What formats is CLB legal in?

CLB cards are legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage. They are not legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern unless a specific card was also printed in a set legal in those formats. Note that several initiative-granting cards from CLB were subsequently banned in Legacy.

What is the initiative mechanic and why were some CLB cards banned in Legacy?

The initiative is a mechanic introduced in CLB that lets you venture into the Undercity, a powerful new dungeon with escalating rewards. Other players can take the initiative from you by dealing combat damage. In Commander Draft, it creates interesting politics; in Legacy, initiative-granting creatures proved so efficient that several cards — including White Plume Adventurer and Seasoned Dungeoneer — were banned in that format in late 2022 and early 2023.

How does Commander Draft work with CLB?

In Commander Draft with CLB, each player drafts from three booster packs as normal, but builds a 60-card Commander deck from their drafted cards instead of a 40-card limited deck. The first card you draft is typically your commander. The Background pairing system means you're often choosing both a legendary creature and a Background enchantment to define your deck's identity during the draft.

Is Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate connected to Adventures in the Forgotten Realms?

Both sets are set in the D&D Forgotten Realms and share mechanics like dungeon-venturing, but they aren't connected by a single continuing story. Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (2021) was a Standard-legal set; CLB (2022) is a Commander Draft product. Think of them as two separate windows into the same D&D world rather than chapters in one narrative.

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate (CLB) Guide

Q: What is Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate?

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate (CLB) is a 936-card Magic: The Gathering set released in June 2022. It is designed primarily for Commander Draft — a format where players draft a full Commander deck from booster packs — and crosses over with the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms setting, specifically the city of Baldur's Gate.

Q: What is the Background mechanic in CLB?

Background is a new enchantment subtype introduced in CLB. Many legendary creatures in the set have the text 'choose a Background,' allowing you to pair them with a Background enchantment as a second commander. The Background you choose shapes your colour identity and gives your commander additional abilities, creating a modular character-building system inspired by D&D.

Some sets are built for the competitive table. Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate was built for the one covered in snacks, house rules, and a dungeon map someone printed out three weeks ago. Released in 2022 as the second entry in the Commander Legends line, CLB fuses Magic's most social format with the beloved world of Dungeons & Dragons - and it does so with a frankly enormous 936-card set designed almost entirely to be drafted in groups of four.

What is Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate?

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate (set code: CLB) is a Magic: The Gathering set released in June 2022. It is the follow-up to the original Commander Legends (2020) and crosses over with the Dungeons & Dragons universe, continuing the partnership established by Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (AFR, 2021).

At 936 cards, CLB is one of the largest sets Magic has ever produced. That size isn't accidental - the set is designed primarily for Commander Draft, a format where players draft a Commander deck directly from booster packs rather than building one in advance. Like its predecessor, CLB includes a massive pool of legendary creatures intended to serve as commanders, plus a supporting cast built to slot into a wide range of Commander archetypes.

Format check: CLB cards are legal in Legacy, Vintage, and Commander. They are not legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern unless a card was printed in another legal set.

Themes and mechanics

CLB leans hard into its D&D identity, and you can feel that in both its mechanical choices and its flavour. The set revisits and expands on mechanics introduced in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms while adding a few new tools built specifically for the Commander Draft environment.

Returning mechanics from the D&D crossover

The dungeon mechanic returns from AFR. Players can venture into one of three dungeons - Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Dungeon: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, or Undercity - progressing through rooms to collect incremental rewards. CLB introduces Undercity as a new dungeon, one only accessible through the new initiative mechanic.

Background is a new enchantment subtype introduced in CLB. Many legendary creatures in the set have the text "choose a Background," which lets you pair them with a Background enchantment as a second commander. This gives those commanders a modular, build-around quality - the Background you choose meaningfully shapes what your deck wants to do. It's a clever design that echoes D&D's own character-building system, where class and background combine to define who your character is.

The initiative

The initiative is CLB's most talked-about new mechanic, and for good reason - it turned out to be one of the most powerful things the set introduced to the wider game.

Taking the initiative causes you to venture into the Undercity, a new dungeon exclusive to this mechanic. Whenever you take the initiative or begin your upkeep while holding it, you advance through the Undercity's rooms, collecting powerful effects along the way: life gain, card draw, creature tokens, and eventually - if you reach the end - finding the Throne of Eldraine, which gives each creature you control a +1/+1 counter every upkeep.

Other players can "take" the initiative from you by dealing combat damage to you, which means it creates a dynamic tug-of-war at the table. In Commander Draft, this plays out as a fun political mechanic. In Legacy, it turned out to be something else entirely.

Format check: Several initiative-granting cards - most notably Seasoned Dungeoneer and White Plume Adventurer - were banned in Legacy in late 2022 and early 2023 due to how efficiently they enabled the initiative engine in that format. The initiative mechanic proved far more powerful in a 1v1 context with access to Legacy's card pool than its Commander Draft origins would suggest. If you're playing Legacy, check the current banlist before building.

Draft-specific design: the background pairing system

One of the things I find most elegant about CLB's design is how the Background mechanic creates a huge matrix of possible commander combinations. With dozens of legendary creatures that accept a Background, and dozens of Backgrounds to pair with them, the number of distinct commander identities you can draft into is enormous. That's by design - it keeps the draft format fresh across many play sessions.

Other returning mechanics

Several mechanics from across Magic's history appear in CLB to fill out the set's mechanical texture:

Cascade returns, rewarding decks that curve their spells carefully.
Myriad gives combat a multiplayer flavour, creating token copies attacking each other opponent.
Baldur's Gate - a subtype used for Gates, tying into the city setting and enabling Gate-matters cards.
Partner and Partner with return in limited capacity, reinforcing the two-commander theme the set celebrates.

Limited and Draft

CLB is designed for Commander Draft, which works differently from a typical booster draft. Players draft from three booster packs each (like normal), but build a 60-card Commander deck from their drafted cards rather than a 40-card limited deck. The first card you draft is your commander - usually one of the many legendary creatures in the set.

The Background pairing system is central to how draft archetypes form. Early in the draft, you're not just picking a colour pair - you're picking a commander identity, and then a Background that complements it. The two choices shape what supporting cards you're looking to pick up throughout the rest of the draft.

The format tends to play at a slower pace than a typical booster draft, which makes sense: Commander is a slower, more political game by nature, and CLB's card design reflects that. Sweepers, ramp spells, and value engines are plentiful, and games often go long enough for dungeon-venturing payoffs to matter.

I'd recommend CLB Draft to anyone who enjoys Commander but has never tried drafting - it's a genuinely fun way to experience the format without needing to own a pre-built or constructed deck.

Lore and setting

Baldur's Gate is one of the most storied cities in the Forgotten Realms, the D&D campaign setting that Magic has licensed for this crossover. It's a sprawling port city on the Sword Coast, famous in D&D for its political intrigue, its powerful merchant guilds, the Flaming Fist mercenary company, and its position as the setting of the classic Baldur's Gate video game series.

CLB draws heavily on D&D iconography - both the tabletop game and the Forgotten Realms setting specifically. Characters, locations, and monsters from decades of D&D lore appear on cards throughout the set, depicted in Magic's art style. The trivia for the set extensively catalogues D&D references across locations and characters, which gives you a sense of just how deep the design team went into the source material.

Lore aside: Magic has visited the Forgotten Realms twice now - first with Adventures in the Forgotten Realms (2021) and then with CLB (2022). The two sets are not directly connected by a single storyline in the way a traditional Magic set is; they're more like two different windows into the same D&D world, each designed around a different product type (Standard-legal set vs. Commander Draft set).

The dungeon mechanic, and the Undercity specifically, fits naturally into Baldur's Gate's identity as a city with a labyrinthine underground history. Venturing beneath the city is a very Baldur's Gate thing to do.

Notable cards and impact

While I won't run through an exhaustive list, a few cards from CLB made an outsized impact on formats beyond Commander.

The initiative mechanic cards - particularly those that could enter the battlefield efficiently in Legacy - proved to be the set's most consequential competitive contribution. The initiative engine became a dominant strategy in Legacy almost immediately after the set's release, leading to multiple bannings in that format. It's a striking example of how a mechanic designed for a slow, multiplayer, draft format can behave very differently when dropped into a 1v1 format with access to powerful tutors, fast mana, and efficient creatures.

Beyond the initiative, CLB added a significant number of legendary creatures to the Commander pool - which, given that the set contains 936 cards and was explicitly designed around the format, is exactly what you'd expect. Many of those legends found homes in pre-existing Commander decks or inspired new ones.

Set legacy

Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate occupies an interesting place in Magic history. As a Commander Draft product, it delivered on its primary goal: creating a fun, flavourful, highly replayable draft experience built around the most popular format in the game.

But it will probably be remembered by competitive players primarily for the initiative, which stands as one of the more dramatic examples of a draft mechanic accidentally becoming a Legacy problem. That's not a knock on the set's design - it's genuinely hard to predict how a mechanic will interact with thirty years of card history - but it's the kind of story that sticks.

For Commander players, CLB expanded the commander pool substantially, introduced the Background system as a creative pairing mechanic, and gave D&D fans a deep, affectionate love letter to the Forgotten Realms. In my opinion, that's a success worth remembering on its own terms.