The one big announcement for Magic: the Gathering last week would be, the change of name for the popular multiplayer format, Elder Dragon Highlander, into Commander (http://bit.ly/ekd1Ze).

Commander is a format where only single copies of non-basic land cards are allowed in the 99-card decks. The color of each card needs to also match the colors of a designated “general” card, which is legendary creature card.

It’s a relatively popular format that even has the occasional support in tournament play worldwide, although such competitions are often unsanctioned and do not count towards player rankings and points.

The Commander announcement made last week also led into Wizards previewing one of their bigger summer 2011 product releases, of the same name.

“Commander” will give us five pre-packaged 100-card decks, with each card appearing no more than once as per the format (except for basic lands as mentioned).

And to sweeten the deal, 51 new Magic cards will debut in the set – you can bet your shiny foil rare legend card that they will be absolutely crazy fun for the format!

You will be privy to two new preview cards from the links above, “Death by Dragons” and “Karador, Ghost Chieftain.”

One interesting bit I noticed about the new upcoming pre-constructed product is the use of “wedge” colors. It simply means that if a legend has three colors, they will be non-allied: Karador being a prime example as it is Green, Black and White. Another triumvirate might be Blue, Red and White.

Well, while we wait for half a year more for the product, there’s no stopping us from building our own Commander decks from scratch.

IMHO, great starting points for DIY Commander decks are multicolour heavy expansion blocks such as Alara and Ravnica. There’s quite a few nice Legend cards to select from there, and from that point it’s a matter of picking the appropriate cards to fill the deck slots.

Go ahead and try it if you haven’t – as you can imagine, games are just super random due to the non-existence of multiple copies of the same card!