MTG Arena Finally Adds More Support for Commander Variant

Last updated on September 15, 2025

Railway Brawler | Illustration by Kevin Sidharta

Brawl (formerly Historic Brawl) is the only way to really engage with the Commander format on MTG Arena. It’s sort of Commander Copium, if you will, closer to Duel Commander than anything, given the one-on-one nature of the format. It also has a die-hard fanbase of brewers, competitive players, and those just trying to complete their daily quests with their trusty win-or-lose-in-three-minutes Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer deck.

The problem is, all of these players get lumped together in the same field, and though there’s a sort of weighting system that tries to match decks of equal power level against one another, it’s not entirely effective, and the format ends up being a bit messy due to its weird matchmaking. Perhaps the addition of a competitive queue for Brawl will help separate players with different intents, and the Arena team’s going to play around with that idea next month.

Brawl Challenges on Arena

Gratuitous Violence | Illustration by Christopher Moeller

The “Metagame Challenge” events on Arena are format-specific mini-tournaments that let players test their mettle in a slightly more competitive setting. These events usually have a reasonable buy-in, but also fairly good rewards for doing well in the events. And the Magic Arena Calendar of Events shows that Brawl’s going to be getting one of these challenges in October.

Right now, there are only two ways to play Brawl on the platform. You either build a Standard Brawl deck consisting of only cards in the current Standard rotation, or you build a general Brawl deck that contains cards found all across Arena, including Alchemy and digitally-altered cards.

After that you join the queue and you’re thrown to the wolves, pairing up against randoms in the same queue with fingers crossed that the matchmaking doesn’t pit your Grakmaw, Skyclave Ravager deck against another optimized Rusko, Clockmaker deck.

The Brawl Challenge will take place from Friday, October 17 through Monday, October 20. According to Andromanner on r/MagicArena, MTG Arena Design Manager Ian Adams has stated that the queue is an experiment of sorts, so there’s no promise of a long-term competitive queue for Brawl, and this might end up being a one-shot event for the format. Though as with many Arena events, if it ends up being successful, it could evolve into something more permanent.

Strange Time to Be a Brawler

Knockout Maneuver | Illustration by Aaron J. Riley

There are usually a few popular, dominant commanders that the matchmaking tries to weed out into their own “hell queue” of sorts, but Brawl’s matchmaking involves a lot of unknown factors, which includes weighting the contents of your deck as well. It’s all a bit nebulous and not worth gaming out, but it does make it hard to be a casual brewer in a field that has just as many spikes.

It’s always been a bit of a player complaint that digital-only and rebalanced cards affect Brawl, when there are Alchemy and Historic queues that those changes are intended for, but Brawl’s most recent problems comes from the latest batches of cards released on Arena.

A pair of Arena Anthologies released earlier this month, adding a grip-full of historically powerful MTG cards to the client. Among those was Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary, which has overtaken Nissa, Who Shakes the World and Mythweaver Poq as the de facto green ramp commander of the format, and it’s quite absurd. If your opponent can’t kill Rofellos on sight, the elf player usually ends up with 6+ mana as early as turn 3, very consistently, and Brawl matches are easily won off of early mana advantages.

Another pair of problems came from Edge of Eternities, specifically the Stellar Sights bonus sheet. Strip Mine and Ancient Tomb were both reprinted in the set, and added to Arena for the first time. And neither are particularly healthy cards for the format. As anyone who’s ever dabbled with Legacy or Vintage knows, a well-timed Strip Mine can effectively win a game on the spot, and Ancient Tomb’s a fundamentally broken land that leverages Brawls slightly higher starting life total of 25. The Arena team’s usually prudent about pre-banning problematic cards in various Arena-only formats, but none of these have been touched for Brawl.

A quick Reddit search of “MTG Brawl” gives you an idea of the type of reaction the format receives. Not to say there isn’t a ton of fun to have playing Brawl—it’s actually a blast to play when the matchmaking “gets it right”—but it has obvious problems and power outliers that rarely get addressed. The upcoming Metagame Challenge might be a secret acknowledgment of this, and might be Arena’s way of diverting top-tier decks to a different event in order to free up more casual matchups in the regular queue. Hopefully the event ends up being a hit, as a permanent, competitive Brawl queue could end up being a perfect solution to many of Brawl’s current issues.