MTG: Brawl
I don’t think of Brawl as being necessary, at all.
I don’t want to be a jerk about it, I mean, you know, any question of ‘is this necessary’ can always be met in response by a smug ‘well how necessary is any game.’ It’s Standard Commander, which feels like it would have been a simpler way to describe it, but there is the rule that Planeswalkers are valid commanders too, I guess, and that rule in big-pants Commander would have made a lot more Tezzeret-does-something-busted games.
Honestly, I feel really bad about how much of the past year of Magic has been full of me going ‘well I guess it’s okay, fine,’ since I really like the top-down decision making going on. I’m proud of what Magic is doing, I advocate for it as a teacher and a writer, I just, as a player, haven’t been excited by the cards I get to play with.
Still! Far be it from me to turn the whole thing down. I like Commander, I sometimes like Standard, and we have a whole new set full of Legendary creatures who probably can’t swim in the dank water of 1v1 Commander, so why not do something more interesting?
I design Commander decks usually seeing an interaction I want that hinges around something the format makes available (like [mtg_card]Heartless Hidetsugu[/mtg_card] + [mtg_card]Grafted Exoskeleton[/mtg_card]). I like playing a game of Magic where you can always rely on drawing a particular card, especially in an otherwise high-variance game. What then, would I make in standard, with Brawl?