Formats — Brawl

Brawl is a Commander-style format for Magic: The Gathering Arena, played 1v1 with 100-card singleton decks.

It uses all cards available on Arena, like Historic, and plays the Alchemy-rebalanced version of any card that has one. Unlike Historic it has its own banlist, so cards Historic pre-bans - fetch lands, Ragavan, Force of Will - are perfectly legal here.

Decks consist of exactly 100 cards and no sideboard, one of which is a legendary creature, planeswalker, Vehicle, or Spacecraft chosen as a commander. Except for basic lands, all cards are allowed in only 1 copy, and no card is allowed if its color identity contains colors outside the color identity of the chosen commander. As an exception, if your commander is colorless you may play basic lands of one chosen type.

Starting life total is 25. There is no commander damage rule.

Three formats called Brawl

The name has moved around, which makes older articles confusing to read:

  • The original 2018 format was simply called Brawl until Arena's larger version arrived. It is now Standard Brawl and is barely played. Standard Brawl is not supported here.
  • Historic Brawl launched on Arena in December 2020 as the Historic-sized version, and was renamed to plain Brawl in December 2023, once its card pool had drifted too far from Historic's for the name to mean anything. That is this page.
  • Competitive Brawl, the ranked queue added in June 2026, is the same card pool and the same deck rules as Brawl but with a completely different banlist. It was announced as "Ranked Brawl" and renamed within a week, precisely because the old name suggested the two shared a banlist.

Banned cards

Restricted cards

Ban history

2026-06-29
Announcement
2025-11-21
Silently pre-banned with the TLE bonus sheet - no announcement, dated to the set's Arena release
2025-11-10
Announcement
2025-09-23
Announcement
2024-06-14
Announcement
2022-11-18
Announcement
2022-10-05
These cards are conjurable only
2022-08-04
Announcement
2022-07-07
These cards are specialized/conjurable only
2022-01-25
Announcement
2021-12-09
Announcement
2021-10-01
Announcement
2021-08-26
These cards are conjurable only
2021-06-19
Announcement
2021-04-15
Announcement
Format start
Announcement