I am Kyle Brondyk a writer and Magic the Gathering enthusiast. In my time as a cardboard slinger I have tried out the Standard format, Modern Format (Extended too), and even a little bit of Legacy. It was not until a year ago however, that I discovered my soon to be favorite format: Commander or as it is sometimes called EDH.
For those of you who do not know, most formats require a player to build a 60 card deck of cards that fall within a number of blocks set out before hand by Wizards of the Coast (ex. Standard consists of M12, Scars of Mirrodin Block, and Innistrad Block as of April 27th, 2012). Within these decks you are permitted to run any colors and may include up to four copies of any one individual card.
Commander is another breed all together.
The Commander format originated from a casual multiplayer format invented by the player base of Magic called Elder Dragon Highlander. As the name suggests the format focused on using one of the five Elder Dragon cards from the Legends block to serve as generals for 99 card decks where everone at the table starts at 40 not 20 life.
So where does the Highlander part come in? Well...
"There Can Only Be ONE!"
I'm serious here ladies & gents!
The nickname developed over time as the format only allowed for singletons of each card. This meant a player was stepping up to the 8-man table with 100 (99 + a general) cards with zero of the "Spike" player's so called consistency.
As time wore on and more and more people entered the format players began to bore of the same old generals. This is when the General rule was established for the Commander format: A decks general must be a Legendary Creature card or Creature whose type is Legend. The colors that appear in the generals's casting cost are the only colors allowed to appear in the deck.
The first question that a savy Magic player might have would be: "What about Rhys the Exiled or Bosh, Iron Golem are they legal generals?" The issue here being that Rhys has only green in his casting cost and black as an activation cost for one of his abilities.
The answer to this is yes. Rhys, Bosh, Memnarch and a few others are all considered legal generals however it is up to your individual playgroup and community whether Rhys is a mono green general, a black/green general or a green general who can produce black mana only to activate his ability.
One other thing to note about generals is that they present a unique win condition: If a general is able to connect for 21 points of damage regardless of life gain or the players current life they have lost. After this change is when the format truely begins to shift from the old traditional definition of EDH and moves towards the Commander format players can enjoy now.
Recently Wizards decided to endorse the format and make it tournament legal. This meant that they released an official banlist and products for the player base. For those of you that would like I have included the link to the ban list here. If this introduction has gotten you interested or if you already know that Commander is one of your favorite formats I invite you to continue reading as I am going to cover one of the strangest paradigms associated with the Commander format in my next post.
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