Explaining All The Most Popular Formats in MTG Easily and Plainly

Unlike some other card games, Magic has a ton of different ways you can play it. These formats each have their own cardpools, and occasionally their own rules for deck construction. So to help newer players with their way around the game, we’re going to go over each of these formats, how and where to play them, and the pros and cons of each format, starting with the weakest formats, and going to the strongest.

Script and Editing by Pumkinswift
├ The List
Intro: (0:00)
limited: (0:20)
Standard: (3:53)
Alchemy: (5:13)
Historic: (6:09)
Explorer: (7:16)
Historic Brawl: (7:59)
Pioneer: (10:03)
Pauper: (10:58)
Modern: (11:53)
Commander: (13:00)
Legacy: (14:16)
Vintage: (15:37)

#mtg #tcg #magicthegathering

[screechingtoad]

One format my college friends would do sometimes is two-headed giant. Basically, it's two players on a team against two players using 60 card decks

[BusinessSkrub]

For anyone watching this for education on the formats post-May 2023, Standard's time frame has been increased from ~2 years to ~3 years.
For posterity

[LadyArtemis]

I remember the chaos of early magic days. One of my favorite memories is going so summer camp right when Prophecy was the newest set. We would sit on the floor of the multi-purpose room in a massive circle and play a single free-for-all game that anyone with a deck could join. Meaning we often had 20-30 people all playing a single game of magic.

It was absolutely nuts and a terrible way to play the game. You would literally have to stand up and walk around the inside of the circle in order to see what cards the other kids had played. Combined with how many people were playing, that meant it might take fifteen minutes or more between each of your turns. Again, terrible way to play but I loved it and cherish those memories.

[anthonycannet]

Some of the other formats that weren’t popular enough to get listed include:
Planechase, a format where in addition to the usual deck each player brings a 10 card deck of special Plane cards, each representing the various locations in Magic’s multiverse setting. There is always 1 plane card in play, and players can spend their mana to roll a d6 in an attempt to either move to the next plane or trigger the secondary effect of the plane in play. Planes have 2 effects, the first is always active and the second is a triggered effect that happens when someone rolls the chaos symbol on the planar die (or a 1 on a d6). If a player rolls the planeswalker symbol instead (a 6 on a d6) the current plane is discarded and the player replaces it with the top card of their planechase deck. Planechase is generally treated as a mechanism added onto another format where instead of everyone having a personal planechase deck, all the planechase cards are shuffled into a single shared deck to draw planes from, so if you’re able to find a few people willing to play a multiplayer format like commander, there’s a decent chance they’d be willing to introduce planes to the game.
Vanguard, similarly to commander, each player also brings a vanguard which represents a character in Magic’s story. The vanguard applies certain effects to the game such as altering your starting life total or maximum hand size as well as some other unique ability. Unfortunately this format was discontinued and you probably won’t find anyone willing to play.
Two-headed giant, this is a 2v2 format where players are on teams against each other. Players share a life total (determined by 1.5x the starting life of a single player, so a 2v2 commander game would have starting life totals of 60), and can block for each other, however cards in hand and mana are not shared. Instead of each player taking their own turn, the team takes it’s turn together. Both players draw, play cards, attack, etc. at the same time. If one player loses, the team loses.
Archenemy. This is a 4 player format where the game is set up in a 3v1 match. The 3 players are on a team but have their own life totals. As a team they take their turns at the same time, however if one team member dies, the other two are still alive. The single player or “archenemy” also has a special “scheme” deck, meant to balance the 3v1 teams. At the start of the archenemy’s turn, they reveal the top card of the scheme deck which can help the archenemy or hurt the team players. The archenemy also starts with twice the normal life total and only wins when all 3 other players are defeated.
Oathbreaker. This fan-made format is similar to commander except you get a 58 card singleton deck with a planeswalker as your “oathbreaker” and an instant or sorcery as your “signature spell”. The signature spell can be played following the same rules as casting your commander with the added restriction that you must control your oathbreaker/commander in order to cast it.

[Necroskull]

One format I have a soft spot for that sadly doesn’t see much play: Oathbreaker. It’s like Commander, but you have to use a Planeswalker as your commander, and they also have a Signature Spell — an instant or sorcery in your oathbreaker’s color identity that also goes in the Command Zone, and can only be cast while your oathbreaker is on the field. You can do things like play a blue artifact-centric oathbreaker with Thoughtcast as the signature spell, so as long as you keep putting artifacts on the board, you can keep drawing cards for super cheap despite the theoretically rising commander tax on Thoughtcast. Most of which will be artifacts, that you can then put on the board.

It also has a lower life total and deck size than Commander — 20 life and 60 cards — so that combined with the existence of the Signature Spell makes the games a lot faster and more explosive. Which makes it a better format than Commander for quick, casual multiplayer games, like when you’re at the game store a bit early waiting for the draft to fire and you wanna shuffle up with your buddies.

[fwg]

Two other formats I think are worth mentioning are Cube and Canadian Highlander.

Cube is a limited format, but rather than opening packs, someone assembles their own pool of cards from which players can make their own "packs" to draft from. While there aren't any absolutes with how a cube is constructed, it's typically 360 or 540 cards (meaning an 8 player draft will use either 100% of the card pool or 2/3rds of it), will include no duplicate cards, and has a very high power level. The most well known cube is the Vintage Cube on MTGO, which boasts the power level of Vintage, but without the consistency of every deck being a finely tuned combo deck. With the baseline for just about every card being an extremely good card and often format warping back when it was first printed, as well as some extremely good mana fixing to reduce the cost of splashing, the draft portion ends up being a lot more synergy focused than traditional draft. The typical draft strategy of a 2 color good stuff deck is just going to fall flat before decks where every card is working in the same direction. Though on the other hand, everything is so good, you can usually just go with whatever seems like the most fun and still end up with a pretty good deck. Trying to physically build a cube can be pretty expensive, but it costs nothing to maintain once you do construct it. Even eternal formats have cards go in and out of the meta as well as bannings, which does mean there's some upkeep to stay in the format. Additionally, you can tailor the cube to fit your exact preferences. People have made cubes around a certain format, or tailored it around certain colors or themes, such as the Grixis cube (only blue, black and red cards) or the Artificer's Cube (all artifact focused synergies). As someone who really enjoys drafting, but also enjoys high power level, cube is pretty much the perfect marriage of those.

Canadian Highlander is maybe the most popular unofficial format. While there are many Highlander formats operating on a similar ruleset, the Canadian one seems to be the best balanced of the bunch and sees the most play outside its area of origin. It often gets compared to Commander (originally called Elder Dragon Highlander) as it is also a 100 card singleton format with no sideboard. However, that's about where the similarities end. There's no commander and no color restrictions. The better comparison is Vintage, as they have the same banned list (cards that aren't legal in any format, like ante cards). However, the restricted system Vintage uses where you can only have 1 copy of extremely powerful cards doesn't work in a format where you're only allowed to have one copy anyways. Instead, CanLander introduces the points system. Extremely powerful cards are assigned a points value, with decks allowed to have 10 points worth of cards in them. This means that you can play any card you want, but you can't play all the best cards together in one deck. And this system has worked well enough that its lead to maybe the most diverse metagame of any format in MtG. Nearly every deck that has at one point dominated an eternal format has some sort of equivalent in CanLander that has seen competitive success, as well as a few decks that are unlike anything other formats have to offer. This makes it the ideal format for anyone who loves brewing their own decks, as well a great format for anyone nostalgic for some old deck they used to play. It can be a very expensive format to get into, given how some of the cards can be upwards of several thousand dollars, but in practice it actually isn't. The place it sees the most play is on MTGO, where prices are far cheaper. In addition, since it isn't an official format, proxies are often accepted where it does see paper play. Additionally, since the format is so different from other formats, a lot of the powerhouses of the format are cards that never found a home in other formats and aren't worth anything. There are competitive decks that don't rely on any of expensive reserved list cards, and can run you less than a modern deck to put together from scratch.

[poiri]

Putting pauper above pioneer in powerlevel, as it should be

[antischtick]

A correction on Explorer: It's Arena's version of Pioneer and not Historic, and will be exactly Pioneer once all the cards legal in that format are on Arena.

[n__neen]

vintage does technically have a ban list: Shahrazad, ante cards, and dexterity cards like Chaos Orb. If ante were allowed, Contract From Below would probably be the most powerful card in the game.

[ctsamurai]

the best part of playing pauper is that you can probably afford to build multiple decks, and the mechanics of each deck tend to be fairly straightforward. So make 2 or more, its a great alternative to casual sessions where some folks might be waiting for the next Commander game.

[TrickyJinjo]

As a pretty big Magic newbie who's only been playing for a few years this is the video I've been waiting for

[EdBurke]

It's really cool to see you getting into Magic after watching your streams trying to understand it from a Yugi-Oh players perspective.

[deltazulu]

My favorite is kitchen table format. The only rule is no companion cards (just a commander) and no crying and if your turn is taking too long the table can declare your turn over. It’s contextual. Are you busy with procs and counters? Do your thing. Are you just wonderingg what you should do. AUTOMATIC END STEP.

[nielsmarckmann]

Explorer doesn't have *all* cards on Arena that aren't digital only, it only has the cards from formerly or currently standard-legal sets, where Historic also has the Historic Anthologies, Jumpstart, the Strixhaven Mystical Archive cards, and some Modern Horizons cards from Jumpstart: Historic Horizons. Explorer will one day have all cards legal in Pioneer.

[JaimeAGB-ptxl]

This video was made very comprehensive and its a great intro for those curious about MTG.... because of that, it should've been put in your Other channels as to promote this channel and MTG as a whole

[NinjablazerZero]

Just an addendum to the Planeswakers in Commander, you can use a Planeswalker in Commander, they just have to specifically say they are allowed to be used as a Commander. They aren't totally disallowed as Commanders.

And if you have group of friend you play with, because of the casual nature of the format, house rules can and often do form, which can be another Pro to the format, and so you can get away with using certain specific planeswalkers as a Commander if your pod allows.

[dagonhydra]

This is a fantastic, straight-forward guide! I’ll be pointing people here whenever they ask about the different formats.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit worried you might not mention MTGO, so I was happy to see it in the “where to play” sections!

[joshsmith]

Hey dude, thanks for making his channel! Love the yu gi oh and wow channels. Made this discovery today and, as a mtg player, have been binge watching all these vids today lol

[TheTundraTerror]

One big benefit to Pauper is that many cards that wouldn't normally see play are suddenly a lot more useful.

[Jamal..]

The guys Iv been playing with have shown us some cool little things to do that have been awesome for the nights we are bored of standard commander. The three notable ones we have done are 2 headed giant with any number of even players on each side. We did a king type game where we each got special cards that dictated our role and we won based off the role not by player. There was king.. knight.. assassin etc… the last game mode we explored was really cool but requires 6 players. It’s like 2 headed gaint but there’s two kings in the middle and two nights on the side. Each side fights it out while the kings build and the last king standing wins. That was super fun!