Commander decks: how many cards and how to build one

A Commander deck is exactly 100 cards, all different, and one of them is your commander. That is the short answer. The rest of this article is what changes compared to a normal game of Magic, which is more than you would think.

Commander (also called EDH) is the format most people play today, and it does not work like Standard or Modern. It is not just that the deck is bigger: the life total, the number of players, how you lose and even which cards you are allowed to run are all different.

The five rules that define it

1. Exactly one hundred cards. Not 99, not 101. Your commander counts as one of those 100.

2. One copy of each card. This is what singleton means. The only exception is basic lands: run as many as you want. If you are coming from Standard, this is the part that takes getting used to, because you cannot lean on four copies of your best card.

3. One commander. A legendary creature (some planeswalkers work too, but they say so on the card) that starts the game in a separate zone called the command zone, face up for everyone to see. You can cast it from there whenever you can pay for it.

4. Forty life. Double a normal game, because games run much longer.

5. Commander damage. If a single commander deals you 21 points of combat damage over the course of the game, you lose, whatever your life total says. It is an easy rule to forget and it decides more games than people expect: keep the count from the very first hit.

Colour identity: the rule that breaks decks

Your commander is not just another creature: it decides what colours your whole deck can be.

If your commander is green and white, your deck may only contain green cards, white cards, green-and-white cards, and colourless cards. A single blue card, however perfect it would be, makes the deck illegal.

And watch out, because colour identity is not just the mana cost: it also counts any mana symbol printed in the card’s rules text. A colourless creature whose ability reads “pay {R}” has a red colour identity and cannot go in a deck that is not red.

The commander tax

When your commander dies it goes to the graveyard like any creature, but you may put it back into the command zone instead of leaving it there. Same if it gets exiled, or ends up in your hand or library.

The catch is that casting it again from the command zone costs 2 more generic mana every time. First time, its normal cost. Second time, +2. Third time, +4. And that increase never resets for the rest of the game.

So in Commander your key card is never gone for good, but every time they kill it, getting it back costs more.

Multiplayer: what changes at the table

Commander is normally played by three or four players, and the last one standing wins. That changes things that do not exist one on one:

• The first mulligan is free. Draw seven, and if you do not like the hand, shuffle and draw seven again with no penalty. From the second mulligan on you put one card under your deck for each. (One on one there is no free mulligan: the first already counts.)
• Table politics matter. With three opponents, attacking whoever is ahead is usually a better idea than attacking whoever sits next to you. A good chunk of the game is convincing everyone else whose turn it is to be attacked.
• Games are long. A four-player game can happily run to an hour and a half.

Brackets: so everyone plays at the same level

The classic Commander problem is sitting down to play without knowing whether your opponent brought a store-bought precon or a deck built to win on turn three. Wizards solved this with a five-bracket system (Exhibition, Core, Upgraded, Optimized and cEDH) the table agrees on before shuffling, based on how many cards from the “Game Changers” list you run and whether your deck combos off or chains extra turns.

Saying it out loud before the first hand avoids the classic ambush: bringing your bracket-2 precon against a bracket-4 deck. The Commander brackets guide breaks down all five levels and how to calculate yours step by step, and two-card combos have a guide of their own: they are the criterion that pushes a deck out of bracket 3 fastest.

How many lands?

36 to 38 for a 100-card deck is the starting point that works almost every time. It is more than people expect, and most bad hands in Commander come from cutting lands.

You can go lower if your deck is very cheap on mana or runs a lot of land search, but below 33 the game becomes a lottery.

Four decks to start with, one per archetype

You do not need to design anything from scratch for your first game. Four entry points depending on how you like to play:

• Mono-color aggro — cheap commanders that hit fast and do not lean on expensive pieces. The easiest place to learn Commander’s rhythm without wrestling five colors of mana at once.
• Blue-black control (or a third color) — countermagic, removal and a handful of big threats. It forgives more mistakes early on because it does not depend on executing one exact plan turn by turn.
• Aristocrats (sacrifice) — a token, sacrifice and life-drain engine. Any single piece does little; together they win on their own.
• Tribal — a commander that rewards one creature type (zombies, elves, dragons) and a deck built around that word. The fastest way for a deck to feel like yours from the first game.

Where to start

The cheap way into any of the four is a preconstructed deck: Wizards puts out ready-built Commander decks with every set, one per archetype, playable straight out of the shop. Play a few games with one, note which cards you never use, and swap those first.

If a word on a card leaves you stuck, it is in the keyword glossary; if you want the mechanics underneath, how abilities work and what each card type does cover it. And to see how Commander compares with everything else, the formats guide puts them side by side.

The Commander banlist

There are currently 83 non-basic cards banned for good in Commander. It is not a fixed list — Wizards reviews it a couple of times a year — but here is today’s, grouped by why each block got banned:

• Broken fast mana and card advantage (21): the five Moxen, Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Time Vault, Tinker, Channel, Fastbond, Library of Alexandria, Tolarian Academy, Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist, Hullbreacher, Nadu, Winged Wisdom and Paradox Engine.
• Only work in Conspiracy draft (25): the whole family of hidden agenda cards and their kin — Adriana’s Valor, Advantageous Proclamation, Assemble the Rank and Vile, Backup Plan, Brago’s Favor, Double Stroke, Echoing Boon, Emissary’s Ploy, Hired Heist, Hold the Perimeter, Hymn of the Wilds, Immediate Action, Incendiary Dissent, Iterative Analysis, Muzzio’s Preparations, Natural Unity, Power Play, Secrets of Paradise, Secret Summoning, Sentinel Dispatch, Sovereign’s Realm, Summoner’s Bond, Unexpected Potential, Weight Advantage and Worldknit — because their mechanics make no sense outside that format.
• Ante cards and cards with physical rules (12): Amulet of Quoz, Bronze Tablet, Contract from Below, Darkpact, Demonic Attorney, Jeweled Bird, Rebirth, Tempest Efreet and Timmerian Fiends are played by staking real cards; Chaos Orb and Falling Star are actually thrown at the table; Shahrazad puts a whole extra game inside the game.
• Removed for offensive content (5): Invoke Prejudice, Cleanse, Stone-Throwing Devils, Pradesh Gypsies and Jihad.
• Banned purely for how they break a Commander table (20): Balance, Crusade, Emrakul the Aeons Torn, Erayo Soratami Ascendant, Golos Tireless Pilgrim, Griselbrand, Imprison, Iona Shield of Emeria, Karakas, Leovold Emissary of Trest, Limited Resources, Primeval Titan, Prophet of Kruphix, Recurring Nightmare, Rofellos Llanowar Emissary, Sundering Titan, Sylvan Primordial, Trade Secrets, Upheaval and Yawgmoth’s Bargain.

If an old card comes your way and you are not sure it is legal at your table, look it up on Scryfall and check its Commander legality before adding it to the shopping list.

Commander slang

Words you will run into on forums and Discord even though they never appear on a card:

• cEDH — Competitive EDH: the part of Commander that plays to actually win, no concessions to anyone.
• Stax — a deck built to make the game harder for everyone else (taxes, cards that do not untap, lands that enter tapped) except you.
• Ramp — speeding up available mana ahead of schedule, so you cast your big cards turns before everyone else.
• Salt — what the table says when your legal card ruins everyone else’s fun, like resource denial or single-player lockouts. There is even a “Salt list” the community votes on every year.
• Kingmaking — when a player who can no longer win decides with their last move who wins between the other two.
• Rules lawyer — someone who knows the rules cold and brings them up at the worst possible moment.

If the word you are after belongs to a card itself (like “trample” or “vigilance”), that is in the keyword glossary; this is table slang, not rules text.

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