How viable do we think Gishath, Sun's Avatar is going to be? I tried to build a casual Gishath deck with signets and the like but found that it was honestly just too slow to even get the guy out and summarily converted the deck to Legacy, but with the drop in consistency due to the format being singleton, I feel like maybe this is his chance to shine - especially with the myriad of dinosaurs present in Ixalan block.
I do feel like that with games even in commander, you get some mid-range deck that is able to apply pressure. In a dinosaur deck there are value creatures to be played, and in theory you will have the bigger of the creatures, so you get to dictate the action a bit. It is 30 life, not 40, so this is relevant as well. I made a decklist, you can find the link in my signature. I mean if you get to actually attack with Gishath, Sun's Avatar then it is ridiculous power. But obviously you need to structure the deck in a way that can function without it for much of the game.
They did just spoil Gilded Lotus in Dominaria, which gives Paradox Engine a LOT more to work with when it comes to generating colored mana. It's probably still not anywhere near as busted as it is in EDH, but that's a boon for sure.
What is your experience, anyone actually playing the format?
In my area, noone is really interessted in this.
So far, I'm in love with it. Brawl solves a lot of the issues I have with the Commander format.
59 Card Decks — Shuffling a 99 card deck is a pain, especially if it's double-sleeved. Decks being 59 cards instead of 99 means they're much easier to handle. In addition, it makes them cheaper. I don't need to own as many expensive cards to construct a functional deck.
30 Point Life Totals — Changing the starting life total from 40 to 30 means creatures are more relevant. That's a good thing since a lot of meaningful interaction between players involves combat. When the starting life total is too high, players tend to ignore it.
No Commander Damage — I've always hated Commander damage. In my experience, Commander damage was always a bookkeeping chore: irrelevant in 99% of cases. Removing it means one less thing I have to keep track of.
Standard Only Cards — This is the biggest selling point to me. Commander, for better or for worse, is full of cards that ought not exist in Magic. Take Sol Ring for instance. Sol Ring is a card that unequivocally should not exist. Period. It's an absolutely broken card that would never had been printed had Wizards known what they were doing 25 years ago. I think very few players would argue with me on that.
The issues I have with many of these cards like Sol Ring is...
1. They come from an era long ago where Wizards didn't have the greatest idea what they were doing. This is excusable on Wizard's behalf since Magic was literally the first trading card game in existence. They're inevitably going to make mistakes because of that. Still, it nonetheless doesn't solve the problem of having troublesome cards like Sol Ring be available for players to play with.
2. Commander didn't exist throughout most of Magic's history. As such, Wizards never considered the repercussions of printing any given card in regards to Commander. They couldn't have. This has led to the creation of cards that play well in traditional Magic but play poorly in the context of Commander.
3. Players can't be trusted to create great games of Magic on their own. In my experience, players tend to selfishly indulge in whatever aspects of the game they find most interesting. This isn't a criticism of human behavior so much as it is a criticism of the Commander format. When given access to all of Magic's cardpool, players frequently find ways to ruin the game for others, and many of the reasons why have much to do with the fact that the cardpool is vast and ancient. Limiting players to Standard only cards seriously alleviates that problem as all of those cards are now beholden to Wizard's modern design philosophies. And Wizards has gotten much better at making Magic fun over the years.
So, yeah. In a nutshell, I think those are the reasons why Brawl appeals to me more than Commander right now. Wizards basically made some minor tweaks to the format, and it will play better as a result of it. And, ultimately, that's what I'm there for: a better game.
EDIT: Forgot to touch on planeswalkers.
Planeswalkers as Commanders — Philosophically, I think this is a great change since the thematic idea behind commanders has always been about a legendary character representing your deck. Planeswalkers are, in and of themselves, characters.
Don't get me started on the Sol Ring debate. The thing is that there are a lot of cards that were were under-costed and overpowered in Magics early days. Like Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus. Guess what? You put these on a ban list. So it's just the ban list which has failed commander.
Don't get me started on the Sol Ring debate. The thing is that there are a lot of cards that were were under-costed and overpowered in Magics early days. Like Ancestral Recall and Black Lotus. Guess what? You put these on a ban list. So it's just the ban list which has failed commander.
For what it's worth, I don't think the ban list is failing the Commander format. Given what they have to work with, I think the RC has done an amazing job with the Commander ban list. (And I don't think Sol Ring deserves to be banned, but that's an entirely separate discussion.) What I think is "failing" the Commander format is the fact that Commander, as a format, is trying to piggyback off of Magic where it would very much play better as its own card game. Having thousands of cards designed for an entirely different purpose does not suit a game well when its rules diverge so greatly. The RC just can't control what kinds of cards will enter the Commander format and is instead forced to adapt all of them into it by default where many of the designs are malsuited.
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
One of my LGS's has a small group of 4-6 players that built current standard brawl decks and we played some games this past Thursday. I like the format a lot, it's actually kind of refreshing to not see the same tired, old staples every game. The diversity was pretty big too, the planeswalkers definitely help there. My other (bigger) LGS will be starting 4 man FNM pods that are fill and fire all night like commander pods. There was a lot of expressed interest there, but they are waiting to start until after Dominaria pre-release.
Does anyone else think the Brawl ban list is absolute nonsense? Like, Brawl isn't Standard. It might use the same pool of cards, but Ramunap Ruins and Rogue Refiner don't mean the same thing in a 30 life total, multiplayer format. My playgroup has personally abolished the ban list entirely. This has led to a lot of Smuggler's Copters being cast, but that card seriously isn't a problem, and everyone is generally happy to play with it given the card's relative cost and power.
The one exception to this move we've made is that my playgroup has opted to ban Approach of the Second Sun. This card has been an enormous problem for us since, aside from countermagic, there's virtually no way to interact with Approach whatsoever. You either counter it, kill the player before they can cast it again, or somehow mill the card before they draw it again (and even that isn't a permanent solution). Given blue's ridiculous monopoly on countermagic though, that leaves the vast majority of decks with very few ways to actually deal with the card. It's been the ultimate and (nearly) irrefutable way for my playgroup to break 3 hour long stalemates. And boy is it unsatisfying.
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I am kind of bummed that I can't play looter scooter or rogue refiner in brawl. At the same time, I'm pretty glad Aetherworks Marvel and Felidar Guardian are banned still. Second Sun has been pretty underwhelming in our group. People die before they hit it again, or watch it get milled by Ipnu or just countered and then RFG'd. I have yet to see anyone win with it in our Brawl matches. Decks like Huatli, Kumena and Ghalta are killing people by t6-ish pretty consistently.
For what it's worth, I thought I'd mention that nobody really has to worry all that much about Felidar Guardian since the only deck that can pair it with Saheeli Rai in the entire format is Jodah. That certainly won't stop unscrupulous players from doing it, but at least color identity rules will stop it from ever really being a sizable portion of the metagame.
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
That, and two card combos are inherently not as threatening in a singleton format. I'm not especially worried about Copter for the same reason. It is a fantastic deck filtering tool when you can make sure you almost always have one, but it becomes simply an annoyingly efficient and highly prevalent card when it is a single card of 59.
And that really is my biggest complaint about Brawl going into the future, is that using the Standard banlist is a lazy copout by Wizards. The two formats are fundamentally not the same, and tying them to one another simply makes sure both are at risk of being less playable.
Hypothetically an excess of support cards are printed making Merfolk the most consistent deck in the format,(say they printed Master of the Pearl Trident on top of Merfolk Mistbinder in Rivals and Kumena was dominating Standard as a result). In such a situation, Kumena might be banned from Standard, or they might ban one of the Lords. Either way, we weaken one of the few strategies with enough support to be playable as a non-goodstuff list in Brawl as a side effect.
Or the reverse with a card like The Scarab God, where it is a legend that might be fine in Standard due to lacking an otherwise solid deck in his colors, but could end up absolutely dominating Brawl. At that point you have to ban him from Standard as well, and neither of those are good options.
I played A LOT today since the format became legal in MTGO.
4 multiplayer games and 30+ 1vs1 games. Playing Galtha, Hapatra and Kambal.
It doesn't feel like Commander or Standard, it feels like you're playing an excellent Sealed pool with a Vanguard. There's pretty much zero build-around being done today with the only exception of Hapatra and Kumena decks. Unsurprisingly Hapatra and Kumena are pretty powerful.
Playing 1vs1 I experienced pretty much zero deck diversity. Hordes of Bolas, Hapatra, Kumena and Kambal. The only other decks I saw all day were 1 Beckett, 1 Gonti, 1 WG Huatli and my own Ghalta. None won the games they were played in.
The midrangey decks (Hapatra, Kumena and Kambal) can't seem to beat Bolas. And among them the games are grindy, complex and extremelly long, every second game went to time. Hapatra seems to be the strongest of the three, I didn't lose a single game playing Hapatra vs either Kumena or Kambal, and I didn't win a single game playing Kambal vs Hapatra. Having no sideboards sucks.
Multiplayer was miserable in my experience. Maybe because everyone was playing Beckett, Hapatra, Kumena, Scarab God or Zacama. And every game was a clogged board state where the only non-unprofitable move was not doing anything until either of the blue players on the table decide to play kingmaker with River's Rebuke and someone's arbitrarily kicked out of the game.
As of now I really hope Dominaria adds A LOT of casual appeal to multiplayer because right now there's absolutely no fun to be found in this format. As for 1vs1, unless a lot of aggro decks start showing up and somehow survive Hapatra's grindy ways, Bolas will get banned..
One of my biggest critiques of Commander (and this extends to Brawl) is that the format is inherently flawed due to the fact that the cardpool doesn't support the goals of the format. In the case of Brawl specifically, I can't help but imagine that the cards in Standard right now didn't take Brawl into consideration while they were being designed. They certainly took Standard and Draft into consideration, maybe even a bit of Modern (and Commander players were certainly thrown their bones), but Brawl? Who knows if that was even on Wizards' radar six months ago.
Constructing a positive Brawl environment is not the same as constructing a positive Standard environment. They might share the same cardpool, but something like The Immortal Sun is going to make a much bigger difference in a casual format where planeswalkers can be commanders than in a format where Rogue Refiner is banned. This is one of my major fears with the format, that it might just be written off by Wizards as a casual format and therefore undeserving of significant attention. After all, why divert energy specifically to crafting a healthy casual format when the needs of Standard come first?
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WUBRGMr. Bones' Wild RideGRBUW Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
I played A LOT today since the format became legal in MTGO.
4 multiplayer games and 30+ 1vs1 games. Playing Galtha, Hapatra and Kambal.
It doesn't feel like Commander or Standard, it feels like you're playing an excellent Sealed pool with a Vanguard. There's pretty much zero build-around being done today with the only exception of Hapatra and Kumena decks. Unsurprisingly Hapatra and Kumena are pretty powerful.
Playing 1vs1 I experienced pretty much zero deck diversity. Hordes of Bolas, Hapatra, Kumena and Kambal. The only other decks I saw all day were 1 Beckett, 1 Gonti, 1 WG Huatli and my own Ghalta. None won the games they were played in.
The midrangey decks (Hapatra, Kumena and Kambal) can't seem to beat Bolas. And among them the games are grindy, complex and extremelly long, every second game went to time. Hapatra seems to be the strongest of the three, I didn't lose a single game playing Hapatra vs either Kumena or Kambal, and I didn't win a single game playing Kambal vs Hapatra. Having no sideboards sucks.
Multiplayer was miserable in my experience. Maybe because everyone was playing Beckett, Hapatra, Kumena, Scarab God or Zacama. And every game was a clogged board state where the only non-unprofitable move was not doing anything until either of the blue players on the table decide to play kingmaker with River's Rebuke and someone's arbitrarily kicked out of the game.
As of now I really hope Dominaria adds A LOT of casual appeal to multiplayer because right now there's absolutely no fun to be found in this format. As for 1vs1, unless a lot of aggro decks start showing up and somehow survive Hapatra's grindy ways, Bolas will get banned..
What's your MTGO user name? I think we've played a few games!
I'm seeing a lot of people crying out to ban Baral because of 1v1. I'm concerned the split between multiplayer and 1v1 is going to become a real issue soon.
So - here's my impression from playing 6 or so Brawl leagues on MTGO with various decks.
Let me preface this by saying that my impression probably isn't true of your local paper metagame or playgroup or what have you; it's an impression of what 1v1 Brawl looks like on its first week on MTGO.
I'd say the current top decks are Baral, Bolas, and Zacama. Baral decks made up of 20+ counterspells seem particularly punishing against the sort of midrangey value piles that are the obvious way to attack a format like this, and similarly Zacama acts as a very powerful universal answer in a format where playing a nine drop is naturally pretty easy.
Scarab God is good, but somewhat overrated - Remember, SG is priced accordingly to its "return to hand instead of dying" clause, and so it's not necessarily competitive in a slot where every creature gets a similar ability. There's also not a ton of ways, in UB exclusively, to dump cards into your graveyard; Scarab God's value engine is harder to set up and takes longer to pay off than the top commanders. It also falls in kind of a bad spot where it neither comes in "under" all the permission in the format (like Baral) nor does it win the game on the spot when it resolves (like Zacama).
The format seems diverse from where I'm sitting... but it's also true that I was jamming pretty untuned, "fun" decks in there and not doing great, so I wasn't getting a picture of the 3-0 bracket. The general pattern every league was a Zacama or Baral deck that seemed to just run over whatever I was doing, and four other random decks that I seemed like I could have a "fair" game against.
The extra cushion of 10 health made "aggro" strategies like Admiral Beckett Brass and even Kumena seem pretty awful. Dire Fleet Poisoner is not a card that looks good in this format.
There's a dearth of really good planeswalkers in Standard right now, and a lot of the best ones in a format like Brawl are two colors, so plenty of people jamming The Immortal Sun as a value card that also happens to hose planeswalker commanders.
Mostly, my impression of this format is that I'm probably not going to keep playing. I think commanders just lead to gameplay I personally don't care for, with games becoming entirely about trying to keep a commander off the board or a commander's abilities just invalidating everything else up to that point (Zacama is the poster child for this, as he tends to come down and destroy every relevant permanent an opponent controls). It warps the format in the direction of playing cards like Sorcerous Spyglass, Gideon's Intervention, and Overwhelming Splendor because commanders are unanswerable by design without using those kinds of effects. This might be different in multiplayer, but as a 1v1 format, Brawl leads to insufferable games that revolve entirely around a single permanent that refuses to die; a lot of games feel like they come down entirely to whether I draw enough narrow answers. Even with the Standard card pool, it seems hard to not play blue simply because permission and card draw are so strong in a format where most of what happens on the board for the first four turns doesn't seem to matter.
In that setting, it feels obvious why Baral decks are so powerful - if you can reliably have a counterspell every turn, you can overwhelm commanders with the sheer number of answers. The format feels a lot like an arms race with decks aiming to go over the top of one another; aggressive decks that would normally punish that are just too anemic with the higher starting life total.
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On average, Magic players are worse at new card evaluation than almost every other skill, except perhaps sideboarding.
I really feel brawl is not intended to be 1v1, I can only imagine its a trashy experience. If I wanted to play 1v1 with standard pools... I'd go play standard. I kinda feel the same about duel commander though.
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Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith
R Norin the Wary: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This
UG Thrasios & Kydele: Knowledge is Power
RG Borborygmos Enraged: The Breaking of the World
BG The Gitrog Monster: All Glory to the Hypnotoad
WUR Zedruu the Greathearted: Endless Possibilities, One Outcome
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain: What's Dead May Never Die
Turn your junk into something great with PucaTrade!
59 Card Decks — Shuffling a 99 card deck is a pain, especially if it's double-sleeved. Decks being 59 cards instead of 99 means they're much easier to handle. In addition, it makes them cheaper. I don't need to own as many expensive cards to construct a functional deck.
30 Point Life Totals — Changing the starting life total from 40 to 30 means creatures are more relevant. That's a good thing since a lot of meaningful interaction between players involves combat. When the starting life total is too high, players tend to ignore it.
No Commander Damage — I've always hated Commander damage. In my experience, Commander damage was always a bookkeeping chore: irrelevant in 99% of cases. Removing it means one less thing I have to keep track of.
Standard Only Cards — This is the biggest selling point to me. Commander, for better or for worse, is full of cards that ought not exist in Magic. Take Sol Ring for instance. Sol Ring is a card that unequivocally should not exist. Period. It's an absolutely broken card that would never had been printed had Wizards known what they were doing 25 years ago. I think very few players would argue with me on that.
The issues I have with many of these cards like Sol Ring is...
1. They come from an era long ago where Wizards didn't have the greatest idea what they were doing. This is excusable on Wizard's behalf since Magic was literally the first trading card game in existence. They're inevitably going to make mistakes because of that. Still, it nonetheless doesn't solve the problem of having troublesome cards like Sol Ring be available for players to play with.
2. Commander didn't exist throughout most of Magic's history. As such, Wizards never considered the repercussions of printing any given card in regards to Commander. They couldn't have. This has led to the creation of cards that play well in traditional Magic but play poorly in the context of Commander.
3. Players can't be trusted to create great games of Magic on their own. In my experience, players tend to selfishly indulge in whatever aspects of the game they find most interesting. This isn't a criticism of human behavior so much as it is a criticism of the Commander format. When given access to all of Magic's cardpool, players frequently find ways to ruin the game for others, and many of the reasons why have much to do with the fact that the cardpool is vast and ancient. Limiting players to Standard only cards seriously alleviates that problem as all of those cards are now beholden to Wizard's modern design philosophies. And Wizards has gotten much better at making Magic fun over the years.
So, yeah. In a nutshell, I think those are the reasons why Brawl appeals to me more than Commander right now. Wizards basically made some minor tweaks to the format, and it will play better as a result of it. And, ultimately, that's what I'm there for: a better game.
EDIT: Forgot to touch on planeswalkers.
Planeswalkers as Commanders — Philosophically, I think this is a great change since the thematic idea behind commanders has always been about a legendary character representing your deck. Planeswalkers are, in and of themselves, characters.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Niv-Mizzet Reborn
Feather, the Redeemed
Estrid, the Masked
Teshar
Tymna/Ravos
Najeela, Blade-Blossom
Firesong & Sunspeaker
Zur the Enchanter
Lazav, the Multifarious
Ishai+Reyhan
Click images for decks->
-Prime Speaker Vannifar
---------------------Will & Rowan Kenrith
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
The one exception to this move we've made is that my playgroup has opted to ban Approach of the Second Sun. This card has been an enormous problem for us since, aside from countermagic, there's virtually no way to interact with Approach whatsoever. You either counter it, kill the player before they can cast it again, or somehow mill the card before they draw it again (and even that isn't a permanent solution). Given blue's ridiculous monopoly on countermagic though, that leaves the vast majority of decks with very few ways to actually deal with the card. It's been the ultimate and (nearly) irrefutable way for my playgroup to break 3 hour long stalemates. And boy is it unsatisfying.
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
And that really is my biggest complaint about Brawl going into the future, is that using the Standard banlist is a lazy copout by Wizards. The two formats are fundamentally not the same, and tying them to one another simply makes sure both are at risk of being less playable.
Hypothetically an excess of support cards are printed making Merfolk the most consistent deck in the format,(say they printed Master of the Pearl Trident on top of Merfolk Mistbinder in Rivals and Kumena was dominating Standard as a result). In such a situation, Kumena might be banned from Standard, or they might ban one of the Lords. Either way, we weaken one of the few strategies with enough support to be playable as a non-goodstuff list in Brawl as a side effect.
Or the reverse with a card like The Scarab God, where it is a legend that might be fine in Standard due to lacking an otherwise solid deck in his colors, but could end up absolutely dominating Brawl. At that point you have to ban him from Standard as well, and neither of those are good options.
4 multiplayer games and 30+ 1vs1 games. Playing Galtha, Hapatra and Kambal.
It doesn't feel like Commander or Standard, it feels like you're playing an excellent Sealed pool with a Vanguard. There's pretty much zero build-around being done today with the only exception of Hapatra and Kumena decks. Unsurprisingly Hapatra and Kumena are pretty powerful.
Playing 1vs1 I experienced pretty much zero deck diversity. Hordes of Bolas, Hapatra, Kumena and Kambal. The only other decks I saw all day were 1 Beckett, 1 Gonti, 1 WG Huatli and my own Ghalta. None won the games they were played in.
The midrangey decks (Hapatra, Kumena and Kambal) can't seem to beat Bolas. And among them the games are grindy, complex and extremelly long, every second game went to time. Hapatra seems to be the strongest of the three, I didn't lose a single game playing Hapatra vs either Kumena or Kambal, and I didn't win a single game playing Kambal vs Hapatra. Having no sideboards sucks.
Multiplayer was miserable in my experience. Maybe because everyone was playing Beckett, Hapatra, Kumena, Scarab God or Zacama. And every game was a clogged board state where the only non-unprofitable move was not doing anything until either of the blue players on the table decide to play kingmaker with River's Rebuke and someone's arbitrarily kicked out of the game.
As of now I really hope Dominaria adds A LOT of casual appeal to multiplayer because right now there's absolutely no fun to be found in this format. As for 1vs1, unless a lot of aggro decks start showing up and somehow survive Hapatra's grindy ways, Bolas will get banned..
One of my biggest critiques of Commander (and this extends to Brawl) is that the format is inherently flawed due to the fact that the cardpool doesn't support the goals of the format. In the case of Brawl specifically, I can't help but imagine that the cards in Standard right now didn't take Brawl into consideration while they were being designed. They certainly took Standard and Draft into consideration, maybe even a bit of Modern (and Commander players were certainly thrown their bones), but Brawl? Who knows if that was even on Wizards' radar six months ago.
Constructing a positive Brawl environment is not the same as constructing a positive Standard environment. They might share the same cardpool, but something like The Immortal Sun is going to make a much bigger difference in a casual format where planeswalkers can be commanders than in a format where Rogue Refiner is banned. This is one of my major fears with the format, that it might just be written off by Wizards as a casual format and therefore undeserving of significant attention. After all, why divert energy specifically to crafting a healthy casual format when the needs of Standard come first?
Trap your friends in an endless game with this 23-card combo!
What's your MTGO user name? I think we've played a few games!
I'm seeing a lot of people crying out to ban Baral because of 1v1. I'm concerned the split between multiplayer and 1v1 is going to become a real issue soon.
R Norin the Wary: I've Got a Bad Feeling About This
UG Thrasios & Kydele: Knowledge is Power
RG Borborygmos Enraged: The Breaking of the World
BG The Gitrog Monster: All Glory to the Hypnotoad
WUR Zedruu the Greathearted: Endless Possibilities, One Outcome
WBG Karador, Ghost Chieftain: What's Dead May Never Die
Turn your junk into something great with PucaTrade!
Let me preface this by saying that my impression probably isn't true of your local paper metagame or playgroup or what have you; it's an impression of what 1v1 Brawl looks like on its first week on MTGO.
Mostly, my impression of this format is that I'm probably not going to keep playing. I think commanders just lead to gameplay I personally don't care for, with games becoming entirely about trying to keep a commander off the board or a commander's abilities just invalidating everything else up to that point (Zacama is the poster child for this, as he tends to come down and destroy every relevant permanent an opponent controls). It warps the format in the direction of playing cards like Sorcerous Spyglass, Gideon's Intervention, and Overwhelming Splendor because commanders are unanswerable by design without using those kinds of effects. This might be different in multiplayer, but as a 1v1 format, Brawl leads to insufferable games that revolve entirely around a single permanent that refuses to die; a lot of games feel like they come down entirely to whether I draw enough narrow answers. Even with the Standard card pool, it seems hard to not play blue simply because permission and card draw are so strong in a format where most of what happens on the board for the first four turns doesn't seem to matter.
In that setting, it feels obvious why Baral decks are so powerful - if you can reliably have a counterspell every turn, you can overwhelm commanders with the sheer number of answers. The format feels a lot like an arms race with decks aiming to go over the top of one another; aggressive decks that would normally punish that are just too anemic with the higher starting life total.