UnCommander seeks to create a variant of the Commander format that incorporates nonstandard elements, like silver-bordered cards, while maintaining a streamlined and enjoyable Commander experience. In keeping with the spirit of regular Commander, our intent is to make as many cards as possible function within the bounds of normal Magic without excessively policing the formats.
“But what about those weird cards that make you say tongue twisters, or act as beverage coupons?” I hear you ask. Good question! Quite a few Un-cards work perfectly well from a mechanical standpoint, only made silver-bordered by dint of their wacky card art, title or some other small humorous idiosynrasy that wouldn’t be printed in a normal black-bordered set. However, the Un-sets also contain some truly bizarre cards that reference things far removed from the scope of a normal game of Magic. After some deliberation, we came up with an approach for handling cards, explained below.
The Interpretation Issue
The biggest issue with incorporating silver-bordered cards into a multiplayer format like Commander is agreeing on how to interpret unclear situations. A great number of silver-bordered cards have elements that are vague or difficult to quantify. For instance, on a crowded Commander table, if Slaying Mantis is thrown onto the battlefield, how do you determine which creatures were touched by it as it skids onto the table, and which weren’t touched by it, just knocked by other cards? Or, if Old-Fashioned Vampire is on the battlefield during the evening, what happens if players disagree on whether it is currently dark outside or not? These issues are manageable in two-player games, as only two people need to agree. However, if more players are in the game, it becomes exponentially more difficult to get everyone to agree. Outside your regular playgroup, this will often slow play down as each unclear issue needs to be discussed as it comes up.
UnCommander’s Approach
Our intent with UnCommander is to create a self-consistent logic that can be intuitively understood and applied in the majority of situations, similar to how most rules-questions in a normal game of Magic can be puzzled and reasoned out with a bit of thought. This will allow players to read an un-card and be able to translate it into modern Magic terms, similar to learning to understand outdated rules text such as “bury” or “remove from the game”. With UnCommander, the function of cards often differs from what is printed on the cards because of all the crazy elements that they incorporate. The hope is that if people become familiar with this philosophy page, they will be able to play UnCommander with minimal reference to the card entry errata or rules on this website.
Not all situations can be worked out from the printed cards alone. After all, Weird and wonderful interactions are par for the course with anything involving silver-bordered cards. UnCommander provides card entries with errata and rulings for all the cards added by the UnCommander Variant. An underlying rules framework and details on the more complex elements and interactions are covered on the UnCommander Rules List page. While playing outside your usual playgroup, we recommend keeping this website on hand if possible.
Generally, the idea is rework or remove stuff that ‘doesn’t work’ in a multiplayer card game and keep game mechanics that are solid. At the beginning of this project, our initial thought was to simply ban all cards with strange elements not supported by the existing official rules, but it became obvious that this was too harsh and removed too many interesting cards. After a lot of arguing, we eventually came up with the following procedure for banning or fixing a card to make it compliant with a workable rules framework.
Meta Elements
We use the term “meta element” as a blanket term to refer to a variety of aspects of cards that fall outside the game’s reach because of the arbitrary nature of their effects. This includes referencing things inside or outside of the game without a good logical reason or system besides whimsical humor (which is of course a hallmark of the un-sets). Cards with meta elements may be banned or have the offending parts of its text removed in the updated version by errata. This includes such things as references to events and players outside the game, other games, collector-numbers and card artists, or other situations such as the time of day.
Cards with meta conditions for otherwise functional abilities, that also do not have the chance of failure as an integral part of the ability or have a subjective condition, will not usually be banned. Cards that have abilities where a meta aspect has a significant chance for different outcomes, or don’t function without the meta aspect, will generally be banned, or will be given errata to remove those abilities.
Subjective elements
Some cards have effects based around something with a subjective fail-state, i.e. it would be a matter of opinion whether or not you succeeded or failed. These cards are not usually banned and instead have simply been amended so that the choice of how the effect resolves lies with the intent of the relevant player.
These cards can have a variety of possible effects or outcomes dependent on a scenario or condition that is extremely subjective in nature. (The complementary nature of a statement, or the exact definition of a person’s ‘normal voice’ for example.) As a result these effects are notorious for sparking arguments, particularly should the result of a game rest on whether a player’s voice was adequately booming, or whether a Cheatyface was noticed ‘Right away’.
Legal cards with subjective meta elements have been given errata so that the meta elements have their outcomes chosen by the player or players the ability asks to fulfill the condition (often the controller. If it is unclear, consult the relevant UnCommander card entry). There is no obligation to attempt to fulfill the subjective meta conditions, but if you do, it is considered good conduct to abide by the results.
Trivial Meta Elements
A trivial meta element is a minor meta element that can be removed while preserving the card’s functionality. These include unconventional formatting, such as the Pig Latin text on Atinlay Igpay. Other examples of trivial meta elements include flapping your arms and clucking as part of the activation cost of Mesa Chicken’s ability. These have been errata’d out of the UnCommander card entries.
Just because we have removed these conditions within the raw rules text of the cards doesn’t mean we have no sense of humor at all. We highly encourage you to flap like a bird when activating Mesa Chicken despite no longer being technically required to do so. The trivial meta elements can still be found on the printed cards’ text.
General Commander Philosophy
The Un-sets and other non tournament-legal cards have many different crazy cards in them, so it is unsurprising that some of them end up quite powerful or problematic in practice. As a variant of Commander, UnCommander tries to follow the general philosophy of normal Commander when possible. For cards that function within the rules framework, we have occasionally banned cards because they run counter to the positive play experiences described in the official Commander philosophy. A good example of this would be Mox Lotus, and the other cards can be seen here.
Printing-Specific Elements
Printing-specific elements cover anything that can vary between printings of the same card, such as border color, art, watermark, flavor text, expansion symbol and collector number.
In Magic, these elements are generally non-functional. The expansion symbol used to be an official card characteristic, to define how effects that cared about a card’s expansion, like City In a Bottle‘s ability, functioned. However, as part of the Magic 2014 rules update, to better represent Magic’s policy that all cards of the same name function identically in-game, expansions were no longer considered a characteristic, just a property that had no effect on play. All cards that referred to expansion symbols were given errata to refer to cards “with a name originally printed in” a certain expansion. Since this change, no printing-specific elements have had a functional impact in normal Magic.
The un-sets contain a sizable number of cards that refer to printing-specific elements, from artist credit in cards like Drawn Together to rarity in cards like Ineffable Blessing (variant D). Dealing with printing-specific elements in UnCommander was a thorn in our side during development. After much deliberation, we decided on the following approach.
In UnCommander, the same principle that all printings of a card with the same name should function identically applies. However, some printing-specific elements are treated as proper characteristics in UnCommander: the watermark of a card and card borders. All other printing-specific elements are currently not treated as characteristics, as they seem too arbitrary, not tying in a consistent way to either gameplay or setting.
Watermarks
Watermarks have been used to denote allegiance to factions in official sets since the original Ravnica Block in 2005. These serve to define a card’s role in setting and theme, in a similar way to creature types. As such, in UnCommander, watermarks are a characteristic and effects are allowed to refer to them.
Card Borders
Card borders are a bit less of a strong case. In normal Magic, the only difference with card borders is that white borders were usually in sets that contained only reprints, while other sets had black borders. This is an arbitrary difference as it does not really tie into other in-game systema, themes or flavour. On the other hand, there is a marked difference in theme and flavor between silver-bordered cards and normal Magic cards, such as the frequent use of mechanics outside the design space of normal Magic and the more comic tone. Mark Rosewater, designer of the un-sets, has said that the un-sets take place in their own seperate multiverse, suggesting a shared identity in the setting.
The Original Printing
For the purposes of UnCommander, printing-specific characteristics on a card are considered to be the characteristics of the original printing of that card. For instance, this means that a card originally printed with a certain watermark and later reprinted with no watermark will be treated as having that watermark regardless of which printing is used. This also means that few cards are treated as white-bordered, as most were originally printed with a black border.
Dexterity Cards
Dexterity cards involve some kind of physically dexterous action whose outcome affects things in-game, such as spinning them around, dropping something onto the playing area from a height, or balancing something on your head. Dexterity cards are nothing new to magic, the most famous example being Chaos Orb, originally printed in Alpha. However, only one more similar card was printed in normal Magic, Falling Star, as part of the Legends expansion in 1994. After that, no more dexterity cards were printed in normal Magic, and both cards have since been banned in all sanctioned formats and most casual formats (including Commander). A number of dexterity cards have been printed on silver-bordered cards, as the Un-sets include many elements that would not be included in normal Magic. Most of these cards are difficult to accurately track, and to optimize play involving these cards, players might arrange their cards in ways that slow down gameplay. This is problematic in multiplayer games, so dexterity-based elements of cards have been treated as meta elements. As such, dexterity cards have been banned or given errata to remove those elements.
UnCommander Formats
When we started the UnCommander project, we only ever envisioned having one UnCommander format. However, as the project grew we found interesting cards and pieces of the game’s history hidden away in internet archives, from old video-game adaptations to gaming magazines. Most of these have never seen print as physical Magic cards. We reasoned that not everyone interested in UnCommander would want to play with these cards, as some of them only had semi-official status. At the same time, it seemed a shame to abandon them.
The solution we decided on was to separate these from the cards that had an official printing. We called these cards the “UnOrthodox supplement” because they came from rather unusual sources. There are now two UnCommander formats:
- UnCommander Core – only cards that have been in an official physical printing. (Not necessary a publicly retailed printing, as the privately distributed Happy Holidays promo cards are also included)
- UnCommander UnOrthodox – Includes both cards from UnCommander Core, and cards from the UnOrthodox supplement that have not been in an official physical printing.
What formats a card is included in is shown Traffic Light Marker on that card’s UnCommander card entry on this website. “UnCommander” means that the card is included in both UnCommander formats. “UnOrthodox supplement” means it is just included in the UnCommander UnOrthodox format. Legality is the same in both formats for cards included in those formats.
UnCommander and House Rules
UnCommander, much like the rules of the regular Commander format, functions as a set of guidelines for ease of play. If you want to implement house rules in your playgroup, go for it. If you want to allow people outside the game to be involved in it and make cards like Better Than One legal, don’t let us hold you back. Just make sure that everyone in the match agrees on the format, what house rules to use and which sorts of cards are legal before the game starts.
Notes on Which Cards Have UnCommander Card Entries on EDHSilver.com
For some sets, like the Arena New Player Experience, only cards that are not published in official Magic: the Gathering expansions have been given UnCommander card entries. In other sets, like the The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Tie-in cards, cards that were also published in official expansions are included as well, because the presentation is different on these cards to their official printings.