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 awesome 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 (or Two if you have partner commanders, but thats just stupid.) 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. Despite the fact that cards with hybrid mana costs can be played using either of the mana symbols that are part of the hybrid symbols, they still count as both for the color identity and for the purposes of identity-related exclusion. So Rafiq's deck is allowed to use Snakeform or Selesnya Guildmage, because their hybrid mana costs include green and blue and green and white, respectively. It can't use Unmake or Double Cleave, even though their hybrid symbols include white, because they also include colors that Rafiq is not.

An equally 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 with the exception of basic lands (hence the Highlander aspect of the original name). You may have multiple versions of Ajani (say, Ajani, Caller of the Pride and Ajani Goldmane) but you can only have 1 Ajani Goldmane. There are currently two cards that can skirt around this restriction; Relentless Rats, and Shadowborn Apostle.
• 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 Commander format has its own specific ban list. though as it is a casual format and no one has any say over what you do at the kitchen table, you can make your own banlist. 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, or someone decides to become the fun police in a format that was designed to be non competitive and fun. At the present time, the following cards are banned from Commander (We've also given you a reson why their banned for context.):

• Ancestral Recall: Banned for being part of the Power Nine
• Balance: Banned for being anything But.
• Biorhythm: Banned because people can kill people on Turn 3 with enough ramp.
• Black Lotus: See ancestral Recall
• Braids, Cabal Minion: Banned for Being played on Turn 1-2 and locking the rest of the table out of the game.
• Channel: Banned for too much Fast mana
• Chaos Orb: Banned for overly compicated rules issues
• Coalition Victory: Banned for being an Auto include in all 5 color commander decks
• Emrakul, the Aeons Torn: Banned for being too good a creature to exist in a Very Creature Centric format where their are so many ways to ramp/cheat in creatures.
• Erayo, Soratami Ascendant: Banned for being Far too oppresive
• Falling Star: See Chaos Orb
• Fastbond: See Channel
• Gifts Ungiven: Banned for being such a powerful tutor
• Griselbrand: See Emrakul, The Aeons torn, And because Kaalia of the vast was capable of running it at one time (unsuprisingly that was the time When that deck was at its most powerful in the format.)
• Karakas: Banned for Bouncing Legendary creatures in a format Built around legendary creatures
• Leovold, Emmisary of Trest: Banned for being far too oppresive, easy to break and overall representing everything commander players do not like.
• Library of Alexandria: Banned for being a powerful draw engine of Vintage strength.
• Limited Resources: Banned for locking down the game oppresively. Sorry Marshal Sutcliffe.
• Mox Emerald: See ancestral Recall
• Mox Jet: See ancestral Recall
• Mox Pearl: See ancestral Recall
• Mox Ruby: See ancestral Recall
• Mox Sapphire: See ancestral Recall
• Painter's Servant: Banned for being a combo piece with Grindstone
• Panoptic Mirror: Banned because of Enabling infinite turns with [any https://magiccards.info/query?q=Time+stretch&v=card&s=cname] Extra Turn spell.
• Primeval Titan: Banned because the Ramp it offers is simply too good for commander. see Inkmoth Nexus and Kessig wolf run.
• Prophet of Kruphix: Banned for being run in every blue and green deck, enabling players to dump creatures on their opponents turns.
• Recurring Nightmare: Banned for comboing off with many cards like Survival of the fittest.
• Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary: Banned for making green decks Too fast.
• Shaharazad: Banned for causing headaches and excessive Anger.
• Sundering Titan: Banned for being capable of destroying all your opponents lands by blinking it a few times.
• Sway of the Stars: Banned for being a Troll card.
• Sylvan Primordial: Banned for being a combination of sundering titan and Primeval titan.
• Time Vault: Banned for enabling infinite turns.
• Time Walk: See Ancestral Recall.
• Tinker: Banned for being the strongest artifact tutor and being capable of Cheating in [1] Artifact creatures.
• Tolarian Academy: Banned For enabling insane amounts of mana with cards like over Matter and Mycosynth Lattice.
• Trade Secrets: Banned for letting 2 player draw their entire decks.
• Upheaval: See Sway of the stars.
• Worldfire: See Sway of the Stars
• Yawgmoth's Bargain: Banned for being a better version of Necropotence.

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 would leave the battlefield by any means (be it bounce, exile, destroy, sac, death, or even tucking), it can be put into the Command Zone instead of being placed into wherever it would have gone. 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.

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 10 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 Serra 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

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:

• Kaalia of the Vast. MASTER OF MOTHERFUCKING CRUELTIES. and the fact that she cheats in Angels, demons AND dragons
• Narset, Enlightened Master. this deck is unfair to say the least. does a very similar thing to Kaalia, but instead of cheating in a angel, demon or dragon, it allows the player at their best to be casting 4 NONCREATURE SPELLS FOR FREE on every attack, and usually that these spells are extra turns or extra combat step spells, and that the deck is usually creatureless and wins with either commander damage or an infinite combo, and the fact that the commander has Hexproof to boot, usually has most people saying "Fuck you! I'm not playing against that!" (hey that sounds familiar... )
• Gaddock teeg. this deck is what we call a "Hate deck". the premise behind it is playing cards that prevent people from doing "unfair" things (Drawing extra cards, blowing things up etc), but your playing So many of these "fair" cards that it stops anyone from doing anything at all. allow us to explain something. you know how control's philosophy is "you want to do that? ill do this so your stopped dead in your tracks!" , hate decks are very similar and usully run by people who hate control, a hate decks philosophy is "i do this so YOU CANNOT do that." Its almost as if their becoming the thing they dislike... needless to say, this deck is built around stopping anyone from doing fun and crazy things, in a format that was specifically made for those purposes.
• Ghave: guru of spores. Not only are +1/+1 counters, and Abzan in general PURE degeneracy, but this commander combo's so many cards it't not funny. take a look at earthcraft, ashnods altar, phyrexian altar,and any token doubler, if you dont like infinite tokens, and infinite +1/+1 counter on each of their creatures, kindly tell them to fuck off. try playing aether snap and watch them shit bricks.
• The Mimeoplasm. nowhere near as hated as the other commanders so far, but he is still REALLY fucking strong. a notorius reanimator or voltron graveyard centric deck, usually seen exiling a phyrexian dreadnought or deaths shadow and a blighted agent. which will usually get you kicked out of playgroups. this kids is why you run graveyard hate!
• Zur, the Enchanter. Zur is REALLY obscenely good. either you respect this guy or you loathe him. the deck is built around all manner of 3 CMC or less enchantments like Necropotence, grasp of fate, diplomatic immunity, bitterblossom, ghostly prison, rhystic study, rest in peace and greater auramancy to ensure they stay in play. usually wins with an infinite mill win con, some scary combo, or sometimes even opalescence (though rarely)
• Animar, soul of elements. this deck is REALLY fucked. the whole point is buffing up animar so you can reduce the cost of creatures by leaps and bounds results in dropping a blightsteel into Kozilek butcher of truth into Ulamog and Ulamog the ceaseless hunger for FREE, which is never considered fun for anyone except the person piloting it.
• Atraxa, Praetors voice: atraxa is FUCKED. she will either kill you witha swarm of creatures with infinite +1/+1 counters, play nothing but planeswalkers and eventually generate enough of a boardstate to swing in and kill everyone at once, or she will poison you to death. whats sad is that she is phyrexian and /tg/ loves phyrexia, but we certainly HATE her.
• Breya, etherium sculptor: people have pretty much always hated artifact decks, oldfags especially as it reminds them of a Dark and terrible time in magics history when Mirrodin was in standard. Breya decks are so oppresive due to them either dumping giant artifact creatures into play or comboing off with numerous infinte combos or swinging in with infinite thopters. the scary thing about her is figuring out what varient you will be up against. it also doesnt help that the sheer amount of value she generates will more than likely bounce you back from the brink of defeat and win you the game.
• sharum, the hegemon See above, minus the red.
• Karador, ghost chieftan: despite being hated this guy is actually pretty coollooking as a commander. the heart of any karador deck is the graveyard, this deck will either be some sort of dredge deck, reanimator deck or graveyard value deck, usually winning with sepulchral primordial, craterhoof behemoth and elesh norn. Here is a video of karador in action, caution you may weep blood.
• Oloro, Ageless Ascetic. The definitive lifegain AND control deck of the format. Felidar sovereign and test of endurance is all we will say because speaking about this deck further will likely make you as angry as a khornate berserker.
• Derevi, Empyrial Tactician. a prime example of a flexible commander, think of derevi as Several different flavors of fuck. the real reason people hate her is not because she evades command tax (which is annoying) its the deck people build around her. having a deck where you play cards like stasis and natures will combined with Tabernacle and a vigilance enabler will pretty much instantly get you kicked out of your group.
• Grand arbiter Augistin IV. The ULTIMATE pick for azorius control, right off the bat he taxes your opponents while reducing the cost of your spells, if you like the colors white and blue and you love control, you will LOVE this guy. if not, a more appropriate name would be "The fun police."
• Uril, the Miststalker. A notorius commander built around putting as many auras on your untargetable commander to make it Fuckheug, then watch your opponents gaze in horror as you sit back and oneshot/pick them off via commander damage one by one for the rest of the game. pack enchantment removal and watch him cry.
• Jenara, Asura of War. a notorius commander for Singleton legacy 1v1 commander, just put all the best cards in legacy that arent in rakdos colours in the deck and your good to go.
• Sliver Overlord: Do we need to say anymore?
• Nekusar, The mindrazer: Trust us, we have played this commander, and he is as table murdering/absolutely hillarious as everyone claims he is.

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, the Miststalker deck as players feel that it is used specifically to target their deck.
• The Nephilim cycle of creatures were often assigned pseudo-legendary status to make them usable as commanders. Prior to Commander 2016, they were 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. n
• 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. did we mention that Slivers have their own version of it? another reason why sliver overlord is feared by every other deck in the format, including itself.
• 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.

Gallery

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  SURRAK PUNCH MANY BEARS! surraks only friends are bears, surrak tragic figure...