Commander Games Feel Fast These Days… And Here’s Why

Sometimes you sit down for what you expect to be a decent length Commander game, only to feel like the game ended in record time. Life totals melted, despite nobody being on combo. If you’re asking yourself why this is happening more often these days, then you’re in the right place. Let’s explore why Commander games feel so fast these days. 

HOW LONG IS A COMMANDER GAME?

If you ask how long a game of Commander is – which we kinda need to, in order to set up this discussion – you may as well be asking how long a piece of string is. It depends heavily on which kind of Bracket you’re playing in, what kind of decks people have brought, and also the overall vibe at the table. Are y’all joking around and catching up, or more laser focused on finishing rotations efficiently?

That said, it’s become common consensus to many* that a board wipe after 90 minutes to 2 hours is unwelcome. So, we can extrapolate that the average expected time to play a game of Commander is about 90 minutes to 2 hours. And, if you’re in Bracket 2 and 3, you’re likely expecting to see at least seven to eight turns of the game if not more. 

Increasingly, games are ending in fewer turns and often in less time – though the latter isn’t always the case, given the amount of “chess clock” some decks can take with complex action-after-action turns. Either way, you’re left with a feeling that you only just shuffled up. 

*I’m still of the opinion that a focused playgroup can get through multiple wraths and end a game quicker than the average table in this scenario with a little less chatter and more win conditions, but that’s by the by.

COMMANDER’S SET-UP PHASE IS SHORTER

The first major influence on this is that Commander’s set-up phase is shorter. Games of Magic can be divided into set-up, mid-game, and late-game. Classically, you could expect to be at parity or even a little behind going from the set-up to the mid-game, and still have time to turn things around. That’s far less often the case in 2025. 

With Commanders costing as little as two mana and having big resource advantage or even entire gameplans written on them, you’re hitting the mid-game that much sooner. A Sythis deck can keep her hand topped up while ramping with Auras; Mendicant can get you to a Max Speed of 2 the moment it comes down provided you played a one drop attacker; Arabella can start shredding life totals as early as turn four if you curve out. 

Just look at the difference between Syr Gwyn and Kassandra. The set-up phase in a Syr Gwyn deck takes many turns, as you need to reliably get to six to eight mana to resolve the Commander. Kassandra, meanwhile, comes down with Haste and can start drawing you cards and tagging people with Commander Damage as early as turn three. Hell, with the right draws, you can knock a player out on turn three. In that way, Kassandra doesn’t care about those stages of the game – she’s straight into the mid-game as soon as you drop her. (It’s also why I couldn’t seem to build a list that wasn’t B4).

TREASURES AND CARD DRAW ARE LINKED TO ATTACKING AND DAMAGE

In order to get to the mid-game as soon as possible, decks want to start hoarding Treasure tokens and drawing extra cards as soon as possible. For most Casual decks that operate on a combat damage approach to gameplay, that means getting into the red zone. 

Gaining mana and card draw are now predominantly linked to attacking and dealing combat damage. My low power Burakos/Guild Artisan deck was so fast at accruing mana that even on a relative budget, it managed to zoom past other decks at the table and be on a much “later turn” than the other players. Playing mana rocks or land-ramp spells is fine, but it doesn’t move life totals, and it doesn’t give you blockers, and it doesn’t give you a board to turn the corner with by casting Akroma’s Will or Craterhoof Behemoth. 

When progressing your own gameplan involves wailing on the other players, life totals start to drop. It’s not uncommon for players to enter the midgame with life totals in the low 20s just from aggressive poke damage. What’s more, they might be entering that mid-game on a “later” turn than another player at the table who has accrued a snowball advantage by turning sideways. It’s for this reason that I advocate running a good amount of 2/4s in your early curve.

THERE’S A DEARTH OF BOARD WIPES

Despite there being more than enough cheap wraths, or one-sided wraths, or wraths that let you come out on top, people generally play fewer than they used to. By and large this is because of the eggs-in-many-baskets approach to deckbuilding that favors the current design trend of printing cards you want to curve out with, cards that are amplified in power by other cards. Haymakers just eat removal, after all. 

In theory, this means wraths are better, but in practice? It just means everyone wants to curve out. 

This has an impact on how quickly life totals go down, as any player with a substantial start is less likely to be reset to a clean board. It also means that any player who is lacking on blockers, missing land drops, or otherwise an easy target ends up getting the brunt of the “chip” damage in the set-up phase, meaning they’re entering the mid-game with as much as a 10-15 point life deficit.

Realistically, this means that should a player who was behind on board manage to turn the corner in the mid-game, they’re almost certainly easier to knock-out with “player removal” than the players who managed to snowball an advantage and deploy more creatures to block with in the earlier stages of the game.

Really, you have no excuses to not be running the options in your colors that can come down cheap and let you be the first to rebuild. Beyond that, you should be playing ones that work for your deck. Winds of Rath or Austere Command in an Enchantress deck; Living Death in a reanimator deck; Raise the Palisade in a typal deck; Damning Verdict when you’re playing with +1/+1 counters. 

EVERY DECK IS NOW A BURN DECK

Okay, I’m definitely taking liberties here, because not every deck is a burn deck. But, when you sit down for a game of Commander, there’s a high likelihood that at least one deck at a table – and sometimes more than one! – is on a strategy that will melt your life total. And I’m talking “melt your life total by otherwise taking game actions they would already take”. 

Whether that player is on Sephiroth, Fabled SOLDIER or another aristocrats Commander; playing a landfall strategy with Hearthhull, Tannuk, or Omnath; token go-wide with the aforementioned Arabella; or the sneaky good Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed, you’re going to be shedding life points like nobody’s business. 

If you have one of these decks at the table and an aggressive deck, you’re going to be hitting the mid-game in the low 20s (or even lower!) a good amount of the time. If there are two of these decks at the table? Well, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle.

I played my Joshua, Phoenix’s Dominant Bracket 2 deck into a pod with Y’shtola the other week, and the combination of burn damage from both of us was sending life totals dangerously low dangerously quickly. On the flipside of this (haha, get it, Joshua transforms) I was able to stay at a higher life total than the other players by merit of gaining life when I was burning people. I could speak more on this, but that’s spoilers for a future article. Something about Oops, All Siege Rhinos. 

THE ULTIMATE COMMANDER

In this climate of burning face and cheap Commanders who give you card/mana advantage or a gameplan, there exists a perfect culmination of this ethos. What is beautiful is often also treacherous and/or terrible, and that’s definitely the vibe here. It’s a card I actively dislike because it’s just too good. It’s a deck that with the bare minimum of upgrades – budget cards at that – you’ll get easy wins. 

Eshki, Temur’s Roar does it all. She has two win conditions in the CZ (burning everyone, and Commander damage), and she also has card draw, which is linked to you… casting the spells that burn people. She’s also literally just Temur mana to get into play. Eshki didn’t need to have all of that text for three mana, but she does. If you want to race the table and take advantage of the current Commander metagame at casual tables, then Eshki will get it done for you.

You might think I sound a little jaded here, but there are some positives to this current design trend. 

Eshki excluded. Ugh.

THE PIVOT TO MAKING GAMES END

One of the best Commons in Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate Limited was Coronation of Chaos. It opened up board states and helped you to knock players out in a board stall. 

This is great design, and speaks to the over-arching philosophy that seeks to make games of Commander end. While many look back on the battlecruiser slug-fests of yesteryear with rose-tined glasses, those games weren’t always fun. In fact, for anyone not on Temur or Sultai colors, playing a traditional aggro style deck was basically impossible. Do we really want to go back to the times where players sat behind armies of Rampaging Baloth tokens, at a stalemate? No, I don’t think we do.

Overall, the shift to faster-feeling games is one that comes from a mostly-positive place – but it’s worth noting that it comes with a hefty value statement: more games are better than one longer game. 

I’m not sure I always agree, but I think I do most of the time. Without the push towards ending games in modern Commander design, you’d end up trading off the occasional 2.5 hour pendulum swing of shifting advantage and hilarious interaction that makes a tale-for-the-ages, with half a dozen forgettable snoozefests. While those longer games can and do still happen – and often feel like the goldilocks game, these days, if I’m honest – it’s on the whole better for everyone for games to wind down and let new ones start up.

END STEP

So, what’s to be done about the increased speed of Commander games? Well, you can play more blockers with high toughness. You can play more wraths and spot removal. You can also splash more lifelink into your list – it really does buy you an extra turn. Do games feel faster to you? What’s your local meta feel like? Let us know on socials.