Commander Glossary
Every term a Commander table actually uses, from the legend rule to cEDH to kingmaking, defined in a sentence or two. Where the site has a full guide on something, it's one tap away; where a term is simple enough to answer here, it stops here.
The list of cards Commander's Rules Committee has ruled too disruptive for the format, maintained separately from every other Magic banned list.
The Commander Banned List, Explained →A spell that destroys, exiles, or otherwise clears most or all creatures (sometimes other permanent types too) at once, usually hitting every player's board rather than just one.
Wizards' official five-tier scale for how a Commander deck plays: Exhibition, Core, Upgraded, Optimized, and cEDH, numbered 1 through 5. It replaced the informal 1-10 "power level" guessing players used before it.
The Commander Bracket System, Explained →Short for competitive Elder Dragon Highlander: bracket 5, the highest tier of Commander play, built to win as fast and consistently as possible, usually around a two-card combo.
What Is cEDH in Commander? →The rule that actually decides what can go in a Commander deck: every card has to share a color with the commander's own color identity, which includes colored mana symbols in its rules text, not just its mana cost.
What Is Color Identity in MTG? →The zone outside the battlefield where a commander starts the game, and where it returns by choice whenever it would otherwise go to a graveyard, hand, library, or exile.
Magic's flagship singleton, multiplayer format: 100-card decks led by a legendary creature, 40 starting life, and no card besides basic lands run more than once. "EDH" (Elder Dragon Highlander) is the older name for the same format.
Commander Rules: The Complete Guide →A player loses if they've taken 21 or more combat damage from a single commander over the course of a game, tracked separately from ordinary life loss.
What Is Commander Damage? →The recurring social occasion, not just the format: a group of players who get together, regularly, to play Commander together.
What Is a Commander Night? →The extra {"{2}"} generic mana a commander costs to cast from the command zone for each previous time it's been cast there that game, stacked on top of its normal mana cost.
The informal, pre-bracket way players described how strong a Commander deck was, usually a 1-10 scale with no fixed meaning from one table to the next.
What Is EDH Power Level? →An archetype built around handing everyone at the table resources, cards, mana, extra turns, on the theory that a friendlier table leaves its own threats alone the longest.
Group Hug: The Commander Archetype, Explained →Two or more cards that, once assembled, repeat an action an unlimited number of times, usually to produce mana, damage, or card draw rather than winning by themselves.
What Are Infinite Combos in MTG? →A player who can no longer win the game deciding, deliberately, who does. Playgroups genuinely disagree about whether it's a problem or just how multiplayer games behave.
Commander Politics & Threat Assessment →If a player controls two or more legendary permanents with exactly the same name, they choose one to keep and put the rest into the graveyard.
Matchmaking Rating: a number, borrowed from competitive gaming, that estimates how strong a player or a deck is from match results, rising after wins and falling after losses.
What Does MMR Mean in MTG? →Reading who at a multiplayer table is actually dangerous right now, on more than one axis (board, resources, clock, combo proximity), and deciding who to answer accordingly.
Commander Politics & Threat Assessment →A stand-in for a real card, legal outside sanctioned tournament play at any table that agrees to it, and never to be confused with a counterfeit made to deceive.
MTG Proxies: Rules, Etiquette & What's Allowed →The informal pre-game conversation where a table agrees on power level, house rules, and anything they'd rather not play against, before anyone shuffles up.
What Is Rule 0? →Wizards' direct-to-consumer product line: limited-run, alternate-art printings of existing cards, sold straight from their own store rather than through booster packs.
What Is Secret Lair? →The deckbuilding rule, not unique to Commander, that a card besides basic lands can only appear once in a deck rather than up to four times.
Singleton vs. Constructed →Player slang for any strategy built around taxing, denying, or locking out what opponents are allowed to do, rather than racing them on life total.
What Is Stax in MTG? →Common shorthand for a Commander deck's non-commander cards. A hundred-card deck is talked about as "a commander and its 99."
A team variant where two players share one life total and win or lose together, most often adapted to Commander at 30 life per side.
Two-Headed Giant in Commander: The Rules →An archetype built around making one creature, usually the commander, big and hard to remove, then winning through combat or commander damage alone.
Voltron: The Commander Archetype, Explained →Elder Dragon Highlander, the format's original name from when the earliest commanders were all Elder Dragon legendary creatures. "Commander" and "EDH" refer to the same format today; players use both interchangeably.
Not a dedicated one. Magic's own Comprehensive Rules define every rules term precisely but read like a legal document, and a lot of genuinely common Commander vocabulary (stax, cEDH, the 99, kingmaking) is player slang that predates or sits outside official terminology entirely. This page collects both kinds in one place.
A rules term (commander damage, the legend rule, color identity) has a precise definition in the Comprehensive Rules and means the same thing at every table. A slang term (stax, cEDH, kingmaking, the 99) is community vocabulary that describes a strategy or a situation, and its exact boundaries can vary a little between playgroups.
A handful of terms here (the command zone, commander tax, the legend rule, the 99) are simple enough to answer completely in a sentence or two, so they don't need a full guide of their own. Everything with more to say links out to its own page.
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