I’ve gone back and forth on this one for years, genuinely, loved it as a teenager, quit it in my twenties over the money, came back to it because a two person Commander deck is honestly one of the best two-player experiences on my whole shelf right now. Richard Garfield built something in 1993 that’s still, thirty plus years later, the reference point every other card game gets measured against, and however I feel about the business model, I can’t pretend the actual design isn’t why it lasted.

Setup for a casual two player game is nothing, shuffle, draw seven, you’re playing inside two minutes, which is part of why it survives on my “will actually get played on a weeknight” shelf when denser games don’t. The catch, and this is the part I have genuinely complicated feelings about, is that the game itself is basically infinite, new sets four times a year forever, which means the fun of building a deck never really has an endpoint, it just keeps costing you a little more to stay current. I’ve heard the number some players have sunk into this game and it makes my stomach hurt a little, I keep my own spending to sealed starter product and secondhand singles specifically because I know exactly how this hobby can run away from you if you don’t set a hard line.

What keeps me actually playing, past the collecting anxiety, is that a well built two person Commander pod is close to a perfectly balanced duel, no third player to gang up on either of you, no politics, just two decks and however many turns it takes for one engine to click before the other one does. The combo moment when a deck you built actually does the thing you designed it to do is a real, specific kind of satisfaction I haven’t found in many other games, card or board.

Four stars. Would be five if the format didn’t require an ongoing subscription fee I have to actively discipline myself against paying.