On Saturday, 11/9/13 Anime Kat hosted its first Commander Tournament. According to Wizards of the Coast, Commander (sometimes called “Elder Dragon Highlander”) is a multiplayer Free-for-All game 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.
Appropriately enough for a format named after the legendary creature that’s leading your team, your commander works differently from other cards in the game. Before the game begins, each player removes his or her commander from the game. You may play your commander from the command zone (no matter how it got there) for its normal costs plus an additional {2} for each previous time it has been played this way. If your commander would go to the graveyard or the exile zone from anywhere, you may put it into the command zone instead . In addition to the normal Magic loss conditions, if a player is dealt 21 points of combat damage from a single commander over the course of the game, that player loses the game! Currently, MTG Commander hosts the complete rules for the format.
For our event, we ran 2 rounds (which turned into 3). All players were divided up into 3 groups for the first round. The winner of each group went on to play all other winners in a second round. Because of a great play by Mike, he and one other player lost simultaneously in the second round forcing a draw. They went on to a third round were Mike was the last person standing.



Fighting to win Round 1

Fighting to win in Round 2