Commander Legends (CMR): The Draftable Commander Set

What is Commander Legends?

For thirty years, Commander was a format built around 100-card singleton decks, traded and crafted over time - not something you cracked open at a table and drafted. Commander Legends (CMR), released on November 20, 2020, changed that entirely.

This 718-card set is the first Magic: The Gathering product ever designed specifically to be drafted in the Commander format. It was Wizards of the Coast's Innovation product for 2020, and the concept alone raised eyebrows: draft a Commander deck? At a pod of players used to three-pack Booster Drafts? It turns out the answer was a resounding yes - and the execution was genuinely clever.

Format check: Commander Legends is legal in Commander, Legacy, and Vintage. As with all Commander sets, its cards are not legal in Standard, Pioneer, or Modern unless they were printed in a legal set separately.

The set's release was originally scheduled for November 6, 2020, but production delays pushed it back two weeks to November 20.

Themes and mechanics

Designing a Commander set that could also be drafted meant solving a puzzle no Magic set had faced before. Commander games are built around legendary creatures - your commander - and singleton deckbuilding. A draft format, by contrast, thrives on redundancy, curves, and synergy clusters. Commander Legends had to serve both masters.

The result was a set packed with mechanics tuned specifically for multiplayer play, legendary creatures you could actually draft around, and enough density of synergies that a pod could fire a real Commander game from three packs.

Because the source material available doesn't go into full mechanical detail for every keyword introduced in CMR, I'd rather point you toward Scryfall's full card list or the official CMR mechanics page than guess at specifics. What I can say is that the set leaned hard into the flavour and feel of Commander as a format - big splashy effects, politics-flavoring abilities, and cards that reward multiplayer dynamics rather than 1v1 combat math.

Limited and Draft

Drafting Commander Legends works differently from a standard Draft format, and it's worth understanding before you sit down at the table.

Rather than three packs of 15 cards, each player opens three packs of 20 cards and picks two cards at a time per pick. This means you're building a 60-card pool (before basics), from which you'll construct a Commander deck of at least 60 cards rather than the typical 40. Your commander is chosen from among the legendary creatures in your pool - so finding one early and drafting toward it is the whole game plan.

The multiplayer game adds wrinkles that don't exist in traditional Limited. Removal hits the table differently when there are three opponents. Card advantage and political effects matter more. And the density of powerful legends in CMR means nearly every pod will produce genuinely different decks with different commanders at the helm.

In my view, Commander Legends Draft is one of the more inventive Limited formats Wizards has released - even if it requires a bit more table coordination than a standard draft night.

Notable cards and impact

With 718 cards, Commander Legends is one of the largest sets Magic has ever released. That size was necessary: to make a draftable Commander format work, you need enough volume to ensure every player at the table gets a workable pool, and enough variety that no two drafts feel identical.

The set includes a significant number of new legendary creatures designed as commander options, alongside reprints of format staples and Commander-relevant cards. The combination of new legends and meaningful reprints gave the set real pull for Commander players who weren't even planning to draft - just cracking packs for singles.

Because my source material doesn't detail specific banned cards or confirmed format staples from CMR, I'll stop short of naming individual cards here. Scryfall's CMR page is the cleanest way to browse the full list and see which cards have made lasting impacts across Commander tables.

Commander Legends Commander decks

Alongside the main set, two Commander Legends Commander Decks were released simultaneously. These follow the pattern of earlier preconstructed Commander products - mostly reprints, designed as accessible on-ramps for players new to the format.

Each deck contains three new cards exclusive to that product, with the rest being reprints. If you were coming to Commander Legends as a new Commander player rather than a drafter, these decks were your entry point: pick one up, sit down, and start playing without having to draft or build from scratch.

Think of them as the training wheels and the bicycle existing side by side. The draft experience is the headline act; the precons are there to make sure nobody has to sit out.

Set legacy

Commander Legends proved something that wasn't obvious before it existed: the Commander format, built on 30-year-old kitchen-table traditions, could be reimagined as a draft experience without losing what makes it special.

The size of the set - 718 cards - and its release as the 2020 Innovation product signals how seriously Wizards took the design challenge. And the fact that the format has been revisited since (with sets like Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate following the same template) suggests it landed well enough to become a repeatable product line.

For players, Commander Legends sits in an interesting space: it's a set you can draft, a set you can buy singles from for your existing Commander decks, and a set that comes with preconstructed decks for newcomers. That flexibility is, in my opinion, exactly what a product called Commander Legends should aim for.