The Playmat
What you're looking at once a game starts.
The layout#
Across the top, every player has a stat row: life, poison, energy, experience, commander damage and whatever other trackers you've turned on. The player tabs in the middle switch whose board you're looking at. Top right is the turn clock and the phase strip.
The big area is the battlefield. Yours is split into two bands, Creatures / Enchantments above and Lands below. The bar between them drags to resize, and the labels can be hidden in settings if you'd rather have the space.
To the right of the battlefield is a column of your zones: Command, Graveyard, Exile and Library, each with a count. Under the library sit the Day/Night and Monarch buttons. The in-game cog can also add a Dungeons button and a reverse turn order button for cards like Aeon Engine; reversing it tells the whole table in the log and shows a Rev chip beside the turn number.
Your hand runs along the bottom. Hover a card to see it large. Drag it onto the battlefield to play it.
The right edge is the sidebar: turn controls, draw, shuffle, tokens, scry, dice, zoom, view modes, concede and the log. Game Controls goes through every button.
View modes#
The buttons under the zoom control (or keys 1 to 4) change how opponents are shown:
| Key | View | What you get |
|---|---|---|
1 |
Single | One board at a time. Click a player tab or press Tab to cycle. |
2 |
Side-by-side | Your board next to one opponent's. |
3 |
Stacked | Opponents' boards stacked above yours. |
4 |
Quadrant | Everyone at once. Needs enough players to fill it. |
There's no camera to rotate or pan. Zoom is the +/− control in the sidebar, and it scales the cards, not the page.
Placing cards#
Cards go wherever you drop them and they'll happily overlap. Right-click a card for Bring to Front or Send to Back when a pile gets messy. Right-click empty battlefield for three layout helpers:
- Auto-arrange tidies your permanents into rows.
- Snap to Grid (also
S) makes drops line up. - Zone Labels shows or hides the band labels.
Tokens of the same kind stack. A stack shows a count badge, and its menu lets you tap the lot, split it, or remove some.
Reading a card's state#
- Tapped cards are turned sideways.
- Face-down cards show the card back. Only you can see what it is.
- Counters appear as badges on the card. +1/+1 counters also update the P/T badge.
- Attached Auras and Equipment sit with the card they're on. Attach and detach through the card menu, not by dragging.
- Pinned cards go to a tray so they don't get lost on a busy board.
Selection and highlighting#
A green outline means you're hovering the card and hotkeys will hit it. Blue means it's selected. Ctrl or Shift plus click adds to a selection, or drag a box around several cards. Escape clears it.
One click on a card opens the card view with full oracle text. A double-click taps or untaps it.
Your zones#
- Library. Click to open the library viewer. The ⋯ menu has two reveal modes: Show top to me for Realmwalker effects and Reveal top to all for Courser effects.
- Graveyard and Exile. Click to browse. Cards can be dragged straight out. Opponents can ask to look at yours and you approve or decline.
- Command zone. Commanders start here and come back here. The tax counter lives on the zone.
Settings#
The cog at the top right opens the game settings, in five tabs: Board, Cards, Trackers, Turn and Sounds. Board background and opacity, compact hand, P/T and loyalty badges, the card back, the floating mana column, which trackers appear in your stat row, turn alerts, auto untap and auto draw all live there. Everything is per player and remembered between games, including which tab you were on.
Board mat
Under Board background the Mat picker chooses what shows through the seats. Site background is whatever you set under Appearance. Felt is a cloth table for anyone, with the TableCommander mark woven through it, in green, wine, navy or slate. Your image (this device) is a supporter perk: pick a picture from your device and it becomes your mat, with the opacity slider controlling how much of it shows. The image stays in your browser. It is never uploaded and no other player sees it, so it is yours alone and only applies on this device.
Under Cards, Card back picks the emblem on face-down cards: Planeswalker spark (the default, chosen by a forum vote), Mana pentagon, Runic ring or d20. It is your view on this device. Other players see their own pick.
