I love the argument against Moxes. While it does not faze me too much, I just simply delight in the fact that the very same argument can (and is currently being used) against the partner mechanic, yet you did not care about that at all.

Look up recent major tournaments. Partner is always present (not only in Vial Kraum, thank god this is over) but also in simply VALUE decks. Jeskai Control with two commanders. Having 9 cards in hand is really good.

Boros Aggro, a perfect curve due to two commanders.

While I applaud your incredibly quick decision to ban Vial Smasher, I still believe the partner mechanic is a tumor that needs to be removed in Duel Commander. On the other hand, perhaps this is what you want?

A meta that boils down to: Partner, Geist, Zurgo and Baral?

Because, in case you havent noticed, but this is what the meta is becoming. You can perhaps steal a win with a combo deck (5% representation since 20hp, most of them being not real comboes but rather Meren and Prossh), but all in all:

Combo is dead.

The tier 1 decks are way too good in comparison to tier 2, thus are dominating the meta.

Your decisions with this banlist update were:

Vial Smasher: Alright, although I’d rather have seen a partner mechanic ban instead of a Vial Smasher ban.

Breya: Imo a bit unjustified, but hell I don’t care about that woman.

Yisan: Justified, although I believe other commanders (such as Zur or Marath) could’ve been unbanned with the same reasoning (also Marath without Cradle is just not as strong as he used to be)

Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond: At least somewhat justified, although I believe again, the argument you’re bringing up here is a lot better to be used against the partner mechanic, rather than Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond. I do not mind the banning though, since it will be a bit less frustrating to face a Baral. On the other hand, it is a 100 card format, so the chances of people having either one in the starting hand are somewhat low.

All in all: You did what was needed (ban Vial Smasher) but I feel like you haven’t thought about your decisions enough. Listen to the community and their arguments, often people bring up great points.

The past few months of playing competitive Duel Commander have been hell and boring as such. I doubt this “patch” on the wound will change anything. I still see Geists and Zurgos running around stealing wins, I still see the Partner mechanic that is simply giving my opponents an addition card in their starting hand and I still see way too much mono green ramp for some reasons. It doesn’t win though…

Anyways. This update is a step in the right direction. Just… maybe do these steps faster? And perhaps a bit bigger steps?

Anyone who says Zur should be unbanned should not be taken seriously.
If you miss non-interactive combo so much wait one week for WotC’s list, the 20lp change happened explicitly because 30lp was combo vs combo all day every day and the banlist was growing too large.

Vial Smasher should have been gone last pass, it’s glaringly obvious how broken it is in 20hp Commander. But it’s gone now, and that’s good.

Breya I have to agree was not worth banning. She gets hit by a lot of the usual flak (mass removal) plus the incidental artifact hate most decks run. Or the explicit artifact removal, given the popularity and impact of equipments, particularly in…

…Geist decks, which really are a MUCH bigger problem than Breya ever was. They are built to not only dodge a lot of (read:targeted) removal natively, but they also run a lot of defense against removal that works. Combined with a rapidly fast clock that can kill you in 2-3 turns most of the time (depending on support) and counterspells to ruin your day, this deck is a menace that exists purely on the back of the guaranteed efficient threat a commander offers. Given how good Geist is against basically everything and how it leads to people tailoring hate specifically (perhaps to the detriment of other matchups even) I don’t think it’s something that should be in DC.

Zurgo on the other hand is fine FOR THE MOST PART. The part that’s not fine, in my opinion, is quite simply one card: Price of Progress. The ridiculous amount of swing this card provides out of nowhere is not a degree of RNG I appreciate in a metagame. It can literally win a good number of games on its own, dealing 8-10 damage or more for a 2-mana instant. That’s absurd for a format without the consistency or redundancy of something like Legacy, and follows the pattern of previous bans with ridiculous swing RNG (e.g. Mind Twist).

The Mox bans I am entirely fine with. While not overpowered per se, they also introduce an amount of RNG that can get quite unpleasant if the tempo follows up. All the while they add very little positive to the game experience, which is why banning them is entirely fine. Diamond moreso than Chrome, of course, but both are probably better off out of the meta.

Yisan I never found quite as problematic to deal with as some people made it out to be when it was legal, and so I’m fine with an unban. In any case, it’s much less of a hassle to deal with than Geist, as it gets hit by literally every removal with usually favorable tempo. Mass removal even wrecks all the usual support alongside it. In all honesty, Titania is probably the better Mono-G, and she’s not worth banning, either.

In my opinion, Zurgo is overpowered though. You are 100% sure to have your 1-drop which is a 2/2 creature. It is quite unlikely that the opponent kills Zurgo with a removal spell or blocks him turn 2, when he attacks. how many cards 1-drops do you need to put in your deck to be sure to play something on turn 1? The presence of Zurgo makes the format less diverse, in my opinion.

A while ago on this website there was a post in which the definition of “interesting format” had been discussed. And honestly I think that people who prefer to have a format, in which you have a limited number of decks to “work out match-ups” and where you have to switch to a new deck every few month or so, should play Standard, not EDH. I would love to have an accessible format where you have a wide choice of decks to build, where you can build your deck once and just slightly modify it once in a while (since it is an eternal format), and where you don’t play against the same deck twice in a tournament (I don’t know who would find it fun).

There are tons of cool potential generals, but nobody would even try to build a deck around them just because it would lose to Zurgo and Geist with 95% chance. Once you speed up the format you narrow a lot the available generals and strategies. So far, Zurgo and Geist are the speed references, and considering their significant presence in the format, if your deck is not able to compete with them, it is doomed.

And of course, the partner mechanics which is, in fact, the 9th card in your starting hand is just insane.

I completely agree with the point that there should be some aggressive decks around in the format to put some pressure. But if you put too much of it format degenerates.

I would say that Zurgo is a solid deck which can be matched by few other solid decks. Finally we have a format with 5 solid decks (which is the case if we check out the metagame) and 150 decks which are not quite solid enough. I find this kind of format sad. If we slightly adjust the meaning of solidness, Zurgo becomes clearly overpowered. How is that, among all the legendary red creatures only one deserves to be a general?

Price of progress is strong but it hits both sides, so I don’t see too much disbalance. You just need to be faster than Zurgo, but wait a moment, it is virtually impossible to be faster than Zurgo. Honestly, in mono-red you have a bunch of broken cards (I’d say that Eidolon of the Great Revel and Sulfuric Vortex almost guarantee you the victory). You cannot ban all of them just to keep one general reasonably solid. Zurgo deals you those extra 2-4 damage which eventually kill you, and he does it every game consistently with no adequate way to prevent it. It is like to start the game with 16HP, not 20.

IMHO when one deck takes one third of the whole aggro metagame and two decks take two thirds of it, something goes clearly wrong. I admit that there are some bad match-ups for Zurgo, but I think that the beauty of the singleton formats is that your bad match-ups are not too bad,
and your good ones are not too good. Like anyways we have to play to see the result.

And I believe that if by reducing “competitiveness” of the format by 10 percent we make it ten times more diverse, it’s worth it. There are other narrow and competitive formats around.

@Cainsson 30hp was Control decks using combo kills instead of actual damage. Combo was still very much underrepresented at 30 hp (at least after cradle ban that is). Zur is weak to spotremoval, but does have counterbackup. Also Zur needs 2-3 attacks to win the game (funnily enough, just as much as Geist needs, after his opponent fetched twice). Zur would be strong at 20 hp. He’d be a viable combo commander, but he wouldn’t be even close to his old 30hp version, where you could simply wait for 6 mana to play zur with a counterbackup. 6 mana, during that time every aggro player has burned your face off twice.

Disacknowledging facts that people point out, simply because they have a different opinion than you do is a pretty silly thing.

Going from personal experience, I have to agree somewhat. Cockatrice has been somewhat of a letdown for DC for almost half a year now, and is steadily declining. RL tournaments are underwhelming, some locations have even dropped DC completely. Polling quickly within my own social network, the 20hp change was almost universally unpopular (shoutout to TanRes, who’s apparently the only one who likes it).

Personally, I think I’ll just move to Leviathan instead. Not that that format isn’t without its own set of problems, but I feel there is more fun to be had in a format not dominated by the same 5 super resilient midrange aggro decks all frigging day long.

“Aggressive decks also became top tier strategies”

“in order to prevent uniform control strategies that end up being particularly oppressive for aggressive decks, Breya, Etherium Shaper is now banned as a commander”

These two statements kinda contradict one another.

GG duel commander board. I said in my last comment this update would determine whether this format lives on or dies–you killed it. You banned Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond to specifically hurt Baral and Jace, Vryn’s Prodigy you say. You realize those decks made up a combined 5% of the meta in events since the change to 20HP yes? Yes, let’s hurt these decks that are not super great all the time right now and ignore the 10% of the meta that is Geist, and the 10% Zurgo.

Combo, as much as some people hate it, is a legitimate way to play MtG. As others have said, combo has a place in every eternal format, and it deserves a place. If you don’t want to play against combo ever go play Standard! Was is too strong before in the 30HP meta and the banlist was getting out of hand? Yes! There definitely needed to be a change. Combo is dead now though. It consists of 8% of all decks. That’s an entire archetype that is overshadowed by ONE DECK in either control or aggro. Unbanning Yisan is not enough to stop that.

Banning Breya just goes to show you guys really don’t know what to do. She isn’t the problem. The problem is the way this format works now. I honestly believe you should have split the difference and gone with a 25HP life total. That might give combo just enough to not be oppressed by Both control AND aggro.

@Bendoq is right on point. You guys are just selfishly banning and changing things to suit what fits y’alls idea of a perfect format: nobody runs combo or mono-blue with counterspells (the horror! *sarcasm dripping*). Everyone runs either aggro with two or three different commanders or control with predominantly single-target removal. What you are saying by that is this: “We don’t like blue control; we like W/B/R control better so we will change things until W/B/R control is always better than U control”. All you are doing is shifting the issue; you are NOT fixing the balance.

Goodbye duel commander. It was fun while it lasted. Before i go though, there is one thing I do want to know though: did Wizards ask you guys to commit seppuku in order to make way for their 1v1 format that is coming soon? That’s really the only thing that makes sense. Surely you aren’t this clueless right?

I honestly think banning Breya is not going to stop the control decks that can form around artifacts. I could easily start up a thopter meek combo with any commander around UBW since that is mostly what it goes for. I recently played a game with a friend and the whole time we played I only sent out Breya once, but I had to wipe the board clean of creatures the next turn because I would have been killed otherwise. Red is literally just there as a bonus, since there are a few actually good red cards that can go in the deck when you have other infinite combos you want to put in.
If it were me, rather than banning Breya in dual commander, I’d ban stuff that causes easy wins, like such:
-Felidar Sovereign and Aetherflux Reservoir: Both of these cards basically tell your opponent “Get rid of me before the next turn or aim for my life.” Decks that usually run these cards are decks that also focus on keeping their things alive or making more chumps to keep you from touching them. Aetherflux Reservoir is a cheap shot straight to the opponent that also nets you life with each spell you cast. By the time you have these guys out you’re also too late to get their life back down most likely.
-Ashnod’s Altar/Krark-klan Works: These are the actual fuels for the Thopter Meek combo. Rid of sword, make a Thopter and bring the sword back, rid the Thopter for 2 mana (artifact and creature), repeat until you can flood the board with Thopters and flood yourself with colorless mana. Combine this with cards like Skullclamp for free card draw, spending the one on the sword drop and the one to attach the clamp.
With unlimited drawing comes near-endless opportunities and openings into the actual good combos or infinites. Time Sieve, Aetherflux Reservoir, Disciple of the Vault, Impact Tremors, Cranial Plating, the list can go on with how many options this combo leads into with those two cards. It’s not the thopter meek combo that’s broken, it’s the thopter meek+mana addition that’s broken.
-Memnarch: Imagine how fun it is when your commander is taken from you because it is now an artifact, and not just your commander, but any permanent on the field. Everything touched by Memnarch adds on to the chaos.

The main point here is that Breya’s hint of red is worthless with these options.The only red card that I mentioned was Impact Tremors, but even that can be replaced with something better like Zulaport Cutthroat. Out of all the new Commanders to ban though, you guys pick Breya, not Atraxa, who can cause fun to be ruined more with Infect. Not Leovold, who even in a 1v1 game can be an annoying pain in the ass.
It makes me glad that my friends and I just follow the normal commander rules in a 1v1 game.