” and similar ones.
- Banned pairings cannot be registered for events or played during them.
- If a combination X & Y is banned as a “Banned as a pairing,” a deck cannot register X & Y as its commanders and cannot switch to X & Y in the command zone during games 2 and 3 either.
- Other combinations remain unaffected by this.
- If X in combination with Y is banned as a pairing, players can still play X or Y with any other card that is not banned from the command zone. For example, if Yoshi & Rograkh is banned as a pairing, players can still register decks like Yoshi & Esior or Rograkh & Tevesh.
- It is also possible to include both X and Y in the same deck.
- For example, if Yoshi & Rograkh is banned as a pairing, players can register Yoshimaru & Akiri and have Rograkh among the 98 cards. It is thus possible to have the banned pairing present in the game simultaneously in this manner.
“Banned as a partner” remains a relevant category for our banlist. If X is banned as a partner, it means that X & Y is banned as a pairing for every possible partner Y. For more implications of the introduction of the banned as commander pairing category, have a look at our original voting announcement.
We hope that this approach aligns with the spirit of our format and the wishes of our player base. We look forward to an exciting new meta within all our communities and, more broadly, in our beloved format