TL;DR: 

  1. Secret Lairs, promos, promo-like set supplements (like Masterpieces), and local releases (products that aren’t released in English) are no longer considered legitimate sources of rarity shifts. That means this list of creatures are no longer legal at all, this list of creatures are no longer legal as commanders (but are still legal in the 99), and Cursed Rack is no longer legal in the 99.
  2. We have reworked the way PDH legality works on Scryfall. Only commons show as “legal”, and we now have a new search term (is:PauperCommander) for finding legal commanders. The old “restricted” category has been removed.

What Makes a Card Common?

Up until now, the Pauper Commander’s take on what makes a card common was that it had to have a paper or MTGO printing at common. (Similarly, creatures needed an uncommon printing on MTGO or as a traditional card to be a legal commander.) There have long been a handful of odd corner cases that blurred the edge of this definition, such as MTGO promos, which had their rarity changed retroactively.

One of the unresolved and confusing issues was that Cursed Rack has a common printing in Renaissance (a reprint set only released in German, French, and Italian) but is not legal in 60-card Pauper. For the longest time, this seemed to be linked to Pauper’s presence being primarily on MTGO. However, we were recently able to get clarification from the Pauper Format Panel on why Cursed Rack isn’t Pauper-legal: 

“Because Renaissance was a special localized release its rarity doesn’t impact Pauper. That’s essentially the long and short of it.”

Our conversation continued, discussing various products, with promos being another primary focus where paper products are not intended to cause rarity shifts and do not affect 60-card Pauper legality. However, a consistent theme was that this isn’t purely about products with “promo” in the name, and also extends to several lines of promo-like products, such as Secret Lairs, Box Toppers, and Masterpieces (although it was noted that Box Toppers might change in the future). 

After this conversation, the PDH RC discussed whether we should follow 60-card Pauper for the sake of uniformity across all Pauper formats, at the cost of a slight adjustment to our current list of legal cards. In the end, we decided that keeping close ties to 60-card Pauper will cause less confusion in the long run and be better for continuing to grow our format.

The New Rule

The following are considered legitimate sources of rarity shifts:

  • Core and Expansion sets.
  • Masters sets (ex: Ultimate Masters, Ravnica Remastered, Mystery Booster)
  • Draft Innovation sets (ex: Commander Masters, Jumpstart, Clue, Battlebond, and Universes Beyond sets)
  • Bonus Sheet Sets (ex: Strixhaven Mystical Archives and Brothers’ War Retro Artifacts)
  • Precons (ex: starter decks and Commander decks)

The following are NOT sources of legitimate downshifts.

  • Arena-only products (no change here)
  • Promos
  • Promo-like products (ex: Secret Lairs, Masterpieces, Box Toppers, and the newer Challenger decks that all have secret-lair-like set symbols)
  • Local special products (like Renaissance and Salvat)

*As a note of clarification, the distinction between Bonus Sheets and Masterpieces is that Masterpieces are orders of magnitude rarer, while Bonus Sheets have a card in every pack of the set they are associated with.

What Specific Cards Do We Lose?

Ultimately, this change only impacts 16 cards (1 from the 99 and 15 commanders):

Arguments For & Against

Obviously, losing any cards isn’t desirable, but thankfully, these aren’t very heavily used. According to PDHData, the 16 commanders only have a combined total of 10 public lists across Moxfield and Archidekt. Cursed Rack is only in 5 public lists on those sites. So this isn’t a huge impact to format diversity and shouldn’t cause many feel-bad moments from people losing their decks or key tech.

This definitely feels like making our rules more convoluted because of the myriad different magic products and having to define whether each product is a valid source of rarity shifts. However, it’s worth pointing out that before we had an “everything except A, B, and C” definition. That still was just as convoluted in practice, it was just quieter about all the exceptions, hiding some behind the definition of a “traditional” printing (for example, excluding cards like Aswan Jaguar and Sol Ring). Moving to a direct “X, Y, and Z are legal” definition should mitigate the problem of making our rules more complicated. The other mitigating factor is that we’ve been working to improve our online tools that people use to find out if cards are legal, to help reduce confusion (see the Online Tools section below for more details). 

One downside that was really worrying at first was potentially making non-English-speaking players feel less valued by ignoring products only printed in other languages. We were worried about somebody having an Italian Renaissance card and thinking it was legal based on that printing.  (This feels similar to arguments about errata and the slow breakdown of the “reading the card explains the card” mentality.) However, all the uncommons that are becoming illegal all have black set symbols and no rarity code in the bottom left, so players were already dependent on Scryfall to know the true rarity of the cards. That greatly reduces the chances of one of these feels-bad moments. We also consulted with the German and Brazilian members of the Pauper Commander Advisory Group, and they weren’t very concerned about this being seen as dismissive of the international Magic community.

Lastly, there’s the argument that we shouldn’t follow 60-card Pauper because their ruling is based around the knowledge that Wizards is trying to avoid unintentional downshifting things to common. However, they may not be quite as careful about rarity shifts to uncommon, so it’s questionable whether we should apply the same criteria to our format. Ultimately, we felt it was important to align our commons with 60-card Pauper, and treating our uncommons differently would have been the most convoluted and confusing of all possible options.

Online Tools

So if these corner cases have been difficult for us to find a simple way to track, how has 60-card Pauper been keeping track of what’s legal and what’s not for years? The answer is mostly just utilizing the Pauper legality indicator tool alongside format-specific search options on Scryfall. As obvious as that sounds, that tool represents a list of every card in the game, individually saying Yes or No to each one. (This is in contrast to how we have tried to use rules like Common and Uncommon to define searches in Scryfall for PDH.) Following 60-card Pauper’s lead, we have also been working to improve how Pauper Commander legality is displayed in Scryfall and the deck building sites that use Scryfall’s data.

Previously, we had all legal commons and all legal commanders listed as legal, but this created a lot of confusion, with a good number of commons appearing as if they were legal in the command zone when they weren’t. It also made searching only for cards legal in the 99 or only for legal commanders much more difficult. So now, via collaboration with the Scryfall, Moxfield, and Archidekt, we have reorganized our legality filter to match the most common ways people actually need to use them, splitting up the command zone and the main deck. Now only cards legal in the main deck appear as “legal” in Pauper Commander on Scryfall (and appear in the “format:pdh” search). Meanwhile, we have created a separate search option (is:PauperCommander) that displays all legal commander options. So now both of the major ways people use legality search options have been simplified down to one search term, instead of the convoluted mess of search terms that we used to use to get pretty close.

We considered leaving the format legality options the same and just adding the new commander search term on top of that, but when we polled the community on which way would be more intuitive or useful to them, ~76% said that this change is what they would prefer.

For those that usually just use the graphical interface of the Scryfall Advanced Search page, there won’t be an option on that page for pauper commanders, only for what’s legal in the 99. However, if searching for legal pauper commanders, you can input all your other search criteria, run that search, go to the search bar at the top of the screen, and add “is:PauperCommander” to the search terms already in that bar from your first search (just make sure to add a space between is:PauperCommander and your other search terms).

The hope is that these changes make it easier for the average player to figure out what is and isn’t legal in PDH, mitigating some of the convoluted feeling of the new rules around what products are and aren’t legitimate sources of rarity shifts.

– Paul (Scarecrow1779)
@PDH Home Base

*Hours after this article was released, we got additional clarification from the PFP that there had been a misunderstanding around pack supplements, especially Bonus Sheets. Bonus sheets are still potential sources of legitimate rarity shifts. As a result, Self-Assembler is still legal as a commander and the article text was edited to reflect that.

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