Magic: The Gathering is playable in a variety of formats, but one has taken on a life of its own. Commander is inarguably the game’s most popular way to play, and Wizards of the Coast has wisely leaned into it with preconstructed decks that make it easier to play with friends with minimal deckbuilding (although that’s always an option, too).

Still, Commander isn’t supported by Wizards of the Coast, leading to players getting their digital fix for it via alternatives like Tabletop Simulator. As the game (and Commander itself) grow in popularity, however, it appears that may change soon.

What Is Commander?

Commander is Magic’s premier multiplayer format, meaning it eschews the traditional 1v1 style of play. It’s playable with anywhere from three players to a dozen (or more), and revolves around 100-card decks where only basic lands can be included multiple times.

Players build their decks around a ‘Commander’, a card that essentially helms the deck and offers a unique playstyle that other cards work to bring to the fore; all cards must match the Commander’s color identity.

Wizards has a handy rundown here, but it’s become popular for a few reasons. For one, players can build around any Legendary Creature that speaks to them, either for lore reasons, because of the way they play, or just because they love the art.

It’s also the easiest way to play casual games with friends, with no real banned cards unless you agree to something beforehand. For my group, for example, we play a bunch of precons and upgraded decks that harken back to the format’s earlier days.

Finally, it’s a multiplayer format that allows a group of three friends to introduce a fourth, and so on and so forth.

Why Is Commander Not In Arena?

There are a few reasons for this, with one of the main ones being the player count. Wizards would presumably need to make Commander’s Arena mechanics scale from 3 to at least 4 players.

Commander games can run long, too, meaning it’d need to be able to support the same game being playable for hours. It’d require a whole new deckbuilding system, too, and a way to track damage dealt by Commander cards.

Then there’s the card list. Hundreds of cards have been printed with Commander in mind, and the lack of rotation means those cards would still need to be viable. On a cynical note, Wizards of the Coast would need to work out how to earn older cards within the game’s existing ecosystem, too.

But Is It Coming?

In a recent interview with YouTube creator Ashlizzlle, Senior Digital Product Manager at Wizards of the Coast, Dave Finseth discussed the possibility of Arena gaining Commander as a format.

“It’s being worked on,” Finseth explained, but it doesn’t sound as though it’ll come anytime soon.

“There are several challenges with adding it to the game. It’s a giant task, I would say. When we built Arena, we weren’t thinking this was going to be a four-player game; we were thinking, ‘how do we make Standard,’ ‘how do we make Draft’.”

“There are a lot of things that we almost call ‘impossible’ design things we need to fix,” Finseth added

“They’re not actually impossible, but that gives an example of how much design work and engineering work we need to do,” he added.

“I also don’t know if we’ll ever have all of the cards. That’s not even really I don’t even think the goal. It’s just to get to that four-player game mode that we’re targeting.“

Finseth also couldn’t commit to how Commander would integrate communication in an Arena setting, but it’s interesting to hear the discussion.

Back in 2024, Hasbro’s CEO Chris Cocks told Bloomberg that “[the company] is testing a video game version of Commander, which would potentially be separate from Arena and allow for more than two players to compete.”

Just last week, Alchemy was retired as a format in Arena, while Wizards of the Coast also confirmed that 50% of players just play Standard, while others enjoy Pioneer and Brawl. It shows that the company isn’t afraid to make big changes, but whether one of those could be integrating Commander (or spinning it out to its own client), remains to be seen.