MTG Formats
Commander built from Standard, at 60 cards instead of 100. The cheapest way to play a singleton deck with a commander, and the format most Arena players spend their evenings in without ever calling it that.
Brawl is a singleton format with a commander, built from the Standard card pool. Sixty cards in paper, one copy of each, a legendary creature or planeswalker in the command zone, and 25 life in a two-player game or 30 at a multiplayer table.
Everything else works the way Commander does. Your commander starts in the command zone, you may cast it from there, it goes back there instead of to the graveyard, and it costs two more each time you recast it. Your deck must stay inside its colour identity, so a commander means no red, green or white cards anywhere in the 59.
Commander's shape, Standard's card pool, half the deck. You get the part people like about Commander, which is the card you always have access to, without thirty years of cards to buy.
the shortest description of Brawl
This is where nearly all the confusion lives, and it is worth being precise about. MTG Arena runs two Brawl modes with two different deck sizes.
Brawl on Arena is the 100-card version, built from the non-rotating Historic card pool. It used to be called Historic Brawl, and it is what most Arena players mean by the word.
Standard Brawl is the 60-card version, built from Standard, matching the paper format. Both use 25 starting life in their one-on-one queues, and Arena gives each player a free mulligan.
Arena also adds two Commander staples to the Standard Brawl pool that Standard itself does not have, Arcane Signet and Command Tower, because a singleton format needs the fixing and the ramp. If you are following a decklist from a website, check which of the two it was built for before you spend wildcards on it.
Brawl decks are 60 cards, so an Arena Brawl list will fit.
Only Standard Brawl is 60. The mode called Brawl on Arena is 100 cards from the Historic pool, so a list built for it has 40 cards and a card pool that a paper Brawl deck cannot legally use.
The life totals are the tell. Commander's 40 exists because you are facing three opponents at once; Brawl's 25 exists because you are usually facing one, and a 100-card format's worth of life would make a two-player game interminable. If you want the full ruleset for the parent format, our Commander rules guide covers all of it.
Cheap beats powerful. A three or four-mana commander you cast on curve and recast after it dies does more work across a game than a six-mana one you cast twice. Brawl games are shorter than Commander games and the commander tax adds up faster when there is less time to make it back.
Two colours is the sweet spot. A mono-coloured commander gives you a flawless mana base and a shallower card pool; three colours in a rotating format means a mana base built from whatever duals happen to be in Standard right now. Two is where most good Brawl decks live.
Planeswalkers are legal here. Brawl lets any planeswalker be your commander, which Commander does not. A planeswalker in the command zone is a recurring source of value that the opponent has to attack, and in a 1v1 format there is only one of them to do it.
Which commanders are available changes with every rotation, so the honest answer to "what should I play" is whatever the current sets offer. Our set guides list the notable legends in each recent release, and the commander leaderboard shows what people are actually winning with in tracked games.
Roughly the Commander template, scaled down. The counts below assume paper Brawl or Standard Brawl; add about two thirds again to each row for the 100-card Arena version.
These overlap: a creature that draws a card when it enters counts in two rows at once, which is why the numbers sum past 60. That is the same convention our Commander deck template uses, and the same one the deck builder in the app applies when it measures a list.
The one adjustment worth making for 1v1: play more removal than you would in Commander, and make sure some of it answers a commander permanently rather than sending it back to the command zone. With one opponent, nobody else is going to deal with their threat for you.
Brawl has a short banned list of its own, separate from Standard's. It covers two kinds of card: things generically strong enough to warp a 1v1 singleton format, and things that stop an opponent using their commander at all, such as effects that lock commanders out of the command zone. The second category exists because a format built around a card you can always reach is not much of a format if one card turns that off.
Arena's list and paper's list are maintained separately and do not always match, so check the one for where you are playing.
Sixty in paper, including the commander, all singleton. On MTG Arena there are two versions and the numbers differ: Standard Brawl is the 60-card one, and the mode simply called Brawl is 100 cards built from the Historic pool. If someone says "Brawl" on Arena they almost always mean the 100-card version.
Card pool and scale. Brawl uses Standard-legal cards, 60-card decks and 25 life; Commander uses every legal set, 100-card decks and 40 life, with the 21-point commander damage rule that Brawl does not have. Brawl is also mostly played 1v1, while Commander is built around a table of four.
Yes. Brawl allows any legendary creature or any planeswalker as your commander, which is a real difference from Commander, where a planeswalker needs text specifically saying it can be your commander. Your deck must still stay inside that commander's colour identity.
Paper Brawl and Arena's Standard Brawl do, because they follow the Standard card pool: when a set leaves Standard, it leaves those too. Arena's 100-card Brawl does not, since it draws on the non-rotating Historic pool.
Substantially, and for two compounding reasons. It is 40 fewer cards, and those cards come from the sets currently in print rather than from thirty years of Magic, so there are no reserved-list lands or twenty-year-old staples to buy. The trade is that the deck rotates.
TurnZero HQ builds singleton decks against archetype targets and keeps the win rate for each version you play.
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