Magic has a word for every card that’s too strong: banned, restricted, Game Changer.

When Wizards built Arena’s new ranked Brawl format, it tested banning the strongest cards players were putting in their decks. Win rates barely moved.

This week, two control players reach the same point from opposite ends. Drake Sasser climbed a format nobody has solved with a deck that knew its job. Talion ran a cEDH tournament from the control seat and couldn’t close out a single game.

Let’s get into it.

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Arena opened a ranked Brawl queue in June with Force of Will legal. The top of the ladder is still playing decks built for a four-player table.

By Drake Sasser

Recently I got nostalgia-baited by some Magic content that compelled me to fire up Arena and muse with the cards that put hair on my chest over a decade and a half ago. Fortunately for me, they had created a new format for me to do just that in: Competitive Brawl. No Arena format with real competitive support has a card pool wider than Pioneer's, so the opportunity to play Force of Will, Library of Alexandria, Strip Mine, The One Ring, Solitude, and Cryptic Command in the same deck was an offer I simply couldn’t refuse. Luckily, I had a nice template for the Teferi, Hero of Dominaria-led deck I wanted to play laid out from torturing people in the Friendly Brawl queues with a hard lesson in control fundamentals a few months back. Notably, this new Competitive Brawl queue has a completely different set of bans than the Friendly Brawl queue does, making them effectively different formats. I made the necessary adjustments to add the broken and banned cards to my deck and fired up some matches. What I saw in the queues was shocking, and indicated a large hole in players’ abilities to build decks for brand-new formats.

Arena typically represents the frontier of modern-day competitive Magic. Players can play for real stakes in Limited, Standard, and Pioneer on their phones any time, and since the widespread adoption of data aggregation tools and Arena streamers, any format supported by a competitive queue on Arena has carried enough stakes for the format to be solved very quickly. Competitive Brawl is the only instance I have ever seen where this is not the case, and it was whiplash-inducing to watch, in real time, players who have always been guided by decklists, pick orders, streamer advice, and tournament coverage struggle to navigate a brand new format with a wide card pool that had previously only been offered as a casual pastime. In fact, for most of you reading this now, you probably weren’t even aware Competitive Brawl was offered at all! Because why would you unless you got an overwhelming urge to teach people what Vendilion Clique and Restoration Angel did to people 12 years ago? However, I think it highlights a set of Magic fundamentals that seems lost on a large swath of the new generation of competitors: navigating a new format by identifying powerful cards and building a game plan around them.

The life cycle of a format has always fascinated me. Infant formats are heralded as a paradise for deckbuilders and advertised as safe places from the “solved” formats under intense competitive pressures. Then, over time, formats develop. Early front-runners for the most powerful cards and most powerful decks arise as some strategies start winning more than others and against more decks than others until a young metagame starts to take shape. From there, the format tightens in accordance with competitive pressure, ebbing and flowing in how small the pool of competitive decks is, with the smallest state earning the label “solved”.

The time it takes to reach that state directly corresponds with competitive pressure, but the effort it takes and the strategies it takes to give an individual competitor an edge in the process vary drastically based on the parameters of the format. The most common parameters are total card pool size, individual card limits (typically 1 or 4), starting life totals, deck size, and sideboard availability. I don't have room here to break down each of these and its impact on the process, but the general takeaway is that the more complex a format is and the more it varies from formats solved in the past, the less brute force and previous templates can be used and the more you have to rely on your own ability to identify cards and strategies powerful in a vacuum and build a cohesive game plan around that. A couple of high-level examples are new set Limited formats and cEDH. Solving these two formats requires two very different approaches despite sharing a common goal: find the cards and the decks that give you the best chance to win.

When it comes to solving a new set for Limited, the cards change every set, but the process has barely changed since the early days of the Pro Tour. Individual Magic sets typically don't exceed 300 cards, so each individual card can be playtested in unique contexts by a small group of professional players seeking to optimize for a draft position and each card is categorized, graded, and ranked in an extremely in-depth and granular analysis before each Pro Tour. This is also made possible by the small deck size of 40 cards and best-of-three matches with sideboarding allowed to adapt strategy. Limited formats represent the formats that are solved fastest and change the least afterward. Cards in Limited don’t get banned, and the format doesn’t have any new cards added these days, especially since “mixed-set” drafts seen during the days of blocks of sets no longer exist. The help of Arena data aggregators like 17 Lands provides an even wider range of analysis for players on Arena, and new Limited sets wear out their welcome rather quickly these days. Fortunately, WoTC appears to have raised their cadence of set releases to meet that demand.

In my experience, cEDH sits at the opposite end of the spectrum for approaching solving a format. As an eternal format, cEDH draws on the game's entire 33-year history spanning tens of thousands of cards with a semi-frequently updated ban list, which makes testing every card in every context impossible. Compound that with the fact that each deck is 100-card singleton, with only your commander available to you every single game, additional deckbuilding restrictions enforced by the “color identity” of your commander, competitive matches that are four-player, single-game matches that can span literal hours, individual player communication called “politics”, and special rules for winning and losing and you find yourself with a highly complex format with a massive amount of introduced variance. So how do you possibly go about trying to solve this format? You don't have the benefit of Arena data, you can’t do an in-depth analysis on every single card the same way you can with Limited, and even individual matches are difficult to get repeat data on with no sideboards to speak of and extremely long individual game time. By necessity, you have to rely more on the variables in your own control: abstractly powerful cards, cohesive deck construction to execute a plan, and answers to the individual cards you fear most rather than to whole decks and strategies. The luxury of data and mathematical evidence is nearly entirely absent or worthless and your own ability to form and execute a cohesive game plan becomes the thing most stressed, despite being much less scientific.

This spectrum from Limited to cEDH is a tangible version of the complexity scale I described earlier, where each added layer of complexity multiplies the time it takes to solve a format. Every existing format falls somewhere along this spectrum based on its complexity and as you move on the spectrum from Limited to cEDH your ability to rely on “brute force” and statistical analysis to provide you with critical evidence to solve the format quickly erodes, and you are suddenly left with only your own knowledge and heuristics to trust completely, a position it is clear many players are deeply uncomfortable with today.

While I don’t think I found the best deck in the format off the rip, after all, I was just playing this to give my fellow brawlers a little sampler of the good ol’ days, I found myself annihilating the competition all the way up the ranks. I fought through turn-one Dark Ritual into Necropotence, Underworld Breach, Cavern of Souls, Field of the Dead, and all manner of ostensibly strong cards that are much more powerful than the UW control strategy I was piloting. But at higher ranks, I found it wasn't play skill getting the job done; it was flaws in my opponents' deckbuilding. The opposition I encountered was clearly templated directly from cEDH, facing decks like Yuriko, Kinnan, Thrasios/Vial Smasher, and Winota in top ranks. Each of these decks is templated nearly identically to its cEDH cousin, including cards that scale far better in multiplayer, like Rhystic Study and Cyclonic Rift. But more importantly, the decks were incohesive. In cEDH, the multiplayer nature makes certain cards much stronger but also puts constraints on combos and removes emphasis from planeswalkers. I see these patterns throughout the higher ranks of the competitive queue, and they don't scale down to 1v1 at the same power level. To me, that signals that the Commander community this format appeals to nearly universally lacks the 1v1 experience to properly evaluate and formulate a game plan designed for the reduced player count. Decks are just soups of powerful cards instead of having a clear Aggro, Combo, Control, or Midrange label to put on them and the lack of cohesion between cards in this way actually reduces the efficiency of decks quite a bit and makes beating them with a couple of counterspells much easier to do in a 1v1 setup than if their deck had more interchangeable parts aligned on the same goal.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that Competitive Brawl is a format in infancy. If WoTC ever puts stakes on the line for the format, it will push towards “solved” and develop a clear metagame that can be targeted and probably earn a few more bans along the way. For now, though, this deckbuilding paradise appeals to me for as long as it lets the old classics I love shine, and it's working muscles I haven't used in a long time. Instead of tournament analysis, metagame churn, and deck tuning, complex new formats like this reward something simpler: pick a game plan and build a deck where every card serves it. Do that, and you'll beat cards widely considered overwhelming and game-ending purely by being more cohesive.

If you’re interested in giving the format a try, my decklist can be found here: https://moxfield.com/decks/tkLH5oPdrkui8fb7G4mcBA

If you are into Commander and into deck brewing at all, I highly recommend giving Competitive Brawl a go! There is a lot of exploration to be done and the gameplay is surprisingly fun for how extreme some of the legal cards are. I expect a good number of the offenders to have their days numbered so potentially only a temporary investment of wildcards as well. Either way, thank you for reading!

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The colors with the deepest card pool in cEDH haven’t won a 100-player event all year. What’s missing isn’t a card.

By Talion

Esper colours are really good in cEDH.

Like, really good. So good that the best deck in the format is fundamentally just Esper with a few red cards in it. Rhystic Study, black tutors, Smothering Tithe, Ad Nauseam, Necropotence, Silence, Grand Abolishers, flash enablers, mountains of free interaction, clones. Literally anything you could possibly want can be found within these colours.

Except tournament results. There has not been a single recorded first place finish by a pure Esper deck at a 100+ player event throughout the entirety of 2026. In fact, sorting by top cuts, there is only a single Esper commander that appears on the front page of EDHTop16 (I’m sure you can guess which one).

So why are Esper decks not doing well at tournaments despite their incredibly high card quality, and what is Tivit doing differently?

Let’s look at some… not-Esper decks. RogShai is probably the closest comparison. It’s pretty much built with the general Esper philosophy of “land an engine and figure the rest out later”, sans the black cards - cutting them off from Naus, Necro, and most importantly the incredibly powerful black tutor package. So what do they get to make up for this loss?

The answer is Underworld Breach. Sure, there are some other goodies in there too - the importance of Rograkh in enabling early acceleration and interaction can’t be overlooked - but the biggest difference is Breach, and the resulting wincon access you get from that. Red decks just get to pick their windows a lot better and more easily than pure Esper does.

Look at a deck like T&T and you get the same story - green gives you access to Cradle lines, with your creature tutors being able to fetch Breezecaller giving you that secret ingredient again: wincon access. This is why Tivit is the only Esper deck that seems to be functioning at tournaments: being able to include the package of Time Sieve and a few artifact tutors gives the deck just enough wincon density that people have to actually respect it as being capable of winning the game under normal circumstances rather than just being a pile of engines and interaction with a singular and easily-stopped win condition.

I had this experience recently playing Talion at a tournament. Despite being in near-total control of every game I played over the four-round event, I couldn’t push wins - not because people had too much interaction, but because I simply didn’t have the pieces in hand. Having access to Underworld Breach would have made winning my Swiss rounds trivial, but with only Thassa’s Oracle lines I went 0-0-4 over the course of the day - I couldn’t close the game, because none of my tutors converted to a win on their own.

I think when building cEDH decks, many people have a tendency not to think too hard about the win conditions. After all, if you draw 20 cards off Rhystic Study, you should be able to figure it out, right? But time and time again we see that that isn’t how it pans out - the Esper deck plays some mana rocks and maybe another engine, discards to handsize and passes the turn, leaving their three opponents to continue jamming hopelessly into their accumulated hoard of countermagic until the round timer goes off.

The point is, when you’re building your next midrange deck, think about how you are ending the game. Include more than one winline, and try to mix it up. Think about winning at instant speed, through The One Ring, through Angel’s Grace, through a Ranger-Captain, through whatever stax pieces impact your deck - Deafening Silence, Cursed Totem, Drannith Magistrate. These aren’t just thought experiments or pointless exercises - they help you become familiar with your deck’s win conditions, and the strengths and weaknesses of each one. What happens if this card is exiled, or that card? How do you win then?

Getting an idea of how far you can push your win conditions before they stop functioning is key to understanding how good your deck actually is at winning. If your Esper cEDH deck can’t win the game with Thassa’s Oracle in exile, that’s not a very good cEDH deck. It’s just a pile of engines and countermagic with no robust plan for ending the game.

If you’re struggling with this, prioritise finding a commander that allows you to play 1-card wins, like Tivit, or an outlet commander like Kinnan or Thrasios. There is a reason these decks are so dominant, and it's because their pilots and deckbuilders are thinking about the deck’s density of and access to their various win conditions. It’s not a coincidence that all the best-performing midrange decks seem to have exactly two major winlines (Breach plus Thoracle, Basalt plus Hullbreaker, Breezecaller plus EwitSnap), it’s a heuristic of deck design that exists… because it works. And if you’re not Sam Black, you should probably pay attention to the heuristics.

For more about win conditions, deckbuilding heuristics and what makes a “good” winline, check out this article on my Substack.

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