Brawl

Brawl is a rotating singleton format on MTG Arena that draws heavily from Commander. Each player builds a 60-card deck — with no duplicates allowed except for basic lands — and chooses a legendary creature or planeswalker as their commander. That commander sits in a separate command zone and can be cast at any time, with its colour identity determining which other cards are legal in the deck.

Unlike Commander, which uses a 100-card deck and is primarily a multiplayer format, Brawl is designed for one-on-one play on Arena and uses the Standard card pool — meaning it rotates as Standard does.

How Brawl Plays

Each player starts at 25 life. Your commander can be cast from the command zone on any turn you have enough mana, and if it’s destroyed or removed, it returns to the command zone rather than being permanently lost. This means your commander is a consistent, recurring strategic anchor throughout the game — a card you can always rely on being able to play, even if the game goes long.

The singleton rule fundamentally changes how decks are built compared to Standard. Rather than running four copies of your best cards, you build around synergies, cover your angles with one-ofs, and lean heavily on your commander to provide consistency and direction. This makes Brawl feel more creative and less repetitive than conventional 60-card formats.

Brawl vs Historic Brawl

The critical distinction is the card pool. Standard Brawl uses only currently legal Standard cards and rotates annually with 60-card decks. Historic Brawl uses the full Historic card pool and never rotates, using 100-card decks. If you want to build around a legendary creature that has since rotated out of Standard, Historic Brawl is where you’ll find it — and most Brawl players on Arena gravitate there for exactly this reason.