I was referring to multiple divisions doing it all at the same time. In the corporate world, in my experience, that's because there's a new VP who's hot to put their stamp on things or someone dropped a silly amount of money on a consultant and now feels obligated to enact some of their suggestions.
Wizards have had the Pauper format panel since early 2022. According to the announcement, they were formed because the format was fairly popular, but not popular enough for Wizards to dedicate enough internal resources to it so they figured it was better to have prominent community folks provide input on bans and such.
Commander is somewhat a different story. Commander, aka Elder Dragon Highlander, had historically been handled outside of Wizards' purview, by a 5-member Commander Rules Committee backed up by a Commander Advisory Group. It started as an oddball rules variant but had, I believe, become the most common way of playing, and Wizards had been providing more and more direct support for it, with Commander-specific preconstructed decks and sets. Anyhow, the CRC had historically been fairly restrictive with bans, but last year they handed down four at once. One of these was expected, with a card that had proven to be both annoying and excessively powerful in multiple formats (Nadu, Winged Wisdom). But the other three had been around for a fair while and were considered staples of the format, at least for those who want powerful decks: Mana Crypt, Dockside Extortionist, and in particular Jeweled Lotus. Because of the predatory secondary market for Magic Cards, these were quite expensive, but having them banned in Commander made the prices drop – the no-frills version of Jeweled Lotus went from about $90 to about $30.
This made a lot of crazy people who thought of their Magic collection as an investment, as opposed to a collection of game pieces, very angry, and because of the Internet people blamed the CRC for costing them lots of money, sometimes even leading to death threats. As a consequence, the CRC didn't really think they wanted to deal with that nonsense anymore, and asked Wizards to take over the format, and now Wizards is responsible for it with the Commander Format Panel (to some degree but not wholly consisting of the old CRC and CAG) advising.
The Pauper format panel seems to be doing pretty fine. The jury is still out on the Commander format panel, but they did continue the former CRC's work on a system that's supposed to be a shorthand for measuring how strong your deck is, to provide a starting point for table discussions about appropriate decks, and that seems to be working out fine.
So if something like that is what Wizards has in the works for D&D as well, I'm all for it.
