Beyond the Norm: Brawl Announcement

(Disclaimer: I love Magic, have a lot of respect for Wizards R&D, and understand that making Magic is a very tough job. The following contains some… er… playful jabs at Wizards, but is hopefully enjoyed as good-natured. 

Here is Wizards original announcement but this is what I read from it. 

Join the Brawl

It’s not every day that we ban cards apologize for dumb mistakes accidentally leak entire cardsets introduce a new format.

While leaks of Dominaria have predictably begun, today I’m excited to talk about something you might not have been expecting. First off, we’ve decided to make the card Firesong and Sunspeaker only able to be obtained through the purchase of an entire box of Dominaria! That’s right, this is not a card you’ll be able to find in packs, no matter how well you map our boxes! Don’t worry though; this card is not really playable in Standard, so demand shouldn’t be too high.

This is all in line with Dominaria being a legendary-matters theme, which many of you have somehow managed to guess online! Pat yourselves on the back, and then give the Chinese Dominaria Release Notes a pat as well.

But wait! I was talking about a new format only a couple of paragraphs ago! Are you enjoying my attempt to ratchet up suspense that is probably being read as a set of confusing tangents? Well don’t worry; it’s all connected.

With Dominaria, we’re rolling out a brand-new casual format where that super-hard-to-get, small-in-number legendary card we just mentioned and promised you would never want anyways is suddenly going to be in very high demand!

Now, we already support a huge variety of formats in which to play competitive constructed Magic. We have Standard, Modern, and Legacy, just to name a few all of them. Most of our players enter the game through our drug-laced, addictive booster packs the Standard format. At least, they did until we massacred it repeatedly over the last two years. You wouldn’t, for example, enter the game through Legacy. In fact, you really shouldn’t even play Legacy because we don’t really want to support it. Why? Well, a long time ago… wait. Is this about to become another Reserved List article?! Sorry, can’t talk about the Reserved List, and also can’t talk about why we can’t talk about the Reserved List, so let’s just move on and forget we ever mentioned Legacy! Just know that pretty much ever single player we know who plays both Legacy and Standard definitely, without a doubt, strongly prefers Scarab God – I mean Standard.

If you look at casual constructed, instead of three formats, there’s “kitchen table,” Commander, ’93-’94, Frontier, Pauper, and more. As you can see, there’s just not the same kind of variety when we decide to only list Commander. And Commander is daunting to get into! There are just so many cards! Sure, we sell Commander decks that sell like crazy once a year, but still. SO HARD TO GET INTO. So what’s the solution?

Enter Gerrit Turner.

Most of you don’t know that Gerrit is a real name of a real person, but now you do. We certainly didn’t make him up to tell a beautiful story of love and loss in order to justify selling sharing this format with you! You see, Garet is a hardcore Commander player. Super hardcore. We only managed to have the third Great Designer Search after Garrit murdered a couple of R&D over a three-week game of Commander.

Well, Garat built a variant format for his own playgroup (what was left of them), and they loved it. They loved it so much, and then we loved it too. We shared it with people who had never played Magic before, and they loved it. We shared it with strangers on the street, and they loved it. We brought it to starving people all over the world, and they all loved it. We playtested this HIGHLY-LOVED format across all of R&D, and people who hated Magic, Wizards of the Coast, and even just playing cards LOVED IT. They couldn’t get enough. They sold their children, their limbs, and even bought drugs just so they could turn around and sell them at a markup all in order to fund their new addiction… Brawl.

What’s Brawl, you might ask? Is it a fight club? Is it an underground cockfighting ring where chickens play Magic? Nope. Instead, it’s 60-card Commander, but with only Standard-legal cards. We originally wanted to call it “Commandr” in an attempt to be hip with the edgy teenz, but we feared that new players might be too easily confused.

That’s it. That’s what we love SO MUCH. I could write seven bulleted paragraphs explaining to all of you what this means, but again… it’s 60-card Commander with Standard-legal cards. It’s actually very easy to understand. But, let’s answer a few questions anyways.

Why 60 cards?

Due to the fun way we distribute power in our sets, there aren’t 100 playable cards in Standard.

How about 30 life?

We “playtested” a bunch of life totals: 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, … 10n, n Î ℤ. We also tested 1, 15.5, and p, but found that it required too much tracking of the board state for new players. After our playtesters decided that correct starting life total was “Rogue Refiner,” we checked with Gerit (who is a real person, we promise) and he suggested just copying what everyone already did, which was starting with 30 life.

Why Legendary Planeswalkers as commanders?

It’s FUN!!! And more expensive. Though probs won’t top Firesong and Sunspeaker, which we printed JUST FOR YOU, Brawl players! Isn’t not acknowledging the secondary market for our product fun?

Now, some of you might think this is the coolest format since Frontier and Tiny Leaders. Others might be a tad skeptical. Whichever side you fall on, don’t pass judgment before you try it! Because we LOVE IT. So. Much. Most of R&D has left their respective spouses and families just so they can squeeze in a little more Brawl time.

Dominaria was the perfect time to give this a try because of the legendary theme. As you can start to see with the spoiler leaks, there TONS of cool legendary cards to use as your commander in Brawl. For example, there’s Firesong and Sunspeaker, Teferi, Firesong and Sunspeaker, Jhoira, Jaya Ballard, Firesong and Sunspeaker, and a cool legendary promo that you can ONLY get by buying a box!

But let’s be real. There’s one legendary creature you really want to use that you just hasn’t had the chance to shine in Standard. The poor, poor Scarab God has been at the receiving end of more Essence Scatters, Ixalan’s Bindings, and Vraska’s Contempts than any other card in the format. People have maxed out the number of TSG answers they run in their decks because, if a player untaps with Scarab Boi, they win. Because of this, we just felt that the odds were too stacked against our favorite God of Insects, so in Brawl, we made The Scarab God actually unkillable! That’s right, if it dies normally, just bring it back to your hand! If it’s exiled, just throw it into the Command Zone and cast it again the next turn! Due to this interesting pattern of gameplay, we’ve already begun affectionately referring to Brawl as “The Scarab God.” It’s just more realistic to ask a friend, “Yo, Gerot, wanna play some Scarab God?” than it is to ask, “Yo, Gerritt, wanna play some Brawl?” After all, it’s an open secret that in Brawl, like in Standard, if you’re not playing The Scarab God, you’re just not really playing the format.

Many, many games of Scarab God have gone on already within the halls of Wizards because WE LOVE THIS SO MUCH, and I’m really excited for you all to start building and playing the format! Now, even though we’ve made it very clear that Scarab God is the greatest format EVER and it is PERFECT and Garritt (who is real) has been promoted to President of Everything, we would love to hear your feedback. That way, we can respond to positive feedback by blasting it all over social media, and handle negative feedback the same way we’ve dealt with requests for Gatherer comments, inquiries into our cardstock, and requests for halfway-decent Masters sets.

So please, give Scarab God a try! There are some really sweet decks out there you can build! How quickly can you kill your opponent just with Scarab God drain triggers? How many ETB triggers can you get in a single game solely through reanimation with The Scarab God? How many games of Scarab God can you lose by building a deck around [any legendary creature other than The Scarab God]? Can you get your win percentage in The Scarab God mirror over 50%? There are plenty of great decks and strategies to try here. Definitely go out, pay 3UB and then 2UB many times, and report back!

Get your deck-building engines ready, and prepare for a new way of playing – with The (now truly-unkillable in any way) Scarab God!

Gavin and Gerriet

Ryan is a grinder from Boston with SCG & GP Top 8’s and a PT Day 2. His fragile self-esteem is built on approval from others, so be sure to tell him what you think of his articles on Twitter @RyanNormandin and in his Twitch chat at twitch.tv/norm_the_ryno.