Commander
Multiplayer · 100 Card Singleton
Commander is Magic’s most played paper format, and the easiest place to find a game. Build a 100 card deck around one legendary card, your commander, and play free for all games in pods of three to five. Big plays, table politics, and stories you’ll retell are the whole point.
The Rules
- Your commander leads the deck. It’s a legendary creature, a legendary Vehicle, or a legendary Spacecraft with a power and toughness box. A few cards simply say they can be your commander. (CR 903.3, 903.3a)
- It starts in the command zone, face up next to your library, where everyone can see it. (CR 903.6)
- You can cast it right from the command zone. Each cast after the first costs 2 extra generic mana. That’s the famous commander tax. (CR 903.8)
- Everyone starts at 40 life, so games run big and long. (CR 903.7)
- 21 combat damage from one commander takes a player out, totaled over the whole game and tracked per commander. (CR 903.10a)
- Everything else is regular Magic. Turns, combat, the stack, and mulligans all work exactly as you know them.
Deck Makeup
- Exactly 100 cards, and the commander is one of them. (CR 903.5a)
- Singleton: apart from basic lands, no two cards share a name. (CR 903.5b)
- Stay inside your commander’s colors. Every mana symbol on a card, cost and rules text alike, has to fit your commander’s color identity. (CR 903.4, 903.5c)
- No sideboard needed for casual play.
- A friendly starting skeleton: 36 to 38 lands, about 10 ramp, about 10 card draw, 8 to 10 removal, and the rest is whatever your deck loves doing. A rule of thumb, not a rule.
Tips
Power levels vary a lot, and a quick pregame chat smooths it out: what your deck does, how fast it wins, how much it interacts. The official 1 to 5 brackets exist for exactly this, so peek at the current definitions on the official Commander pages.
A preconstructed Commander deck is legal and playable right out of the box, and upgrading it a few cards at a time is the classic, low pressure way to learn deckbuilding.
You can’t fight three people at once. Point removal at the scariest thing on the table, not at whoever hit you last.
Watch Out For
An off-color symbol anywhere in the rules text, even an activation cost, keeps a card out of the deck. Give the whole card a read.
The extra 2 counts every earlier command zone cast that game, even if your commander died in between.
Noncombat damage doesn’t count toward the 21, and two different commanders never pool their damage.
Banned Cards
Commander keeps its own banned list, separate from every other format. Old or popular doesn’t mean legal, so give the list a quick look before you sleeve up. We don’t list banned cards here on purpose: banlists change, and a stale list is worse than none.
Official Banned & Restricted List