Beginner Series
A mulligan is a redraw of your opening hand. Under the current London mulligan you shuffle back, draw a fresh seven, and repeat as often as you like — then pay for it at the end by putting one card on the bottom of your library per mulligan taken. In multiplayer Commander the first one is free, which means there is almost never a good reason to keep a hand you don't like.
You always draw seven. The cost of mulliganing is paid once, at the end, in cards you put on the bottom of your library.
That last sentence is the whole rule, and it's the part that confuses people coming from older versions of Magic. Under the London mulligan you never draw a smaller hand. You draw seven cards every single time, however many times you do it. Only when you finally decide to keep do you pay the bill — and you choose which cards to pay it with, which is the reason the rule is as strong as it is.
You draw your opening seven. It has one land. You don't like it, so you mulligan: shuffle all seven back into your library.
You draw a fresh seven. Still awkward — two lands but nothing you can cast before turn five. You mulligan again: shuffle all seven back.
You draw a third seven. This one is good, so you keep it. You've now taken two mulligans.
In multiplayer Commander the first mulligan was free, so you owe one card, not two. Put your single worst card on the bottom of your library and start the game with six.
Note the order: you decide to keep first, then bottom. You are choosing which cards to lose from a hand you've already seen and approved — not drawing blind into a smaller hand.
Because you pick what goes on the bottom, a mulligan is much better at fixing a specific problem than it looks. Mulliganing into a hand with three lands and four expensive spells isn't a disaster — you bottom the most expensive spell and keep a functional six. The old rule gave you a random six; this one gives you the best six out of a seven you chose to keep.
After you mulligan, you scry 1 before the game starts.
That was the Vancouver mulligan, retired in July 2019 when the London mulligan was adopted across every format. There is no scry under the current rule — you draw a full seven and bottom cards instead. If someone at your table offers you a scry after a mulligan, they're playing a seven-year-old rule.
In multiplayer Commander your first mulligan costs nothing. You ship seven, draw seven, and keep seven.
This is a genuine, official part of multiplayer Commander, and it's the single most under-used rule in the format. Your first mulligan doesn't count toward the number of cards you bottom. Every mulligan after it does. Here's what your final hand size actually looks like:
Read the second row. A free look at a completely new seven-card hand, at no cost, is an enormous amount of value to leave on the table — and plenty of players do leave it there, either because they don't know the rule exists or because they feel vaguely bad about using it. There is nothing to feel bad about. It applies equally to all four players, and using it makes for better games, because four functional opening hands produce a better night than one person watching from behind a hand of two lands and nothing else.
If your opening seven in a multiplayer Commander game is merely okay, ship it. The first one is free, so an okay hand is not the bar — a hand you're happy with is.
— the practical takeaway
One exception worth knowing: Duel Commander, the 1v1 version of the format, does not get the free mulligan. It follows the standard London rule, so your first mulligan already costs you a card. If you play both, don't carry the habit across.
There's no rule capping it, but the arithmetic caps it for you. Each mulligan past the free one costs a card off your final hand, so eventually you would be bottoming everything you drew and starting with nothing. Long before that, the hands stop being worth keeping.
In practice, three is about the floor of usefulness in Commander. A five-card hand can still contain three lands and a plan. A four-card hand usually can't, and in a 100-card singleton deck you can't rely on drawing your way out of it — see Singleton vs. Constructed → for why consistency works differently here than in a 60-card deck with four copies of everything.
Count lands first, then ask whether the hand does anything before turn four. Almost every mulligan decision resolves on those two questions.
Should you keep this opening hand?
1. How many lands are in the hand?
2. Can the hand do something before turn four?
3. Does the hand only work if you draw one specific card?
4. Is this your free mulligan, or a paid one?
Mulligan advice written for 60-card formats doesn't transfer cleanly, and it's worth knowing why before you apply it at a Commander table.
You start at 40 life, and nobody can kill you on turn four. In a 20-life format a slow hand loses to an aggressive start before you've drawn out of it. In Commander you usually have time to recover from a mediocre keep — which makes greedy keeps less punishing than they'd be elsewhere. That cuts both ways, though: because games are long, being the player who spent five turns doing nothing means three opponents got five turns of development on you.
Singleton means no redundancy. A 60-card deck runs four copies of its best card, so mulliganing looking for "a" card is reasonable. In Commander there is exactly one of each — so you should basically never mulligan looking for a specific card, only for a functional distribution of lands and costs. There is no second copy coming.
Your commander is always available. This is the quiet reason Commander keeps can be looser than they look: you have guaranteed access to one specific card from the command zone regardless of what you drew. A hand with lands and ramp and no other action is often fine, because the action is your commander. See Commander Rules: The Complete Guide → for how the command zone works.
Mulligan frequency is a deckbuilding signal. If you're mulliganing a particular deck most games, that's not variance, it's a message — almost always that the land count is too low or the curve is too high. Both are fixable, and both are covered in The Land & Mana Base Guide → and What Makes a Curve →.
Not taking the free mulligan. The most common and most costly one. In multiplayer Commander a merely-adequate seven should be shipped, because looking at a brand new seven costs you literally nothing.
Keeping a landless hand because the cards are exciting. Exciting cards you cannot cast are worse than boring cards you can. A hand with no lands is a hand with no game.
Bottoming your lands. When you keep after mulliganing, the instinct is to protect your most powerful spell and bottom a land. That's usually backwards — the reason you mulliganed was probably mana, and a six-card hand with three lands functions while a six-card hand with one doesn't.
Mulliganing to find one specific card. Reasonable in a 60-card deck with four copies. In singleton it's chasing a single card out of 99.
Playing the old rule. No scrying, and you never draw fewer than seven. If you're dealing yourself six cards after a mulligan, you're playing a rule that was replaced in 2019.
Shuffle your hand back into your library and draw a fresh seven cards. You can repeat that as many times as you like. When you finally decide to keep, you put one card from your hand on the bottom of your library for each mulligan you took, choosing which ones. So you always look at seven cards; the cost of mulliganing is paid at the end, in cards you bottom, not in cards you draw.
In multiplayer Commander, yes. Your first mulligan doesn't count toward the number of cards you bottom, so you can ship your opening seven, draw a new seven, and keep all seven at no cost. Every mulligan after that costs a card as normal. Duel Commander — the 1v1 format — does not get the free mulligan and follows the standard London rule.
There's no hard limit, but the maths runs out. Each mulligan past the free one costs you a card off your final hand, so after enough of them you'd be bottoming all seven and starting with an empty hand. In practice almost nobody goes past three, because a four-card hand in a 100-card deck is rarely better than a bad seven.
No. That was the Vancouver mulligan, which let you scry 1 after keeping a reduced hand. It was replaced by the London mulligan in July 2019 across all formats. Under the current rule there is no scry — you draw a full seven and bottom cards instead.
Almost always, yes. A typical Commander deck runs 36-38 lands in 100 cards, so roughly a third of your deck is lands and you cannot count on drawing several in a row. A one-land hand is usually a mulligan too unless it's packed with cheap ramp. Keeping a landless seven because it contains exciting cards is the single most common way new players lose a game before it starts.
TurnZero tracks results per deck across a season, so a deck you mulligan every week shows up as a pattern instead of a feeling.
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