Commander

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It's Wednesday night. Big E, a dick, and everyone's favorite troll are all sitting down to play their weekly game of Paradox Poker. Sadly, the Deceiver couldn't make it this week because he was too busy feeding his friends to their teamkilling fucktard brother, and he had the goddamn deck because someone couldn't be trusted not to let this asshole play with it. Then the Emperor remembers a game he once saw one of his minions playing with some of his troops that looked pretty fun. 10,000 years in, around Tzeench's 22nd consecutive turn, good old Cegorach got bored and decided to troll everyone by hopping back to 2011 and let the whole of the human race in on the game. The result: Commander

Commander, known to oldfags and nerd-hipsters as EDH, is a format of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering. A drastic departure from standard MtG formats, Commander imposes a number of restrictions on decks which in turn require a very different approach to deck building. Originally a homebrew game mode called Elder Dragon Highlander, it was formatted for larger games with more than just two players (though it can be played 1v1 like normal Magic). Because the Commander originated as a fan made format and grew to significant popularity before being adopted as official by Wizards of the Coast, there are widely varied house rules and ban lists which can easily turn the game into something great or something that makes you weep blood. If you're going to play Commander, make sure you determine what rules you are going to use before the start of play, lest you cause massive and prolonged arguments leading to butt hurt and potential violence.

Commander is an intensely political game. Constantly shifting alliances and treacherous back stabbing can be expected in any game involving more than two players. Even players who are close friends can rapidly descend into rage when an alliance shifts to prevent them from winning on their next turn, or when they are gang-raped by their opponents because they brought a $15000 deck to the table. This is another key point about Commander: Unlike certain other neckbeard games by some greedy assholes, a good game of commander doesn't require blowing a whole paycheck on game components. While an expensive deck may have incredible power, and $5000 of the best cards in Magic will certainly improve your deck's win-rate in 1v1 games, a couple of opponents with $10 decks with excellent synergy and the right handful of bulk rares and decent uncommons mixed in will almost invariably team up to crush your costs-as-much-as-a-car Spike deck just to make you mad.

So what makes Commander unique enough that players drop the core game entirely to become commander players?

The Rules

In a commander game, player take control of an army under the command of a legendary creature. Any legendary creature can be named as a deck's Commander, and immediately gets its own special zone (the aptly named Command Zone), where it sits when out of play.

With the release of Commander 2014, a specific set of Planeswalkers may now be taken as commanders, in place of a Legendary Creature. These Planeswalkers all clearly state this fact on the card, so don't try to be sneaky.

Color Identity

The Commander restricts the color(s) playable in the deck to those of its color identity. Color identity is best described as any color who's mana symbol appears on the card in question, and a commander's deck can only contain cards with the same color identity.

For example: Rafiq of the Many is a legendary creature with White, Blue and Green mana symbols on the card. His color identity is, therefore, White Blue Green. A player may use any (unbanned) card in a Rafiq deck, so long as it is White, Blue, Green, or some combination of the three, or if it is colorless (artifacts, eldrazi, etc). His deck may NOT contain any cards on which a Red or Black mana symbol appear. A slightly more confusing case occurs regarding lands. Non-basic lands may have a color identity. This means that an Overgrown Tomb has a color identity of Green Black, and so cannot be included in our Rafiq deck. Basic lands, however, do NOT have a color identity. That said, they may only produce colors of mana which are within your commander's color identity. Any other mana they would produce is colorless. Land names also do not contribute to color identity. A colorless artifact which says "search your library for a Swamp..." may be played in our Rafiq deck, despite the fact that a Swamp would only produce colorless mana! Confused yet? Don't worry, because here's the best bit! Color words do not give a card color identity. That is, if a card says "Red" or "Black", regardless of context, those words do not specify a color identity for the card. A card which says "Search your library for a Red creature..." can be played in Rafiq's deck despite the fact that the creature you are searching for may not!

The Deck

A Commander deck provides a slightly different set of construction rules to players, in addition to the color restrictions.

• A Commander deck must contain exactly 100 cards, including the Commander itself.
  

• A Commander deck may contain NO MORE THAN ONE COPY OF ANY GIVEN CARD (hence the Highlander aspect of the original name). You may have all 5 versions of Ajani, but you can only have 1 Ajani Goldmane.

• The Commander format has its own specific ban list. These cards are banned in addition to the standard list of globally banned cards (Un- cards). Make sure you check this list before you play, especially if you're new to Commander. If you don't, you'll inevitably encounter the fucktard who plays Biorhythm on turn three to kill everyone. At the present time, the following cards are banned from Commander:
  

• Ancestral Recall
• Balance
• Biorhythm
• Black Lotus
• Channel
• Coalition Victory
• Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
• Fastbond
• Gifts Ungiven
• Griselbrand
• Karakas
• Library of Alexandria
• Limited Resources
• Metalworker
• Mox Emerald
• Mox Jet
• Mox Pearl
• Mox Ruby
• Mox Sapphire
• Painter's Servant
• Panoptic Mirror
• Primeval Titan
• Protean Hulk
• Recurring Nightmare
• Shaharazad
• Sundering Titan
• Sway of the Stars
• Sylvan Primordial
• Time Vault
• Time Walk
• Tinker
• Tolarian Academy
• Trade Secrets
• Upheaval
• Worldfire
• Yawgmoth's Bargain
  

• In addition, the following cards are banned from the game, but only as Commanders. They may still be played as cards in the main deck:

• Braids, Cabal Minion
• Erayo, Soratami Ascendant
• Kokusho, the Evening Star
• Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary

• A deck may only contain cards which match all or some subset of the Commander's color identity. Cards outside of this color identity may not be played in the deck.

The Game

• Players start with 40 life.
• Damage dealt to a player by a Commander counts as Commander Damage (formerly known as General Damage). If any one commander ever deals 21 damage to a single player, that player immediately loses regardless of their life total. It is important to note that each commander tracks damage to each player separately. This means that if two players deal 15 and 6 Commander damage to a third player separately, the third player does not lose, even if both of the first two players control the same commander or one player clones his commander.

The Command Zone

• Each commander has his own special Command Zone. This is in essence the same as the Removed From The Game zone, or the Really Fucking Removed From The Game Forever zone. Creatures other than a commander cannot be sent to the Command Zone, and only the commander who started in a specific command zone may be sent to that Command Zone.
  

• A commander starts in his Command Zone at the beginning of a game. It can be cast from this zone as if it were in its owner's hand, but may not be targeted by other players while it is in the Command Zone.
  

• If a commander dies, or is removed from the game by an RFG spell or effect, it can be put into the Command Zone instead of being placed into the graveyard or RFG zone. When this happens, the commander gets a "flag", an imaginary marker that denotes the number of times the commander has been sent to the command zone as an alternative to death or removal. A commander can be recast from the Command Zone, but the owner must pay 2 additional colorless mana for each flag on the commander. A commander does NOT gain a flag if its owner chooses to place it in the graveyard as any other creature would be.

• A commander may NOT be sent to the command zone as an alternative to being returned to its owner's hand or deck. If either of these effects would occur, the commander is treated like a normal creature until they hit the field, graveyard, or RFG zone. Bouncing a commander to a red or white player's deck, then shuffling it away is an excellent way to induce massive amounts of Rage. NOT ANY MORE, a player may now opt to send a commander that would be bounced or tucked away into the commander zone.

The Bad Rules

Due to the nature of Commander, the games tend to be slower and more heavily based around pulling hilarious bullshit rather than formulaically winning every game on turn 3 or 4 with the same combo. Unfortunately, because Wizards in their infinite wisdom decided to only carry over some rules from the homebrew, you can still pull complete bullshit and induce tons of rage. Examples include:

• The fact that players die on 11 poison counters, despite having double life.

• Felidar Sovereign's life total win condition is unchanged, despite having double life.

• Serra Ascendant starts out at full power because players have double life.

Noticing a pattern yet? Things like this lead players rapidly to create their own...

House Rules

Most house rules are made for the purpose of correcting shitty rules. A player at the author's LGS often stated these as "rules which increase the fun factor of the game, or remove an un-fun factor". Terrible use of the English language, but still a valid point. Commander is meant to be primarily a fun format played with friends over beer and pizza with the intent of causing copious amounts of rage and maximizing the level of bullshit which can occur. To this end, here are some of the common house rules for Commander:

The Big One

Far and away the most common house rule in Commander is that all life total requirements, and the total number of poison counters necessary to kill a player, are doubled. This prevents assholes from playing a Blightsteel Colossus on turn three (with haste and sac-at-the-end-of-turn, of course) to kill a player before the game has really gotten under way. This isn't fun, it isn't clever, it's just a dick move and everyone hates that guy. This rule also removes the need to house-ban cards like Felidar Sovereign and Sera Ascendant, because they will require double the life total to "go off".

A less common version of this rule also doubles set life totals for certain other cards. The examples of this include Sorin and Magister Sphinx, which canonically both set a player's life total to 10, setting their life total to 20 instead. This prevents dickery on a similar scale to the aforementioned Blightsteel incident, where a player can be almost completely taken out of the game in the first few turns by cheating an artifact into play temporarily. However, since this does not literally remove the player like Blightsteel, it is less common as a house rule.

Other Popular House Rules

• Banned Commanders:
  

Commonly, players will ban commanders they feel are particularly stupid in nature. These are usually commanders who force an entire play group to collectively and drastically alter their play style in order to avoid being beaten every time. While some, including the author, feel that this is in a way the point of MtG, others feel that if an entire group has to respond by heavily altering their decks to deal with your one recastable creature, that creature needs a ban. Common bans include:

• Uril Miststalker. This fucker can shut down entire play groups who don't have sufficient enchantment targeting removal cards.
• Jenara, Asura of War. Three cost flyer with permanent self pumping in WG can reliably kill a player on turn 5 in a good deck.
• Any Eldrazi. Because, depending on your house rules, an Edlrazi commander can only be played in a colorless deck with only non-basic lands, and they're full of bullshit if they can successfully be recast, players often ban the use of Eldrazi as commanders.

• Banned, Unbanned or Modified-Type Cards

Another common policy is to change the type assigned to a card by making a non-legendary card legendary, or to ban/unban cards that players feel should/should not be on the banned cards list:

• Platinum Angel was a common card which was assigned legendary status prior to the M14 Legendary Rule change, since having multiple Platinum Angels on the battlefield at once literally stalemates a game.
• Hinder is often banned in play groups which contain a Uril Miststalker deck as players feel that it is used specifically to target their deck.
• The Nephilim cycle of creatures are often assigned pseudo-legendary status to make them usable as commanders. They are the only four-color creatures in Magic, and there is only one per four-color wedge. Combine this with the fact that each has a cost of four specified, different colors, and players tend to feel that they are valid for use as legendary creatures.
• Like the Nephilim above, some more casual playgroups will allow you to run certain non-creature legendary permanents as your commander, like Genju of the Realm, a legendary WUBRG aura enchantment that turns one of your lands into a creature, or double faced cards like Elbrus/Withengar and Westvale Abbey/Ormendahl which are not truly legendary creatures, due to the front facing side not being legendary, or even a creature.
• Some particularly butthurt play groups ban Aura Shards because they are scared of a little enchantment-based enchantment destruction. That said, it is a very powerful card if used correctly, and if you're a reasonable player who doesn't ban it, you should be prepared to kill it the moment it his the field.
• Play groups with particularly deep pockets sometimes unban power-nine cards from their play groups in order to speed games by improving their ability to pull massive bullshit.
• Eventually if your play group is in to the trickery and dickery aspect of Commander as much as many, someone will also convince you all to unban Shaharazad. DO NOT DO IT. Playing a commander sub-game may sound fun, but by the 5th hour of continuous Commander sub-games on that player's every turn, you'll end up so angry that even his honorable angryness will be impressed.