Draft & Limited
Eight players open three 20-card packs each, take two cards per pick, and end with a 60-card pool. From it each builds a deck of at least 60 cards with a commander, then the pod splits into two four-player games at 40 life. Duplicates are legal, which makes this the one official Commander format that is not singleton.
Commander Draft is the only Limited format that produces a Commander game. You draft a pool the way you would in any draft, then build a Commander deck out of it and sit down to a four-player game rather than a best-of-three match.
Eight players sit down and each open a 20-card booster.
Everyone takes two cards, not one, and passes the remaining 18 to the left.
This repeats until the packs are empty. Pack two passes right, pack three passes left again.
Each player ends with 60 cards: 480 opened across the pod, split eight ways.
Pick a commander from your pool. Many of these sets let you run two, via Partner or a Background.
Build at least 60 cards including that commander, respecting its color identity, and add as many basic lands as you like. Duplicates from your pool are fine.
The pod splits into two four-player games, and everyone starts at 40 life.
One point of confusion worth heading off: Commander Draft is not the same thing as Pick-Two Draft, even though both take two cards per pick. Pick-Two Draft is an official four-player format from 2025 that uses any normal boosters and ends in a 40-card Limited deck. Commander Draft is eight players, 20-card packs built for it, and ends in a Commander game. The shared mechanic is a coincidence of pacing rather than a family resemblance.
A Commander Draft deck has to be 100 cards and singleton, like every other Commander deck.
Neither. The deck is a minimum of 60 including your commander, and you may play any number of copies of a card you drafted. Everything else about Commander applies unchanged: 40 life, commander tax, 21 commander damage and color identity.
The differences are all in deckbuilding. Once the game starts, this is Commander, with the politics and the 40 life and the long turns that come with it.
Color identity is the rule doing the most work here, and it works exactly as it does in constructed Commander: every card in the deck has to fall inside your commander's identity, which for a pair means no red, black or green pips anywhere, including in rules text. The difference is that in constructed you choose the commander first and build to it, and here you are discovering your identity mid-draft while the packs decide what is available.
A Commander Draft pool has to do a different job from a 40-card Limited deck. It is bigger, the games are longer, there are three opponents rather than one, and nobody can be pressured out of the game by turn six. Five adjustments cover most of it.
Commit to a color pair later than you would in a normal draft, and to a commander later still. Your first few picks should be cards good in any deck, because a commander that turns up in pack two can undo an early commitment.
Take the removal. A Commander game at 40 life with four players lasts long enough that every bomb gets cast, and a Limited pool has very few answers in it.
Ramp is worth more here than in any other Limited format. Games go long, decks are 60 cards rather than 40, and the payoff cards cost real mana.
Watch for the legends being passed. In a set built for this, a legendary creature going late is the strongest possible signal that a color pair is open, because everybody at the table is looking for one.
Duplicates are legal, so a common you saw four times is a genuine plan rather than a curiosity. This is the one draft where taking the fourth copy of an efficient two-drop can be correct.
The general Limited priorities still hold underneath all of that, so if this is your first draft of any kind, start with BREAD (Bombs, Removal, Evasion, Aggro, Duds) in the main draft guide and apply the adjustments above on top of it. Evasion is the letter that changes most here: a single unblockable creature matters less when there are three opponents to get past rather than one.
Commander Draft needs a set built for it, because it needs enough legendary creatures for eight players to each find one. Four products have done that.
The set that invented the format. It introduced the 20-card pack and the pick-two rule, and printed Partner on a wide swathe of legends specifically so a drafted pool could support two commanders.
The Dungeons & Dragons follow-up, which added Choose a Background as a second route to a two-card command zone. Backgrounds made the format friendlier, since a Background is easier to find late than a second Partner legend.
A reprint set drafted the same way. Its notable rules twist: any card that can be your commander on its own and whose color identity is one color or fewer is treated as having Partner for deckbuilding, so any two mono-colored or colorless legends can pair up.
Set guide →A convention-first Commander Draft product drawing on a pool of roughly two thousand cards, with 60 new legendary cards including the eight Rulebreaker commanders that print official exceptions to Commander's deckbuilding rules.
Set guide →Anything else is a house format. Drafting a normal set into Commander decks is a fine way to spend an evening, and it is a Rule 0 conversation rather than a printed ruleset, so agree the deck size and whether duplicates are allowed before anybody opens a pack.
A Commander Draft evening produces two four-player games from decks nobody had that morning, which makes it the hardest kind of night to remember accurately a week later. The decks do not exist any more, so the only thing worth keeping is what happened: who ended up in which colors, which commander the table underestimated, and who won.
TurnZero HQ tracks it as what it is, a Commander night: life totals, commander damage between each pair, the winner and the pod. The deck being a one-off does not stop the result from counting, and a group that drafts a few times a year ends up with a genuinely interesting record of which of them can build on the fly.
Commander Draft is a Limited format that ends in a multiplayer Commander game. Eight players each open three 20-card boosters, take two cards per pick and pass left, right then left, ending with a 60-card pool. Each player builds a deck of at least 60 cards including a commander from that pool, adds unlimited basic lands, and the pod splits into two four-player games at 40 life.
At least 60, including your commander, rather than Commander's usual 100. Your pool is only 60 cards to begin with, so in practice you are cutting a handful of unplayables and adding basic lands to reach a deck you can actually cast.
No, and this is the one official exception in the format. You may play any number of cards with the same name from your drafted pool. Every other Commander rule stays in place: 40 life, commander tax, 21 commander damage, color identity and the free first mulligan.
Often yes, and the sets are built for it. Commander Legends printed Partner widely, Battle for Baldur's Gate added Choose a Background, and Commander Masters treats any mono-colored or colorless legend that can be a commander as though it had Partner. Two commanders combine their color identities, which is how a drafted pool ends up playable across two or three colors.
The deck is 60 cards rather than 100, duplicates are allowed, and every card in it came out of a booster pack forty minutes earlier rather than off a shelf. The play experience is otherwise the same format: four players, 40 life, a commander in the command zone, commander tax and 21 commander damage.
You can, and playgroups do it as a house format, but it is not the official Commander Draft rules. A normal set's packs are 14 cards and are drafted one at a time, and a normal set prints few legends, so a 42-card pool rarely contains a commander worth building around. If you want to try it with a standard set, agree the deck size and whether singleton applies before you open a pack.
Track life, commander damage and winners for a drafted pod the same way you track your regular one.
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