Mono white Commander Decks Suck: The Dawn of No Hope

I really enjoy listening to the Magic the Gathering podcast ‘Drive to Work’. For those of you who don’t know it already, it’s a podcast where Head Designer Mark Rosewater gives fully comprehensive yet easily accessible insights into the game design of Magic the Gathering and his own evolving design philosophies, all during his morning commute. It’s a great podcast and it comes highly recommended for any magic or game design aficionado out there (links below). It goes without saying that for myself, a Magic the Gathering junkie of no less than 20 years (gulp), it’s a real weekly treat and I know a lot of the more heavily enfranchised members of the Magic community hold it in equally high esteem.

Rosewater himself is about as involved in discussions with his fans (and detractors) as anyone in his position could ever be and his efforts to remain open and highly responsive to all feedback he receives show his sincere passion, highly nuanced understanding and deep respect for a game which continues to flourish with his safe hands at the wheel. Almost every design quibble I’ve had with Magic has been directly addressed in his weekly podcasts (as well as his constantly updated Q and A style Tumblr blog and weekly articles- seriously the guy is a machine). He has, on numerous, numerous occasions, shown me the errors in my thinking and expanded my view and enjoyment of a game I love so much further.

However, listening yesterday, I found myself for the first time in a  good while, seriously disagreeing with his view on a subject.

The podcast in question was about ‘colour pie bends and breaks’ and covered the philosophy of the 5 different colours and, as usual, all of his views made coherent sense to me except one, and this view has led me to a conclusion which is of course the take of this piece so let’s stop beating about the bush and just say it: I think Mark Rosewater is wrong about how the colour white should be treated for the commander format.

Before I begin arguing what I think it wrong about his thinking I think it’s worth setting out my position which I believe is quite close to the thoughts of the commander/EDH playing community at large. I love playing commander and building commander decks. Over the years I’ve built decks of every possible colour combination and been pleased with the result yet every time I’ve tried to build a fun mono white deck, again and again I have failed.  And now I’m just having to accept the fact that, for as much as I love the idea of playing a mono white deck, I can’t. And that’s because mono white commander decks are very bad. They’re lot worse even than mono red decks which aren’t all that good but are still leagues better than mono white decks. And I don’t mean bad in a competitive sense, I mean no fun even for the most casual of commander play.

This is primarily because white has very few ways to draw extra cards, something that every other colour has way more access to and which is essential in the longer games typical of the commander format.

A common counter arguement here might be one that Rosewater goes into in his podcast and that argument is to use artifacts. He states (and I heartily agree) that all colours need strengths and weaknesses to define themselves from one another and that are the device all colours can use to shore up their weaknesses but with necessary inefficiency, so use those. Look at mana for example: mana artifacts are used in every deck that can’t play green and they get by very well, surely it’s the same for card drawing?

Sadly, it very much isn’t and while they are fine at ramping you up mana, artifacts alone are generally insufficient to the task of keeping you in the steady stream of cards needed to allow you to keep meaningfully participating in a commander game beyond the first few turns.  

And there’s the fact that when you try to build a mono white deck and rely on artifacts for card draw you really have to cram quite a few into your deck. Now add these artifacts to all the mana accelerating artifacts you need to play to get the deck to tick and suddenly your deck is playing almost as many or more artifacts as white cards at which point your deck is probably better playing cards that care about and/or synergise with artifacts rather than the white cards or themes you’d like it to care about. Another mono white creation is just another pile of artifacts with a few white cards in it again Greg, (sigh) back to the drawing board.   

Now I know Rosewater and the magic design team in general is aware that monowhite decks are poorly in commander but I think Rosewater in particular doesn’t quite understand the degree to which they are behind even other mono-coloured decks in the format and the steps that are going to be required if they are going to make mono-white commander decks even close to playable.     

Hearing the podcast made me think back and I realised I first began really giving credence to these thoughts after I saw Rosewater discuss the card ‘Dawn of Hope’ which was first unveiled near the end of last September.

Even a bad magic player such as myself saw this card and recognised pretty quickly that this was wizards throwing a bone to mono white (and red/white) commander decks and I was very happy. This is exactly what I wanted to see. A clunky but thematically white card draw engine that feels within white’s section of the colour pie and philosophy but also seemed way too slow and expensive to see competitive play. Dawn of Hope was such an apt and flavourful name as well. I’m an optimist at heart and here was a card that seemed to me to be emblematic, a standard bearer heralding a new dawn full of possibilities for white decks in commander! I was very excited by this card and precedent it seemed to be setting.

Fast forward to early October and another otherwise excellent article about the design of the Guilds of Ravnica set by Rosewater named ‘More Stories from the City’ (linked below), specifically the paragraphs where he discusses Dawn of Hope’s design. He begins by discussing the challenge of creating cards that will make sense in the variety of formats magic is played in,

“One of the places this has proven most problematic over the last few years is in the color pie in red and white. Commander tends to have games that go longer (partially due to the higher life total and partially due to the nature of multiplayer politics). Red and white, for different reasons, don’t naturally fit into the play style of Commander, which has resulted in a lot of pressure from Commander players to stretch the colors and make them more Commander friendly.”

Here, as I have said, we see that Rosewater acknowledges and understands the problem and I definitely have to acknowledge this piece is indeed more pressure from a commander player to make a colour more commander friendly which both makes me feel a bit guilty for getting in on a crowded soapbox here but also somewhat validates my position as the popular position within the commander community.  

My only issue with what he says in this paragraph is the fact red and white are lumped together. Red has multiple ways to draw cards in commander such as rummage linked to draw (discard X cards and draw X cards) and several forms of what is colloquially termed as ‘impulsive draw’ (exile X cards from the top of your library, you may cast them before Y end step.) and of course several ‘wheel’ effects (X number of players discard their hands and draw up to 7). Red has received a few cards over the last year which utilise these type of drawing effects which have really helped it’s commander viability further. White on the other hand has no official or colloquially named mechanic for drawing cards and Dawn of Hope is quite exceptional.

He continues in the next paragraphs by identifying correctly that white has the card drawing problem in commander before expanding on white’s philosophy, explaining how white’s inflexibility is reflected in it’s inability to draw into the answers it needs without help from other colours. We’ll put a pin in that and look at this part in a future blog post I will definitely be posting soon as I’m keenly aware that identifying problems is easy and I wouldn’t do so without offering possible solutions and I do have some suggestions, but that’s not the discussion here. He continues, 

One of the answers we’ve experimented with is allowing white access to card drawing but in a way that requires a dedication to a specific strategy. For example, Mentor of the Meek, from Innistrad, lets you draw cards for playing small creatures. To capitalize on this, you need to have a deck full of small creatures, which means you don’t get a lot of answer cards.

Dawn of Hope is a very contentious card because it’s starting to stretch the boundaries of what being forced to dedicate to a theme means. Yes, you have to have life gain cards in your deck, but we use life gain often enough as a rider, that it might be too little of a barrier. The fact that it also has a built-in way to gain life even undercuts how much space in your deck you have to dedicate to the theme. I’ll be honest, as a color pie person, this is the card in the set that scares me the most. I hope my fears end up unfounded.

I agree that the dedication to a theme idea is a good way to go here to keep white card draw at a sufficiently slightly clunky level which is where it should be but this is also where he completely loses me because dawn of hope does requires some dedication to a life gain strategy to be effective, doesn’t it? I mean it can fuel itself as he says but not very efficiently at all. It’s 2 mana to cast, 4 to activate and 2 for the draw trigger which means 8 mana for your first card if it’s the only life gain card in your deck and 2 mana for each repeated draw from then on is still quite a steep cost even if you have cards which repeatedly gain life.

It also says something about how starved white is for card advantage engines that his go-to example of Mentor of the Meek is a card from Innistrad, a set released back in 2011.

I might be reading too much into this but it sounds to me like Rosewater thought this card would be very strong in commander to the extent that it is warping the colour pie and perhaps the commander format or other competitive formats by being some sort of card drawing powerhouse. In my experience the card is around the level I initially assessed it, fine but hardly great and it still made very little impact on the viability of mono-white commander decks. Mono white decks are still terrible, just a little bit less so now.

I really admire the honesty he displays when saying how fearful he is about such a card but, in my mind, he is quite far away from the reality of the situation here. I’m writing this piece around 10 months after this article was published and the card is listed on the excellent edhrec.com as being present in a strong but hardly scary total of 965 commander decklists in their database of hundreds of thousands and is only the 7^th most popular commander card from the Guilds of Ravnica set. And I can confirm the card is not played very much at all in competitive formats. So I think I can safely say the magic design team hit a good mark here and that Rosewater’s fears were very much unfounded.

But what is more scary to me, when thinking about the future of mono white commander decks, is that this fine but not great card was so ‘contentious’ within the magic design team. This, to me,  speaks to a lack of understanding of the severity of the problem and the way Rosewater speaks of his ‘fears’ of it probably means we’re unlikely to get many many more cards like this down the line if his position hasn’t changed. I really hope that it has but I doubt it which is such a huge shame because Dawn of Hope looked to me like the beginning of the magic design team turning the corner and finally trying to do something about for mono-white commander decks and doing it in the correct way.

But the head designer of magic seems to strongly disagree and I think he’s clearly not got the full picture and I think the commander community would back me up without much hesitation when I say plainly and honestly:

Mr Rosewater, you are a genius and someone we trust but if Dawn of Hope is what you consider too much of a colour pie break, if Dawn of Hope is what you think is too powerful and if Dawn of Hope is a card you actively fear printing, then you are never, never going to make mono white decks in any way viable in commander.  

Links:

The highly recommended ‘Drive to Work’ podcast- https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/media/podcasts

Mark Rosewaters Tumblr Blog- https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/