How Commander leagues work

Draft one deck, then spend a season growing it. Points and reward packs come from how you place in games, and the deck you finish with is nothing like the one you drafted.

A league takes the thing Commander usually lacks, which is consequence, and adds it without asking anyone to buy anything. You draft a deck once. Every game you play with it earns points and reward packs by where you finished. The points move you up divisions and the packs let you rebuild the deck, so by the end of a season it has grown into something the draft never gave you.

It is free, it runs in the browser, and a league can be anything from one pod to a whole community.

Starting one

Create a league and share its code. Members join with the code, and the league owner sets how it runs: how many divisions there are, what they cost to climb, whether decks can be shared publicly, how many decks a member may have, and whether the season wipes on a schedule.

Members then draft their league deck. A league draft is four to five players and three packs each, and it uses the ban and pick: the pod removes and claims commanders from a shared pool before any pack is opened.

Points

Results are recorded by finishing order, so a game scores everyone rather than just the winner.

Two things soften the bottom of that table. A deck in the first division cannot lose points at all, so a new deck is never dug into a hole it has to climb out of before it starts. And points never fall below zero.

Players who tie share the place and its payout, and the next place skips past them. Everyone who was at the table when the game began has to be given a place, so walking away mid-game does not dodge a result.

Divisions

Points move a deck up through divisions, five of them by default, at seven points each. An owner can change how many there are and what each one costs, and a patron-owned league can rename them, so a league can run its own ladder instead of D1 to D5.

Reaching a division for the first time pays ten reward packs. That is a one-off per division: it is a milestone, not a bonus you can farm by falling back and climbing again.

Reward packs

Packs come from placing. First place earns one pack per player at the table, and each lower place earns one fewer, down to one. A five player game therefore pays five packs to the winner and one to last place, before the owner's multiplier.

Opening a pack is a commitment. You choose a set, the pack is generated from that set's real booster recipe, and you then have ten minutes to keep thirteen of the cards. They go into your deck's maybeboard. There is no backing out and no reopening it later.

A league deck has a card cap, two hundred by default, and basic lands do not count toward it. Opening a pack that would push you past the cap is refused rather than allowed and then punished, so the deck has to be trimmed first.

Trading in and upgrading

Cards you do not want are not dead weight. Trading in fifty non-basic cards earns another reward pack, which is the release valve for a deck that has accumulated more than it can use.

You can also spend duplicates on how the deck looks. Trading in copies of a card upgrades it to a fancier printing of the same card: four, eight or twelve copies depending on what that printing is worth. The upgraded art then shows everywhere the deck is rendered, in the builder and at the table.

Start a league

Seasons

An owner can have a league wipe on a cadence, and there are two kinds of wipe. A standings reset zeroes the points and packs but keeps the decks, so the ladder restarts with the decks everyone has grown. A full reset clears the decks too and everyone drafts again from scratch.

There is also an optional inactivity decay, off by default, which sheds a set number of points per idle week. It exists for leagues where a deck sitting at the top untouched for a month is a problem, and it is worth leaving off unless it is.

Monthly events

Each month brings a themed event with its own commander pool and ban board. A league that opts in can run its draft as an event draft, and the winner of that draft's game permanently unlocks the event printings of the commanders they picked, for use in that league.

Common questions