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Gavin's Verhey's February 9th Good Morning Magic Video got me thinking about the trajectory of Commander as a format. It wasn't an involved sort of thinking. It sat at the back of my mind, an idle wondering, amalgams unformed. Then something anxious took root. I stumbled across an article on Cascade Cascade written by Rob Bockman called Towards Perfection. They wrote, in relationship to Magic art,

"I don’t think they’ll burn those bridges lightly, but they’ll happily burn bridges if they think it’ll make space for more permanent infrastructure. I also don’t think Wizards’ design team will embrace LLM technologies until Mark Rosewater and his mentees are out of the picture, simply because they don’t need to: Wizards R&D is exceptional at creating cohesive Magic sets. That said, as society shifts towards accepting AI products and Hasbro leans on Magic as a profits engine, we can’t imagine what aesthetic mutations await us."

I became fixated on this idea that Magic would change for the worse when current leadership left. I'm not kidding. The anxiety rolled up and over me at Chili's in the middle of the night. I was deeply worried for Magic the way the doomers in my comment section had been. I understood - suddenly, intimately - the context of that fear. The fear every person feels as they age, as things outgrow them.

Instead of letting this fear wrap itself around me, I started researching. I became obsessed with figuring out the patterns of Commander, and I'll share what I found with you.

Where Did Commander Start?

In my article Is Optimization Ruining Commander Deck Building, I ran through the history of Commander. If you've read that one, you'll see some similarities in this section. Before I talk about the trajectory of Commander as a format, I want to talk about where it started.

Adam Stanley started the first iteration of Commander, in 1996, in Alaska. It wasn't Commander back then; it was EDH, or Elder Dragon Highlander. The title came from the 1986 Highlander movie. Back then you played one of the Elder Dragons available at the time, such as ChromiumChromium, Arcades SabbothArcades Sabboth, or Nicol BolasNicol Bolas. One commander + 99 singleton cards.

Sheldon Menery didn't get involved with EDH until 2002 at an Air Force Base. He wrote an article in 2004 for Star City Games, developing the notoriety of the format.

Scott Larabee commercially launched the format in 2011 with Wizards of the Coast (WOTC). The name was changed to Commander due to it's connection to Highlander.

Commander's Success

Over twenty billion Magic cards were produced from 2008 to 2016. That had been Magic's greatest peak in popularity and had also been the rise of Commander. Magic's even more recent-ish success comes from the popularity with Commander and Commander wasn't created by corporate minds of Hasbro. It came from the creativity and love of players of the game.

I mention this because I want to explain where Commander really came from initially, where it was conceived.

I hate using Sheldon Menery in my articles to make a point. He was a person, a living, breathing, real person with a real life. He wasn't just what he was to the Commander community. He had family and friends who loved him. I don't like the idea of using his life and death as a point in my article about the future of a game. So, I'm going to leave that point where it is. He absence affects the future, but I'm not going to dissect that.

"Mark Rosewater and his mentees," as Rob Bockman put it, feel like the last line of defense against the voraciousness of financial success and whatever "responsibility and obligation" comes with capitalism. In Matt Bassil's WarGamer article, they state, "On February 10, Hasbro released its Q4 2025 and full year financial report, and the headline is: it was a very, very good year for Magic. According to its parent company's stats, Wizards of the Coast revenue was up by 45% year-on-year, with Magic: The Gathering in particular growing its revenue by a staggering 59%"

That's a lot of money. They made nearly 1.7 billion dollars in 2025. The year before was the first time they'd made a billion dollars and they nearly doubled that. Wizards of the Coast is very profitable for Hasbro. Magic is very profitable for Wizards of the Coast. Commander is Magic's biggest supplier of revenue. It's hard not to worry that the success is coming from some way up the chain and Commander is at the bottom of the hierarchy of concerns.

All of these rapid changes they've made to the game as a whole recently feel ominous, right? Right?

Commander (Magic's)'s Big Changes

Here are some of the things that have changed for Commander in only the last six years. I promise after all of this there is a point.

Secret Lairs

I was spooking around online looking for the first ever Secret Lair Drop. I found this Blake Rasmussen article from November 26, 2019 explain the concept of what, "Magic: The Gathering cards would look like if the imaginations of artists were completely unleashed." They were advertising four different Serum VisionsSerum Visions arts for $29.99.

Wow, how much has changed in just six years.

I've always loved the art in Secret Lairs, but there has always been a finicky problem with the logistics of getting one. There was this push and pull between the time-boxed demand model and the print-to-demand model. Players don't like jumping into a virtual queue for an hour in the middle of a Monday just to find out that they didn't get this hyper limited item because of scalpers.

Corey Plante at Polygon wrote a lovely article about this sentiment. Wizards of the the Coast has been candid and transparent about how changing from this current model is bad for business. It's not what you think, though. It's not just money grabbing, scalper sales, and artificially driving up the value of limited stock. It's bad for business in a way that makes other sets less timely. If they print-to-demand, it gets in the way of their print schedule for other big sets. The timing is the issue.

They also talk about the garbage dump picture of Secret Lairs too. Go read the article.

Anecdotally, I've noticed that a lot of Secret Lair printings of cards tend to be cheaper than of non-Lair printings. It got me wondering how much WOTC actually makes on Secret Lairs. I wonder if it's a labor or love or actually particularly profitable. I couldn't really find anything online about how much they make with my meager sleuthing, but let me know in the comments if you have some insights.

Universes Beyond

The Walking Dead was the first official Universes Beyond (UB) product, released as a Secret Lair in 2020. It featured mechanically unique cards. Warhammer 40,000 were the first full UB Commander Precons, released in 2022. Transformers, also in 2022, was the first microset included in another set.

The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth (LOTR) was the first full UB set, released in 2023. It was the best selling Magic set of all time. That is until 2025, when Final Fantasy took that title. LOTR is currently in third place under Avatar: The Last Airbender, also released in 2025.

Think about that for a second. Magic's first full UB set had been a smash hit financially. New players abounded. People who never played Magic - or any trading card game before - were playing Magic.

What does that do to the machinations of a big company trying to make a lot of money? Nathan Ball talks at lengths at MTGRocks about Hasbro's mismanagement of Magic in relationship to a recent lawsuit. I'm not really concerned with the lawsuit per se. I'm more concerned with the sentiment of the lawsuit.

Ball states,

"That said, the fact that this lawsuit exists at all is a bit of an ill omen for Magic. While the game has gone from strength to strength financially over the last few years, it’s also pushed out a lot of its core player base and created a lot of anger and resentment. Players aren’t happy with the state of competitive formats, the rise of Universes Beyond, or the absurd release rate for new products. This lawsuit, while clearly coming from a shareholder perspective, still captures a lot of that anger."

We can argue at lengths about the aesthetics of UB - an argument I hate, but indulge - but there is definitely a real concern from the community in regards to the push for four UB sets in 2026 and only three in-universe sets. There has been a lot of discourse surround making UB sets Standard-legal. I just hesitate to say that the "core" player base of Magic now are the ones upset with this. New players might outweigh longtime players.

I'm not trying dismiss the concerns of the minority here though. There is something about all of these decisions that feels like the curving of something. Like an oversimplification of mathematics, the not showing of work - something on the part of WOTC that makes me a little queasy. Is this what makes most players happy? Is this what's best for Magic?

This is by no means a platform or piece about being Anti-UB. I'm pro-UB. More, I'm trying to get at the rapidly changing landscape, the new normal of the format. What is it going to look like? I wonder, like so many others wonder, if it's more profit driven than player oriented.

I know UB brings in more players, but I see Hasbro's lawsuit and worry.

MagicCon

MagicCon started in 2023 to celebrate 30 years of Magic. This is the explosion of everything Magic. There used to be Grands Prix and even MagicFests which were smaller, less grand version of a MagicCon, but the distinction is worth noting. The fact that Magic is now big enough to fill some of these huge convention halls with people paying to flying out and play games for three days, three times a year is evidence of how popular this game has become.

I mention this only to point how new this concept is.

Brackets/Game Changers

With the dissolving of The Commander Rules Committee - which ran the Commander Format previously (read more about that in my article The Pros and Cons of Unbanning Jeweled Lotus) - the Bracket System was developed by the new Commander Format Panel in 2025. Game Changers were included in that introduction.

I mention this, again only to point out how many new things have cropped up for the format recently.

Vehicles and Spacecraft as Commanders/Hybrid Mana (2025/2026)

The Commander format has also had a rules change too. With the release of Edge of Eternities, it was announced that legendary Vehicles and Spacecraft could be your commander now. The Commander precons for Edge of Eternities also featured two legendary Spacecraft as well.

A lot of players were ruffled by this choice. There was a lot of discourse surrounding this, but ultimately it didn't change much about the format because it didn't affect many cards. However, this set release and rules change coinciding made players very uneasy.

When The Commander Format Panel started talking about hybrid mana rules, it became chaos. I wrote a whole article about it: Should We Change the Rules for Hybrid Mana in Commander. There were whispers that it was because of the increase in hybrid mana in Lorwyn Eclipsed and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It was decided, after hearing from the community and the Panel, not to change hybrid mana rules at this time. I definitely did see, anecdotally, more hybrid pips in both of those sets though.

There is a concern that these changes are motivated by a desire to homogenize the design space for Commander and competitive formats. I wonder if this is profitable for them or not, but there does seem to be a push for something like this.

Conclusion

Okay, this is the most doom and gloom I've ever been in an article, but I need you to lock in about my conclusion. I talked to my partner about feeling really sweaty and scared about the future of Magic, and he said, "Isn't keeping Magic players happy the most profitable thing they can do? Why would they sabotage that? They'll lose money if they change anything too much just for money."

I thought about this for a long while. I went to bed with it. I woke up with it. A lot has changed in Magic in the last six years, but when I really think about it, it has been for the better. At least for me.

I like Secret Lairs making the art for Magic more inclusive and approachable. I like how UB normalizes Magic as a hobby by bringing people in from a wide range of backgrounds. I like sharing Magic with everyone around the world - or mostly the US - at conventions. I love how the Bracket System has streamlined gameplay between players. WOTC listened to us about hybrid mana despite how profitable and easy it would be to change it.

Even with that aside, this isn't the only time in Magic history that things changed rapidly and for the better.

If we look nine years before Secret Lairs, Commander precons were released for the first time in 2011. Two years later, the Legend Rule changed. And a year after that, planeswalkers as Commanders were introduced. In the decade before that, planewalkers were introduced as a card type in 2007 with Lorwyn. The From the Vault series (a precursor to Secret Lairs) was introduced in 2008. Damage stopped using the stack in 2009.

The changes were ultimately good. I can understand what change might mean if someone in charge doesn't consult the community, or if they make a drastic, tone-deaf change that doesn't improve the overall health of the game. I know some of you might think that's the era we're in now, but it wasn't what the 2000s or the 2010s brought, even with the big changes of those times.

We should have some faith. I want to let the anxiety - that this ship will all burn down some day - sit in a box for now. I want to enjoy how good it all feels now.

I'll get up in arms when and if it does get bad - like if they make a Harry Potter Universes Beyond. But those are my thoughts. Tell me yours. I'm @strixhavendropout on everything.