Commander

Commander

Originally named Elder Dragon Highland (EDH), Commander is a casual multiplayer format designed by judges so they would have something to play after a long day of judging. Each player chooses a legendary creature, to be their Commander/General, and constructs one hundred card decks, including your Commander, with the colours of your deck being set by the colours in your chosen Commander's mana cost. Unlike other formats, your starting life total in Commander is forty life, to ensure longer games and allowing more interactions than just attacking your opponent to happen. Like in other formats, if you reduce you opponent's life total to zero they are out of the game. Commander's addition to this is; if your Commander racks up twenty one points of damage to any one player, that player is out of the game, similar to infect damage.

This format consists of a lot of cards, some reaching all the way back to Alpha, giving people the chance to play with older cards. Being a casual format, players are more inclined to have fun and do cool things, rather than finding the most efficient way to win. This results in cards that you may have dismissed in any competitive capacity showing up as well as a low barrier to entry for newer players.


This format started out life as Elder Dragon Highlander because the founding judges used the five Legendary Elder Dragons as their commanders.

                                                  

                     

As you can see, each of the Elder Dragons has three different colours in their mana cost, allowing each player to have access to three colours decks. As this format evolved over the years, the choice of Commander has now been expanded to cover any legendary creature, maybe it has one colour in it's mana cost, maybe it has five, the choice is yours.

After choosing your Commander you now need to construct your deck of one hundred cards, no more, no less, with your Commander counting as one of those cards. The other ninety nine cards can be whatever you want as long as they share a colour with your Commander. There is also a restriction on the number of non-basic land cards with the same name you can play, that number is one. Yes, it's a singleton format with variable colour restrictions which leads to some interesting situations. You might have a card in hand that can save you to fight another turn, but as soon as you use it everyone will know you wont be drawing that card again. On the other hand, you can leave your fate in the hands of the other players at the table, maybe running a bigger risk.

This format plays very well with three or more players, although playing one on one games are also great fun, giving people the opportunity to build bridges with other players to team up on another strongly positioned, but now outnumbered opponent. Commander is incredibly fun game to play with friends, using in game politics to dissuade possible attacks at your face, or personal interactions with those friends to persuade a swift beat down on someone else. Convincing opposing players that you're on their side is integral in Commander. Promising safety in exchange for targeting anyone that isnt you, only to go back on your word at the first opportunity, might seem pretty straight forward, but you run the risk of it backfiring and then facing down three other players, more than happy to put an end to your treacherous hi jinks. In every game you have to find the balance of helping other players while still finding ways of winning yourself, not to say there wont be a deck that makes everything random and quirky. You should be careful not to let them get too carried away though, then realise that after all the fun and quirky dust has settled, three out of four players have no permanents or cards in hand say, and the one player that has enough resources to wipe out all opposition and, probably because of sod's law, that player wont be you.

Because of the singleton nature of the format, every game has different scenarios even if you play against the same players with the same decks over multiple games. Yes, you can build a deck that tutors for everything it needs and then combo's off and kills everyone, and in Commander finding ninety nine cards that allow you to do that is easy. The problem with this way of thinking is, if it doesn't go off without a hitch you're on a highway to being public enemy number one, mainly for taking the fun out of the game. This format really gives players the chance to channel their creativity into building the deck they always wanted to build. You know when you see a card that has a huge effect but comes with a high mana cost, your mind starts running through ways to use it in decks or cards to couple it with. A lot of times you have to concede that most of those cards are useless in the environment you were looking at them in, but Commander is the place for those cards to shine.

Building a deck in Commander can tricky. You have so many things that you can do, so many different Commanders you can chose and so many cards you can play, it can be hard to settle on one strategy. A lot of first decks I have seen are five colour Commanders, giving access to all the colours and therefore any card. Most of these decks are boring to me. Having a Commander like Child of Alara or Karona, The False God, despite having global effects, I feel just lead to messy decks and greedy card choices, not to mention your lands being all over the place. Yes my first Commander deck was a five colour build and contained Eye of the Storm to have fun and win while assembling a combo, leading to a house ban of the card and me for a short time. That gave me time to refine my play style and change up my Commander; Sharuum, the Hegemon which remains to this day. I settled on Sharuum because of the artifact theme, artifacts give you a lot of different choices and abilities you see, some add mana to your mana pool, usually varying in colour, some draw you cards or provide an answer to any opposing problems you may have. Because most of these artifacts are colourless they are very versatile, being played in most Commander decks, like Sol Ring or Sensei's Divining Top. My thinking was, I could concentrate the power of those colourless cards, resulting in a streamlined but still interactive and fun deck.

 

There isn't any rotation in Commander, so you don't lose any cards from your selection, however there is a banned list. A list consisting of a selection of cards deemed too powerful to be played, like the five Moxen for obvious reasons. This means the card selections are unlikely to change until new sets are released. Even then, most changes will be trade ups of older cards that already occupy a slot in your deck, that is to say; finding a new card that serves the same function as a previous card, but has an extra ability or lower mana cost.

 

I will be looking deeper into Commander in future articles, including looking into the most fun Commanders you could chose. In the mean time, keep checking back to Game Changers for more updates.