Magic must ban Sol Ring from Commander for the good of MTG players

I never want to see another turn-one Sol Ring again

If you're building a Commander deck in Magic: The Gathering, there are a few hard and fast rules you need to follow as you assemble your 100-card battle plan: roughly 36-40 lands, about a dozen removal spells or other ways to interact with your opponents, a few boardwipes in case things really get out of hand, and one Sol Ring. Virtually every single Commander deck in existence benefits from Sol Ring, one of the most overpowered, totally busted cards in all of Magic's 33-year history.

That's why Wizards of the Coast includes a copy of Sol Ring in every single new preconstructed Commander deck it puts out. It's also why Wizards should finally do the right thing and ban Sol Ring from Commander once and for all.

I'll lay out my argument in a minute, but before that, it's worth clarifying what a Sol Ring even is, in case you've never played a game of Magic before. Sol Ring was printed in the very first set of Magic, known as Limited Edition Alpha, in 1993. For one mana of any color, you get an artifact card that taps for two colorless mana each turn.

That's right. You spend one mana to get a permanent that pays you back two mana every turn. If that sounds unfair, that's because it is. Sol Ring essentially breaks the First Law of Thermodynamics. But even worse, it breaks the rules of Magic itself.

Over more than three decades, Wizards has established some unwritten rules for how new Magic cards are designed. These rules change over time (power creep is a major issue), but some are hard and fast. When it comes to cards like Sol Ring (artifacts that tap for mana, aka, mana rocks), most fall within one of two buckets:

1. Two mana typically gets you a mana rock that taps for some but not all colors, and with some sort of restriction (Example: Talisman of Hierarchy)
2. Three mana gets you a mana rock that taps for one mana of any color, with some sort of upside (example: Dragonstorm Globe)

There are notably also a lot of exceptions to this rule, especially when you include super-rare cards that are already banned or heavily restricted due to their rarity. But when Wizards goes to design a new mana rock, it will almost always follow one of these two basic frameworks.

But not Sol Ring.

Sol Ring doesn't just break the rules of Magic's own design philosophy, it also breaks the gameplay experience. If you start out the game with Sol Ring, you're essentially skipping ahead of your opponents by two turns, since everyone else is limited to playing just one land each turn (and most other ways to accelerate your land are inferior, especially in the early game). In four-player Commander, anyone lucky enough to get a turn-one Sol Ring has a decent chance of running away with the entire game.

This also creates an entirely different issue. Playing a turn-one Sol Ring makes you the "problem" and increases the risk that everyone else in the game gangs up on you. It's a lose-lose scenario.

Most annoying, because everyone puts a Sol Ring in their deck, not putting one in yours isn't an option either. That means one less free space to actually get creative in your 100-card Commander deck because you need to have a Sol Ring.

So why hasn't Wizards banned Sol Ring already? In 2024, it banned two other cards with similar "fast mana" abilities from Commander, so clearly the company knows it's a problem. But because Sol Ring dates back to the very first set of the game, and because it's printed in every single new preconstructed Commander deck, it's become a symbol of the game in general. Banning the card would also feel like a big F.U. to all the players who've purchased precons in the past, which is a lot of people.

(The upside is, because there are so many copies of Sol Ring in circulation, it's not that expensive to purchase. There are currently 72 unique visual interpretations of the card by my count.)

I don't expect Wizards to ban Sol Ring from the Commander format anytime soon, if ever, but there are a few other (less controversial) solutions to consider. One option is an update to the Commander Bracket system, which was introduced in 2025 as a way to clearly designate the power level of anyone's deck on a scale of one to five. One of the key factors is how many "Game Changers" (a list of powerful cards that warp the entire game) are in your deck. So making Sol Ring a Game Changer would automatically boost up the deck to bracket 3, effectively kicking the card out of more casual play groups and tables. Problem solved!

On a more local level, players can always come up with their own solutions for the Sol Ring problem. I know some Commander groups just ban the card outright. But if that doesn't go over well with your squad, a friend of mine recently suggested an interesting house rule: If any one player gets a turn-one Sol Ring, the rest of the table gets to search their decks for the card and put it onto the battlefield so the game feels more even. I'd just add one tweak: the first player, who drew a Sol Ring in their opening hand, gets to draw an extra card as a treat.

Of course, house rules like that, and even the Commander bracket system, all rely on a certain degree of player buy-in. You can't force a stranger you meet at your local game store to agree to your socialist Sol Ring policies or even necessarily trust that they'll be transparent about the power of their deck before the game begins. The only real solution is for Wizards to step up and ban the card once and for all.

Until then, I'll keep putting Sol Ring in every new Commander deck I build. I'd be an idiot not to.

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