Summander

If you’re reading this then you’re probably aware (at least a little) of what this is, but I should try to explain for those of you who stumbled upon this or struggled to understand my ramblings.

Summander is an experiment in attempting to provide a deck rating that is at least partially based on something that can be evidenced and compared with one another when having a pregame discussion. Please note that I omitted the word power from that sentence, as synergies, strategies and deck-building can more than compensate the inclusion of a few powerful cards.

I feel as if I should give you a little background as to why I’m doing what I’m doing, but feel free to skip to the next section if you just want to find out more about Summander.

I’ve been playing Magic the Gathering on and off for the last twenty years, but I’ve been fortunate enough to have a group of friends to play Commander around a kitchen table with beer and wine gums since the original precons were released. Kids and life put things on hold for a bit but we’ve been playing almost weekly since Khans of Tarkir.

During the years we’ve played a lot of different types of Commander: precon upgrade leagues, pauper EDH, kingdoms/hidden roles, horde, planechase, horde + planechase (those were… brutal), 2HG, star, cEDH – I’m sure there have been others but you get the point – we’re happy to try anything Commander related and we like to play at various power levels.

Occasionally we’ll have a bit of a mismatch in power level when someone builds an untested deck or someone new joins the group, but these are usually ironed out before meeting up – in the past these have been back and forth discussions over WhatsApp about expectation of the types of games we’d like to play next time, calibration of power level and what we consider to be fun or not so fun.

Then near the beginning of 2020, things got a little weird during the first lock-down, we went from playing in person to Magic the Gathering Online. It was good for a while but we didn’t feel as if it fit our casual games of allowing take-backs or rewinding the game state if we needed to.

We switched to Cockatrice which fit much better but suddenly we were bringing a new deck each time and playing two or three times a week. Games were chaotic and it became difficult to avoid those mismatches in power level, especially if grabbing an average (or expensive!) deck list from EDHREC.

My enthusiasm for Commander began to wane, cEDH was the only thing keeping me interested in playing as it was easy to navigate; the expectations were a known quantity and it was reassuringly simple to have a good game.

Thankfully regular games have returned to normal now that we’re back playing in person and earlier this year a new LGS opened up for FNM!

Playing at the LGS feels a bit like those Cockatrice games, communication is a bit difficult, especially behind face masks – and I’m not the loudest of people to start with.

After reading Sheldon Menery’s interesting article on a modular banlist and watching the Professor and PleasantKenobi’s Commander review episode on Dies to Removal, I started wondering if there is a way to both have my cake AND eat it (such an odd saying, the answer is to start with two cakes!) – can a friendly environment be curated that also allows people to play with whatever they like, and aid in the pregame discussion?

Summander Explained

I’m a huge fan of LoadingReadyRun’s Magic the Gathering content on YouTube, a series of theirs is based on the 100 card singleton format Canadian Highlander; a bit like Commander, if it was 1v1, had no Commander at the head of the deck and therefore no colour restrictions.

The interesting part is that except for most of the Vintage banlist, everything else is available at the cost of a limited amount of points – the most powerful cards in the format had to be carefully considered when constructing a deck.

What if this was brought in for Commander? There are plenty of complaints about the ubiquity of the format due to staples, what if choosing to include Sol Ring became a meaningful choice?

I started with the Canadian Highlander points list, yes it’s a different format for 1v1 but I had to start somewhere and I thought that at the very least it compares some of the most powerful cards – regardless of format – with each other.

I then took the Commander ban list and allocated each card enough points to ensure that they wouldn’t be seen in a regular game of Commander, the Rules Committee banned them for a reason so I see no need to deviate from that, I also updated any of the cards from Canadian Highlander’s points list to ensure that these align with the Commander ban list.

Finally I took EDHRec’s 100 saltiest cards, excluding the Walking Dead cards and assigned them a point (we’ll come to why in a second) and finally we end up with the following:

INSERT TABLE HERE – for now here’s the Google Sheet, the final list starts in column P.

The idea is that you add the points cost whenever you include any of these cards in your deck to determine your deck rating, to start with I suggest the following limits:

0 – Precons

4 – Regular

8 – High power

12 – cEDH

Several people have asked me why precons are 0 when they include a Sol Ring, my answer is that people should be able to play with a preconstructed deck regardless and that a modified deck or one built from scratch will have good enough synergies and strategies to make up for the exclusion of a Sol Ring. Salty cards are effectively banned at the precon level – something that I think a good number of people may appreciate. Perhaps we can avoid the “no MLD, no cheap counters, no stax…” discussion when looking for games on PlayEDH or MTGO with a simple “0 rated decks only”.

I chose 4 points as the limit for regular games as all of the banned cards start at 5 points, and hopefully it’ll make for some interesting decisions when it comes to including cards from the points list.

I’ve been asked why cEDH isn’t limitless, well a lot of the cEDH community think that restrictions are a necessity of a healthy format; we had the request for Flash to be banned and it’s reinvigorated the format. We also saw the creation of Conquest, a variant of Commander through a competitive lens – I don’t think this is the answer personally as I still want to play Commander (and I like my Fetchlands!). Perhaps cEDH decks should be budgetless, but the points spent determine the turn order with lowest spend going first.

Really though, these points and caps are completely arbitrary, it took me ten minutes to think of the list – I’m sure there are others far more qualified than myself that could come up with a better way to score cards (probably by looking at the legendary creatures themselves to start with!).

Summander still won’t tackle that problem of how to balance those decks that everyone gives a 7 when asked for power level. I see this as a good way to start pregame discussions at an LGS, or perhaps PlayEDH, or trying to start some pickup games at a Magic Fest; I think it would be simpler for people to say: “This is my Golos deck, it’s an 8 as Golos itself is 5 and I’ve included a Wishclaw Talisman and a Crop Rotation.” in addition to a “Cube?” sign we could see a “4 point Commander?” sign making its way around tables in a convention hall.