PonderPonder | Art by Dan Murayama Scott

Hello everyone! I’m Levi from the Thought Vessel, and today we are going to look back on The Bracket System to answer the question: “Are we ready to move the Bracket System out of beta?”

The most recent update to the Bracket System was in October 2025 and is still in its beta version. After thousands of games and eleven months of seeing the brackets in action, can we move forward, or is there still work to be done?

Initially, I thought this would be a simple yes-or-no question, but the more I dug in, the bigger it became. Join me as we go down the rabbit hole of The Bracket System and how we communicate with complete strangers when it comes to this crazy game.

The Bracket System As It Stands

In February 2025, Gavin Verhey, with the help of the Commander Format Panel (CFP), debuted the very first iteration of The Bracket System, defined as a conversation starter to help players gauge power level and expectations for Commander when playing with people for the very first time. The Bracket System consisted of five Brackets. The lowest bracket, Bracket 1, focuses on thematic and artistic builds rather than winning or losing, and Bracket 5, commonly referred to as cEDH, is the most competitive tournament style of play. 

Before this, we had players rate their decks from one to ten. On that scale, one was essentially a theme deck that was technically legal, but had no way of actually being a threat, and ten was the most lethal cEDH deck possible. With little scope beyond that across a variety of different playgroups, most players typically stated that their deck was a seven, thus the old joke “everything is a seven.”

An example of the pre-Bracket System method for stating a deck's power level.

The Bracket System helped with this problem by halving the number of levels from ten down to five to help reduce the number of decks one player would have to have in order to cover each Bracket, if they chose to do so. It also introduced the Game Changers list to bring up cards that were either universally powerful or oppressive, and noted what types of things should be disclosed for players. Not everyone wants to compete against a combo deck with fifteen tutors that is expressly trying to end the game as quickly as possible, or a deck that wants to make it where no one can do anything at all. There are a lot of issues that the Bracket System has been successful in addressing.

With the first iteration of Brackets, preconstructed decks were listed at Bracket 2. With the most recent update from October 2025, they have rolled back on this idea, though a good portion of the Commander community still abides by it.

October 2025's revised Commander Brackets infographic.

What the Bracket System Does Well

In a lot of ways, the old power level system was a bit of an ego check. Players building decks for the first time, especially those who didn’t have a universal understanding of powerful cards like Rhystic StudyRhystic Study, could generally use the scale to evaluate their decks. The problem was that your playgroup had a huge influence on how strong or weak you perceived your deck to be. A deck that consistently won against objective Level Five decks and a deck that consistently lost to Level Eight decks could both end up being called Level Seven, even though they were wildly different in strength.

A deck could also perform very differently from one playgroup to another depending on factors like budget, archetype, and playstyle. Over time, this meant that most players simply settled somewhere around Level Seven. The Bracket System shifted the focus away from trying to assign a number to a deck’s power and toward understanding the intent behind how the deck was built.

If the deck is built to aggressively win and protect its own win condition, that is going to behave more like a Bracket 4. Is there a bigger priority on pet cards and committing to the bit? That may belong in Bracket 2, and some adjustments need to be made. There was less ego involved, and the Game Changers helped players know which cards were potential issues.

Turn expectations and descriptions of how decks are built, how gameplay should go, and what win conditions should be like really help paint a picture of what the goal should be. It can provide a general idea of what to expect that has wiggle room depending on a variety of factors like playgroup.

Of course, the Bracket System is not perfect, and there are also issues. But it is performing well enough that it can show us where it needs improvement.

Game Changers as of February 2026

What It Doesn’t Do Well

Getting the entire spectrum of decks down to five numbers leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation. A deck might be a Bracket 2 on paper with a powerful card or synergy that, when played, makes it feel much stronger. The Bracket System speaks to consistency, but not how to gauge a deck that has both a low floor and high ceiling.

Two decks can have a similar average power level while producing wildly different games depending on their draws. One might have a low floor but the ability to completely take over a game when everything lines up. Another might have a much higher floor but never reach the same ceiling. Both decks can fit into the same bracket while creating very different experiences.

The space between the top and bottom of a Bracket is a pretty drastic one. I have the luxury of living in a city that has a lot of local game stores that I like to play Commander at. A Bracket Three deck in each of those spaces is so different that I actually have to build separate decks for those playgroups to accommodate.

For example, if a player is self-conscious about not wanting to pub-stomp the table and builds as low into Bracket 3 as they can, then plays against a player whose group typically likes to play with spice and will push the Bracket to the limit, that is going to be a miserable game for both parties involved.

Neither person was doing anything wrong, but the space between the high end and low end of a Bracket leaves room for blowouts. Yes, we could get into each player’s personal background, experience, and deckbuilding philosophies, but this might be a 15-to-20-minute pregame conversation. Is this a reasonable ask for players to go through every time they sit down with a new pod?

The turn expectation also opens the floodgates to a lot of different questions. Yes, this is just a conversation and not a hard and fast restriction, but there are a lot of decks that want to win in a variety of different ways. Voltron decks want to build up one big creature to take players out with Commander damage. They can likely take out at least one player before turn eight if they aren’t interacted with. Is the expectation that all Voltron decks are restricted to Bracket 3 or higher?

I don’t think anyone would try to make that case, as we consistently get precons with Equipment or Aura themes that will try to win through Commander damage, but aren't optimized enough to hang with a Bracket 3 pod. Control and Stax decks typically want to draw a game out and stop any early game aggression. It is rare to see a powered-up Stax deck win before six, but it's going to hang at a Bracket 4 pod.

While we are on the topic of Stax, there is also the issue of the Bracket System stretching itself too thin. There are powerful decks, and there are decks that aren't fun to play against. While a deck can cover both of these categories, there are plenty of powerful decks that are fun to play against, and there are decks that can generate a lot of salt but not a lot of wins. Having them lumped together in the Bracket System by adding features like Mass Land Denial and Lockouts can be problematic.

Concessions

Ultimately, I don’t believe that The Bracket System is quite ready to move out of beta. But having a perfect conversation piece for strangers to play a game is basically impossible for a variety of reasons. There are some things that we are simply unable to fix.

No matter how a power level or Bracket is set up, there will always be bad actors. This is not an issue unique to Magic: The Gathering. There will be people who will misrepresent what their deck is capable of doing, intentionally or accidentally.

Sometimes a player might not be aware of what Game Changers are and will bring a Cyclonic RiftCyclonic Rift into a Bracket 2 game. Sometimes a player is confident in a deck that still needs a lot of work and ends up pub-stomping themselves. Sometimes a player cares about winning above anything else and will simply stack the deck in their favor. None of these are great to experience, but they happen from time to time.

Players come from different backgrounds and have wildly different experiences. I started playing Commander with a small group of well-established Commander players in Wisconsin. These players had strong decks with lots of interaction. We used to have The Zur Test, where players would bring new decks to play against a Zur the EnchanterZur the Enchanter control deck one-on-one to look for weaknesses and test its viability. Learning to play in that environment shaped how I play today. The amount of interaction I would find acceptable for a Bracket 3 deck compared to what a player who hangs out with their friends and plays upgraded precons twice a month would find acceptable is going to be extremely different. Technically, we’re both correct for what our playgroups expect.

Strict definitions will always bring out min-maxing players. Saying things like “A Few Tutors” and “Late Game Combo” are there as general suggestions rather than hard and fast rules. The stricter we get on these things, the further players will push their limits. As the saying goes, “Players will always optimize the fun out of games.”

Finally, we're going to get things wrong. When we interact with strangers in games or in life, we’re not going to be aligned 100% of the time. We'll play games in which we accidentally obliterate the table, and we’ll also get stomped so badly we genuinely feel bad for the stack of cardboard we put in front of us to endure that experience. (Apologies again to my Vihaan, GoldwakerVihaan, Goldwaker deck.)

The important thing is to not let one bad game set the tone for the rest of your night. If it keeps happening, you’re probably too far apart on expectations, and a new pod might be the answer. There will always be risk when playing outside of a dedicated playgroup.

What Still Needs to Improve

If we're going to move out of the beta version of the Bracket System into something more solidified, these are the things I believe we need to address.

The Bracket System needs to decide if a deck should be judged by its best-case scenario, its floor, or somewhere in between. No matter how we decide to make this evaluation, having everyone on the same page would trim the high end and low end of Brackets a bit.

We need to delineate between powerful cards and unfun cards. Demonic TutorDemonic Tutor is powerful. Grand Arbiter Augustin IVGrand Arbiter Augustin IV is unpleasant to play against. There are no Grand Arbiter Augustin IV cEDH decks putting up tournament results, yet we corral them together in the same group.

I am not advocating for Grand Arbiter Augustin IV to be removed as a Game Changer, but finding a way of splitting up powerful and salty cards would be helpful. The chart below from Oneofthosebeebles that was floated around before the Bracket System had some very interesting insights into this. Separating how powerful a deck is from how unpleasant it is to play against could give players another useful piece of information without forcing every disruptive deck into the same category as the most powerful decks Commander has to offer.

Finally, the Bracket System needs to put a better definition on Bracket 4. Of every bracket, this is the one that is by far the most difficult to get an even pod for. This is a combination of off-meta cEDH decks and Bracket 3 decks that are winning way too often, getting thrown together. Both of these decks have prepared for a very different kind of fight.

With unlimited Game Changers, the raw card quality between decks can be drastically different depending on player tolerance and budget. A deck with eleven Game Changers is going to have a dramatically different play experience than a strong deck with three Game Changers, but they can still occupy the same space. If this means we add a Bracket between 3 and 4 that keeps Bracket 3's six-turn clock but pushes the Game Changer count to five to seven, so be it.

Wrapping Up

The tragedy, yet beauty, of the Bracket System is that it can feel and mean different things for different playgroups. You might be reading this at home and completely agree with every word I say, while another person might disagree with me entirely. Commander and Magic: The Gathering allow for more personal expression than almost any other game.

Ultimately, the best option is to have a dedicated playgroup of friends who are familiar with each other, where a lot of this is irrelevant. We can’t expect any single conversation to create perfectly balanced games for us, and that shouldn’t be the goal.

The goal should be to make sure everyone has a reasonable idea of what kind of game they are about to play. As far as opening up that dialogue, the Bracket System is the best tool we have. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect or finished.

Do you like the Bracket System? What would you change about it if you could? Share your idea in the comments below.

Until next time, happy brewing!