A Compleat History of the Magic: the Gathering Metagame, Supplemental: Commander's Road to Hell
On September 24 2024, the Commander Rules Committee put out their quarterly update detailing the newest batch of changes to the format. These changes consisted of banning four cards from the format: Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus, Mana Crypt, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom.
Less than a week later, the Commander RC – the independent group of fans who had controlled the game’s most popular format for over a decade – was no more.
What follows is an attempt at understanding how the world's most popular card game got to this point.
A brief explanation of Commander
If you're unfamiliar: Commander is a casual Magic variant that has, in the last 10 years, become the most popular and widespread form of the game. In Commander, players play free-for-all multiplayer games, typically with four players, using a deck of 100 singleton cards – every card, other than basics, has to be unique.
What sets Commander apart from other formats is the presence of the titular Commanders – legendary creatures that act as the 'general' of a player's deck. Commanders start play not in the deck but in the 'command zone', from where they can be played as if they were in hand; essentially, players start a game of commander with their commander in hand.
Commanders that are removed from play are then sent back to the command zone, from where they can be recast – although it costs more mana to do so each subsequent time. Players start at 40 life. This leads to long, slow games that are intended as much more of a social experience than a sstraightforward game of Magic, where the point of the game lies more in the moment-to-moment feeling of interactions than in strategic play.
Commander, notably, was – until this week – maintained by an independent group of community members, rather than by Wizards of the Coast. These volunteer fans were responsible for card bannings and rule changes, in addition to advising Wizards on the products that were released for the format.
The origins of Commander
The earliest form of Commander probably originates with a 1996 Duelist article. The magazine, at this time, would publish fan-submitted rules for variants and alternate formats. 'Elder Dragon Legend Wars,' credited to one Jesus M. Lopez, is a very clear precursor to what would become Commander.
This proto-Commander is still very different from what would emerge later, but the core ideas are the same: Pick a legendary, multi-color creature as your 'general'. Build a singleton deck around them. Battle it out in a free-for-all format.
But the 'true' Commander format originates with a group of players in Alaska. Local player Adam Staley is credited with codifying what would be known as Elder Dragon Highlander, or EDH. A description of the format appears on the web in 2002, implying to me that people had been playing this for a while already at the time.
Staley denies having been inspired by the Duelist article, but it's pretty clear that these ideas were just in the air in the first decade of casual Magic play; indeed, early on, Wizards actively encouraged players to develop their own formats and variant rules.
Staley's version is, however, much more similar to modern Commander. Decks are 100-card singleton, rather than the more complicated card restrictions from the original Duelist article; the main deckbuilding restriction is that cards must match the general's colors.
However, one critical difference between this and the later version: In the original Alaskan EDH, generals had to be, specifically, Legends from the actual set Legends. This functionally restricted generals to a small collection of bad cards – all the Legends legends are overcosted creatures with underwhelming abilities. Furthermore, they stipulate that "only one deck for each Legends legend may exist in your local area (that means all of Alaska!)".
In early Magic, 'highlander' was a general term for singleton formats – as in, 'there can only be one.' EDH would, much later, be renamed 'Commander' to avoid any trademark implications.
Adam Staley, of course, called dibs on Nicol Bolas for himself.
EDH's spread to the broader Magic community is credited mainly to one man: Sheldon Menery, a longtime Magic judge. During the early 2000s, Menery was in the USAF, stationed in Anchorage; there he came into contact with EDH. A few years later he was a high-level judge with a column in the extremely popular Magic website Star City Games, which is where he originally introduced the format.
Pretty soon, EDH was spreading like wildfire through the Pro Tour community – specifically, the judges. Magic's circuit of high-level events functions only through an army of mostly volunteer judges, who adjudicate the game's complex rules and manage the large-scale tournaments. Those judges are, themselves, heavily-invested players – though often they are much more casual players. After all, you can't compete in a tournament that you're judging. A format designed for long, languid, casual play sessions in the backstage of these major Magic events was a pretty great fit for the judge community, who acted as the early evangelists for the new format.
Menery's version hews pretty close to the Alaskan rules, with one pretty big departure: the 'only legends from Legends' rule has been cast aside, allowing players to use cards such as Rith, the Awakener as their commanders. This makes sense for a lot of reasons. At this point in time, not every Magic player has nostalgic feelings towards Legends, and the growing EDH playerbase will quickly outgrow the 'only one of each legend in your local area' rule.
This article from Sheldon is also one of the earliest known instances of a Commander decklist being published.
This list is really interesting, because we already see so many of the Commander tendencies here. This deck has no particular focused strategy; it's a sort of mush of cards that are good in free-for-all multiplayer. It features only a smattering of extremely efficient single-target removal, for example, but there's several board sweepers. Tooth and Nail is included here, a future format staple that would, most often, be used as a one-card combo; you just put any two creatures that win the game on the spot into play.
Most notable of all, this list includes Sol Ring, a format staple that would appear on basically every Commander decklist for all eternity. The Commander ban list would eventually ban some cards based on their cost and availability – keeping the format accessible meant not requiring that people own extremely rare cards. But Sol Ring was an uncommon in Alpha. It was not on the Reserved List and could be reprinted. It was still a fairly rare card at the time – though it would be reprinted as a judge promo in 2005 – but it still existed in much-greater quantity than something like Black Lotus.
Sol Ring would become baked into the format, calcified as one of its defining features. It is, simply put, the best card in Commander; it's comparably broken to the original moxen. The conventional play pattern at a Commander table is that whichever player drew their Sol Ring in their opening hand is just ahead of everybody else, and becomes the 'archenemy'. The politics of the free-for-all table would, in theory, balance out the wild variance created by the card.
2004 - 2010: Spread
It's hard to pinpoint what, exactly, made Commander such an outlier success in the community. Other variant formats such as Canadian highlander (a more competitive-minded version of 100-card singleton) never broke out of regional bubbles. My hypothesis is that it comes down to how Commander essentially made kitchen table Magic definable and manageable; a real format that you could sanction an event in.
Most Magic play does not come anywhere near official formats. People buy small amounts of cards and play with the cards they have, without really thinking much about the cards they don't have or the broader context of their play. This 'kitchen-table Magic' is orders of magnitude more common and widespread than the heavily-invested play of tournament grinders and card-shop regulars.
But the problem with casual Magic is that it's hard to show up somewhere with a deck and get a game going. There was always a border between casual play and less-casual play that was hard to breach for a newcomer – if you'd only ever played Magic at home with close friends and a handful of cards, it's difficult to bring your deck to a card shop and be able to play. You might find that your deck doesn't fit into an established format, or is too grossly underpowered to have a good time with.
Conversely, the nature of the conventional Magic formats like Standard and Legacy is that they develop mature and cutthroat competitive metagames that are intimidating to the casual player.
Commander essentially solves for this. It creates a format that can act as an agreed-upon basis for casual play – you can know that you can take your deck to any card shop and be able to play with it. But the format is designed to resist competitive-minded play.
The basic theory of how Commander facilitates casual play goes like this:
- Commander is a social format, played in multiplayer pods, with in-game politics acting as a balancing mechanism.
- The big life totals and big inconsistent singleton decks lead to long, slow games, which enable playing big, splashy, bad cards.
- The Commander itself is a safety net; your deck is built around one central card, and you always have access to it. It is therefore hard to build a commander deck that's outright nonfunctional.
For the players who enjoy this style of play, this more or less works. There are definitely cracks – Commander's broad card pool allows huge disparities in deck power level that the format never had a meaningful solution for – but clearly, people are having a good enough experience with it.
2011 – 2019: Productification
The growing popularity of Commander eventually led Wizards' attention to it. Commander was added to Magic: the Gathering Online as a casual format around 2010. Around the same time, Magic R&D had begun developing multiplayer-focused products aimed at casual players. They released Archenemy, a 1v3 variant where one player had an extra-powerful deck and took on the other three players. They released Planechase, a variant that used oversized 'plane' cards that would randomly alter the rules of the game.
And then, in 2011, they released Commander, now retroactively known as Commander 2011. In doing so, they took the unusual step of not taking over the format from the Rules Committee – Commander had originated outside of Wizards, and control of it would remain in the community.
I don't agree with this decision, but I have the benefit of hindsight. It ultimately made people who didn't work for Wizards accountable, in the eyes of the game's fans, for decisions that Wizards made. But I do think that, at the time, it was a choice made in good faith; if not with the best of intentions, at least with the marriage of good intentions and good PR.
Commander 2011 was a massive success. It sold out almost immediately and would go on to be reprinted many times. The product itself consisted of five preconstructed decks explicitly set up for the Commander format, with newly-designed cards intended to function in Commander. Many of these cards would essentially mould the format, patching over oddities and inconsistencies.
Notably, every single deck included a copy of Sol Ring; Sol Ring would go on to be mandatorily reprinted in basically every last Commander precon for the rest of time.
Commander's success caught Wizards by surprise. In 2012, they released Commander's Arsenal, a collection of 18 foil reprints of Commander staples, or at least alleged Commander staples. This product was explicitly a stopgap; Wizards didn't have time to put out a new, full Commander product in 2012 – but they fully intended to do so in 2013. Commander preconstructed decks would become yearly releases, and increasingly, major ones.
In total, between 2011 and 2019, Wizards would release 40 Commander decks. Over this period, the popularity of Commander would see it increasingly creep into the design of new sets, too; more and more, cards in mainline Magic sets were designed not only with Commander in mind, but almost exclusively intended for Commander.
This trend can be seen most starkly by looking at how often Wizards has printed new multicolor legendary creatures.
Commanders don't have to be multicolor, but they usually want to be, as mono-color decks in Commander have access to few cards overall. So, we can think of any creature that's legendary and multicolor as 'commander-coded'.
If we chart how many of these cards Wizards was printing, year over year, from the beginning of the game through to 2019, it looks like this:
You can see the big spike created by Legends itself, a set that treated "multicolor legend" as a baseline and printed many underwhelming cards that fit this bill. But then there's a long lull, with another significant spike happening during and around Ravnica block. Ravnica reveals to Wizards how popular multicolor cards really are, and from that point onwards they become more of a regular design tool in every set, rather than something restricted to specific multicolor-themed sets.
Once the Commander product gets going, it creates a steady stream of new commanders. But we also see this trend pushed in the mainline expansions, with legendary multicolor creatures becoming more and more of staple of set design.
Commanders are easy to quantify, but there's an overall trend towards printing Commander-relevant cards in mainline sets more and more. This, of course, makes sense – as Commander becomes the most popular format, the main product needs to pivot to catering to it.
Eventually, there's a sense that 'commander cards' are the main thrust of the design of the rare and mythic rare slots in most sets. As an illustrative example, look at the mythic rare sheet from Ixalan (2017).
A lot of space is taken up by multicolor legendaries, most of which are very expensive and splashy cards that really only make sense in casual play and are very Commander-coded. Many of the remaining cards are expensive, powerful effects that will not see any play in competitive Constructed but are very relevant in the slow, ponderous world of Commander.
By 2019, Commander is Magic's most popular format; yearly Commander releases are beginning to outpace the popularity and importance of mainline expansions; and Commander-focused design has seeped into all corners of the game.
2020 – present: Saturation
Remember that chart from the previous section? Those were the times, huh? Anyway here's what this chart looks like now.
Pandemic-era Magic is is chaotic and characterized by an exponentially-accelerating firehose of new product. Like every kind of collectible, Magic explodes in popularity in 2020; secondary market prices soar. Wizards takes notice and decides to cash in not by printing more of the products they already make, but by making more and more and more SKUs. This period of time sees the introduction of Secret Lairs, limited-edition collectible bundles of cards with increasingly weird and nonstandard card treatments. These are very explicitly aimed at the collector market, with direct-to-consumer sales and a hype cycle resembling the marketing for collectible sneakers.
It's in 2020 that Commander products stop being their own independent thing and become tied to mainline sets. Rather than Commander 2020, the product is known as Ikoria Commander and features cards with the same themes and setting as the main expansion for the year, Ikoria. Commander decks are now released alongside every new expansion; 2021 sees the last big yearly release of Commander decks. From 2022 onwards, they are spread out, 2 or 3 preconstructed decks at a time, allied to each main expansion.
Commander creeps into more and more of the ever-expanding product schedule. 2020 sees the release of Commander Legends, a supplemental draftable set of cards intended for Commander. 2021 sees the introduction of 'Universes Beyond', a line of Magic cards incorporating characters and elements from various other IP – to be grotesque, the 'fortnitefication' of Magic. UB products come in many shapes – mostly one-off Secret Lairs intended for turbonerds – but the biggest such releases are sets of Commander decks featuring Warhammer 40,000, The Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, and Fallout.
Wizards is printing more and more new products, and more and more of the new cards in these products are designed, explicitly or implicitly, for Commander.
Jeweled Lotus, itself, was originally printed in Commander Legends. It was an immediate format staple for four years until it was banned last month.
So, how did we get here?
In April of 2013, the Commander RC announced the banning of the card Trade Secrets. The card itself is a silly-seeming rare from Onslaught, but it was notably reprinted in one of the decks in the original Commander precons; this is the first time the RC banned something that Wizards had put into a Commander-focused product.
In July of 2021, the RC banned Hullbreacher – a card from Commander Legends. For the first time, a card designed explicitly for Commander had been banned from Commander. Hullbreacher was not a beloved card; the reaction from the community at the time seems to have been more along the lines of 'good riddance'. But it revealed the inherent tension in the way Commander was handled: with every other format, a banning begins with Wizards admitting to a mistake. With Commander, it begins with an outside group choosing to declare something Wizards did a mistake.
There's an odd power dynamic here – Wizards is printing powerful Commander cards because they sell boosters; if those cards prove to be too powerful, the RC are the ones who are supposed to fix the format. Who really owns the vision for the format? The people who make bans or the people who make the cards?
I'd argue that as Wizards' own design practice got more and more aimed at Commander, they exerted more and more control over the format.
Ultimately the position that the RC were put in was profoundly unfair. I don't really want to go over everything that happened after the bans, especially not the extreme harassment that some RC members were targeted with. I don't have all the facts and it's not a very interesting story. Suffice to say that this system – where the RC is an independent group outside of Wizards – proved unsustainable in the end.
Was Commander 2011, itself, a mistake?
Wizards thought Commander 2011 would be a fun one-off product acknowledging something the community had created. It then promptly became the shared-custody lovechild of the RC and Wizards, and then that baby grew to eat the game alive.
Commander has too many inherent problems that made it really ill-suited to play this role of the one true designated casual format. The format is grounded in lots of expensive old cards, which makes sense as it originally grew being played by Pro Tour judges. It not only breaks some of Magic's design assumptions, it breaks a lot of them all at once, making the effects of those breaks hard to disentangle. It seems to me like printing cards for Commander that also have to function in other formats is a nightmare. Commander is almost antithetical to the normal way of thinking about and evaluating power level in Magic – it is, after all, deliberately designed to make you play with cards that are otherwise bad or useless.
Alas, some of those 'bad' or 'useless' cards are much, much more powerful in Commander than others. And when Commander is the main way people play Magic, the Commander format staples stop being quirky cards that only see daylight in Commander; they become, well, format staples.
Again, I have the benefit of hindsight, here. The problems with Commander are only problems if you know that it's going to become the dominant form of Magic; I suspect that there are plenty of people at Wizards who would not have wanted that to happen, and would have thought about Commander 2011 differently, at the time, if they knew what was to come.
The Commander tar pit
Commander being so unlike the regular game probably contributed to its rapid growth. It tapped an untapped market; if you din't like Magic, you might very well still like Commander. Commander is so different, and it appeals to such a different audience from the rest of Magic, that it's almost its own game that just happens to use the same game pieces.
Because Commander is its own thing, it has no off-ramp to the rest of Magic. People who came into the game through Commander largely stayed in Commander. But Wizards saw the incredible growth, and it saw Commander as the casual format that they could market and promote and control. So increasingly Commander was the entry point into the game – because Wizards had long struggled to find a product line that could act as that entry point.
When the main point of entry into the game's ecosystem is a tar pit, the whole thing becomes cannibalistic. Commander's popularity didn't help eight-player drafts fire at your local game store, it didn't help the tournament scene. I've described the experience of playing Magic on and off during in this period a bit like having an old friend who's slowly being taken over by a brain parasite. Every time I checked in on Magic, Commander had overriden a little more of its original personality.
In the end, I think the way Wizards treated Commander kind of destroyed the identity of both Commander and Magic. Commander was born as a way of playing cards that nobody cared about; increasingly, the cards only cared about Commander.
Obviously, from Wizards' perspective, they're laughing all the way to the bank. Commander made them a lot of money. It was, by the objective measure of the market, a huge success.
It was also the source of a lot of the worst design and product decisions I've ever seen from them. To me, Commander just shows the consequences of... losing a sense of good taste. It was, ultimately, giving the people what they want. Wizards made more and more Commander product because people bought more and more Commander product. And round and round we went; Commander's popularity gradually corroded the rest of the game.
Is Commander just harder to design for?
How do you even balance Commander? Where do you find clarity about what's appropriate?
If you can play actual factual Sol Ring, a card that's banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage, then surely we can print a goofy Black Lotus variant, right?
Wizards weren't the only ones who missed Jeweled Lotus' power level. Around the time when Jeweled Lotus was printed, Patrick Chapin somewhat-infamously tweeted that he thought it was fine. That it was actually a genius design; it looked powerful, but actually wasn't so powerful. After all, how good is Dark Ritual in Commander?
The reality of it, as it turns out, is that the difference between Dark Ritual (net 2 mana) and a Lotus (net 3 mana) is kind of big. And that when you give everyone access to this fast mana, well, degenerate stuff tends to happen.
The stewards of the format itself weren't any better at it, either. Sheldon Menery infamously asked Wizards not to print Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines because he thought it would ruin the format and would have to be banned. The card actually did not, in fact, do that.
Commander obscures the tipping points between normal cards and broken cards, makes them sharper. The color identity rules means that a card might actually be too good on power level, but you're not allowed to play it in a context where that matters – but then someone prints a similar card in a different color, and all hell breaks loose.
When power level mistakes do happen, half the time they get amplified. Nadu was a problem across multiple formats, but in Commander it was a problem that players always had in their hands. Nasty commanders have the power to ruin every single game they touch.
The impossible dream
The dream of commander is that you can build your deck without needing to worry too much about strategy or the metagame; you can just make a fun deck that appeals to you. Then you can take that deck anywhere and play it against anyone and you'll be playing by the same rules and you'll have a good time. That's what made it so appealing, specifically, for Wizards; here's casual play – which was always the most common way of playing Magic – but we can make it consistent enough to make into a product.
The truth is, I don't know how realistic this dream is, or how achievable. But the RC's philosophy for the format was actively at odds with it. The RC leaned heavily on two ideas: 'rule zero' – the notion that play groups should adjust the rules to suit their needs – and the 'social contract' – the idea that you should play the game not to win, but to enhance everyone's enjoyment.
These are both lovely sentiments but they lead to a lot of negotiation and expectation-setting that players aren't necessarily equipped to do when approaching a new playgroup or looking for a casual game at a store or convention. The RC was saying: find your own fun. Wizards was saying: we have standardized and packaged fun and now you can buy it for $49.99.
So, what happens now?
I genuinely have no idea where Wizards goes with this. They run the format now. They get to own the mistakes but also own the cleanup. Their stated plan is to delineate different 'power levels', a sort of tiering system meant to give people some clarity about what the actual power level of their decks is when playing with others. Trying to, once again, realize that impossible dream.
They are, ultimately, stuck with it. The brain parasite has eaten away most of the brain at this point. Like it or not, Commander is Magic now, and Magic as I knew it – the sharply competitive, beautifully expressive, fast-paced game that I used to love – increasingly seems like a remnant of a bygone age. Commander is what signs the checks. Commander is what the rares in your pack are for.
A pretty clear expression of what was guiding the product decisions at Wizards happened a couple months ago, alongside the release of Modern Horizons 3. MH3 is the much-anticipated third supplemental set for the Modern format, currently the most popular competitive format. MH3 was probably the biggest event of the year for competitive players.
MH3 contains 256 new cards. Alongside it, Wizards released Modern Horizons 3 Commander, a product with a weird oxymoronic name. It's five Commander decks containing, between them, 56 new cards. Those cards are not legal in Modern.
Less than two months after MH3 came out, a card was banned from it in Modern. This card was intended as a quirky rare aimed at Commander play, but it was created late in the design process for the set and several powerful interactions were missed. It became a problem in multiple formats.
That card was, of course, Nadu, Winged Wisdom.