Hosting & Running a Night
Two approaches: point a camera at your real cards, or play a digital client with the whole card pool. Webcam play keeps your collection and your pod; XMage and Cockatrice are free and instant. MTG Arena is not an option at all, because it does not have Commander, only the one-on-one Brawl format.
MTG Arena does not support Commander. It has never had a four-player Commander queue, and the format people mistake for it is Brawl: a 100-card singleton deck built around a legendary creature or planeswalker, following that commander's color identity, played one-on-one starting at 25 life. Wizards added a ranked Brawl queue in 2026, which made the confusion more common rather than less.
The overlap is the deckbuilding constraint. Everything that makes Commander the format people actually want, four players, 40 life, the politics of deciding who to attack, the 21-commander-damage rule, is absent. If you want Commander online, it is one of the platforms below.
The closest thing to a real pod: everyone points a camera at their own board, plays with the physical deck they already own, and the software shares the views and helps identify cards. It keeps your collection meaningful and it keeps the game feeling like Commander rather than like a video game.
The original, still the biggest, and no longer actively developed
Point a camera at your own board, play with your real cards, and let the software handle card recognition and the shared view. SpellTable is what made webcam Commander normal and it still has the largest pool of players looking for a pod. The caveat is real and worth knowing before you build an evening around it: since Wizards took it over it has seen little active development, and outages and connection problems are a regular complaint rather than an occasional one.
The actively-maintained alternatives, webcam and browser
Two of the platforms that grew up in the space SpellTable's stagnation left. Convoke covers webcam play with community and guild features for finding a regular pod, and Playgroup Live is a browser-based virtual tabletop supporting two to six players with nothing to install. Both are worth trying if SpellTable has let you down, and both are moving faster than it is.
No cameras, no paper, and in most cases no cost. The tradeoff is between clients that enforce the rules for you and clients that behave like a shared table and enforce nothing. Rules enforcement sounds strictly better and is not: an unenforced client handles weird interactions by letting you simply do the thing, while an enforcing one occasionally refuses to let you do something legal that it models differently.
Free, rules-enforced, and it genuinely knows every card
A free desktop client with full rules enforcement across effectively the entire card pool, including multiplayer Commander. Rules enforcement is the reason to pick it: nobody misses a trigger, nobody has to adjudicate a stack question, and the game simply will not let an illegal play happen. The interface is functional rather than pleasant and it is a Java desktop application, which is exactly as much friction as that sounds.
Free, no rules enforcement, closest to a shared physical table
An open-source client that acts as a shared tabletop rather than a referee: it moves cards where you tell it to and enforces nothing. That sounds like a weakness and is often a strength, because it plays like paper Magic, handles unusual interactions gracefully by letting you just do the thing, and never argues. The cost is that everyone at the table has to know the rules, and mistakes go uncaught.
Official, rules-enforced, and you buy the cards again
The long-running official client supports Commander with full rules enforcement and a real economy behind it, which is also the objection: your paper collection means nothing here and you are acquiring a second one. Worth it for players who want structured, reliable, rules-enforced games often enough to justify the cost, hard to recommend for a casual weekly pod.
Paid, physics-based, endlessly flexible, enforces nothing
A general-purpose virtual tabletop with Magic modules built by the community. Like Cockatrice it enforces no rules, and unlike Cockatrice it simulates physical objects, which is either charming or infuriating depending on your tolerance for a deck of cards being knocked over by a die. Requires everyone to own it.
Most bad remote Commander games are bad for physical reasons rather than software ones. Six things fix almost all of it.
Mount the camera above the board looking straight down, not across it at an angle. Angled views make cards unreadable to everyone else and card recognition much worse.
Light the board from the side, not from directly above the camera. Overhead light plus a glossy sleeve produces a bright white rectangle where the card used to be.
Use matte sleeves. Glare is the single most common reason a remote table cannot read your board.
Keep your board spread out and in consistent positions. Lands in a row, creatures in a row. Nobody can scan a pile.
Say what you are doing out loud as you do it. Remote play loses every visual cue that normally tells the table you are tapping mana.
Agree how life totals are tracked before you start, on something everyone can see rather than four separate pieces of paper.
Remote Commander loses the shared board. In person, everyone can see every life total, every counter and roughly how much damage each commander has dealt, and that shared picture is what the table's decisions are made from. Over four webcams, each player is tracking their own numbers on their own paper and nobody quite agrees. Commander damage is the first casualty, because it is a separate total between each pair of players and nobody remembers it.
One shared tracker that everyone can see fixes it. TurnZero HQ handles life, commander damage between each pair, and the game's result across every common pod size including 1v1 and Two-Headed Giant, so the numbers live in one place rather than four. It also means a remote night still produces a record: which decks were played, who won, and how the deck is doing over time, which is exactly what remote pods otherwise lose.
No. Arena does not have Commander. Its closest format is Brawl, which uses a 100-card singleton deck built around a legendary creature or planeswalker following its color identity, but plays one-on-one at 25 life instead of four-player at 40. Ranked Brawl arrived in 2026, but multiplayer Commander is still not a format Arena supports, and the digital-only Alchemy cards in its pool do not exist in paper.
If you want to use your own physical cards, a webcam platform: SpellTable has the most players, Convoke and Playgroup Live are more actively maintained. If you would rather not use paper at all, XMage is free and enforces every rule, and Cockatrice is free and enforces none, which suits groups who know the rules and want the game to feel like paper. Magic Online is the official option and the only one where you pay for cards again.
Yes, it still runs and still has the largest community, but it has seen little active development since Wizards of the Coast took it over and players report outages and connection problems regularly. It is worth having a backup plan for a scheduled game night rather than assuming it will be up.
It depends on the platform. Webcam play uses your actual physical cards, so yes. XMage, Cockatrice and Tabletop Simulator give you the whole card pool for free, which makes them the practical way to test a deck before buying it. Magic Online is the exception where you buy a separate digital collection.
Agree on one shared method before the first turn rather than four separate ones. Some platforms have counters built in; many pods use a separate tracking app that everyone can see, which also handles commander damage between each pair of players, the thing most likely to get lost when nobody is sharing a table.
Life totals, commander damage and results for every pod size, on phone and web.
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