Duel Commander

Duel Commander
Where to Play
Paper	MTGO	Arena
Constructed
Players	2
Life	20 points
Decks	100 cards (no sideboard, singleton)
Rules	Commander (color identity, 21 commander damage)
Scryfall Statistics
legal cards
banned cards

Duel Commander is a variant of Commander designed for 1v1 gameplay. Kevin Desprez, a French judge, created the format, and the governing Duel Commander Committee was formed in 2007. In late 2025, the Committee fragmented into two groups with competing visions for the format.

Duel Commander was added to Magic Online on July 24, 2024.

Comparison to Commander

Duel Commander is a strictly two-player format. Unlike Commander, but like most other two-player formats, players start at 20 life.

Deck construction follows the same color identity rules as Commander. Decks consist of 99 singleton cards with one commander, or 98 cards with two commanders that share Partner or Friends forever. The format maintains a separate banned list. Similar to historical versions of Commander's banned list, some cards are banned in Duel Commander only as commanders, and are otherwise allowed in the deck.

Governance split

Around October 2025, a divide between members of the Duel Commander Committee became public. A faction of the Committee, claimed to include "the entire Committee team, from Core Members to Consultants and Community Managers", asserted that another member of the Committee, DocFX, had blocked decision-making processes for years, and that the conflict had culminated in DocFX locking the rest of the Committee out of the format's platforms and communication channels, including the original website, mtgdc.info. DocFX outlined a contradictory narrative in a letter on the original website, in which he claimed to have "fired" seven members of the Committee, and described his actions as a governance reset.

The departing majority faction launched a new website, duelcommander.org, to promote their vision for the format. As of November 2025, Magic Online implements the format as described on that website.

Background

In the years preceding the split, some members of the Committee had sought to change format's banned list and deck construction rules to utilize a point system, similar to Canadian Highlander. Two newer Core Members, Florian Trotte and Crimelune, opposed the change, in part because it would hinder efforts to introduce the format on Magic Online. Sylvain Lauriol resigned from the Committee in June 2024, following the earlier departure of Manuel Le Marec. Lauriol said that he no longer had the energy or time to remain a Core Member of the Committee, and blamed decisions by Wizards of the Coast and by his fellow Committee members. Duel Commander was made available on Magic Online the following month.

Three new Core Members joined the Committee in February 2025. This panel of Core Members could not reach an agreement with DocFX regarding access rights to the website and social media, and asked DocFX to resign from his position. Instead, DocFX banned and revoked access for those persons. A group of three former Committee members, including Le Marec and Lauriol, signed a letter supporting DocFX, claiming that two unnammed Committee members were actually "aggressors", and had driven out the former members through unethical behavior.

On November 18, the maintainers of Magic Online, Daybreak Games, announced that they would not choose a side in the dispute in favor of allowing the community to drive the format, and froze their implementation of the format's banned list. In that game's next weekly update, they stated that community support had coalesced behind the majority faction of the Committee at duelcommander.org, and resumed updating Duel Commander on Magic Online.

See also

• 1v1 Commander, a similar but unrelated Magic Online format.
• Brawl, Arena's official 1v1 Commander variant.

External links

• Banned & Restricted Cards, Duel Commander Rules Committee