Preface
The rule-breaking will continue until morale improves. Strap in comrades, we’re doing it again. It’s time to talk about: BREAK THE RULES MONTH THREE: This Time It’s Personal Educational. In honor of the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender set, we’re going to play around with Learnboards, Lessons, and the Learn mechanic!
The tl;dr:
- The Learn mechanic can pull lessons into your hand from Learnboards outside the game, exclusively in January 2026.
- In February, having a learnboard and pulling lessons from outside the game into your hand with the Learn mechanic will go back to being illegal, and the Learn mechanic will resume just being a “discard then draw” effect on cards. But we encourage you to continue experimenting with learnboards in rule-zero games with your group and in online communities.
- We want you to play around with this and see how it goes, and let us know how it goes. How well do decks with learnboards 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 Learnboards this January, or they can choose not to. Check with them before you sign up for an event.
- IN FACT: Chris, aka OneMoreGameMTG, is planning a Common Cause PDH tournament for January with some special rules in honor of Break the Rules Month, involving not only Learnboards but also a new surprise twist.
Wait, back up. What?
If you’re just joining us, what is Break the Rules Month?
We on the Rules Committee (RC) get a lot of questions about whether or not certain cool things are technically legal in the format, like: can you cycle from the command zone? Is Gremlin Tamer red? Should we all agree to ban islands? All five of us are fairly unified in our response to these questions: that stuff is not technically part of the rules but you should ask your playgroup about doing it anyway ‘cause it sounds dope and we all want to see it happen.
To encourage folks to do exactly that, we created Break-The-Rules-Month last January, and Break-The-Rules-Month-2 last July, as month-long events where we changed up some rules to see what would happen. What happened for the first one (uncommon planeswalkers as legal commanders) is that we got a ton of really outstanding feedback about the format and about doing Break the Rules Month again. What happened for the second one (uncommon vehicles and spacecraft as commanders) was less impactful: days after we announced our intention to temporarily break rules with this change, Wizards announced their intention to permanently alter the rules with this exact same change. Still! We considered this to be very positive feedback (our idea was so good that Wizards literally stole it immediately was on the same page), and we want to continue experimenting and exploring and pushing boundaries. We’ve got a lot more ideas about fun things to do with command zone cards and mechanics, but we wanted to put those on hold for a bit to celebrate the upcoming Avatar: The Last Airbender set, and its reprise of the Lesson card type.
What’s a Lesson?
For those unfamiliar, the Learn mechanic and Lesson cards come to us from the Strixhaven set. Lesson is a subtype of instant and sorcery spells; it doesn’t do anything on its own. Certain other spells like First Day of Class or Study Break include the text Learn, which means that as the spell resolves, its controller could either
- Discard a card to draw a card, or
- Reveal a Lesson card they own from outside the game and put it into their hand.
This made limited really fun: cards that were maindeck unplayable, like Introduction to Prophecy or Environmental Sciences, became solidly draftable, because they could provide real benefits without taking up one of 23 precious deck-slots.
Unfortunately, Learn didn’t do much for us in PDH, or any other Commander variant. “Parts of abilities which bring other traditional card(s) you own from outside the game into the game do not function” has been a part of commander rules since the beginning, and PDH has followed suit. Before Strixhaven, us following suit didn’t really matter at all, since there were no commons or commanders that could pull cards from outside the game, but we were on board in principle. For us, Learn has always just meant “You may discard a card to draw a card.”
… UNTIL NOW. (well, until January 2026. Maybe not now. I don’t know when you’re reading this.)
Avatar is bringing Lessons back, and we’re celebrating by allowing the Learn mechanic to pull Lessons from outside the game into players’ hands, exclusively this January, 2026.
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 you grabbing lessons from a learnboard is bogus and unfun, don’t do it. If you’re at a tournament and the rules don’t allow grabbing lessons from learnboards, don’t do it. 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 whoever you’re playing with is enthusiastic about playing against learnboards, and you’re enthusiastic about playing with learnboards, here’s how they’ll work:
How exactly does this work? Mechanically?
- Each deck can have a “Learnboard.” It’s like a sideboard. It can have up to 15 cards.
- The Learnboard can only have cards with the “Lesson” subtype.
- Deckbuilding restrictions apply to the learnboard:
- Lessons must follow rarity rules. The learnboard can only have commons.
- Lessons must follow singleton rules. The learnboard can’t contain copies of cards that are also in your maindeck.
- Lessons must follow color identity rules. You can only use lessons within your commander’s color identity. For example, Pest Summoning is green/black, and can’t go into the Learnboard of a mono-green deck.
- When you resolve a spell with the Learn ability, you have the choice to either
- Discard a card to draw a card, or
- Reveal a lesson from your learnboard, and put it into your hand.
Wait, you said it’s “like” a sideboard. What’s the difference between a learnboard and a sideboard?
I’m taking great pains to exclusively use the word “learnboard” to describe this change, and to avoid the word “sideboard.” We on the rules committee chatted at length about whether to wrap this month’s rule-break in with having a whole sideboard. Sideboards, which we are NOT doing as part of this Break the Rules Month, would allow you to swap cards into and out of your deck, after commanders and turn order have been revealed but before hands are drawn. We decided we didn’t want to include sideboards as part of this month’s rule-break: our number one goal here with BtRM is to do science to determine whether certain rule-breaks are fun to play against and alongside normal rules-as-written decks. Having the opt-in players using sideboards felt like a massive advantage over players who simply chose not to do that, and that’s not what we’re here for.
That said, I have heard rumors of some preliminary planning between Adam (BeachBodGod69, our format’s strongest proponent of sideboarding) and Chris (OneMoreGameMTG, the host of the Common Cause tournament series) about a potential tournament this January that utilizes both learnboards and sideboards. Stay tuned for more details about that event!
This feels pretty different from the last two Break the Rules Months, which were just slightly expanded commander options.
This is an excellent observation. Our first BtRM was a modest change, only increasing the legal cardpool by 21 commanders (Planeswalkers). Our second increased the cardpool by 69 commanders (Vehicles and Spacecraft. Also: nice). Neither month had a direct impact on what was (or wasn’t) allowed in the 99, or on how any mechanics worked within games. These small changes were a healthy place for us to start while we got a feel for Break the Rules Month, and I’m extremely pleased with both of them.
More than that, though, I am delighted to report that our Break-the-Rules ambitions fly far afield of just sometimes allowing weird new commanders. We’re ready to experiment with changes that are more wide-reaching and affect a wider variety of decks, if in smaller ways. EVERY deck can have a learnboard! That said, it’s worth noting that there are currently only 10 cards with Learn: 2 each for white, blue, and red; and 1 each for black, green, Orzhov, and Golgari. Every deck can have a learnboard… but most decks can only have a few cards with learn. Which we think will keep this month’s rule-break manageable, fun and balanced.
What if it’s not manageable, fun and balanced? What if you’re wrong?
A perfect question! I would be overjoyed to discover that we’re wrong. That’s why this is for science. Remember: the most important thing is consent (make sure your playgroup and/or event are on board before you do Break the Rules things). The second most important thing is doing good research. We on the Rules Committee field a lot of questions about corner cases, and our typical response is “that’s not technically legal but it sounds fun; you should try it as a rule-zero experiment.” What would really help us out is reliable, empirical data about how this particular rule-break interacts with rules-as-written (RAW) decks, so that we can point question-askers towards real data as we encourage (or discourage) folks to do the illegal thing. So every time you play with or against a learnboard, write down how it goes. Did the learnboard matter at crucial moments? Was the benefit of adding lessons to your hand worth the price of running learn cards? I want to hear about how all the learnboard games go: tell me everything.
That’s all for now! We’re all very enthusiastic to get to run our weird experiments a third time. Enthusiastic enough that we’re already looking ahead towards the next few Rule-Breaks. More than that, we’re looking forward to the feedback we get from this round, so let us know how it all goes!
Thanks for reading!
Love,
-Dave