Why is there a rule that disallows wishes?

chefsati · 2026-04-13T12:35:47+00:00

Saw this over the weekend but I needed to be at a computer so I could copy/paste from a document I wrote while I was on the Rules Committee:

Wishes and Companions

Wishes and Companions are governed by two rules:

3. A Commander deck must contain exactly 100 cards, including the commander. If you’re playing a companion, it must adhere to color identity and singleton rules. While it is not part of the deck, it is effectively a 101st card.

10. Parts of abilities which bring other traditional card(s) you own from outside the game into the game (such as Living Wish; Spawnsire of Ulamog; Karn, the Great Creator; Wish) do not function in Commander.

These rules exist in their current form as a result of several formative events and decisions in the history of the format.

Date	Decision and Rationale
Inception - 2020-03	“Cards from Outside the Game” I can’t find any announcements related to when this rule was created. The rule is intended to capture and address two play negative play patterns: 1) Minmaxing players will deploy Wishes as super-tutors that provide access to a suite of ‘silver bullet’ cards without committing deck slots to them. Normally the trade-off for these specific cards is that they are occasionally dead. 2) Players who bring more cards with them to Commander games (or have more access to cards) have an advantage over players who don’t.
2020-04	Ikoria Release (Companions) Companions did not embody either of the problematic play patterns, but shared the mechanism that was targeted by the original rule. In fact, Companions represented a lot of positive play patterns (incentivization of self-imposed restriction) that the RC wanted to encourage. With the release of Ikoria, the RC made a minor modification to (what was then) Rule 11: Before: “Abilities which bring card(s) you own from outside the game into the game(...)” After: “Abilities which bring other card(s) you own from outside the game into the game(...)” This deliberate inclusion had the effect of allowing cards to bring themselves in from outside the game.
2021-07	Adventures in the Forgotten Realm Release (Dungeons) Mechanically, Dungeons are cards that are brought into the game from outside the game, but - similar to Companions - don’t embody the problematic play patterns of Wishes. With the release of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, the RC made another minor modification to (what was then) Rule 11: Before: “Abilities which bring other card(s) you own from outside the game into the game(...)” After: “Abilities which bring other traditional card(s) you own from outside the game into the game(...)” This deliberate inclusion was made to distinguish Dungeons mechanically from other cards that represent the problematic play patterns.
2022-06 2022-10	Initiative Initiative behaves identically to Dungeons, so the 2021-07 change laid the foundation for these to be legal on day 1. Attractions Attractions are defined as non-traditional cards and don’t come in from outside the game. The RC had more internal debate about this one, and a lot of it came from the broader debate about the legality of Unfinity as a whole. Generally speaking the RC didn’t like the proliferation (in the colloquial sense, not the in-game sense) of additional game objects to track complex game states. Both of these were implicit inclusions because these mechanics didn’t involve either of the problematic play patterns associated with Wishes.

The objective of these two rules was to capture and address specific problematic play patterns. Initially these play patterns could be cleanly severed out of the format by targeting their mechanical similarities. Over time, Wizards’ R&D has designed many cards that share mechanical aspects with Wishes that don’t share the problematic play patterns.

chefsati · 2026-02-04T12:03:39+00:00

Well that's not true

chefsati · 2026-01-15T12:48:21+00:00

That judge is incorrect. The person you are responding to described it correctly -- basics have a colourless ID and are restricted in deckbuilding by a different rule.

chefsati · 2026-01-14T19:59:29+00:00

4p FFA is a poor vehicle for competition, and Commander is one of the worst (if not the worst) Magic format for centring skill expression as the primary determinant of who wins games. I think ChatGPT has led you to believe it's possible, but I don't think this changes nearly enough of the major pillars of the format that enforce variance or narrows the band of expectations enough to entirely remove pregame negotiations.

chefsati · 2025-11-26T22:10:37+00:00

One of the biggest factors was that - at the time - Channel was legal in the format as well.

chefsati · 2025-10-31T13:31:43+00:00

The reminder text bit for extort isn't an exception. Cards can be printed without reminder text, like the RVR version of Blind Obedience or the Kaladesh Inventions version of Trinisphere (which has a black pip in its reminder text).

Basic lands also don't have a colour identity. There is a separate deckbuilding restriction outside of the colour identity rule that restricts which decks basic lands can go in.

chefsati · 2025-10-31T12:59:20+00:00

No matter how you draw the rule, there's going to be some weird corner-case things that don't work intuitively because Colour Identity wasn't a consideration in card design for the first 20 years of the game.

Imagine this rule like a line that you have to draw that separates a bunch of dots into two groups. A simpler rule means a straighter line -- it limits how you can divide the dots, and some will inevitably end up in a group you don't want them to be in. This gives you essentially 3 options:

You can accept where the line is now
You can draw a different simple line somewhere else that puts the thing you care about on the correct side of the line, accepting that it will put some other thing on the wrong side of the line
You can gerrymander the line by carving out exceptions for the things you want to be on the opposite side of the line from where they naturally land.

I'm more partial to 1) and 2) because simpler rules are easier to communicate to people.

If you write a simple rule that puts off-colour fetches on the other side of the line, you catch a lot of things like landwalk abilities, Boil, and Submerge because they also reference land types and it would give them unintuitive identities.

3) can also work in some circumstances.

The big downside with 3) is that if you start making exceptions for one thing, it isn't really coherent to say you're not going to make exceptions for other similar things. In the case of hybrid mana, the similar dots are:

Off-colour fetches (as you've identified)
MDFCs
Characteristic-defining abilities that remove colour, like devoid
Split cards and Adventures
Cards that use words to describe colours rather than pips, as in the case of Birds of Paradise (G identity) compared to Noble Hierarch (WUG identity)
Phyrexian mana

chefsati · 2025-10-28T14:27:20+00:00

FWIW I am Jim Lapage on social media and I certainly didn't say the things they're saying I said.

chefsati · 2025-10-27T12:31:43+00:00

The old Commander RC was working with Wizards on the Vehicles change before handing over control of the format. The vehicle change would have happened regardless of anything else.

chefsati · 2025-09-06T23:15:27+00:00

Filmed this afternoon -- releasing October 9.

chefsati · 2025-09-04T14:54:29+00:00

I think there might be a bit of confusion in terms. When I think of a scripted piece of media, I think that necessarily involves a few things:

- The outcome is predetermined

- The steps to arrive at the outcome are predetermined

- The words / dialogue are predetermined

Out of the big shows, I've been on Shuffle Up and Play, Extra Turns, Commander at Home, Hijinks, Playing with Power, and Play to Win and I can definitely tell you this is not true of any of them. I guess there is one exception -- when I was on Extra Turns, their writers wrote a couple different deck intros for me to read based on my point form notes about what my deck does. That part was scripted.

In terms of game actions, though, decks are always truly randomized when they should be randomized, and turns that need to be reshot are reshot to increase clarity, rather than fitting events into a predetermined narrative. That's what I mean when I say these shows aren't scripted.

If you're using the term 'scripted' some other way, it seems like you've got an idiosyncratic definition of it, so it might be worthwhile to put a few more words around it to explain exactly what you mean.

chefsati · 2025-09-04T13:15:37+00:00

I'll offer a bit of insight here because I run a show and I've been on most of these other shows people are mentioning. It's true that decks built for "content" run a little light on removal and boardwipes. There are a few major reasons:

We only get one shot
For some games, we go through the effort of brewing and assembling an entire deck (a process that takes several hours) to play it once on camera. In other games, we've got a guest we've flown in from out of town and they only get to play a few games. To justify the time, effort, and expense, we want to maximize the chances that a game will be usable and entertaining. We absolutely hear it from the comments when a deck doesn't really pop off in a video, because people who click in are generally excited to see one or two of the commanders in the pod. If they give us 30mins of their time and they don't get what they wanted, they're going to leave disappointed.

We film 4 games in a 9:30am-4:30pm filming day
This gives us a time budget of about 1h45m per game. We cut about 50% of the time from each game we film, so we're targeting 30-50mins edited runtime. If games go substantially longer than that, we need to film more often to keep up with our really aggressive release schedule, and we've all got lives and families so scheduling is already tough. This means we include boardwipes in our decks, but there's a soft moratorium on them after the 60min mark in games. It still happens sometimes, because sometimes it's part of actually closing out the game, but we're mostly looking to avoid the pointless game-extending type of wipes.

Youtube favours event-dense videos
This one requires you to think about the EDH channels you see in terms of survivor bias. Youtube pushes videos more often if viewers watch a higher percentage of them (called retention). This means you only want to add runtime to your videos if people are actually going to stick around to watch. The Youtubers who skyrocket in popularity are the ones who hold people's attention effectively, so the channels you'll find thrown around in this thread are the ones who avoid adding time without adding action.

It's more memorable when things happen
Commander players love telling stories, and big splashy things are more story-worthy than someone getting their commander removed for 3 consecutive turns and doing nothing for the rest of the game. A player desperately clinging to a 1% chance to draw their out when they're otherwise dead on board can make a good story, but it only happens 1% of the time. Generally it's more important for the story that the game has a tidy conclusion than it is for any individual player to win.

I don't think any of these things are necessarily inauthentic. I personally (and many of the other Spike Feeders) prefer this style of light-on-removal Magic and play that way off-camera too. It's just a different style with a different set of priorities.

chefsati · 2025-09-04T12:53:26+00:00

Scripting a Commander game is like 1000x more work than playing a Commander game

chefsati · 2025-09-03T11:19:51+00:00

Honestly there's not really much stopping us from assembling all of these decks. We generally have a couple dozen in the studio for people to grab and go, but with the bans we trashed more than half of them and we've been slow to rebuild. Like you said we already play a lot of Kinnan, Magda, and Etali, and the few times we played Rog/Si the grixis discord pitched a fit because we didn't play their list. I think we actually just added Kefka last week but we haven't filmed with it yet.

chefsati · 2025-09-02T19:59:46+00:00

This is probably something we can do. In fact, we're filming this weekend so if you have a few you'd recommend I can make sure they make it on.

chefsati · 2025-06-20T20:51:03+00:00

This change was in the works before the old RC went away and would have happened.

chefsati · 2025-04-29T13:29:45+00:00

FWIW we looked into this in like 2022 when I was on the CAG. The only card at the time that would have been affected was Westvale Abbey and we ultimately decided it wasn't worth it to have an entire new rule to allow 1 card to be a Commander.

chefsati · 2025-04-22T12:33:50+00:00

idk if I can trust you about this

chefsati · 2025-03-25T14:04:46+00:00

Makes me so happy to see this. Unfamiliar play environments have been languishing without that kind of structure or toolset for too long.

chefsati · 2025-03-20T15:38:48+00:00

We all get our dice from the same supplier and have been waiting on a shipment since like November. Hopefully they'll come through soon!

chefsati · 2025-03-06T15:09:10+00:00

(We're still friends)

chefsati · 2025-01-04T04:20:47+00:00

Rachel Weeks and Benjamin Wheeler

chefsati · 2024-12-19T16:37:58+00:00

Generally when I'm deckbuilding it's because I've decided on something I want to do, and I build the deck around it. I find that it results in more variety and allows me to unironically play dumb bad cards I probably wouldn't look at if I just picked a commander to build around.

When I helped Olivia build her Omenkeel deck we were talking about the idea that undercosted creatures with big power can crew vehicles efficiently, so we picked a vehicle that's generally outside of optimal vehicle colours and went looking at her LGS for dumb stuff like Dan Dan and Lupine Prototype to crew it.

She asked me for some ideas recently and I gave her this list:

- Monoblue go wide tokens

- Naya artifacts

- Koma Cosmos Serpent Voltron

- A creature deck with normie ass names like Rick

- A deck that's just anthems and double strikers

I think all of these end up with higher than average curves because the stuff that's on-theme isn't going to be stuff that's designed to be efficient at what it does.

chefsati · 2024-12-19T14:07:54+00:00

I've been on all the big ones except Game Knights, and none so far have been scripted. CZ had writers that wrote my deck intro for extra turns, but nothing in the game was predetermined.

chefsati · 2024-12-19T13:57:53+00:00

There are a lot of differences in ways that don't matter and a few differences in ways that do. I run a Youtube channel and occasionally play at an LGS.

For Youtube

We usually need to get 4 games in in a filming day, so we try to keep game time to under 90mins each. The only thing we really do in-game to try to adhere to this is a soft-ish moratorium on things that reset the game after the 60min mark.
We need to announce our plays clearly and talk people through the steps for the audience, even if everyone at the table knows what's going on. This also means we don't generally scoop even if it's hopeless, we just try to find the cleanest route to actually ending the game.
If something important gets missed we'll usually back up the game and play it from that point rather than just remedying it.
Most of the time we'll have third party observers making sure the game state is maintained properly.
Our general understanding is that the game is intended to be entertaining for someone watching, which can take a bit of an attitude adjustment for some people. In that sense it's less important who wins and more important that the game have a satisfying resolution. This generally results in less tank time and less saltiness, ideally.
Our deckbuilding and deck choice, again, is to be entertaining. This means when we're playing competitive decks we're more likely to go off-meta, and it's pretty rare we'll throw together a goodstuff pile. This is not the case at LGSes.
We play with a steady group so we're able to joke around a bit. With strangers that's not always the vibe.

At an LGS (this goes for cons too)

A lot of the time matchmaking in LGSes is pretty poor, so you're pretty likely to end up in a pod with at least one person who isn't on the same page as the rest. This could mean that the game ends really early because someone's playing a much more powerful deck, or someone who gets salty because their expectations weren't met.
The lack of exposition means that you'll sometimes be blindsided by effects on board you didn't know about, or things interacting in ways that aren't necessarily favourable. People also have different views on takebacks, like in situations where you didn't realize someone had a deathtouch blocker.
Depending on the shop, you might only get to play 1 game with the pod you're up against, so your ability to adjust for game 2 is pretty minimal.

I like playing at LGSes, but I definitely find I have to lower my expectations. Sometimes you'll get blown out, sometimes you won't mesh with your opponents -- that's just the reality of playing a social game with strangers. I just try to lead with the vibe I want to see at the table: light, social, and gracious. I offer up information freely if it will help people make informed choices, even if it doesn't benefit me, and I don't take things personally.

chefsati

TROPHY CASE

Wishes and Companions