Format Multiplayer Three and four seats
Multiplayer pods
Commander and free-for-all at a real table. Three or four seats, a tiled board that shows the whole pod at once, and a bot ready to sit in any chair nobody claimed.
At a glance
- Seats Three or four
- Sides Free-for-all or teams
- Empty chairs Played by bots
- Commander damage Tracked per source
- Elimination Handled mid-game
- Spectators No hidden information
Everything a pod needs, and nothing it does not
- Free-for-all or teams. Seats carry a team number, so a four-player table can be four rivals or two pairs.
- Bots in any seat. Each lobby seat has an open-or-bot switch. Run a full pod solo against three bots, or backfill the one friend who did not show up.
- Attack the player you mean to attack. With more than one opponent, declaring is attacker-first: arm a creature, every legal target lights up, then click the player, planeswalker or battle it is swinging at.
- Commander damage is tracked per source, along with each player's life, hand size and board, all visible without opening anything.
- Elimination is handled properly. A player leaving mid-game does not strand the pod, and the remaining seats keep their identities rather than shuffling under each other.
- Spectators are welcome and see no hidden information, so a knocked-out player can stay and watch the rest.
Multiplayer is where the rules get hard
A pod is not a duel with extra chairs. Priority passes around a ring, triggers from three players can want the stack at once, an attack has several possible defenders, and someone losing in the middle of a turn has to be resolved without unwinding the game. These are exactly the situations where a hand-written approximation of the rules falls over.
Endstep does not have a hand-written approximation. The pod runs on the same rules engine the duels run on, which has supported multiplayer for years, so the awkward cases behave the way they are supposed to rather than the way somebody guessed.