MTG’s Head Designer Admits the Partner Mechanic Might Have Been a Mistake

Last updated on December 26, 2024

Vial Smasher the Fierce | Illustration by N.C. Winters

Partner is one of MTG's most powerful keyword abilities in the EDH format, with partner commanders routinely topping cEDH tournaments and showing the highest conversion rates. Is it too powerful, though? To the point of calling it one of Magic's design blunders?

According to MTG Head Designer Mark Rosewater, the answer seems to be “Yes.”

“My first hunch is partner,” Rosewater wrote in his blog yesterday when asked if there are any really fun mechanics that, in retrospect, were a mistake.

“I think we would be happier if we only ever made monocolor cards with partner.”

This confirms what Rosewater said earlier last week in his Odds & Ends: 2024, Part 1 article on Magic's official website.

“The partner mechanic has what we call a combinatorics problem,” Rosewater explained. “That is, each new one we print makes all existing ones more powerful, and that power level ramps up for each new one we make.”

The more partner Commanders they print, the easier it is to break them, and as Rosewater points out, plenty of players already consider it a broken mechanic.

Two for One

Tymna the Weaver | Illustration by Winona Nelson

Magic is, at its core, a battle of resources. There's nothing that MTG players love more than a 2-for-1 exchange (except perhaps drawing cards… although that's 2-for-1 by other means!), and partner commanders are exactly that.

Introduced in Commander 2016, the partner mechanic allows a player to have two commanders in their command zone, as long as both have the “partner” keyword.

The two commanders function independently (they each pay their commander tax separately, their commander damage is tracked separately, etc), except for determining the decks color identity: if you partner an Izzet commander () with an Orzhov commander (), your deck's color identity will be .

The mechanic was brought back in 2020 for Commander Legends; by that time WotC, was beginning to realize that the mechanic had limitations, and although Commander Legends introduced plenty of partner commanders, they were all monocolored commanders.

They also tried other solutions to corral the power of free-range partners, like the “partner with” mechanic introduced in Battlebond, the friends forever mechanic from a Secret Lair Universes Beyond crossover, and background enchantments in Baldur's Gate.

“Every partner you add to the game powers up every existing creature with partner,” wrote Mark Rosewater in 2022, during the Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate previews. “There just comes a limit where the mechanic will break.”

cEDH Dominance

A glance at the top-performing cEDH commanders quickly confirms Rosewater's assertion that dual-color partners were perhaps a mistake.

Here are the top nine cEDH archetypes in the last six months, sorted by conversion rate, according to EDHTop16:

Source

Even if we include the recently banned Nadu, Winged Wisdom into the tally, partner commanders represent more than half of this top nine.

Why are they so powerful?

As Rosewater notes in his blog post from yesterday, WotC would be happier had they only printed monocolored partners.

Notably, 66.7% of the archetypes in the top nine shown above have three or more colors (and the number goes up to 75% if we remove Nadu from the tally).

This trend is consistent if we look at the top 24 cEDH archetypes, as seen below: there are only 2 mono color archetypes (circled in yellow), and excluding Nadu we have just four dual-color archetypes (circled in red).

Source

The correlation is obvious: Having access to 3+ colors is an important edge in cEDH. And dual-color partner commanders – as exemplified at the top of this chart by pirate commander Malcolm, Keen-Eyed Navigator plus goblin commander Vial Smasher the Fierce, and Kraum, Ludevic's Opus plus Tymna the Weaver – provide exactly that kind of flexibility.

Future Partnerships

Two years ago, Magic designers seemed to find the solution to their earlier problem: to limit partners to a smaller, very specific subgroup of cards, as they did with the “partner with” mechanic, friends forever, and Backgrounds.

“The future of partner,” wrote Rosewater back in May 2022, “is mostly going to be partnering with specific subsets.”

“In general,” he clarified a few days later, “we’ve learned partner-like mechanics need to be pretty self-contained as they grow in power pretty fast when you add things.”

In 2024, we've seen these lessons applied in Doctor Who, with Doctor's Companions being both a flavor win and a well-balanced mechanic.

“We can make a group of cards that only partner with themselves and keep them to a small enough number so that it doesn't start creating problems of its own,” Rosewater wrote last week on the Magic official site. “This allows for some partnering without causing balance issues.”

WotC has indeed printed a couple of free-range, mono-colored partners in the last couple of years – dog commander Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful in Neon Dynasty Commander, and more recently Francisco, Fowl Marauder in The Lost Caverns of Ixalan Commander (LCC) – and reprinted some of the dual-colored parter powerhouses, like Vial Smasher the Fierce doing their goblin berserker thing in Duskmourn‘s Endless Punishment precon.

But as far as new dual-colored partners go, Magic's designers have learned from their mistakes: those are not fit to print.