What format is Battlebond designed for?

Battlebond is designed specifically for Two-Headed Giant (2HG), a multiplayer format where two players team up, share a life total, and take turns simultaneously against another team of two. It can be played as either a draft or sealed format, as long as it's Two-Headed Giant.

Are Battlebond cards legal in Modern or Standard?

No. The 85 new cards in Battlebond were immediately legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage on release, but were never added to Standard or Modern. The reprints in the set retain whatever legality they had before — they don't gain new format legality from appearing in BBD.

What are the Battlebond bond lands?

The bond lands (also called crowd lands) are a cycle of taplands that enter the battlefield untapped if you have two or more opponents. Battlebond contains the five allied-colour versions — Spire Garden, Luxury Suite, Sea of Clouds, Morphic Pool, and Bountiful Promenade. The enemy-colour lands came later in Commander Legends. They're Commander staples and saw play in Legacy and Vintage as well.

How does the 'Partner with' mechanic in Battlebond work?

Unlike the open-ended partner mechanic from Commander 2016, Battlebond's 'Partner with [name]' links two specific legendary creatures together. Each one names its exact partner. In the booster packs, partnered pairs always appear together — and if one is foil, the other will be too.

How many cards are in Battlebond, and how many are new?

Battlebond contains 254 unique cards: 5 Basic Lands, 101 Commons, 80 Uncommons, 53 Rares, and 15 Mythic Rares. Of those, 85 are brand-new cards. The rest are reprints from throughout Magic's history, many featuring new artwork.

Who are Will and Rowan Kenrith?

Will Kenrith and Rowan Kenrith are twin planeswalker siblings and the marquee characters of Battlebond. They feature on the booster pack art and are the set's two planeswalker cards, each with their own emblem. They compete in Valor's Reach on the plane of Kylem, and both went on to appear in later Magic sets.

Battlebond (BBD): The Two-Headed Giant Draft Set

Most Magic sets are designed for one player at a time. Battlebond throws that assumption out entirely - it's a set built from the ground up for two-on-two play, drafted in pairs, and set in a world where the crowd roars louder when you pull off something spectacular with your partner.

Released on June 8, 2018, Battlebond (BBD) was Magic's Innovation Product for that year - the same slot that had previously given us Conspiracy and Eternal Masters. It's the first booster set ever designed specifically around Two-Headed Giant (2HG), a multiplayer format where two players share a life total and take turns simultaneously as a team.

What is Battlebond?

Battlebond contains 254 unique cards: 5 Basic Lands, 101 Commons, 80 Uncommons, 53 Rares, and 15 Mythic Rares. Of those, 85 are entirely new cards, with the remaining slots filled out by reprints from throughout Magic's history, many with fresh art. The new cards were immediately legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage on release - but not Standard or Modern, following the same precedent as other non-Standard innovation sets.

The set is inspired by sports and e-sports, and every new card is set in Valor's Reach, an arena on the plane of Kylem. The flavour text makes clear that winning is good, but looking good while winning is the real goal. Style points count.

Format check: Battlebond cards are legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage. The new cards were never Standard or Pioneer legal.

Themes and mechanics

Partner with

The headline mechanic of Battlebond is a new variant of the Commander keyword partner - specifically, "Partner with [name]." Rather than letting any two legendary creatures pair up (as in Commander 2016), this version links specific characters together. Each partnered legendary creature names exactly one other, and the two are inseparable: they always appear together in booster packs, and if you open a foil version of one, the other in that pack will also be foil.

The set features eleven partnered pairs, and they anchor the top of the collector number ordering - listed in rarity order before the other new cards.

Supporting Two-Headed Giant play

The mechanical identity of Battlebond is shaped entirely around the 2HG format. Many cards reference teammates, shared life totals, or create effects that scale beautifully when two players are working in concert. The R&D team made deliberate choices to support the draft environment: they reduced the number of weak filler commons and increased the proportion of common artifacts above the usual rate, giving both players in a pair more to work with.

Bond lands

One of Battlebond's most lasting contributions to the broader game is a cycle of taplands now known as bond lands (sometimes called crowd lands). The five lands in BBD cover the allied colour pairs - think lands that produce, say, green and white mana - and they enter the battlefield untapped as long as you have two or more opponents. In a multiplayer game like Commander, that condition is almost always met, which makes them strong fixing in the format.

Lore aside: The bond lands' art depicts locations from Valor's Reach, and the expansion symbol itself - two connected figures in front of a diamond - is a silhouette of the Spire Garden towers, one of the five land locations represented in the cycle.

The enemy-coloured bond lands didn't arrive until Commander Legends, completing the full ten-card cycle years later.

Limited and draft

Battlebond draft works differently from almost any other set. Eight players sit down, but they immediately pair up into four teams of two. You draft your deck in the usual way - passing packs, picking cards - but you're building toward a 2HG game where you and your partner share a 30-life total and win or lose together.

That shared context changes every pick. You and your partner naturally gravitate toward complementary roles: one player might lean into aggressive creatures while the other builds a support and control shell. Cards that create tokens, grant bonuses to your team, or interact with your partner's strategy rise in value significantly compared to how they'd read in a solo draft.

The design team leaned into this by pulling back on the weakest common cards that normally pad out a set and replacing them with more playable artifacts. Both players need functional decks, so the card quality floor is intentionally higher than usual.

Battlebond can also be played Sealed, and the core mechanics - especially partner and the team-oriented spells - work just as well there, since the format is still Two-Headed Giant.

Notable cards and impact

Battlebond's 85 new cards were designed with multiple audiences in mind: 2HG players, Commander tables, and Cube builders. Several of those cards have had significant and lasting impact.

Will Kenrith and Rowan Kenrith are the set's marquee planeswalkers - twin siblings who appear on the booster pack art and whose emblems are among the set's two emblem tokens. They were the first time Wizards introduced characters as a partnered planeswalker pair, and both went on to appear in later sets.

The allied bond lands - including Spire Garden, Luxury Suite, Sea of Clouds, Morphic Pool, and Bountiful Promenade - are probably the single most format-impacting contribution of the entire set. They became staples in Commander and saw play in Legacy and Vintage shortly after release, where the "two or more opponents" condition is irrelevant anyway since it simply means they enter untapped.

Najeela, the Blade-Blossom is another notable new card, generating Warrior tokens and enabling aggressive strategies that scale well with multiple attackers - a natural fit for 2HG and a Commander staple since.

The set also brought reprints of cards like Doomed Traveler, Beast Within, Genesis Chamber, and Noosegraf Mob, all with the 2HG environment in mind.

Tokens and emblems

Battlebond features six token types and two emblems:

1/1 Spirit with flying (for Doomed Traveler)
1/1 Warrior (for Blaring Recruiter, Najeela, the Blade-Blossom, Regna, the Redeemer, and Take Up Arms)
2/2 Zombie (for Doomed Dissenter and Noosegraf Mob)
5/5 Zombie Giant (for Quest for the Gravelord)
3/3 Beast (for Beast Within)
1/1 Myr artifact creature (for Genesis Chamber)
Emblem for Will Kenrith
Emblem for Rowan Kenrith

Lore and setting

Battlebond takes place entirely on Kylem, a plane devoted to the spectacle of two-on-two combat. The specific venue is Valor's Reach, an arena where warrior pairs compete for glory, fame, and the adulation of massive crowds. Every new card in the set depicts a location, character, or moment from Valor's Reach.

The aesthetic is unmistakably influenced by sports and e-sports culture - the arena, the crowd, the celebrity combatants. Kylem isn't a plane in peril. There's no Eldrazi, no Phyrexian oil, no world-ending threat. It's a place where the drama comes from competition, partnership, and performance. That's a refreshing change of pace in a game whose story often involves civilisation-scale catastrophe.

Will and Rowan Kenrith, the twin planeswalkers, are the set's central characters - competitors whose bond as siblings mirrors the set's core mechanical theme. Both feature on booster pack art alongside partnered pairs Zndrsplt and Okaun, and art from Lore Weaver also appears on packaging.

Promos

The set's twenty-two promos consist of the eleven partnered pairs in foil with alternate art, plus both planeswalkers at alternate art numbered #255/254 and #256/254 - a small bit of intentional whimsy with the collector numbering. These came in two-card packs.

Set legacy

Battlebond is remembered warmly, and I think that's because it did exactly what it set out to do. It made Two-Headed Giant feel like a real draft format with its own identity, rather than an afterthought. For players who enjoy multiplayer Magic but sometimes find Commander's four-player politics exhausting, 2HG draft with a trusted partner is one of the most fun experiences the game offers.

The bond lands are the set's most tangible competitive legacy. The allied five showed up immediately in Legacy and Vintage sideboards and became Commander staples that remain in high demand years later. When Commander Legends completed the enemy-coloured half of the cycle in 2020, it was widely celebrated - and traced directly back to the foundation Battlebond laid.

The "partner with" mechanic didn't return in the same form immediately, but it established a precedent for linking specific legendary creatures as pairs - a design space that's been revisited and expanded in subsequent sets.

Honestly, Battlebond is one of those sets where the Limited experience and the eternal-format card contributions both landed well, which doesn't happen as often as you'd like. If you have a chance to draft it with a trusted teammate, I'd take it. ✨