Thread by @Magical__Hacker

Let me present to you some #DataIsBeautiful that shows how WotC is prioritizing phasing out (no pun intended) monocolored EDH deck designs for command zones for the sake of command zone designs that facilitate multicolored decks. I'll go into detail for each of these 4 charts. 🧵

First, let's start out by talking the raw numbers of what Commanders are printed each year. As @SaffronOlive tweeted based on the entire @MTGGoldfish Commander Crew's end of the year podcast, designing commanders is currently in an unprecedented spike, but is it all the same? No.

To add more context, here's what the cumulative totals of raw commanders look like. It took us 25 years to have more than 750 commanders (1993-2018), and only THREE more years to get past 1500 commanders (2019-2022).

If we break it down to the actual types of commanders that are printed each year, it's difficult to understand much. (See the last tweet for more detailed explanation of the colors in all these charts.) We do see a monocolored spike in 2010, the year before the 1st EDH precons.

Lastly, here's the really telling chart. Since 2005, the year after the start of the Kamigawa block & the year of the start of the Ravnica block, monocolored command zone designs have been on a steady and recently accelerating downfall, even when ignoring partner-like mechanics.

In other words, rather than understanding that players dislike playing monocolored (see the attached image showing 1/8 of the #EDHREC top 100 most popular being monocolored/colorless) and consequently prioritizing inventing designs that reward monocolored decks, they have -->

<-- ignored this important space for design and chose to print more multicolored options so that the lack of popularity of smaller color identities is no longer a problem. Monocolored options were 72% of the options in 2005, and now they're almost HALF of that.

Why do I care? If players are happy, what's the big deal?
Players like playing against a variety of decks. Sameness of what your opponents play is a BIG cause of unfun in ALL formats. If it's rare for an opponent to be playing a deck that ISN'T multicolored, that's a BIG problem.

Some players may not intuit this. However, ask players if they feel that cards that punish multicolored decks and reward monocolored decks, like the cards below, are fair to play in non-cEDH #Commander.

If you feel it's not fair to punish strong decks, ask yourself, "Why not?"

This is my request to @wizards_magic to view monocolor commanders less as a small niche that is better left ignored but more as an untapped (no pun intended) design space that could excite players, given exciting cards that preferentially incentivize monocolored Commander decks.

(In the charts above, Red represents command zone designs that use multiple cards, like "partner" and "choose a background". Of the rest of all commanders, which are single cards in command zones, Gold is all the ones with color identity>1, and Blue is for color identity<2.)

See the full stats: docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…