One Commander Box league to rule them all!

I've been getting lots of questions about the new Box League works.... followed by a lot of ... wait, what?!?  So here it is, direct from the WOTC website:

Commander Box League Deck Rules After players open their Play Booster box, they construct a 60-card Commander deck from the contents. Buy-a-Box and Commander promos may not be used in deck building. Decks may include multiple copies of cards opened from the Play Booster. Any legal commander opened is allowed. Color identity rules in deck building are ignored; players may build decks with any colors they want, regardless of their commander's color identity. Note: commander color identity still applies when cards refer to color identity (for example, with Arcane Signet). Players may adjust their decks between games using cards from their Play Booster box.

How's it going to work? starting Thursday (7/31) and running through the following Thursday (8/7) all day players can join the league and play as many games (3 player minimum) as they like. There will be league tables for easy matchmaking, but no swiss ranking or digital nannying. Each pod gets 3 tokens. Two go to the winner and one goes to the runner up (all 3 to the winner if all opponents die at the same time). Play as many league games as you like. Turn in your tokens before the end of the league to log your standing.

How long does it run? 8 days, or 2 Thursdays, depending on how you look at it. We expect the vast majority of games to happen on commander nights (Thursdays) since this event is targeted at commander players. But, if you can find pods outside of Thursday, you are free to play more league games. Either way, the league ends 8/7 at 11pm. Winners need not be present, but they do need to turn in their tokens before the league ends to claim top prizes. 

Why are we doing this? Wizards suggested it and provided cool promos, so we're giving it a go. We have a huge commander community, so it feels likely that some players will want to give this a go AND provide us feedback on what's fun. We've done lots of sealed leagues in the past but nothing like this! Cool!


What are the prizes? Everyone gets a league promo and a buy-a-box, BUT not for use in your league deck. At the end of the event we'll have packs as prizes for the top 6 players. The total packs in the pool will be driven by the number of players in the league, with a minimum of 4 EOE play packs per participant going into the prize pool. So, as a model, if we have 20 players, the winner will get 40% of the pool (that's more than a box), 20% to 2nd (16 packs) and 10% to 3-6th place (8 each). Bonus TBA packs will go in if we have more than 10 and more than 20 players.