It feels like I talk a lot about commander on here and I feel like I’ve never really… explained it fully. What’s that, no one? You want me to? Well I am bored at work, so what the ■■■■.
Commander (sometimes called EDH) is a “casual” format of magic that focuses on deckbuilding and multiplayer play. It was created by a group of world tour judges way back when. They spent a lot of time together on the road and naturally, when they did, they’d play magic, because apparently they were all masochists who couldn’t separate work and pleasure time. However, being judges, they’d seen a lot of decks/formats and wanted to play cards that didn’t see a lot of play, so they came up with their own format to come up with more interesting mixes. They called it Elder Dragon Highlander, or EDH. The “Elder Dragon” portion comes from the fact that the first “commanders” were usually one of the elder dragons printed way back in days of yore.
The phrase “Highlander” was added because of the singleton nature of the format (more on that later, but the short version is “There can only be one”).
However their game eventually came to include any legendary creature. The format gained traction and tournaments as something fun to do between matches, and eventually developed enough of a following that Wizards bought the format so they could print cards specifically for it. They left the original judges in place and hired them to maintain the format’s rules and banlists, and renamed the format Commander.
So what sets commander apart from other MTG formats? Again, I’m glad you asked no one. You’re really inquisitive today, and I like that in my imaginary audience.
Typical MTG formats have a set of rules in deckbuilding. Those rules usually limit what sets your cards can be from, how big your deck can be (usually there’s no limit on max, but minimum is 60), and how many of one particular card you can have in the deck (usually 4) to encourage random play that doesn’t get stale.
Commander has these rules as well, but they differ wildly from other formats.
- A Commander deck must be exactly 100 cards (no more, no less).
- Commander decks follow the singleton build restraint (you can’t have more than one of any card, except for basic lands).
- One of those cards must be a Legendary Creature (a special creature that you can only have one of out at a time, usually representing a particular character in an MTG set) that is defined as your Commander.
- The remaining cards in the deck must match at least one color of the deck’s Commander’s “Color Identity” or be colorless.
- Any tournament legal magic card (that is not included in the format’s ban list) can be played.
The game is also played somewhat differently than other MTG formats.
A Commander game follows the standard MTG rules, except for the following:
- At the start of the game, each player places their commander in a special zone called the “command zone” (this does not exist in other formats [except for Conspiracy, but we wont talk about that here])
- As long as a player can pay their commander’s mana cost, they may cast their commander from the command zone at any time they could legally cast the card.
- Whenever a deck’s commander would be placed in the exile or graveyard zones, or would be shuffled into the player’s deck or placed into their hand, that player may instead choose to place it into the command zone.
- Each time the player does this, the card’s cost increases by two colorless mana.
- Each player starts the game at 40 life (in most formats, this is 20).
- If any player would take 21 damage from any other players commander over the course of the game, that player loses the game.
So there’s a lot to unwrap here. First let’s tackle the idea of a Commander.
Your commander is a representative of the deck you’re playing that you’ll basically always have access to play. Typically you want that card to also be representative of the deck or have an ability that greatly increases it’s playability, but this is not necessary. It’s not even necessary that you play your commander at some point in the game - you just have to have one to be able to build a deck. Each time your commander would leave play (in basically any way), you can throw it back into the command zone and cast it again later… but it will cost more, so protecting it is a good idea.
The other thing to tackle when talking about commander is the phrase “color identity” because it appears… almost in no other format. Typically when discussing a card’s color, you only care about the kind of mana that had to be spent to cast the card. Example: one of my favorite cards, Goblin Arsonist…
Is red. It costs red mana to cast and has a red border, so yeah.
Some cards have multiple colors. For instance, Dominus of Fealty and Dack’s Duplicate…
Are both red and blue.
However color identity is a bit different than actual color, as it represents all mana symbols on the card. I played a game last week against a Tasigur deck, which illustrates the difference pretty well.
Tas by himself is a black creature. However his color identity is Black, Blue, Green, because it contains all of those mana symbols on the card. In the case of that deck, the player can use cards of any of those colors, because they would matcha t least part of Tas’s color identity.
An important thing to note is that the deck can’t include cards that produce mana specifically outside of it’s color identity as well. For instance, you wouldn’t be able to put a Mountain into a Tasigur deck, because it produces red mana. However, you can use lands that produce any kind of color, like mana confluence…
Then when the game starts you can make that mana. It just can’t have the red mana symbol on it.
So… dafuq does all this mean?
The nature of the decks in commander is highly variable, mostly thanks to the high card count required by the format as well as the singleton rule. It would be very rare for you to meet someone with exactly your deck, even if you’re using the same commander and general strategy because of the variance included.
Additionally, the game is designed to go on a lot longer than an average magic game and play a bit slower. For example, a typical round in a standard tournament lasts an hour, and players are expected to get 3 matches (full games) in before time goes up. Occasionally one or two games will have a draw, but one match is usually easily doable. I played a commander game last week that lasted an hour and forty-five goddamn minutes. The reason is that because of the deckbuilding restraints, the decks are naturally slower, and because you start at double the normal life value it’s harder to put a player out of the game before they’re able to build some type of response.
One of my favorite aspects of the game however is that because of the slowdown, fun or interesting cards that otherwise wouldn’t be competitive in the least get a chance to really shine. Take another of my favorite cards, Rite of Replication.
On it’s own… this isn’t a great card. It costs 4 to put out a copy of a target creature on the board which is a cool ability blue gets all the time. The exciting thing in the card is the kicker (an additional cost that may be paid as you lay the card), which allows you to put five copies of that creature onto the battlefield rather than just one. However, to play this card with the kicker, it’d take 9 mana rather than 4. In most formats, if you hit 9 mana, you’re either playing a control deck, a ramp deck, or the game ended 3-4 turns ago.
So this card isn’t good in any format. Except commander, where’s its a goddamn staple. The ability to ■■■■ 5 of anything for one card is a great deal, and this card has won more games than Michael Jordan. Cards like this see loads of play in commander, and it’s become almost memetic when WOTC prints a high cost card with a unique ability that “it will see commander play”, because it probably wont almost anywhere else.
Finally probably the best aspect of this format is that it’s designed to be a multiplayer, round the kitchen table format. As long as your friends know the basic rules of magic, it takes maybe 5 minutes of explanation to toss them a deck and have them join in and be competitive, which is rare. The variance and variety of cards means that a high competency player could be put under the gun quick by a newbie, and have to really flex the ole brain noodle to get out of the jam. Newer players may have problems grasping cards or mechanics they haven’t seen before, but after the general rules are explained it can be quick to pick up, and is cheap or competitive as you’d like.
I figured I’d round this out with some humblebrags to show the variance of what you can do with the format, and to give my commanders some love.
My most competitive/quick deck is what I’m hoping to play tomorrow, and is piloted by Krenko, Mob Boss. The goal of the deck is to produce a lot of small, useless creatures and either overwhelm everyone else at the table or blow them up to blow everyone else up at the table.
My cheapest deck is (admittedly) a bit Janky, but I’m still pretty proud of what I was able to put together for around 90 bucks when I built my Olivia Volderen deck. This deck rotates around a vampire tribal theme and Olivia gives me the option to always pick and steal my opponents creatures.
My most expensive and complicated monstrosity has to be Riku, of Two Reflections. This deck is designed to ramp up quickly and then copy spells to gain multiple extra turns or to overrun the opponents with a bunch of creatures. I have two cards sideboarded into the deck for when it wants to get “serious”, both of which are win conditions on their own (Biovisionary and Deciever Exarch).
Finally, probably the one I’m most proud of at the moment is the one I’ve been tormenting people about. I recently converted my Jeleva deck into what I call “mirror match”, designed exclusively to steal, copy, and graverob everyone else at the table to death. It’s not great, but it’s fun as hell.
So there are a lot of different things to do or want to try out in the format, and again, the biggest benefit is you get to build how you want to. If anyone (or no one, for being so attentive) is interested in getting into it, I’m always up for tossing out deck/card ideas.
Also secretly enjoying infiltrating your thread with my usual irrelevance
