Can You Play Commander In Magic: The Gathering Arena?

Commander has long been the most popular format for Magic: The Gathering players. It encourages unique design choices, lets you experiment with new commanders and cards, and has built such an incredible sense of community among Magic fans.

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If you've been itching to play Commander on Magic: The Gathering Arena, you're in the right place to find out. This massively popular and accessible mobile and PC version of the game has been steadily growing since its release in 2018, releasing more and more content every year, so it makes sense you would want to play the most popular format.

So, Can You Play Commander On Arena?

There's A Long Answer And A Short Answer

Let's start with the short answer: no, you cannot play Commander on Magic: The Gathering Arena. That's just the hard truth. But that doesn't mean that the potential for it isn't there or that there's an alternate format you can play that functions very similarly (with some major differences). The long answer is no, not yet, but the future looks promising (not a lot longer of an answer but still longer).

What Can You Play On Arena?

Get Ready To Brawl

If you're itching to play a 100 card singleton format where you're led by a legendary creature, you can still get into the action by playing Brawl. This Arena-inspired format has some major differences from the classic Commander format but still works to be a ton of fun.

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The biggest difference between the two formats is that it is still just a 1-v-1 match, where it's just you going to head with one other player. Commander games are traditionally four-person games (or fewer if you're short a player or two) and deck designs are going to be vastly different depending on the format. Since you only need to worry about one other player, the type of spells you play, like targeted removal vs. board wipes, or the right density of creatures vs spells, becomes a different concern.

Another major deviation from the Commander format is who you can have be your commander. In Brawl, you can pick Planeswalkers to be your commander, and not just those that have special rules that let you. Everyone is fair game in Brawl, from

Nicol Bolas, Dragon God to Tamiyo, Inquisitiive Student.

The third change that helps Brawl stand out from Commander is the addition of Arena-exclusive cards that have digital-based mechanics. Some of these cards have mechanics that affect your cards after they've changed zones, or that involve random search mechanics that can only happen in a digital format, such as randomly searching your library for a card or creating cards in your hand that are neither tokens or copies and did not exist in your deck at the start of the game.

Commander May Be Coming To Arena

Thanks To A Little Hint

While Commander has been notably absent from Magic: The Gathering Arena, there have been a few updates that suggest that it may be on the horizon. With the release of the Karlov Manor set, Wizards of the Coast also teased the addition of a multiplayer format with a little card called Juggle the Performance.

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The card is an Arena exclusive and not found in the normal set, released in the Alchemy series of expansions for Karlov Manor. The card reads:

Each player discards their hand, then conjures a duplicate of each of seven random cards from the library of the player to their right into their hand.

The key phrase to note here is the use of "the player to their right" portion of this card. Since Arena is a digital-only platform, and this is a card made exclusively for Arena, which has been a 1-v-1 game since its release, this is the first time designers have mentioned there being more than just a single opponent.

Giving this theory more credence is the fact that if they didn't intend to have this card function in a multiplayer format, or to hint that one is coming soon, they would have used the phrase "each opponent", or more likely, "target opponent". Cards like these make it onto Arena all the time through regular releases, and the fact that Juggle the Performance explicitly does not say with your opponent, is proof enough.

What About Official Announcements?

Coming Soon...ish

There's also the fact that in 2023, Chris Cocks, Hasbro CEO, confirmed that Arena will be getting Commander functionality sometime in the near future. Exactly what the format is going to look like is still a bit of a mystery, but we can be certain that the folks behind Arena have been working diligently to bring Commander to Arena.

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