Update: Brawl is miserable, because Baral is completely unfair as a commander in a 1v1 format. Unless WotC bans the card, Brawl will die even faster than anticipated. If they do ban it, that means they either have to separate the standard/brawl banlists or ban Baral in standard. Either of those decisions is a mark against the format because some of the appeal was for players not needing to track a separate banlist.

Fun fact: Brawl was originally recommended as a multiplayer format. (They bring it up twice in this article.) Somewhere along the line, the internet community decided it should be 1v1 and started discussing it as such, but that was never the original intention.

My commander playgroup just decided this week to build brawl decks, and I'm excited to see how it goes.

Baral rotates in a month anyways.

Standard rotates in fall, not summer. It'll happen with the set after M19.

Not surprised about Brawl being received by the Standard community as 1v1. The only thing the vast majority of the Standard Community knows and understands is 1v1. The political aspect of multiplayer and the lack of “gold-fishing” in deck design probably blows their minds and/or turns them off from multiplayer immediately.

They really should have caught on before the launch. Not that I am shocked.
Ideally, they'll just allow every type of basic land in every deck. It's not like a monoblue deck can use red mana to cast their nonred cards anyway. And then that will set the stage for the same rule being adopted in Commander. And then the world will be good.
Or they could just declare all basic lands legal regardless of rotations to include Wastes.

Here's the "We're changing and fixing Brawl" article everyone has been waiting for, and honestly it seems pretty confusing.

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/future-brawl-2018-05-10

What's confusing about it? The changes make sense to me. I only skimmed the reasoning, though.

I'm not sure why you would tell new players that Brawl uses Standard cards and then direct them to a Ban List that is divorced from Standard. It seems better to just eat your loss on Baral since he rotates in the fall and then design Legends better from here on out with Brawl in mind. Legendary creatures never really needed to be Standard powerhouses anyway, especially since you've designed a new format to showcase them rather than depending on having them show up in Pro events to push packs. Also, I'm not keen on the change in life total depending on what sort of Brawl you are playing. This is one of those cases where multi-player concerns should just win out as that is the point of the format.

I’m confused at the “You ask two others if they have Brawl decks and it turns out you are all actually different formats!” Brawl means Standard, that was established at formation. That is a nonsensical scenario that requires a store to be stocked with idiots who don’t know what terms mean.

I feel that was a hypothetical covering "What if we admitted subdivisions, such as Standard Brawl (the current version), Modern/Extended Brawl, or Block Constructed Brawl? This would be a bad idea, let's not do that."

Yeah, my wife really wanted to do a Brawl deck featuring angels, but we are blocks away from Innistrad and it would take Modern Brawl to make her the deck she really wants to play.

Ghalta was tearing it up too, if I remember correctly. Lots of Ghalta and Baral decks topping at some Brawl event.

Hmmm, while that is fair (I personally think Brawl should've been like 8th Edition Up to cut out a lot of the broken stuff but still give lots of decks; or at the very least used Frontier not Standard) at the same time it was kinda made clear with the basis it's supposed to be Standard unless there are stated house rules.

Yah dude your wife is awesome. I wanted to mod the Kalemne, Disciple of Iroas Anthology deck with more of a Angel Tribal focus and recursion with Master Warcraft, Ghitu Chronicler, Emeria Shepherd and Hallowed Ground with other combat controlling cards like Blinding Angel and Stonehorn Dignitary to really bring Peace and Justice to the Multiverse. Avacyn, Angel of Hope with Worldslayer or Armageddon and Serra Avatar with On Serra’s Wings and Urza’s Ruinous Blast or just stomp someone with Warstorm Surge when she enters the battlefield. Alt win cons with Test of Endurance and Felidar Sovereign because Angels aren’t victorious through slaying innocents. Caged Sun with like Storm Herd and Entreat the Angels. Man it would be glorious.

Ghalta is (was) really good against the Baral decks because almost every card is must answer, and once you have a few dudes out, you can just cast Ghalta 3 or 4 times.

The divorce of the ban list is good and bad. Bad, because the more they distance it from standard, the less a lot of standard players will be interested. Good, because I don't want them trying to think about Brawl at all while balancing cards in new sets and Baral really was going to kill the format before it rotated.