Commander: The definitive history of Magic’s most popular format

Magic: The Gathering has always been a multiverse. Not just the lore; the community itself has always been fractured across the game’s different formats or styles of play. Today, Wizards of the Coast believes that one format, called Commander, is the most popular one of all. It’s become the glue that helps to hold the collectible card game’s fandom together.

“For a very long time, when I said, ‘Hey let’s play Magic!’ it could mean so many things,” Magic senior designer Gavin Verhey tells me. “I could have five decks in my bag, and you could have five decks in your bag, but they might all be incompatible.

“Commander has become the kind of de facto casual, social format, and it’s made it really easy,” Verhey continues. “Now, no matter who you are, if I ask you to play a game of Magic [...] I have a Commander deck and it plays by the same rules as yours, and we’re ready to go. To me, that’s really powerful and why it’s become — arguably — the largest format in Magic.”

But Commander itself evolved from another format altogether, and that format’s history goes back even further than 2011, when the publisher officially started selling Commander decks at retail.

Where did Commander come from? Who invented it? And why did it catch on the way it has?

To answer those questions, we need to travel first to Fairbanks, Alaska — the birthplace of Elder Dragon Highlander, the format that would eventually inspire Commander.

The legends

Image: Edward P. Beard, Jr./Wizards of The Coast

Magic: The Gathering debuted in 1993. Created by mathematician and game designer Richard Garfield, the game is traditionally played as a two-player duel. Each side has a deck of 60 cards. Inside are mana-producing land cards — colored white, blue, black, red, or green — which, when tapped, provide the fuel needed to use other cards for casting spells and bringing creatures to life. Those spells and creatures can then deal damage. The first player to reduce their opponent from 20 life points to zero wins.

Commander format is quite a bit different from vanilla Magic. To start with, it’s a multiplayer mode of play that supports from two to six (or more) players. Each one gets 40 life points, and any player can attack any other player on their turn. Decks consist of 100 cards, and each of these cards — save for the lands — must be unique. What truly sets this format apart, however, is the fact that one of those 100 cards must be a Legendary Creature, a type of creature first introduced to the game in 1994. That Legendary Creature is designated as the leader of your army, your deck’s eponymous Commander. The player with the last Commander standing wins.

Many Magic players see creating a Commander deck as the ultimate expression of a player’s skill, and of their ability to use their personal collection of cards to its fullest. The Commander format embodies the game’s reputation for competition, but also for storytelling.

“Every Commander deck you have has a different personality,” says Verhey.

But in the early days of Magic, decks weren’t always so expressive. As the competitive scene took shape in the early 1990s, the internet itself was also taking form. That timing gave rise to what players referred to as “netdecking” — the practice of finding a powerful list of cards online and rebuilding those same decks for yourself.

Magic has traditionally been sold in blind booster packs. Players never know what they’re going to find inside, and building out a collection requires both time and treasure. In the 1990s, that meant visiting your friendly local game store and putting down cash to unlock its secrets. Netdecking encouraged players to short-circuit that process, and it also gave birth to a secondary market that still thrives today. Stores didn’t have to just sell blind packs. They could open their stock themselves, and charge a premium for the most popular cards. Netdecking fueled that kind of speculation.

The term itself now feels dated, as does the animosity toward the practice. It’s now standard for Wizards to release multiple sets of nearly 300 new cards every year, and today it’s a lot easier to research the best decks online rather than collect hundreds or thousands of cards you’ll never use. But the Commander format owes its existence to those who initially wanted to push back against the practice of netdecking.

People like Adam Staley.

“You’d go to a tournament and you’d have half the people at the tournament playing with the exact same deck,” Staley recalls. “People got really tired. They didn’t want to play against people that were playing the exact same deck all the time, so it wasn’t becoming social as much as we all wanted Magic: The Gathering to be from the beginning.”

During those first few years, Staley played Magic a little differently. His preferred format was called Highlander, after the 1986 movie starring Christopher Lambert. Its tagline — “There can be only one” — gave rise to the format’s core tenet, that players could only have one of a given type of card in their deck. This format forced Staley and his friends to get creative, to dig into their stacks of unused cards, and to improvise.

“The idea was that you would see different cards, cards that people weren’t using any more, because they didn’t have a choice,” Staley told Polygon. “They had a hundred-card deck [...] and every single card had to be different.”

Photo: Adam Staley

His Highlander games, which were played with only two players originally, also went on a lot longer thanks to their 100-life-point limit — five times higher than in a standard game of Magic. Not only did players have a strange and often unwieldy selection of cards to work with, they also had to dig deep into that deck over the course of a single match to eke out a win.

Everything changed in June 1994 with the release of Legends, the third set of Magic: The Gathering cards ever produced. That’s when the Elder Dragons arrived — Arcades Sabboth, Chromium Rhuell, Nicol Bolas, Vaevictis Asmadi, and Palladia-Mors. Two years later, in 1996, Staley made Nicol Bolas the leader of his own personal Highlander deck, and with that, a new format was born.

He named it Elder Dragon Highlander. Fans would later shorten it to EDH.

In Staley’s EDH format, there were only five possible decks of cards — one for each of the Elder Dragons. Since these dragon cards were the first multicolor cards ever produced for Magic, Staley decided that the colors of each Elder Dragon would be the only colors of cards allowed in each deck. Since his dragon was Nicol Bolas, his deck was only allowed to contain black, red, and blue cards — the same colors needed to summon Nicol Bolas into the game to begin with.

Staley carried the EDH format with him through his college years in Fairbanks, playing regularly with a small group of friends. Eventually, they adapted the game to allow for more than two players.

After college, Staley moved to Anchorage, Alaska, and fell in with a slightly larger gaming group that met regularly to play all kinds of games. That’s where he met Sheldon Menery, who was stationed at what was then Elmendorf Air Force Base as a member of the Air Force, and first introduced him to the format.

The judges

Image: Edward P. Beard Jr./Wizards of The Coast

“I gotta tell you I have spent winters in some pretty exotic locations, like Osan Air Base in Korea. I was at Keflavík — in Iceland — for two years. I spent a couple of years in Omaha, Nebraska,” Menery says during a telephone interview. “Anchorage was better than all of them, weather-wise.”

Still, Menery says he welcomed the indoor activities on offer with Staley’s group in Anchorage. Between games of Settlers of Catan, Hot Shots Golf, and Risk 2010, he first got introduced to EDH in 2002.

“It was an afterthought,” Menery says. “There wasn’t any fanfare. Adam came up with this idea for another Magic format, and there were a lot of sort of ‘kitchen table’ ways to play Magic back then. I’m sure there are now. He was like, ‘This is the thing we’re doing. What do you think?’ It wasn’t intended out of the box to be a real attention-grabber: ‘This is what we’re trying this week.’ And the week before, it was something different.”

In fact, Menery says he never actually played EDH with Staley and the rest of the group. He just watched others play the game in this way. Still, the conceit of the novel format stuck with him — the unique card requirements, the multiplayer combat, and the singular dragon leading each deck. So he took the format on the road.

Menery wasn’t just an airman in the Air Force. He was also a level 5 competitive Magic judge, and one of the most powerful figures on the international Magic Pro Tour. He brought EDH with him on the Pro Tour and began tinkering with it, trying to make it more active and exciting. He helped remove the Highlander restriction on mana-producing lands, so that players had more fuel to cast more powerful spells. That change had the knock-on effect of speeding up play, and opened up the format to more powerful cards. He tweaked setup as well, requiring that each deck’s Elder Dragon — called a General back then — had to start the game already in play.

Contested Origins

In the format’s long history, Commander has gathered its fair share of apocrypha. One old nerd’s tale goes a little something like this: Adam Staley didn’t really come up with the format at all. Instead, he just ripped it off from The Duelist, Wizards of the Coast’s old print publication.

In issue #11, published in July 1996, reader Jesus M. Lopez wrote in to share a format he had designed. He called it Elder Dragon Legend Wars.

“Tournament Magic, while exciting, is so cutthroat that the visual aspect of seeing beautiful cards in play is diminished,” Lopez said. “In ‘Elder Dragon Legend Wars,’ armies have time to assemble, and powerful creatures abound.” He went on to describe a multiplayer format where Elder Dragon Legends like Nicol Bolas also take on the role of a deck’s singular leader.

Photo: Charlie Hall/Polygon

To get to the bottom of this, I first had to find Adam Staley. Sheldon Menery had lost track of him over the years, and Wizards had no clue where to find him. The usual places like LinkedIn and Facebook came up dry, so I started calling around to every hobby game shop that I could find in Anchorage, Alaska.

I hit pay dirt when a clerk at Tier 1 Cards & Games picked up the phone. Of course he had heard of Adam Staley. With his help, I had the man himself on the phone within the hour.

“I do not remember reading that article,” Staley told me in an email. “Some things are similar to my version and some are very different.”

Instead, he attributes his inspiration to the slim pamphlets that used to ship with Magic starter sets, which encouraged players to come up with their own formats.

He also opened the roster of Generals to include any of the Legendary Creatures that had been introduced since 1994. That expanded the possible number of decks beyond the original five Elder Dragons, thereby introducing the potential for even more creativity.

The result was a streamlined, active multiplayer format that retained a more laid-back, stately pace than vanilla Magic. With Menery’s help, EDH became an exciting new option for casual play, one that leveraged players’ deep knowledge of how different Magic cards could work together on the table. It caught on like wildfire with the other judges on the Pro Tour, who were looking for something to do after hours.

“We’d get through running the Pro Tour for the day, and maybe grab some to-go,” Menery says. “And we would sit around, still in judge shirts and right in the same place — on the same tables — that we were playing the Pro Tour.”

In the early 2000s, Menery also wrote for the Magic fan site Star City Games. His article on the EDH format, first published in August 2004 and now available only via the Internet Archive, helped spread the word about it beyond his circle of judges for the first time. But, at least in those early years, the most reliable place to find a game of EDH was on the Pro Tour.

“Philosophically, it was always intended to be a break from competitive Magic,” Menery says. “The games were long and involved. High-level Magic is a much shorter game, intentionally so. If professional Magic games were two hours long, nobody would be interested.

“There would be five-player games or six-player games or four-player games,” Menery continues. “There were times at Pro Tours when the hall itself would close, so we’d be at the staff hotel. [...] We’d be in the lobby, in the cafes, everywhere! And the cards would be sprawled out on any number of surfaces. It was definitely the sort of Wild West.”

The tipping point for EDH came when Scott Larabee, Wizards of the Coast’s manager in charge of the Pro Tour, sat in on his first game in 2005. Menery remembers Larabee was originally skeptical.

“I handed him a deck,” Menery says. “‘Here, play my Lord of Tresserhorn deck.’ He’s like, ‘Lord of Tresserhorn? That’s a crappy card from the Alliances set, right?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, just pay attention.’

One of the most potent hooks of EDH was nostalgia. Even today — perhaps especially today — Magic cards fall in and out of favor as new sets are released and the competitive landscape changes. The EDH format allowed players from any era of Magic to pick up where they had left off, using old tricks against new cards. Before the first game was over, Menery says, Larabee was hooked.

“In 2005, there was already a lot of nostalgia for cards that you couldn’t play any more that had either rotated out of Standard and weren’t good enough for Type One, for Vintage, for any of the other internal formats, but still had evoked some fondness from players. And they’re like, ‘Oh man, I can play this, and I can play that!’ And you still get that today.”

Larabee took the format with him when he went back to Wizards’ headquarters, and it took off there as well.

In 2006, Menery and two other Pro Tour judges — Gavin Duggan and Duncan McGregor — went a step further, codifying the EDH format with a rules committee and an official website. The committee, aided by Larabee’s advocacy for the format inside Wizards of the Coast, was instrumental in the launch of Commander as a commercial product in 2011. The only major change that the publisher made was to the name, in part to avoid any intellectual property issues with the Highlander franchise. Commander was an immediate success at retail, rising in popularity to become Magic’s preeminent format.

Image: Edward P. Beard Jr./Wizards of The Coast

Today, Commander is still maintained by Menery and a small group of Magic super fans with roots on the Pro Tour — including Larabee, Duggan, and Toby Elliott. Wizards still works closely with the rules committee as it builds out its product line year after year. Menery takes a lot of pride in seeing players around the world embrace something that he helped shepherd out of its infancy.

“It’s validation that you’re doing something good,” Menery says. “It’s that shared joy of being able to let some of your friends in on a thing that you know about and they might not. Whether it’s a game or a TV show or a film or a bottle of bourbon, you love sharing things you love with people you like. And that’s basically what we were doing with Commander. ‘Taste this,’ we said. And a lot of people were like, ‘Man, this is right up my alley.’”

Meanwhile, Adam Staley is just glad that there’s still a reason for fans to rummage around in Magic’s huge back catalog, which now numbers in the tens of thousands of cards.

“I’ve had people tell me that they’re really happy that I pushed the Highlander part of it,” Staley says, “because they have boxes and boxes and boxes of cards that they never play with. Highlander makes it so that you have to open them back up again. You can’t play with four Lightning Bolts and four of something that does the same thing. [...] You can only play with one. So, you are forced to actually use cards that do different things, cards that you wouldn’t see in a tournament.”

For Magic designer Gavin Verhey, Commander is more than just a popular way to play. It’s a way for him to keep tabs on how the world’s most popular collectible card game is evolving in small communities around the globe.

“One of my favorite things to do when I travel to events is that I always try to see if someone at the table will lend me one of their Commander decks,” Verhey says. “It’s really, really fun to see what other people are doing, and as a designer, trying out other people’s decks means that I get to see what people are building with the cards that I’m making.”

At a recent event in Las Vegas, a Magic fan handed Verhey a deck full of elephants — dozens and dozens of elephant-themed cards that the player had found sitting around in their personal collection. Verhey had never seen anything like it before, but eventually, he ended up winning with this player’s deck.

“It was this super cool moment of getting handed this super off-the-wall Commander deck that would literally not exist anywhere else,” Verhey says. “But I got handed it, and I won, and I had a blast doing it. Everyone was smiling; even those who lost had a great time. It was a really memorable moment for me, and just an example of the breadth of what you can do in the Commander format.”

Wizards of the Coast has big plans for Commander in 2020 and beyond. The current set — Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths — was released in May, and features five preconstructed Commander decks that are available at retail. There will also be two new preconstructed decks published later in the year with the Zendikar Rising set. Then, in the fourth quarter of 2020 comes Commander Legends.

Verhey, the lead designer on Legends, says it will be the first-ever set of Magic cards completely dedicated to the Commander format. Along with 70 new potential Commanders, it will allow players for the first time to draft Commander decks, pulling cards from specially designed booster packs as they’re opened on the fly.

Verhey isn’t able to share much more information about Commander Legends, other than to say that he and the rest of the design team are being careful to respect the long history of the format.

“We want to make sure that we keep the sanctity of Commander and what the people on the Commander rules committee have created, as well as find all kinds of great opportunities to play Commander,” Verhey says. “We’re being very careful with everything, and we’re really excited, not only for this year but for the future of the Commander format as a whole.”

Magic: The Gathering - Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths bundle

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A bundle of 10 booster packs for Ikoria, Lair of Behemoths, the next set for Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering.

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