It is true that banning cards from the format too early can be disappointing for many players, but so does the opposite. Which sometimes requires action.

Prime Speaker Vannifar proved to be a very high level card. It is even now played in Modern, a faster format than Duel Commander, that doesn’t use the command zone, doesn’t have eternal cards, doesn’t use the singleton construction rule, has 60 cards instead of 99, etc.

Despite all those factors, the card is still played in that format, and so was it in Duel Commander, allowing overly fast combo wins that could even sometimes show a high resilience against spot removals, a lack of interaction that goes against the general philosophy of a healthy metagame.

Baral, Chief of Compliance has been around for two years now, and actually never ceased to be played. It constantly made good results, but has seen a slight decrease in play, until a few months ago, where it became a recurring top-performing deck again. Though the builds are often quite different from its echoing alter ego Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, that was banned in 2015 as a commander, too, it stayed for a while, but keeps pumping the “extra turns” archetypes, and High Tide-based decks.

Regarding those archetypes, “extra turns” decks with Baral, Chief of Compliance as a commander seem more toxic to us than non-Baral, Chief of ComplianceHigh Tide-based decks.

We also think banning a commander often solves problems more than banning a problematic card out of the other 99.