Why Play Conquest?
Conquest offers:
- A balanced and fair environment for all archetypes.
- Affordable deck-building opportunities without Reserved List cards.
- Faster games with more strategic interaction and creativity.
- Expanded commander options, including planeswalkers.
- A focus on combat, resource management, and tactical depth.
Whether you’re a seasoned Commander player or new to multiplayer Magic, Conquest delivers a refined and engaging experience tailored to your competitive and creative needs.
A Balanced, Inclusive Commander Variant
Conquest is a multiplayer-focused Commander variant designed for players seeking an environment that promotes strategic diversity, engaging gameplay, and creative deck-building. By curating specific format parameters, Conquest provides a competitive yet welcoming atmosphere without the need for players to self-regulate power levels.
Curating Strategic Diversity
Conquest’s ruleset ensures all archetypes—combo, control, aggro, and voltron—can thrive in a balanced ecosystem. By lowering life totals and carefully managing card legality, the format makes traditionally underpowered strategies, such as combat-focused decks, viable and competitive. This diversity ensures no single strategy dominates the meta, fostering a dynamic and varied gameplay experience.
Expanding Commander Options
Conquest expands the commander pool by including planeswalkers as viable commanders. This innovation deepens deck-building creativity and allows players to explore new archetypes and synergies. Legendary creatures remain a cornerstone of the format, but the inclusion of planeswalkers broadens the strategic landscape.
Accessible and Affordable
By excluding Reserved List cards and banning excessively powerful staples like fetchlands and fast mana, Conquest dramatically reduces the cost of building optimized decks. Competitive Conquest decks often cost a fraction of cEDH decks, making the format more accessible to new players and those on a budget, while still maintaining depth and complexity for seasoned players.
A Focused Experience
The reduced deck size (80 cards minimum) ensures consistency and focus without sacrificing creativity. Players are encouraged to build around specific strategies and themes while relying less on tutors. This structure promotes games that feel dynamic and interactive while reducing the dominance of repetitive power cards.
Rebalancing the Color Pie
The Conquest ruleset and ban list bring the Magic color pie into harmony. Lower life totals and combat relevance strengthen archetypes traditionally associated with green, white, and red, creating a more balanced interplay across all colors. This ensures that any color combination can find success in the format.
Faster, More Interactive Games
Conquest’s 30-life multiplayer starting total (25 life for 1v1) and 12-point commander damage threshold create a faster-paced environment. Players must consider both defense and offense from the outset, leading to compelling, action-packed games where combat plays a central role.
Encouraging Interaction
Conquest promotes interactive gameplay by reducing the prevalence of oppressive fast mana, hyper-efficient tutors, and overly centralizing win conditions. Players are encouraged to include board wipes, spot removal, and ways to interact with opponents’ strategies, resulting in games where decisions and timing matter more than luck or raw power.
Community-Driven Evolution
Conquest is a grassroots format supported and shaped by its players. The ban list and format rules are curated conservatively, based on player feedback and gameplay data. This ensures that the format evolves thoughtfully while staying true to its philosophy of strategic diversity and balanced gameplay.