The Commander Brackets Beta has been with us for coming up on two years, and there’s a specific bone I’d like to pick with it today: namely, how some of the popular older Commanders don’t quite fit into the Brackets as they stand.
COMMANDER POWER CREEP
We first need to acknowledge that the Bracket System was created during a time of rapid speed and power creep in the format. Commander has been played for many years now, but it’s in the last five years that power level has jumped significantly. You need only look to earlier iterations of the Brackets, which advertised Bracket 2 as being “roughly equivalent to a modern precon” and then walked back that language for later updates – because precons just keep getting stronger and stronger.
Commander was a pretty steady battlecruiser format, and the slow erosion of that identity began in earnest when Wizards put more focus on it. The biggest power bump for individual Commanders was arguably Commander 2016, though, which saw Partners, Atraxa, and Breya added to the format, along with K&T as a group hug build – the blueprint for later Bumbleflower dominance. After that, we’d get the infamous Eminence Commanders just a year later, and the power level of Commanders would continue to rise alongside the push for FIRE design in Standard release booster sets.
With so many uplifts in power and speed, older Commanders have started to show their age – but perhaps only within the framework of brackets. Is it easier to say an older Commander is a rough power level than trying to find the right Bracket for it? It just might be, and here’s why.
THEY DEMAND MORE FROM YOU TO WORK SMOOTHLY
Back in the day, Aurelia was a menace at “mid power” tables. You had time to set up and get to eight or even ten mana in the mid-game, and you had Commander damage as a win con, and a few cheeky infinites too. Notably, those infinites were mostly fine provided your deck was ostensibly slow enough to use them to end a game that had worn out its welcome, rather than tutor for them obsessively to shut down a game early.
Playing Aurelia today feels a lot different. She’s six mana for starters, and she doesn’t have any card draw or other value to help offset it. She has a strong ability, don’t get me wrong, but other Commanders in even casual builds can do a lot more. In my quest to make her usable in 2026, I found that she needs very considered building to be viable in B2 if you’re not running the kind of combos that would automatically push you past even B3 into B4 – a bracket where she is woefully behind some of the competition.
This dichotomy between intent and what bracket you end up in with an Aurelia build is a little frustrating to say the least. The deck demands you to build with keen intent and focused card choices over flavor to even be viable in B2, let alone in higher brackets. If you add Helm of the Host and equipment tutors, and some fast mana to offset the massive mana investment to try and win?
While some older Commanders like Aurelia can be propped up with all of the new tools printed since their debut and achieve a strong showing in Bracket 2 at the very least, they can’t quite find a home at all Bracket 3 tables – and some suffer a little more.
Jeleva is a really cool Commander, but looking at her compared to modern equivalents? She comes up way short. First up, she has only an EtB, and not also an Attack trigger, which sucks when every card is a titan nowadays. This is rough when her strategy promotes the kind of “un-fun” spells and card stealing that the true casual in Bracket 2 don’t enjoy. Jeleva can’t really be good outside of running a heck of a lot of Game Changers and other pushed cards, and is kinda weak compared to similar newer options. Where does that leave her?
Well, who can really say? Even if those extra Game Changers and pushed cards put her squarely in B3, her lack of a repeatable attack-steal trigger means that she’ll be decidedly low impact in a meta where decks are extremely focused with mana curves that have never been lower. Less attractive spells to steal, and you only get to cast one of them a turn? It’s just not where people want to be.
SOME HAVE BEEN SOLVED FOR A LONG TIME
While some OG Commanders are asking a lot only for you to be unsure what table to sit down at with them, others are sitting almost exactly where they left off. Some Commanders have been solved a long time, and thus it’s very very hard for them to see play in Bracket 2, for example, because of how strong they actually are.
For some like Derevi, it’s because of the stax forward playstyle that put it in the upper echelons of frustrating and powerful. It still sees some cEDH play in midrange pod focused builds, and if you’re doing absolutely anything at all to take advantage of Derevi’s busted abilities, you’re already at the top tables.
For others, like Animar, they get new support every year that keeps pushing them to be more and more consistent. Could Animar ever be a Bracket 2 deck? In my opinion it’s highly unlikely, as the legacy of Animar refining over the past fifteen years means even the average Animar build from fresh is going to hit on a highly efficient and proactive build.
For decks like these, they have no real issues slotting into brackets, as they were already at the top of their game before the last few years of power creep added new tools for them to play with.
SOME FEEL LOST BETWEEN BRACKETS
Other OGs feel a little less like they have a solid home, especially if you’re not cranking them to the max.
Meren can’t ever fit comfortably in B2, because her gameplay encourages edicts, which are quite anti-social for this bracket. However, she also doesn’t really keep up with modern reanimator commanders in higher brackets, because she is just really, really slow – and there are often better Commanders to run Golgari combos alongside. Her velocity is way behind decks like Henzie or Celes, and in all actuality the average Meren build is probably not shooting for the higher brackets where those builds dominate.
So, where do you put her? The cop-out answer is B3, but the continued debate about what makes a B3 deck distinct from B2 or B4 is really about the need for another bracket. If a bracket’s existence is defined by what it isn’t, then it naturally ends up being a lot broader than what bookends it. B3 is the bracket with the most pre-game talk around it being “high” or “low” power, and Meren is exactly the kind of deck that begets more pre-game chats.
At the other end of this spectrum is a Commander like Mayael. As time goes on, the “hits” you can get from Mayael get better and better, but the setup required to get value from her becomes increasingly cumbersome, and her impact diminishes over time. Mayael is the poster child for older Commanders that can sometimes have a “spike” of performance in a single game, where their average is actually a lot less impressive. Six mana to look at the top five, once per turn cycle? The floor is low indeed.
THE PROBLEM WITH EXPENSIVE TO CAST OG COMMANDERS
A general trend to note with older Commanders is that their mana value is significantly higher for what you get versus what you’d probably pay for that effect if the card were printed today; the older expensive to cast Commanders that are still run frequently tend to be as cracked now as they used to be, ala Maelstrom Wanderer.
Particularly for newer players, it’s hard to be enamored with a Commander like BFZ’s Omnath, Locus of Rage when you could pick one of the “does everything” modern equivalents in the archetype like Hearthhull, the Worldseed.
What are we doing with Athreos, Shroud-Veiled these days? You need six mana to even begin to put coin counters into play, and then you end up with a decidedly mid outcome. By the time you put a coin counter down, someone else could be winning the game. Back in the hey-day of Atheos’ release, it could fit comfortably into the mid-power region of Commander decks. Now it’s relegated to Bracket 2 due to slow velocity, but maybe it needs bumping to B3 because of the need to jam so much support into it. Are you starting to see the issue?
THE SUM OF ALL: KAALIA
One OG Commander kind of sums up a myriad of issues discussed today, and that’s Kaalia of the Vast.
Kaalia is an interesting one, because she is both solved, more or less, but also demands a lot from you to work smoothly, has a high mana curve (and wants you to run mana rocks), and is also somewhat lost between brackets due to her play pattern. When she works, she works and annihilates players with cruel efficiency. When she has to play in the Brackets this puts her in, she’s easily shut down and outplayed.
This, combined with her being the epitome of a “casual” Commander, kinda sums up the spectrum of issues you can encouter building an older Commander and fitting it into a Bracket System that works for modern card design and pushed synergies. You can’t just expect the pre-2020 Commanders to fit neatly into it.
END STEP
I’ve wrote before about how there seems to be a need for a Bracket somewhere between 3 and 4, but a lesser vocalized aspect that the Brackets have a shortfall in is catering to older designs. For older designs to keep up with the new-school Commanders (and their tools!), they have to equip themselves to the nines with every pushed card that fits into their build. This helps them compete but can often put them in a bit of a no-man’s land between brackets.
We need a Bracket 3.5 – or whatever you want to call it – today.
Kristen is Card Kingdom’s Head Writer and a member of the Commander Format Panel. Formerly a competitive Pokémon TCG grinder, she has been playing Magic since Shadows Over Innistrad, which in her opinion, was a great set to start with. When she’s not taking names with Equipment and Aggro strategies in Commander, she loves to play any form of Limited.