Hello folks! I hope that you are staying safe in our modern COVID-19 world!!!

This month I want to push past Commander for a few weeks and go over some alternate formats you can run at the kitchen table. Why?

Great question!

A lot of friends and fans have been talking about getting blasé about Commander. Commander was created as a fun and crazy and flavorful alterative to the major formats of the day. However, while it started as the scrappy flavor-first format underdog it has become the juggernaut and default format of casual gaming. It's more played than most tournament formats!

Just like people came to Commander tired of the other formats looking for something new, there are people today looking for something new from Commander. There's nothing wrong with Commander! But a lot of folks have gotten tired of only Commander as the only option at the kitchen table and they are looking for something else, at least for a little while. A break. Something Beyond Commander.

Enter this month! For the rest of October, this column will dive into one format a week. Hopefully you can find a fun format to try with your friends! My goal is to give you a few fun alternate formats to experiment with and try out!

We'll start with my favorite format of all time, Five Color.

What is Five Color?

Much like Commander, Five Color (5C) began as an alternative format to the powers that be around the same time as Commander was being made, but 5C caught on faster and grew big. Over just a few years it was played heavily in a lot of casual circles. It was even brought online on Magic Online as a casual format called Prismatic. That's how popular it was!

Commander has largely replaced that format, but it had a board of people that served the community and voted on rules related questions like bannings and restrictions, and I served on that committee for years.

Rules of Five Color

1. Your deck must have at least 300 cards in it
2. Your deck must have at least 25 cards of each color
3. Multicolored cards can count for only one color of their card (so a given Terminate can count as a Black card or a Red card but not both)
4. The format has its own Banned and Restricted list which you can find here (although see this for an updated list as this list is a few years old.)
5. Abe's Recommended Rule - Play this Highlander. Don't run more than one of each non-basic card. It's just so much more fun that way!

Five Color has had a few big changes during it's time as a format. These include deck size, the number of cards of each color, and many more things.

Every person who played this format that I have recommended it to has loved it, and they have loved the Highlander version so much more! To a person. I couldn't recommend this format more with that added element. Plus coming from Commander where you're used to running a deck Highlander, you understand its value.

The great thing about a Five Color build is that you can also run any theme that was across five colors. Or four or three colors for that matter. Artifacts matter? Cycling? Enchantments? +1/+1 counters? Planeswalkers? Blink? You've got this!

I built a Five Color Madness deck with discarding cards like Compulsion in each color. I had a friend build a powerful cycling deck around Lightning Rift and Astral Slide. Pretty much every theme ever has cards in every (or most) colors so you can run anything from tribal themes around a creature to ones around a card type to those around a mechanic.

There are also a lot of variants of Five Color. One online is very popular with me and a few fans as it combined three online formats. What three formats? Singleton (Highlander) so you could only run just one of each card. Sounds good right? Right!

And then Pauper! Yes, that's right! Only commons. It was awesome! The format was called PPS for short (Prismatic, Pauper, Singleton) which is 5PH offline, and I nicknamed it Acid Magic since 5 pH is acidic on the pH scale. I love Acid Magic so much as well!

But seriously, Highlander this thing up. Just like Commander is better with Highlander, so too is Five Color better for it as well. Highlander is your friend and fellow housemate as it makes a lot of formats better. Our playgroup had a deck that we called "The Essentials" which was every card that was voted as key to the format that would be played by anyone and rotated around (and it was Highlander as well).

Where do you start building a 300-card deck? Great question!

Look in your deck stock for Commander. Many great cards from Commander can make the migration to Five Color quite ably like Eternal Witness and Cultivate, Mulldrifter and Fact or Fiction, Demonic Tutor and Shriekmaw, Lightning Bolt and Flametongue Kavu,Crush Contraband and Rambunctious Mutt and loads more. Mind's Eye? Sol Ring? Solemn Simulacrum? You've got it! Only Commander-specific cards like Command Tower and Arcane Signet won't make the transition.

Look at your trade binder. What great cards are sitting there unused and looking for another day in the sun? Cards that just rotated out from Standard like Teferi, Time Raveler that are looking for a home? Cards that were banned like Oko, Thief of Crowns? They won't be as powerful here as they were in Standard, but they are pretty saucy none the less. Bring them over! What are you sitting on that is super secretly stock for your first five?

Build your first deck and then play with it and get a feel for the format. Once you do you can make shifts to the deck as needed or you can build new decks with your 5C understanding.

There are some good cards in the format that aren't good in Commander (and vice versa), but you'll figure those out.

I have updated the Banned and Restricted list through today...

Updated Banned and Restricted List

Banned:

• Ante Cards
• Battle of Wits
• Bringer of The Black Dawn
• Phyrexian Portal
• Shahrazad

Restricted:

• Academy Rector
• All Suns' Dawn
• Ancestral Recall
• Balance
• Black Lotus
• Chaos Orb
• Crop Rotation
• Crucible of Worlds
• Demonic Consultation
• Demonic Tutor
• Enlightened Tutor
• Eternal Witness
• Fabricate
• Fastbond
• Gamble
• Gifts Ungiven
• Grim Tutor
• Hermit Druid
• Holistic Wisdom
• Imperial Seal
• Insidious Dreams
• Intuition
• Isochron Scepter
• Library of Alexandria
• Mana Crypt
• Mana Vault
• Merchant Scroll
• Mox Emerald
• Mox Jet
• Mox Pearl
• Mox Ruby
• Mox Sapphire
• Mystical Tutor
• Oath of Druids
• Panoptic Mirror
• Parallel Thoughts
• Personal Tutor
• Primeval Titan
• Recurring Nightmare
• Regrowth
• Sol Ring
• Strip Mine
• Sundering Titan
• Survival of the Fittest
• Sylvan Scrying
• Time Spiral
• Time Vault
• Time Walk
• Timetwister
• Tinker
• Tolarian Academy
• Transmute Artifact
• Vampiric Tutor
• Wheel of Fortune
• Yawgmoth's Bargain

Changes

I pulled Nostalgic Dreams and Divining Witch from the restricted list and added cards like Primeval Titan. I also re-restricted Sundering Titan which was pulled off a few years ago due to the new era of dual lands (and even tri lands now) is more potent and overwhelmingly one-sided. I also unbanned and restricted Insidious Dreams, Parallel Thoughts and Holistic Wisdom which are too limited in their power in the modern casual world to be banhammered any more. Time has passed them by. I thought about doing the same with the black Bringer but felt it still warranted its slot.

Five color has a Vintage feel to its Banned and Restricted list and only bans cards when it has to. The deck size and color requirements are self-limited on most cards.

Note that 5C is the only format (I know of) that allows you to run the flip cards Chaos Orb and Falling Star. Enjoy them!

And there you have it! I hope you enjoyed our tour of an alternate format for what can happen Beyond Commander! Anything in here that I missed or that you want to talk about? Any experiences with 5C that you are looking to share? Just let me know! Have an awesome (and safe) day!