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Contents hide Is Commander In MTG Arena? How to play Commander online? There’s a Commander alternative; Brawl How different is Commander to Brawl?

Magic: The Gathering: Arena is one of the main ways to play Magic: The Gathering officially digitally. The game lets you collect cards from the latest sets without ever needing to spend any money on them thanks to being a free-to-play game. The longer you play the game, the easier it is to stay on top of your collection. Magic: The Gathering: Arena has many formats available on it, from Standard to Arena-exclusive formats like Timeless and Historic. One of the most popular formats in Magic is Commander. However, can you play Commander on Magic: The Gathering: Arena?

Is Commander In MTG Arena?

As of now, Commander can not be played on Magic: The Gathering: Arena. There have been talks about adding a multiplayer format to the game in shareholder calls, but Commander wasn’t explicitly named and nothing has come from it since then. 

How to play Commander online?

If you want to play Commander online, it can be done on the other official Magic: The Gathering digital client Magic: Online, but this does require you money to both access and to acquire the cards to play with. However, you do also get a chat feature to communicate with all players, something missing from Magic: The Gathering: Arena.

There’s a Commander alternative; Brawl

While Commander is not available on Magic: The Gathering: Arena, there is a variant of the format on the client known as Brawl.

Brawl is very similar to Commander, where you have one card as your commander and 99 cards in the main deck that have to match your commander’s colour identity. Like Commander, you can only have one copy of any card in your deck except basic lands.

One notable difference between Brawl and Commander is your commander can either be a legendary creature or a planeswalker. All planeswalkers can be used as your commander, unlike Commander where only certain ones can be used. 

Brawl is a one-on-one format where you start with 25 life and you get one free mulligan at the start of the game if you want a different opening hand. You can always cast your commander, and the command tax adds to extra mana for each additional time you cast it from the command zone. 

There are two variants of Brawl, Brawl and Standard Brawl. Brawl uses all the cards ever released on Magic: The Gathering: Arena, from all Standard sets as well as Alchemy sets, Anthologies, Jumpstarts, and more. If it was ever released on Arena, you can use that card in Brawl (so long as it fits in with your commander’s colour identity).

How different is Commander to Brawl?

Standard Brawl uses a slightly different ruleset. Unlike Brawl, decks are only 60 cards (including your commander) as the card pool is significantly smaller. This is because you can only use cards that are currently legal in Standard. As such, Standard Brawl goes through rotation just like Standard does. Standard Brawl tends to be a much weaker format compared to Brawl which has a higher ceiling of power levels, including some of the best commanders in the game. 

While every card is legal to play in Brawl, there are a few exceptions. As with all formats, Brawl has a banlist meaning you cannot use any banned cards in any deck. These are the following banned cards in Brawl:

  • Agent of Treachery
  • Chalice of the Void
  • Channel
  • Demonic Tutor
  • Drannith Magistrate
  • Field of the Dead
  • Gideon’s Intervention
  • Lutri, the Spellchaser
  • Meddling Mage
  • Natural Order
  • Nexus Of Fate
  • Oko, Thief of Crowns
  • Phyrexian Revoker
  • Pithing Needle
  • Runed Halo
  • Sorcerous Spyglass
  • Tainted Pact
  • Ugin, the Spirit Dragon

The Brawl banlist is rather small, and for the most part, consists of cards with the effect that prevent certain cards from being cast, as they can be named against your opponent’s commander so that they can never cast it short of a removal spell. To make the format more enjoyable, these cards were banned so players would be able to cast their commanders without being locked out of it. 

You can use companions in Brawl, so long as they meet their companion requirement (otherwise they can only be played in the main deck). This is the reason for Lutri, the Spellchaser’s ban (and why it’s also banned in Commander) as all Brawl decks automatically fall under its restriction, making it a free card in any deck with red and blue in them. 

Egregiously powerful cards are banned out of the format as well to maintain a healthy format, as cards like Oko, Thief of Crowns and Ugin, the Spirit Dragon are simply too powerful to always have access to in the command zone. Bans in Brawl are rather rare, and require them to be broken in the format to be removed from it.

About the Author

Johnny Garcia

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