Sidar Jabari of ZhalfirSidar Jabari of Zhalfir | Art by Simon Dominic

Fifteen years ago, a brand new kind of Magic: the Gathering product hit store shelves: Commander. It took the summer product slot, previously held by the likes of Planechase and Archenemy, and wouldn't be giving it back. After the 2012 interlude, there wouldn't be a year that went by without a preconstructed Commander deck release. Year after year, more sets would get released and naturally, they changed. As the designers became more familiar with the intent of the format, as the format itself changed and grew, the precons changed as well.

I'd like to highlight what I believe are three distinct eras of design for the Commander preconstructed deck line.

Era I: Innovation, First Steps

Years: 2011-2016

The first era of design is riddled with exploration, for better and for worse. This is the natural starting point— it could be argued Magic itself didn't know what it was doing for the first five years.

Commander, referring to the 2011 release, was the first of its kind and established a baseline formula for the product. It featured a set of five decks, each capable of being led by three different options (two new designs and one reprint). The number of new commanders per deck would fluctuate, going up to three before dropping back to two in later eras. Each deck would also introduce a third new legendary creature with fewer colors, as a fun new possibility to be considered. It also started “Commander-specific” designs like Command TowerCommand Tower. This first era was defined by which color combinations were being done, with the first being wedges.

I'll summarize the next four years for the sake of expediency. Commander 2013, the shard year, would feature five commanders that interacted with the command zone differently. Commander 2014, the mono-color year, brought in planeswalkers as commanders. Commander 2015, the enemy pair year, introduced experience counters. Commander 2016, the four color year, invented the partner mechanic, allowing decks to run two commanders.

This era is not just defined by the face cards, however, there were the decklists to consider. Early designers didn't know what to do with the decks. I will always point out that Kaalia of the VastKaalia of the Vast had a Dragon WhelpDragon Whelp in it. Nothing like playing your 4-mana 2/2 flyer to cheat out… another 4-mana 2/2 flyer. It's silly, but how could they have honestly known? It was all so new.

Not only were the lists full of silly jank, they were moreso… a starting point for making one's own commander deck. There were obviously suboptimal cards as well as packages intended to be removed and built as its own experience. 2013's Nature of the Beast included Power 5, Beast Typal, and Big Mana as three separate, only loosely related themes. Mayael the AnimaMayael the Anima could not find either of the other commander options with her ability, as just one example of this disparity among plenty I could rattle off.

This era was about figuring out that the product even wanted to exist and what could be done with it. This was a really wild time, exciting in no small part because of how new it was.

Era II: Experimentation, Honing the Craft

Years: 2017-2022

From 2017 through 2022, the make-up of the Commander precon line would enter a tumultuous period of redesigns, most of which are focused on changing how the decks are themed and presented. I'd break this into two mini-eras of 2017-2019 and 2020-2022.

In 2017, Gavin Verhey announced two changes to the Commander product: there would only be four decks, and they would have a mechanical theme rather than all being the same kind of color combination, with this first outing being “creature types”. Four friends could each buy a different precon and immediately play as a pod— the decks even had some design elements intended for this experience. (Feline Ferocity including Crushing VinesCrushing Vines to deal with all those Dragons and occasional flying Vampires for instance.)

A note here would be that this is the first time they started really considering connecting the themes of the set to surrounding Magic sets. Vampiric Bloodlust might encourage players to pick up some cards from the previous year's Shadows Over Innistrad, while Feline Ferocity would get folks to pick up some of the cat cards from that same year's Amonkhet, and Arcane Wizardry would get a few new toys from the following year's Dominaria release. This idea of set synergy would blossom into something deeper in time.

This pod format (which I informally call the “biodome model”) would last three years, with 2018 focusing on card types and 2019 focusing on keywords to varying degrees of success.

This “mini-era” showed some risky experimentation and boundary pushing but nothing truly “new”— Eminence was a keyworded version of the Oloro, Ageless AsceticOloro, Ageless Ascetic ability, Yuriko, the Tiger's ShadowYuriko, the Tiger's Shadow's Commander Ninjutsu was a more specific version of Derevi, Empyrial TacticianDerevi, Empyrial Tactician's tax evasion ability, and lesser-known Gyrus, Waker of CorpsesGyrus, Waker of Corpses had a mana-scaling ability identical to Marath, Will of the WildMarath, Will of the Wild. This is not a criticism of the time, for the record. It was a more reasonable time, taking existing tools and figuring out what could be done differently.

Then came the "Year of Commander", in 2020. The annual release, Commander 2020 (C20), would be tied to the premier set Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths. The set had a loose faction theme, and so the five decks would be able to line up with those five factions, all wedge-themed. There's a very good argument to be made that 2020 represents the start of an all-new era due to this shift alone, one that I'm partial enough to that I break Era II into two mini-eras like this.

The most narratively satisfying reason is that C20 mirrors the beginning of the Commander line of products with the wedge theme, but I'm focused on holistic design choices. The decks of 2020-2022 are still experimenting with how to present the decks and how to tie them together.

_{There's a straight line between these two, I just know it. Make your own conspiracy theory, starting with how their original collector's numbers are each others' inverses…}

The other major change was that this annual release wouldn't be the only set of Commander decks to come out. Zendikar Rising and Commander Legends would each be accompanied by a set of two decks (which I call the “duel deck model”). Early on, these decks were priced cheaper ($20 MSRP), with smaller packaging and fewer new designed cards. The cheaper model lasted only three releases. From Midnight Hunt on, “duel deck” releases would return to the standard model— larger packaging, fifteen or so new designed cards, and regular MSRP.

This became the new norm: from Zendikar Rising on, every Magic property premier set released came with either two or five decks. I qualify that as “Magic property” due to the release of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, technically outside of the Magic multiverse, which leads into the final shake-up of the Commander precon format: Universes Beyond. In 2022, Wizards released the Warhammer 40,000 precons, which featured a little over 40 new designed cards per deck and new art for every single reprint to present a single, cohesive creative vision in line with the property. Incredibly unprecedented event— even the aforementioned Forgotten Realms decks included a large number of Magic multiverse cards.

As for the cards themselves, there were various efforts in design– the most famous of which were the attempts to make red and white stronger in Commander while staying within the color pie. This resulted in great designs aplenty, but also a couple of… not so great designs (namely Teferi's ProtectionTeferi's Protection and Dockside ExtortionistDockside Extortionist). I don't have time here to get into individual designs or even overall patterns of the 861 original cards found here– they weren't all the 2020 cycle of free spells, we also got weird, cool, niche cards like Bribe TakerBribe Taker and Tivash, Gloom SummonerTivash, Gloom Summoner.

Era III: Growing Pains, Scaling Back

Years: 2023 - ???

In the same way 2016 represents the final year of its era by strongly resembling the next, 2022 represents the final year of its era by showing a strong quality of the next era: growth. 2023 would be the peak of this, seeing 25 total decks released across 7 releases, none of them being an all-reprint set like 2022's Starter Commander Set and two of them being Universes Beyond, meaning way more new cards per deck. Tales of Middle-earth Commander would bring 104 new cards to the format and Doctor Who brought 229.

Special note: 2023 saw one special release, March of the Machine Commander, which is the only time Wizards sold a set of 5 commander decks which were not tied by color theme. They had shards, wedges, and an enemy color pair! Very unique and strange, I still love this release.

Despite only being 3 years, this era already has 20 releases to tally. Era II had 16 across half the time. A big reason for this was a shift to the biodome model: Lost Caverns of Ixalan was the start of a chain of six premier sets in a row that got four commander decks released alongside it.

All told, half of the 20 releases in the last three years have been biodomes. After 2022's massive release numbers, the community began grumbling about the heightened number of Commander products being released, and Wizards listened. The following year, 2024, was already locked in and saw 24 new decks, but 2025 cut back to pre-2021 numbers: 13.

Spider-Man and Avatar: the Last Airbender featured no commander deck releases, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles only had one, something to be repeated in Reality Fracture. (We've now had one, two, four, and five decks released in a set– I wonder if we'll ever get a set of three?) There's still some tweaking and experimenting. Avatar: the Last Airbender saw a Commander Bundle, Scenes, and the Jumpstart collection as different ways to get players building their own commander decks, which is a route other sets may take in the future.

The game as a whole has switched to six premier sets a year, with little to no room for supplementals, so it seems unlikely we'll get another random biodome drop like Fallout or Doctor Who anytime soon. More to the point, it seems that the company wants to reduce how much product they're putting out for the sake of customer fatigue. This is a time of pulling back, still experimenting and keeping things fresh, but also relaxing a little and letting things breathe.

On an individual card design level, there's been a genuine push for more balance. Trouble in PairsTrouble in Pairs made some noise and even hit the Game Changer list, but has since been delisted. The decks have been largely more cohesive and synergistic from the start, with the potential to be more easily and readily upgraded with cards from its associated set as well as adjacent releases thanks to various inter-set synergies.

It's a good time to get into the game, with Commander decks still being released every few months but without the major deluge of new cards that tend to overwhelm. All the same, the format has been improved by it– I've regained that sense of “what card even is that?” that I hadn't had regularly since 2015. Games are more varied, with way more options than can ever be experienced, let alone memorized– there are only so many archetypes and ways to play them, but there are a lot of subtle choices that can make them feel more fresh and unique, and I love that.

It's shaping up to be a great, new era.

Long live the Commander precon.