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If you have friends who play Magic: the Gathering, more than like you’ve probably been asked to pick up and play Commander. It is the game’s most popular format after all. Well, if you’re interested in this awesome format, then we have you covered. We’ll be going through how to play Commander, including the rules for building a deck and any format specific rules that you’ll need to know as well as some great resources to help you build a deck.
If you’re needing to know how to play Magic in general, then we also have a guide for that. This guide will build upon the information in that guide. There’s a lot of room for self expression in Commander so it’s a wonderful way to play Magic in a way that’s fun for you. That being said, let’s dive into everything!
How to play Commander
At it’s core, the foundation of a commander game is very similar to a normal constructed game of Magic. But there’s some stipulations around Commander that make it very different too.
- Commander decks much be 100 total cards
- Commander is a singleton format
- Commander can be play 1v1 or multiplayer
- Players start with 40 life in Commander
- A player can lose the game if they have taken 21 damage from any one Commander creature.
As we said before, there are a few stipulations that make Commander games different. We’ll save the “deck specific” notes for the next section, but let’s talk about the game focused notes. Commander is typically a more casual, multiplayer format that is about building a fun and synergistic deck. That being said there is a competitive commander format, cEDH, which is a 1v1 format.
In Commander, players will start with 40 life instead of 20. If you take 21 combat damage from any single commander, you lose the game. One other thing to consider, which is more a rule of multiplayer formats, rather than Commander specifically, is that the player who is going first will draw a card on their first turn. Now, let’s talk about how to build a Commander deck.
How to build a Commander deck
When you’re looking at building a Commander deck, there’s a few different options you have. First, you can buy one of the many preconstructed Commander decks that Wizards of the Coast releases every set. You can find these at your local game store, big box stores, and online retailors such as Amazon or TCGPlayer.
The other option that you have is to build one yourself from scratch. First, you’ll want to pick a Commander, which is a Legendary creature that isn’t on the Commander banned list. On occasion a Planeswalker card may say that it can be your Commander.
Once your commander is picked, it’s time to start building your deck. There’s a few rules to follow when building your deck.
- Your deck must be 100 cards in total, 99 cards in the main deck plus your Commander. If you have partner commanders, then you’ll have 98 cards in your main deck, plus your two commanders.
- Your deck may only contain one copy of any non-basic land cards, unless otherwise stated on the card (ex. Shadowborn Apostle).
- Cards in your deck must follow your commander’s color identity. This means that cards in your deck can only have the same colors as your commander. If a colored mana symbol is printed anywhere on the card, except in rules text, that isn’t the colors of your commander, then you cannot use that card.
- For example, if you were using Krenko, Mob Boss as your commander, you cannot use Ancient Grudge in your deck, as it has a green mana symbol in its Flashback cost.
Outside of this, you can pretty much build your commander deck how you want. But there are so many cards that you have to choose from, what’s the best way to figure out which deck to build? Well, next we’ll go through some awesome resources that you’ll want to use to help you build your deck.
Community Resources
One of the most useful resources that exists for Commander players is EDHREC.com. They have a massive database of all of the cards that people are using as their Commanders and in their decks. You can even look for specific deck themes, or cards with a specific type or theme to help you find cards that you may not have considered before.
But let’s say you know what colors you want to play, but aren’t sure what commanders are out there. You can search by color combinations and EDHREC will give you all the available Commanders for those colors.
Once you pick your Commander, EDHREC will give you a list of new cards that could go in the deck, as well as some of the most common cards that are being used. It will also show a “synergy” percentage, meaning that while the card may be viable for the deck, it may not have as much synergy with the overall theme or other cards in the deck.
Once you’ve made some of these baseline decisions, where how would you go about planning your build? Well, there’s a couple places we recommend doing this. Archidekt and Moxfield are both online deck building tools that give you the ability to have a visual representation of your deck. This can help making building significantly easier. On top of that, if you want to play Commander on Spelltable, but don’t have your deck in paper, you can play using Moxfield.
And that’s all there is to it folks! Commander is a very fun format, especially if you have friends to play with. If you’re looking for some Commander ideas from the new set, Wilds of Eldraine, the check out our best Wilds of Eldraine Commanders guide!
