Commander 2011 (CMD): The Set That Started It All

Before preconstructed Commander decks were an annual tradition, there was Commander 2011 - the product that arguably turned a beloved casual format into a cornerstone of Magic: The Gathering. Released in 2011 with the set code CMD, this was Wizards of the Coast's first serious, purpose-built foray into the Commander format, and it changed how millions of players experience the game.

I want to be upfront: the source material available for this article is limited, so where I'm working from general knowledge of the set rather than cited documentation, I'll say so. If you're researching for deck-building or rules purposes, cross-reference with Scryfall or the official Wizards archive.

What is Commander 2011?

Commander 2011 is a preconstructed product released by Wizards of the Coast in June 2011. It consists of five 100-card Commander decks, each built around a different three-colour combination and a legendary creature as the commander. The set contains 318 cards in total - a mix of reprints and brand-new cards designed specifically for the Commander format.

Before this product, Commander (then widely known as EDH, or Elder Dragon Highlander) was a community-driven format with no official precon support. Commander 2011 was Wizards formally embracing it - and that embrace turned out to be permanent.

Format check: Commander 2011 cards are legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage. Individual cards may also appear on format-specific banlists, so always verify with the Commander Rules Committee (commanderformat.com) before building.

The five decks

Each deck in Commander 2011 is built around a three-colour wedge or shard combination, giving players five distinct flavours of Commander gameplay right out of the box.

| Deck Name | Colours | Primary Theme | |---|---|---| | Heavenly Inferno | White, Black, Red | Angels, Demons, Dragons | | Counterpunch | White, Black, Green | Tokens and +1/+1 counters | | Mirror Mastery | Blue, Red, Green | Copying spells and permanents | | Political Puppets | White, Blue, Red | Politics and control | | Devour for Power | Black, Blue, Green | Graveyard value and big creatures |

Each deck shipped with a legendary commander and several alternative commanders, which was a smart design choice - it gave players flexibility to explore the deck's themes under different leadership without needing to buy additional cards.

Themes and mechanics

Commander 2011 didn't introduce a sweeping new keyword mechanic the way a Standard-legal set might. Instead, its mechanical identity is built around experience at the table - politics, resource advantage, and the kind of big, splashy plays that Commander games are built for.

New cards designed for multiplayer

The set introduced a significant number of cards printed for the first time specifically with multiplayer in mind. These cards lean into Commander's core tensions: do you make friends, make enemies, or quietly accumulate power while everyone else is arguing?

Some of the new cards introduced mechanics or effects that scale with the number of opponents - a design philosophy that has since become standard practice in Commander products.

Reprints doing heavy lifting

A large portion of CMD's 318 cards are reprints, and in 2011 that mattered enormously. Many players coming into Commander from Standard or Modern didn't own the older, expensive cards that the format's power level demanded. Commander 2011 brought key reprints into more players' hands at an accessible price point.

I think this is actually the most underrated part of Commander 2011's legacy - not the new cards, but the fact that it made the format accessible.

Lore and setting

Unlike a Standard expansion, Commander 2011 isn't tied to a single plane or a chapter of Magic's ongoing story. The five decks draw on flavour from across Magic's multiverse - angels from Innistrad's predecessors, elder dragons from the earliest days of the game, and creatures that span dozens of planes and settings.

Lore aside: The elder dragon theme is a direct nod to the format's origins. "Elder Dragon Highlander" was named after the five elder dragons from Legends (1994), and Commander 2011 leans into that heritage by including powerful legendary creatures that evoke that same sense of ancient, world-spanning power.

The deck flavour texts and art direction paint each of the five decks as a distinct philosophical approach to power - heavenly hosts, shadowy manipulation, arcane mirrors, political maneuvering, and death-fuelled inevitability. It's broad, but it works for a product that needs to appeal to players across every corner of Magic's lore.

Notable cards and impact

I'm going to be careful here, because specific card names and their individual impacts are best verified on Scryfall or EDHRec rather than taken from this article alone. What I can say with confidence is that Commander 2011 introduced several cards that went on to become format staples - cards that still appear in Commander decks more than a decade later.

The new-to-Magic cards in CMD were designed specifically for the 100-card, multiplayer singleton format, and many of them found permanent homes in the format's most popular decks. Some of the political and group-hug cards introduced here became templates for how Wizards approaches that archetype to this day.

This was also the product that established the template for every Commander precon release that followed - five decks, multiple commanders per deck, a mix of new and reprinted cards, all organised around a mechanical and flavour theme. Every Commander release from 2014 through to the present day (Commander Masters, Commander precons in modern sets) descends directly from what CMD established.

Set legacy

It's hard to overstate how much Commander 2011 mattered.

Before CMD, Commander was a format that existed in spite of Wizards, not because of them. After CMD, it became one of the company's most important product lines - and eventually, arguably, the most important format for player engagement and card sales.

The annual Commander product release became a fixture almost immediately, with Commander 2014, Commander 2015, and Commander 2016 following in subsequent years, each building on the template CMD established. That template - multiple precons, new legendary creatures, format-specific reprints - has since evolved into Commander decks shipped alongside almost every major set release.

In my opinion, the single biggest thing Commander 2011 did wasn't print any particular card. It was the signal it sent: Wizards of the Coast was taking Commander seriously. That signal brought new players into the format, encouraged stores to support Commander nights, and created the conditions for Commander to grow into the dominant way that most Magic players engage with the game today.

If you pick up a Commander precon at your local game store in 2024, you're holding the direct descendant of what CMD started in 2011. That's a pretty remarkable legacy for five cardboard decks. ✨