If you’ve played a handful of Commander games, you’ve probably run into that one deck that everybody recognizes as a threat and works together to take down. Magic: The Gathering has several archetypes that become a target for the group, like Slivers and Eldrazi.
The player with the strongest deck becomes the archenemy, a name that comes from a multiplayer format that predates the first preconstructed Commander decks. With the Duskmourn precons, Archenemy comes to Commander with new cards and updated rules. Whether you’re the hero or the villain, this guide will get you started.
What Is Archenemy?
Archenemy is a 60-card multiplayer format that pits three players against one. Each player brings a normal 60-card deck and together choose which three will work as a team and which will be the archenemy.
There is no banned or restricted list for archenemy, unless each player agrees on a specific format. This is kitchen-table Magic at its best!
The goal of the archenemy is to defeat the entire team of players, while the team is working together to take down the villain before they can enact their evil scheme. The game is played similar to two-headed giant, with the three-player team taking their turns simultaneously, and they can collaborate to make sure they’re all working together.
How To Play Archenemy
To play archenemy, each player needs a 60-card deck, and one player needs a deck of special, oversized scheme cards. The player with the scheme cards will be the designated archenemy, and the remaining three will work together to stop the archenemy from taking over the world (or enacting whatever nefarious plot you want to imagine).
The three players working together start at 20 life each, and each can be eliminated individually. They work together, taking each step of their turn simultaneously. Meanwhile, to balance out being outnumbered, the archenemy has three advantages:
- The archenemy has 40 starting life.
- The archenemy has a 20+ card scheme deck (with no more than two copies of any card).
- The archenemy always goes first (and still draws on their first turn).
At the beginning of the archenemy’s precombat main phase each turn, they reveal the top scheme from their deck. If it has an effect that happens immediately, that effect resolves, and then the card is returned to the bottom of the scheme deck. If it’s an ongoing scheme, it’s treated like an enchantment with an ongoing effect until it’s abandoned, at which point it’s returned to the bottom of the deck.
Scheme cards stay in the command zone, even while they’re ongoing. This means you can’t destroy, bounce, or otherwise interact with them like permanents. Treat ongoing schemes more like emblems.
When the archenemy attacks, they choose which player (or planeswalker, or battle) each creature attacks, but the three team members working together can block for their allies.
The three players working together take their turns at the same time and need to move between phases together, as well. Otherwise, they play as normal: players cannot share mana or use effects that only affect the controller to affect a teammate.
The team’s goal is to defeat the archenemy, so they win when the archenemy’s life total is reduced to zero, regardless of how many team members remain. Meanwhile, the archenemy wins once all three team members have been removed from the game.
If you can’t decide who gets to be the archenemy, you can play a “Supervillain Rumble” version where all players start at 40 life and have a 20-card archenemy deck.
What Is Archenemy Commander?
Commander is the most popular Magic format, and you’re more likely to find players with a Commander deck handy than another format, unless you’re at a format-specific event. So there’s a different set of rules for playing Archenemy in Commander.
In Archenemy Commander, the three players working as a team still have their own 100-card Commander deck and take their turns together, but instead of having separate life totals, they have a shared total of 60 life. The archenemy also has 60 starting life and only needs a ten-card scheme deck.
Aside from the combined life total for the team and the reduced scheme deck size, Archenemy Commander is played almost exactly the same as normal Archenemy.
How To Play Archenemy Commander
To play Archenemy Commander, each player needs a 100-card Commander deck, and one player needs a ten-card scheme deck. The player with the scheme deck is the archenemy, while the other three will play as a team.
All three players on a team have a shared life of 60, and all three players take their turns and declare attacks simultaneously. Life is the only resource shared between these players, so you can’t borrow mana from another player. You can, however, use your creatures to block when the archenemy attacks one of your teammates.
The archenemy has two advantages against the team:
- The archenemy always goes first.
- The archenemy has access to a ten-card scheme deck (with only one copy of each card).
At the beginning of their precombat main phase, the archenemy reveals the top card of the scheme deck and plays it immediately. Most schemes will have a one-time effect, such as destroying your opponents’ creatures or drawing you a bunch of cards, but some are ongoing effects that will persist until someone fulfills their abandon requirement.
Aside from the scheme, the archenemy plays normally. Since the opposing team shares a life total and can block for their teammates, declaring which opponent you’re attacking is less important unless someone controls effects that check for a specific player being attacked, like The Tarrasque.
Since the team members share a life total, these rules eliminate the strategy of targeting a single member of the team to eliminate early. However, it also makes a few older schemes a little weird to work with.
Mortal Flesh Is Weak is the worst offender: in the normal archenemy format, it looks at all three of your opponents’ life totals and sets the two highest down to match the lowest. In archenemy commander, there’s only one life total, making Mortal Flesh Is Weak useless in this format.
If you find that your older schemes don’t work with the Archenemy Commander format, consider dropping them for those games.