Commander Brackets is Wizards of the Coast’s Commander matchmaking system and is another great tool to rank your deck. With the new system, decks are classified into five brackets, which are displayed above.
Along with the new deck ranking system, there is another new ranking system but this time for cards. A small list of cards are labelled as “game changers“, and they help rank your deck through the bracket system. The complete list is:
Game Changers:
Game Changers
In my personal opinion, the new bracket system is a simplified alternative to the power level system , offering new players an easy way to rank their decks. While it is a nice tool, it lacks the depth of the power level system and focuses too much on its cornerstones, while missing some important parts like synergy and consistency.
For example, although game changers are indeed powerful cards, having >3 of them in your deck, does not make your deck optimised. Moreover, the irony in bracket 2 (core) is that precons barely have any tutors and few of them have game changers cards and late game 2-card infinite combos, but that does not make them bracket 3 (upgraded). Even chaining of extra turns, does not make a deck optimized on its own and could easily be a part of a bracket 3 (upgraded) deck if you do not have consistency in activating the combo.
In addition there can be various decks of that have none of the cornerstones of bracket ranking (so they could be accidentally placed in bracket 1), but can annihilate most of the precons (bracket 2), can compete with ease with upraded precons (bracket 3) and even compete against optimized decks (bracket 4). How is that possible? Because a deck can be optimised even without cards from the “game changers” list and can have high synergy and many combos, even without them being infinite. Commander is a game build around… your commander, so you can optimize a deck by building strategies around it and taking advantage of its synergy with other cards. Synergy can easily make an average/junk card a game changer.
In the end, the commander brackets are a nice try to (over)simplify the power level system and make a good matchmaking system, but power level template seems quite more accurate and helpful in defining your deck ranking as it it based in based on win turn, strategy and synergy.
What is your opinion about Commander Brackets? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment below!
