Master and Commander

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Happy Tuesday MTG peeps,

Nope, this is not an article about Russell Crowe's latest cinematic excellence aboard some British naval frigate battling in the Napoleonic Wars. This article has to do with Sheldon Menery, the Master of Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH), or as some call it, Commander.

Recently, Sheldon (a Magic the Gathering Level 5 DCI judge and Pro-Tour veteran) had something of interest he wrote on his Facebook page; "if you love EDH, tune into magicthegathering.com on 2 December for an exciting announcement." Oddly enough, Wizards of the Coast, through their corporate lawyer filed trademarks with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on the 18th October. The trademark was for "Magic: the Gathering - Commander".

Popular belief in many of the various MTG rumour mills indicate some product development by Wizards to deliver to market a multi-player singleton. This seems the most plausible conclusion - EDH / Commander has already been pulled into MTG Comprehensive Rules and certainly is one of the most popular non-sanctioned MTG varient. Perhaps we can expect some pre-constructed (pre-cons) hitting a brick 'n' mortar games store near you in the new year, perhaps sometime after Mirrodin Besieged is released. Having just said that, we do recognise that there may be quite a few hard-core EDH players out there not happy with the news that WoTC is paying attention to this game format - please pipe in so we can hear your opinion. Anywhoos, we think that if Sheldon is excited about this, then we should be too, not that we are Sheeple, but in Sheldon we trust.


Righto - in other news, another new Magic Trademarks had surfaced . . .

WoTC on the same date they filed MTG - Commander with U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, also filed "Duel Decks: Ajani vs Nicol Bolas". This sounds like a very interesting duel deck which we should expect sometime latter next year. Whatever the final decklist is to be, we do hope that not only will both decks be on equal power footing with eachother (Wizards usually does a rather decent job at this) but we also hope that the money cards (bombtastic rares) will be evenly distributed between both these decks. What do you folks foresee as possible inclusion in the (approximately 6) rare slots here ?














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Briefly, here is the low-down on EDH / Commander at-a-glance rules . . .

Commander, sometimes called “Elder Dragon Highlander,” starts with the rules for multiplayer Free-for-All games, in which any number of players compete against each other as individuals. It’s played with the Singleton format (in other words, except for basic lands, each card in your deck must have a different name), and each player starts with a life total of 40 rather than the usual 20.

Most importantly, the centerpiece of each deck is a legendary creature that serves as that deck’s commander. To build a deck, you first choose a legendary creature, called a “commander” or “general,” then construct a Singleton deck around it containing exactly 99 other cards.

Only cards of the commander’s color(s) and colorless cards may be included in the deck. (Note that split cards and hybrid cards count as all of their colors.) In fact, if a card contains a mana symbol anywhere on it that’s not one of your commander’s colors, you can’t include it in that deck! Within the game, if you would add mana to your mana pool that’s a color not shared by your commander, you get colorless mana instead.
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