Linear decks get a bad rap.
Sometimes it’s because people find them boring. Sometimes it’s because the interaction, like the decks themselves, can be one-dimensional. Power level is almost never the culprit, because you can have bad linear decks that are interacted with exactly the same way with powerful linear decks. Sometimes linear decks force games to unnaturally shift in a direction that isn’t particularly well-liked, or may go against what other decks want to do.
I’m reminded of Inverter of Truth decks in Pioneer before the ban. While those decks were just U/B control decks in disguise. The gameplay pattern pretty much forced other decks to either contort their gameplan to be faster, or have so much interaction that the opportunity to catch them before they killed you was artificially high. Another example is Hazoret the Fervent mono-red decks way back when. It was too difficult to truly be faster than that deck, but being too slow was almost certain death. This pushed a lot of midrange out, unless you were slamming the door so hard that there wasn’t a possible window of recovery for the red deck.
In Commander, things aren’t as condensed. It’s almost antithetical to have linear decks exist when it’s already naturally difficult to be redundant. That said, they definitely exist. Anje Falkenrath is the prime example of a hyper linear deck, because almost every single card in the engine effectively has no text except Madness. You are looting as fast as possible to get to your ways of winning the game. There is no other dimension to it, and adding another one will almost certainly take away from the primary gameplan. There is no alternative strategy, no plan B, nothing. You loot, you find your win-con, and you execute. If you fail, you try and do it again before you lose.
I don’t think Anje is a format-defining Commander deck by any means. At least not anymore. What it does is pretty powerful in a vacuum though. Being able to circumvent a fundamental part of Commander will always be inherently powerful, and the weakness in Anje is not due to that specifically, but more how it wins from there.
Yuriko, the Tiger’s Shadow is another example of a linear, but powerful card. This time though, its power and linearity are dual-layered. First, it does something similarly to Anje, fundamentally breaking a rule of Commander. In this case, it’s ignoring the Commander tax. This immediately makes Yuriko a threat the entire game, all the time. This strains removal, mulligan decisions, and hastens the game to an almost uncomfortable pace. An innocuous one drop could mean the end of the match by turn three, all because you spent two mana to reveal a fifteen-cost card and put everyone on the backfoot with no response.
Speaking of revealing, the second ability forces you to build your deck in a way that maximizes the top card of your library for cheap. Any type of Ponder Preordain or Brainstorm effect is immediately magnified. A cheap creature with these effects, or even just a scry? Busted. This is a case of linearity being the focal point of an entire table, and I can understand why this Commander isn’t well liked among casual tables.
So, using these two examples, linearity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and there isn’t anything wrong with it. I do think that people don’t like playing with or against them because they promote gameplay experiences that may not be the most dynamic, which in casual settings, is pretty much what Commander is about. I can totally understand this, and it almost bleeds from competitive players as well. How many times have you heard control players talk about wanting to have options and dynamic gameplay and wanting to play decks that allow them to make good plays? A similar thing is going on here, and it’s hard to make dynamic experiences in decks that really push you to do one thing effectively.
Anthony Lowry (they/he) is a seasoned TCG, MMORPG, and FPS veteran. They are extensively knowledgeable on the intricacies of many competitive outlets, and are always looking for a new challenge in the gaming sphere.