Generally speaking, you want to try and find cards that affect all of your opponents while leaving your own stuff untouched. A Commander deck is 100 cards and you can’t have more than one of any card that isn’t a basic land. That means it’s a little bit harder to try and optimise than most formats, but that’s also a big part of its charm. Your commander counts as one of those 100 cards, and they start the game in the Command Zone rather than in the deck. The commander also dictates what colours you can use in your deck.

Unless you're running a straight-forward battle-cruiser type deck where you want to pound face and get things out of your way. I realize that "aggro strategies" don't generally work with the higher life counts and the tendency is therefore to run higher CMC, bigger impact creatures. As well it's obvious that deck strategy will dictate the specifics, but are there any rules of thumb here? For instance in standard, if you're playing agro you want 30+ creatures.

The Commander 2017 precon decks all had commanders with the eminence ability. This was a static ability that was active as long as that creature was either on the battlefield or in your command zone. It was eminence that got Edgar Markov banned in the Duel Commander format. A lot of people thought these abilities were a bit broken thanks to the advantages they created. As long as your commander is in the command zone, it’s kind of like it's in your hand.

Since you can cast any side of a modal double-faced card (MDFC), you commander combos can cast Extus as Awaken the Blood Avatar and technically have a sorcery in your command zone. But even then, you can only do this by having a legendary creature as your commander. This is also a 5-color commander thanks to its last ability.

Once you have that down, you can start considering every card in that light. I have watched both tcc way to build a commander mana base and MTG goldfish video on how many lands to put in a 60 card deck and want to expand this to commander. Rule 0 makes it so that a Commander game can be a safe environment for testing out new decks or having decks that do fun things even if they’re not all too powerful. It also makes sure that everyone agrees on how the games will be played and that everyone has fun. If you’re going to play with a new group, make sure you’re updated on what form of mulligan they’re using so that you know just how many times you can draw seven cards.

It’s worth noting that you can have other legendary creatures in your main deck too if you want, as long as they’re in the right colours. Team Constructed tournaments use Unified Deck Construction rules. For example, if one player is using Naturalize in a Team Constructed tournament, no other player on that team may have a Naturalize in their starting deck or sideboard.

Standard Brawl vs Commander Rules

Different colours will have different removal, so Black and White are going to be able to use cards that destroy and exile. Blue will have to counter spells or put creatures back in their owner’s hands. Red will be able to use spells that deal damage to destroy things, and Green is stuff with cards that let your creatures fight other creatures. There are cards that break these rules but, generally speaking, this is what you’ll be working with in each colour. Of those, you’ll want roughly ten bits of removal and interaction in your deck. Sometimes that’s going to be board wipes that kill everything on the battlefield and sometimes it’ll be targeted removal that lets you choose a single creature or enchantment to take out.

If your commander is a Red and White creature, then you can only have Red, White and Colourless cards in your deck. Netdecking contributes to the development of a clearly defined metagame in which a number of powerful deck archetypes emerge. Because of this, the metagame of a Constructed format is much more important than the metagame of a limited format.

This ties up with the three previous rules I’ve mentioned. Ban lists get modified depending on what's agreed on during the group talks proposed by Rule 0, and land destruction and infinite combo pieces usually get added to the banned lists. I’m sure I’ve made it clear that Commander is a format focused on fun.

That tells me, for example, that I don't want to be playing the most efficient aggressive black creatures in the format, because I expect games to go longer and win by card quality. The color identity of a deck that uses two partner commanders is the combined color identity of those two creatures. So a Thrasios, Triton Hero and Vial Smasher the Fierce deck has a color identity of red, black, blue, and green. The cards you play can be within any combination of those four colors. You can now fill your deck with as many on-theme cards as you can find. As long as they all play well together you can do whatever you want.

One instance where this rule bends is in the case of certain planeswalkers that can be your commander, like Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath. Cards other than legendary creatures can't be your commander. Every card has what's called a “color identity.” Since your commander is the one leading your build, all of the cards in your deck have to be within your commander’s color identity, or colorless.

What is Commander?

I’ve mentioned that a Commander deck consists of 99 cards and a commander (or two) that gets its own special zone. Your commander begins the game in this zone and you can cast it from here as if it was in your hand. But keep in mind that you’re not actually casting it from your hand, a distinction that could be important when certain cards are in play, like Drannith Magistrate. To repeat my example, Display of Dominance wouldn’t affect Kenrith at all. This is a clear example of the difference between color and color identity. One of them is your commander, who starts the game in the command zone, and the other 99 make up the bulk of your deck.

Can Any Card Be a Commander?

Each player starts with 40 life, places their commander face-up in their command zone, and draws a hand of seven cards. Players are seated randomly in a circle and turns progress one player at a time in clockwise order around the table. Rather, it seems like enchantments/equipment/artifacts that help your board state are more important to stress.