Designing for Commander Draft Part 1: Commanders and Archetypes

Written by DrChillbrain

Draft and Commander are just about as disparate of formats as you can get in Magic. Commander is casual, 40 life, 4 player Magic with a high powered constructed singleton card pool. Draft is often competitive, 20 life, 1v1 Magic with a low powered card pool in which duplicates play a crucial part. And yet there’s an inherent appeal to the Venn diagram between them, both players and official designers have designed draft formats with Commander mechanics to combine the best aspects of Draft and Commander in one. Over the last several months I’ve been designing my own Commander draft set, and I’ve been learning a lot of lessons from talking with and reading the work of other designers, as well as studying and playing the sets themselves. Since I’ve had a lot of people ask me about it (and honestly I’ve just wanted to do this), this article series will cover everything you need to know about designing for a Commander draft environment. There’s a lot to cover, so this’ll be split into two parts. 

So, why do people like Commander anyways? If we’re going to try and create a draft format that captures the appeal of the Commander format, we’re gonna need to spell out what that appeal is in the first place, to ensure we can deliver on what people want to see. I asked a bunch of my friends across several communities what they would say the core appeal of the Commander format is, and these three responses were the most common across them:

• Building around a card you always have access to allows for fun and thematic deck building.

• Multiplayer allows for fun social moments.

• The singleton format and longer games give room for “jank” and pet cards.

So we want to create a draft environment that hits on all three of these points. In this article, I’ll be focusing on designing Commanders and creating archetypes, which will mostly fall under the first bullet point.

By virtue of having a card in the Command Zone at all, you’re going to have some amount of building around that card. But how can we design our Commanders, and our format, to make this part as fun as possible?

Most draft formats have 10 two-color archetypes that are explicitly designed to be drafted around. Some formats have different structures or extra themes, and of course there’s plenty of room for emergent archetypes as a format develops, but in general this tends to be the way it goes. For a Commander set though, this has the risk of making different Commanders in the same colors feel pretty much the same.

In this case, you’re not really building around your Commander, you’re building around an archetype and the Commander is secondary. This is not to say your set should not have larger archetypes that multiple Commanders care about: Without that, your set is going to end up feeling really unfocused and it’ll probably be spread too thin between niche cards not many decks will care about. Rather, consider different ways that cards can care about the same theme.

You see this general pattern repeated throughout the set: You can support these cards with anything that allows for synergies with Black and Red sacrificing, but also with cards that are unique to them: in Mahadi’s case even being a bridge between two different themes of the set (Sacrifice and Artifacts).

When Wizards has created Commander draft sets, they tend to still create 10 2-color themes to make it easy for new drafters to just read the sheet and know what’s going on and what’s viable. That’s not a bad approach, but it’s far from the only one you can take: Especially when Commanders are in the picture, archetypes can be a lot more freeform and span different colors in a lot of unique, asymmetrical ways. Whatever setup you end up going for, I’d recommend having at least two primary “linear” things each color cares about (e.g. not just “aggro”, something that requires specific support and payoffs), and in each color a handful cards that enable or care about multiple of those themes at once. Ensuring there’s obvious themes to build around and not just a bunch of one-offs creates solid directions for new drafters and helps make sure players don’t feel lost. 

“High toughness matters” isn’t a theme of the set anywhere beyond this card. But if you just look through the set (or if you were to pick this card in a draft) you’ll start to see that there’s plenty of cards that can really benefit from this ability.  

Having Rasaad in your Command zone completely changes your evaluation of all of these cards, and it didn’t require any special support for a theme or any cards that only work with Rasaad, these are all perfectly normal cards for any deck of these colors to play. This is a perfect example of a One Card Archetype, and plays to the unique strengths of having access to a Commander in a draft format.

Rasaad works as a one card archetype because he cares about an element of a card that most archetypes don’t particularly, which makes it easy to ensure there’s enough support for a deck featuring him at common and even across different colors. This is the easiest winning formula for creating one-card archetypes: A one off Commander that cares about a kind of card that the set is going to have anyways. Here’s a couple more examples to give you some ideas.

Keene wants you to play Gates. (Almost) every nonbasic land in the set was a Gate, and there were plenty to go around across all rarities. Zevlor wants you to play targeted removal spells and other spells that target. Every draft format needs those anyways. Lae’zel wants you to put counters on things. Adding counters is a common payoff for basically any archetype in White, so you could build a Lae’zel deck either around multiple creatures that accumulate counters in different ways, or even more specifically as just something like an Aristocrats deck that had multiple counter-placing creatures as its payoffs. In all of these cases, these cards could be passed around the table and played in any deck at any given draft, but once and awhile a player will decide to draft around one of these Commanders and those cards gain an entirely new context. This is what made Baldur’s Gate such a replayable and fun environment, and to me is exactly what a designer looking to recreate the fun of Commander in a draft context should look to do.

Getting your suite of Commanders right is crucial, and will require a lot of testing. I’d recommend keeping a spreadsheet of Commanders in the set in order to keep track of which ones players draft and which ones they don’t, as well as how they perform in-game. Of course, take verbal feedback from players as well: did they find a given buildaround to be undersupported, or were they able to build a thematic deck that they were satisfied with? Gathering data from games is an often-neglected part of custom design, but is one of the most important parts of the process.

That should be enough to get you started on at least designing Commanders, but that’s only a tiny part of what goes into creating a Commander Draft set. In the next article of this series I’ll be breaking down how to play to the strengths and solve the challenges of Multiplayer Magic and the Commander format as a whole when creating non-legendary cards to populate your set. Until then, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to drop me a ping, I’m happy to talk shop.

To check out part 2, just click here!