What Comes Next in Magic: Competitive Play, Commander, Cube

Welcome to Level 5. You started this course with one box. By now you can play and teach, build and upgrade a deck, draft with a plan, use the stack, sideboard, and hold your own at a competitive event. That is more than most of Magic ever asks of anyone.

What comes next depends on what you enjoyed. Magic is less one game than a family of games that share cards. Here are the three main paths, and where each one starts.

The competitive path

If the best part was winning a close match, competitive play is for you. It starts at your local store.

• Standard Showdown. Wizards’ Standard Showdown events run at local stores and are open to new and veteran players. Standard uses recent sets from roughly the last two to three years of releases.
• Store Championships. A step up. Every round of a Store Championship is Standard, opponents bring their best decks, and the prizes include special promos and bragging rights.
• Beyond the store. Regional Championship Qualifiers lead to Regional Championships and then the Pro Tour. The next lesson maps that ladder rung by rung, and the magic.gg site covers competitive events, results, and coverage.

Competitive Magic rewards practice. Play the same deck many times, write down why you lost, and watch event coverage to see how strong players think.

The Commander path

If the best part was a long, chatty four-player game, Commander is home.

The next step after a ready-to-play deck is building your own, and the Commander deck lesson at Level 2 walks through a full build. Choose a legendary creature you love and build 99 more cards around it. The rules from the store night lesson still apply, plus two building rules:

• One copy of each card, except basic lands, for exactly 100 cards including your commander.
• Color identity. Every color in a card’s mana symbols, in its cost or its rules text, must also be one of your commander’s colors, counted the same way. Colorless cards with no colored mana symbols are always allowed.

Wizards’ Commander format page has the full rules, the bracket guide, and the Game Changers list. Commander also reaches into drafting: our piece on a Commander cube shows how groups draft multiplayer decks, and our comparison of Cube and Commander helps if your group is choosing between them.

The new-set calendar

Wizards releases sets through the year, and most bring a prerelease and new Commander decks. The next three on Wizards’ products page:

You do not need to follow every set. Many players pick one or two prereleases a year, for the sets whose themes they like, and skip the rest without missing anything.

The Cube path

If the best part was the draft, Cube may be the most fun you can have with Magic cards.

A cube is a hand-picked collection of cards, usually a few hundred, that a group drafts from again and again. Nobody buys packs. Every draft is different, every deck is built on the spot, and the cards are chosen to make the games interesting. It takes everything you learned in the prerelease and draft strategy lessons and makes it the whole evening.

This is where this course hands off. The Ludarium Academy’s Cube course picks up from your first draft and teaches Cube from the ground up. Our Magic and Cube articles go deeper, starting with what a Magic cube is and how to run a cube draft.

Finding your people

Whichever path you pick, Magic is better with a regular group.

• The Wizards store and event locator lists stores and events near you.
• Pick one night a week and keep going. The same Commander table for two months does more for you than six different stores once each.
• If you are near Indianapolis, our guide to where to play Magic in Indianapolis lists stores by area. Join the Indianapolis list for first word on local learn-to-play nights as The Ludarium grows.

If the competitive path is the one that pulled at you, the last two lessons of the course are for you: the road to the Pro Tour, then a practice plan to get on it. If your path is Commander or Cube, the links above are your next step, and the rest of this course will still be here when you want it.