It’s weird to write about banning a card before it’s released. It’s weirder still to write about it in Commander, a format in which has an incredibly high bar for banning cards. It arguably doesn’t ban cards for power level, and honestly, feels to me like it’s more or less done with banning cards.
So is the title clickbait? Perhaps you’re familiar with the rule of journalism where if the title is a question, the answer is no. Well, I’m not a journalist, and the answer isn’t no. The answer is I don’t know, but I think it has a chance, which is wild.
Ok, so where am I coming from and how can I make such an outlandish claim?
First of all, let’s talk about Orcish Bowmasters as a card.
Resolute Reinforcements is a reasonable Magic card. It sees play in Standard. Orcish Bowmasters isn’t *strictly* better, but you get roughly the same thing up front, and you also get to deal 1 damage to any target. By itself, that’s about 40-60% more total value/impact than Resolute Reinforcements for no extra cost, which is actually incredible. I’d be surprised to see a card like that in Standard, and I’d expect it to be the best two mana black creature in the format. That’s still not really enough to get it into the conversation in Commander–you might play it in a deck that’s looking for some sacrifice fodder, since it is nice to get two bodies and also pick off a Birds of Paradise or Esper Sentinel, but it would likely only see fringe play.
So, of course, what sets Orcish Bowmasters apart is that on top of all this, it has the ability tacked on that “whenever an opponent draws a card except the first one they draw in each of their draw steps, Orcish Bowmasters deals 1 damage to any target. Then amass Orcs 1.”
How much is that worth?
Well, if you play this in response to a card draw effect, you’re very likely to get additional damage and counters equal to the number of cards drawn by that effect. If you can respond to a Gitaxian Probe, you get a 1/1, a 2/2, and a Fire (2 damage divided however you choose, derived from Fire//Ice back in Apocalypse). If you cast it in response to a Brainstorm, you get a 1/1, a 4/4, and 4 damage divided however you choose. If you cast it in response to a Wheel of Fortune, you get a 1/1, a 22/22, and 22 damage divided however you choose. For 2 mana.
Of course, that’s not all you get, because the 1/1 is still in play, and still threatens to trigger again whenever anyone draws a card, so you effectively have an extremely powerful stax creature as part of your widely diversified value.
The 22 damage situation sounds like a Magical Christmas Land/this will never happen type of thing, except that it really only requires one spell to be cast, and it doesn’t matter if you cast it or someone else does, and it works off of several reasonably widely played cards. So, this will happen sometimes.
More often, it’ll get cast early when you have two mana free to kill an Esper Sentinel, and then it will sit in play. How much does it sitting in play matter?
If you’ve ever played with Notion Thief, you probably know that it tends to draw you very few cards unless you play it in response to a card draw spell. Sometimes it has a huge impact on the game, but that impact doesn’t involve anything actually happening, it just stops your opponents from trying to draw cards. Orcish Bowmasters is different.
See, the great thing about Orcish Bowmasters is your opponents still get to draw cards, which means that you actually get to trigger it. If player A controls an Orcish Bowmaster, and player B controls some creatures, player C likely actively wants to trigger the Bowmaster to kill player B’s creatures. And this is where I see Orcish Bowmasters becoming a problem.
I’ll get back to that.
What’s in a Ban?
Let’s take a moment to talk about banning cards in Commander.
The Commander Banned List is absolute nonsense as a single snapshot. If you compare the cards that are banned against the best cards that are legal, it follows very little rhyme or reason. The thing you have to understand about the Commander Banned List is that it’s a historical document, kind of like a legal system.
See, there’s a huge barrier to modifying the list in any way. Banning cards sucks. People are sad they can’t play the deck they like to play, or that they spent money on a card they can’t use and that might not be worth as much anymore, and the more you do that, the more people lose faith in the format. Once a card is banned, there’s very little reason to unban it. There are tens of thousands of legal cards, how much better can the format be by reintroducing one card that was once considered a problem? There’s just not a lot to gain by doing it, so very few cards get banned, and “this is similar to another card that’s banned” isn’t necessarily a compelling reason to ban something.
Moreover, the Rules Committee has, I believe, said something to the effect of “we don’t ban cards for power level reasons,” which is to say, merely being too strong isn’t enough of a reason to ban a card.
Consider Dockside Extortionist.
Dockside theoretically gets a pass because it relies on the construction of your opponent’s decks to be powerful, so if everyone stopped playing artifacts and enchantments it wouldn’t do anything. The problem is that it doesn’t just punish players for playing artifacts and enchantments. If you cut all the artifacts and enchantments from your deck, your opponents Docksides would still be strong because the other players will still have artifacts and enchantments. So no one actually has the agency to build around the card, so I think that pass is entirely fake.
In reality, Dockside seems to regularly make 5+ Treasures even pretty early in the game. To shortcut the discussion about just how good Dockside is, since I think most players are familiar with that, I want to put it this way: If allowed to, I think most players who play Dockside would not replace their Dockside with a Black Lotus if given the option, meaning that I believe the card is stronger in this format than Black Lotus, if we ignore the fact that any deck can play Black Lotus.
This card isn’t banned, and I don’t think it really causes much of a problem for the format. I think most casual players simply know not to put it in their decks–it’s rare and expensive enough that players who don’t understand how strong it is don’t own the card, and players who do should realize that if they’re playing with cards like that, their deck will likely be strong enough that they should only play it at high powered tables. Everything kind of sorts itself out.
So, given that I don’t think we’re about to see a Dockside Extortionist ban, am I claiming that Orcish Bowmasters is stronger than Dockside Extortionist? No, of course not. First of all, it isn’t. I believe Dockside Extortionist is the strongest creature in Commander, while Orcish Bowmasters is merely the second strongest. But if I were, that wouldn’t make any sense, since being stronger isn’t a reason it would be banned.
So what is a reason for it to be banned?
The Question of Fun
A card is ban worthy if it makes casual Commander less fun. Winter Orb isn’t banned, so that’s not actually enough. It has to pose an actual problem for the format, which means people have to play it enough for it to make large numbers of games less fun.
So the questions are, will large numbers of casual Commander decks feature Orcish Bowmasters, and will it negatively impact games of casual Commander?
Here are my concerns on those points:
As to how much it will be played, the issue with Orcish Bowmasters is that it has explicit synergy with a wide variety of strategies. If your deck cares about sacrificing things, it’s a great source of objects to sacrifice. If your deck cards about making tokens, it makes tokens. If it cares about +1/+1 counters, it makes those. If it cares about blinking creatures, it’s good to blink. If it’s a group hug deck that makes people draw cards, it’s good with that. If it cares about dealing damage, like Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin, it does that. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re doing proper deckbuilding by playing the card because it’s specifically good in your deck, not just because it’s a power level outlier that every black deck should play, even though in reality it’s the latter. Maybe it’ll develop a widespread reputation as a cEDH only card, maybe it won’t, by writing articles like this, I hope to help it develop that reputation, which might help avoid banning it.
So that’s my thought on the ubiquity issue. What about the negative impact?
This is where we return to the statement I said I’d return to about how this card becomes a problem because the players who don’t control creatures conspire with the player who controls Orcish Bowmaster to kill all the creatures they want dead. I once played a casual game with Dictate of Erebos in my deck. No one had an answer to it and we went around the table multiple times in a game where I wasn’t killing people quickly, but no one could keep a creature in play, and it became clear that no one was having any fun. I say I did this once because I removed Dictate of Erebos from my deck immediately after.
I think there are very few things worse for casual than a card that passively kills every creature. Orcish Bowmasters might only passively kill every small creature, but that still sounds to me like it’s going to lead to a lot of bad experiences.
So that, to me, is the case for banning Orcish Bowmasters. Time will tell if it plays out that way, but I think it has a shot, and I can’t think of another card I immediately had that consideration about.
To answer the next question, do I think Orcish Bowmasters was a design/development mistake, I’ll go ahead and say yes. I don’t understand the reason to print this card at this power level in this set. Specifically, I think this set should be about celebrating the characters from Lord of the Rings, and making some unnamed orcs the strongest card in the set is a wild move, regardless of whether a card should be this strong. Independently, I also don’t think a card should be this strong in this way, for all the reasons I’ve already discussed about how it likely makes games worse.
Sam Black (any) is a former professional Magic player, longtime Magic writer, host of the Drafting Archetypes podcast, and Twitch streamer. Sam is also a Commander Cube enthusiast, and you can find Sam’s cube list here. For anything else, find Sam on Twitter: @SamuelHBlack.c