TLR Partner Rules Update
Hello from the Tiny Leaders Reborn Council! No time for pleasantries, we have a major rules change to announce!
New rule: A player using more than one commander begins the game with a forced mulligan. This is achieved by drawing cards equal to the player's starting hand size and choosing one to place on the bottom of their library. This counts as the player’s first mulligan. Subsequent mulligans are treated as normal. This is an exception to rules 103.5 and 103.5b
Basically: If you’re playing with more than one commander, your mulligan is gonna start at 1. You’ll still look at Seven cards like normal, but to counteract your extra card in the command zone you’ll have to put one away, plus any additional mulligans you may take.
Long time Tiny players may notice this is the same rule we had before the current rule! That’s correct! So let's talk about why we’re doing this.
Philosophy:
Partner commanders have been a problem for Tiny for some time. The advantage gained by always having access to a second card in the command zone has proven to be problematic in 1v1 value oriented formats like ours.
When partners are good, they become the best thing to be doing. They’re dominant and significantly reduce the variety of viable commanders. We don’t want this.
Unfortunately this has proven to be a really difficult problem to solve. The current solution has been to restrict how many of your commanders you could access during a game and therefore eliminate the card advantage gained.
This rule worked for a time! But it was also implemented before the printing of a number of new Partner-Adjacent mechanics and as a result has since become outdated.
Backgrounds specifically have been a victim of this rule. Being functionally banned as a mechanic from our format.
As more and more partners are printed, we realized this rule was no longer serving its function and was significantly limiting the ways players could approach Tiny Leaders deck building.
As such we’ve decided to revert back to the mulligan rule used previously.
The reason we originally got rid of this mulligan rule originally was because it felt overly punishing to players who needed to mulligan and were only left with 5 cards. This is a fair concern and one we thought about a lot. But for the health of the format we decided to use a rule that was harsh and incentivizes our most competitive players to find other strategies.
In other words: We like partners and we want players to be able to use them. But we’d prefer to keep them out of the top tables.
Going forward: We’re going to keep a close eye on partners. This may involve some bans in the future if certain commanders become overrepresented.
We don’t like banning cards erroneously but our hope is that by legalizing these mechanics we’ll open more deck building options, and if the cost is a few bad actors we’re willing to make that decision.
(Banning a handful of commanders is still less than banning an entire mechanic)
We’re excited about this change and we can’t wait to see the combinations you come up with!
Other stuff:
This update does not come with any updates to the banlist. Although we have a few cards we’re keeping an eye on, nothing right now is breaking our acceptable thresholds for bans.
Overall we feel Tiny is in a good place right now with lots of room for growth and development in the meta. We’re going to continue letting the meta sail its course before we add any corrections for now.
Happy Brewing!!
We’re excited about this change and we can’t wait to see the combinations you come up with!