Preface

It’s almost time to break more rules!  This time we’re headed into round 5 of our Break the Rules Month tradition.  Last July was a delight, both for brewing and playing, and I can’t wait to get back into doing crimes.  This January we’re finally pulling the trigger on something that I’ve been experimenting with for a long time: Commanders-on-the-back DFC’s are legal!  As always, I think it’ll be a pretty fun time, but we won’t know for sure until you try it and provide some feedback.

 

The tl;dr

  • If an uncommon Double-Face Card’s (DFC’s) back face has a P/T box, that card can be your commander, exclusively this January 2027.
  • In February, DFC’s will go back to only being legal commanders if their front face is a legal commander.
  • We want you to play around with this and see how it goes, and let us know how it goes. How well do Commander-on-the-back decks play with and against and alongside normal Rules-As-Written (RAW) decks? Share your experiences!
  • No one on the RC is considering a permanent Rules Change.  
  • No one on the RC is considering a permanent Rules Change. We’re just trying to have fun, and to compile information on common rule-breaks for our FAQs while we’re at it.
  • Tournament organizers set their own rules for their own events. They can choose to allow Commander-on-the-back decks this January, or they can choose not to participate. Check with them before you sign up for an event.
  • If a Tournament Organizer is as awesome as Ginger, they’ll mandate Commander-on-the-back decks like for Ginger’s Break-the-Rules-Tournament on January 9th!
  • If you wanna partner up Echoverse legends with their canon appearance, I’ve got suggestions (far below) but we’re not making it an official part of BtRM; you’ll have to square it with your playgroup yourself.

 

The Long Version

As usual, we should open with a recap of what Break the Rules Month (BtRM) even is: it’s science that we all do together to get a better sense of the boundaries of the format by temporarily moving beyond those boundaries.  We on the Rules Committee (RC) have developed a standard baseline set of rules that we feel represents the best balance of accessible (for folks joining us from Commander or 60c Pauper or elsewhere) and inclusive (for folks who want to do cool things with interesting cards).  But there are always fun ideas people have that are just outside the rules: planeswalkers in the command zone, for example, or small modifications to a commander’s color identity.  The RC gets questions about these not-quite-legal situations frequently, and our response is almost always “That’s outside the official rules, but you should try it anyway because it sounds fun!  Just be aware that it’s a rule-zero conversation and you should clear it with your playgroup first.”

 

The RC likes this answer, but we would prefer to be more detailed, and supported by empirical evidence.  For example, “We experimented with planeswalkers in the command zone and it was awesome!  Nothing felt unfun or unbalanced, and the decks played well against each other and well against Rules-as-written (RAW) decks.  This particular rule-break has our enthusiastic stamp of approval.”

 

Those experiments are what BtRM is all about!  We explore outside the boundaries of what the rules allow so that we can gather data about which rule-breaks create fun and balanced games, and which ones are unbalanced and lead to bad or one-sided play experiences.

 

Our results so far have been encouraging.  Some of the rule-breaks were enthusiastically well-received, while others made little impact.  Both outcomes are great data for us!  Our previous BtRM’s have looked like:

 

 

What are “Commanders-on-the-Back”?

Normally, PDH commanders can be any uncommon with a power/toughness box on the front of the card.  That includes creatures, vehicles, and spacecraft, but it tragically excludes some really fun options like The Long Reach of Night, a punishing saga that transforms into a powerful attacker; or Invasion of Regatha, a battle that can transform into a 4/4 pyromancer when it’s defeated.  For January, we’re pretending these creature*-on-the-back cards are legal commanders.  At the time of writing, this BtRM is opening up 41 new commander options for PDH this January: lots of Battles, some Sagas, and a handful of interesting artifacts and enchantments.

*(Or vehicle-on-the-back, since those are also valid front-side commanders.  In the future, perhaps spacecraft-on-the-back!  Time will tell.)

 

This is an especially fun month for me because I’ve already got 4 of these decks built!  A lot of these DFCs present abilities, effects, and play patterns that aren’t seen anywhere else in Pauper EDH, which makes them very intriguing for me.  For each of them, I keep a backup commander nearby in case any of my opponents don’t want to play against a rule-zero deck, and I’m happy to swap them out.  So far, that’s never happened.  Kagha sits in a box with Autumnal Gloom, as of yet completely untouched.  Serra Angel hangs out alongside Invasion of Dominaria, but has not yet graced the command zone.

 

Still, even with 4 commander-on-the-back decks in my regular rotation, I’m very excited to see what new and exciting decks the community comes up with.  The only reason I’ve got 4 of these decks already put together is that building 9 of them felt excessive.  (I’m definitely building more for January.)  There’s an enormous amount of interesting space to explore here, and I’m very excited to see what everyone comes up with!

 

What was that about Ginger running a Mandatory Break-the-Rules-Tournament?
Our brother in arms Ginger has set his sights on running a PDH tournament every month in 2027, and he’s kicking off the year in style with a Mandatory break the rules event on January 9th!  Registration will be free, the gameplay will happen through the service EDHplay, and everyone is expected to bring a Commander-on-the-back rule-break deck.  In the past we’ve coordinated with OMGChris to run Break-the-Rules-Encouraged events, but we’ve often found ourselves in a situation where less-powerful rule-break decks are getting kinda blown out by more established competitive meta decks.  Ginger’s solution to this: everyone brings a rule-break deck!  This is guaranteed to be good times and I’m excited to see you there.

 

How exactly does this work?  Socially?

I’m delighted you asked!  I want to emphasize two different elements of this.  The more important of the two is the social contract.  Break the Rules Month operates exclusively on an opt-in basis.  If your friends think that you putting Behold the Unspeakable into the command zone is bogus and unfun, don’t do it.  If you’re at an event and the rules don’t allow your deck to be helmed by Invasion of Ulgrotha, don’t do that.  If at any point you’re confronted with opposition about this and, instead of capitulating, you invoke my name or this article to try to win what shouldn’t be an argument, I will find you and the resulting conversation will be deeply unpleasant.  This is for fun.  Don’t make it weird.

 

That said: if your whole pod is enthusiastic about playing against commander-on-the-back decks, and you’re enthusiastic about playing with commander-on-the-back decks, here’s how they’ll work:

 

How exactly does this work?  Mechanically?

It’s pretty simple!

 

Why aren’t we doing Echoverse Partners?

Good question!  The recent Reality Fracture set gave us a huge variety of uncommon printings of some of Magic’s favorite legends, and each also had an Echoverse “What if this character was color-shifted and opposite along one trait of their personality?” card.  The list contains some very interesting cards like Jiang without Mowu and Edgar as a Werewolf.  A handful of folks I’ve spoken with are interested in using rule-zero to partner these legends with their echoverse counterpart so that both cards can be in the Command Zone of a deck with expanded color identity options.

 

The short answer for why we aren’t officially endorsing this idea with a dedicated BtRM is “It’s complicated for a few reasons.”  Mostly: partners are strong.  (Duel Commander had to nerf the whole mechanic.)  Even without ever casting the additional commander card you get access to, partners give you an entire extra color or two worth of card choices for deck construction.  That’s a hard sell when it’s attached to commanders that are already perfectly viable all on their own, like Kiora or Ruric Thar.  Our goal here is always to determine whether or not these rule-breaks play well against RAW decks, and we don’t have to do officially sanctioned science to determine that letting some decks break the rules in a way that’s all upside probably doesn’t lead to games that are as fun or balanced.  The Izzet Saheeli is already seeing competitive play and folks are speculating about whether or not it’s as powerful as Third Path Iconoclast, which has won some big events.  If someone adds the white Saheeli to the command zone for no other reason than that it lets them run Rally the Peasants and Suture Priest, then they’ve already got an advantage over RAW in a deck that (from what I have seen) needs no additional advantage to be fun and powerful.

 

Of course, we can try to find ways to mitigate this advantage.  We could impose restrictions, like “you can only have one commander in play at a time” or “the two commanders share commander tax.”  We (the RC) have talked about both, and ultimately discarded the idea for two reasons.  First, that does nothing to solve the “you get access to additional colors in a color-restricted format” advantage.  We just don’t want to run a second BtRM with expanded color identity immediately after last July’s Colorless+1 experiment.  Second, any amount of additional baggage that we attach to the rule-break muddles the rules clarity significantly.  We rely on a lot of word-of-mouth to spread these ideas, and the more complex an idea is, the more potential problems it’s going to have as it gets passed from person to person.  For now I want the rule-breaks that we officially endorse and encourage to be profoundly simple to describe and explain, and “You can partner a FRA legend with its Echoverse counterpart so you get expanded color identity options but the legend rule treats both cards as if they’re the same so if both are in play one gets placed into the graveyard as a state-based action” is just on the wrong side of my simple/complex threshold for this project.

 

BUT.  HOWEVER.  THAT SAID.  You, dear reader, have my strongest unofficial encouragement to brew Echoverse partners and play them, especially against me, using whatever restrictions (or lack of restrictions) you and your playgroup determine are fair and balanced and fun for your games.  Godspeed!  Let me know how it goes.

 

Remember that this is for science!

The rules committee gets a lot of questions about what’s legal or not.  For some questions, like “can you use Sneak from the command zone?” we’re delighted to be able to say yes and explain how that works!  For other questions, like “can you use Ninjutsu from the command zone?” we have to admit that officially you cannot.  Getting good data and feedback from these Break the Rules Months helps us answer those questions very thoroughly.  For the stuff that’s not technically legal, being able to describe those things as either “fair and balanced if your group wants to rule-break it” or “probably a bad idea that’s likely to lead to big unfun game imbalances” is extremely helpful for us.  But we can only do that if you help us run these experiments, and report back with your findings.

 

Go forth, brew some fun commander-on-the-back decks, and let me know how it all goes!

 

Love,

-Dave

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