Why two commanders?

The principle question of SDH.

The first answer is that players freely selecting two commanders essentially takes Commander "off the rails". Just like interesting and unintended things happen in the libraries of commander decks, they can now happen in the command zone, and due to the exponential nature exponential nature of commander pairings, it's practically impossible for the format to be controlled by card designers. This ensures that SDH will to some extent remain a "Wild West" format even if it becomes popular enough that cards get designed for it.

The second answer is that arbitrarily choosing a pair of commanders puts a lot of power in the command zone, and shifting the balance of power from the library into the command zone almost by definition means more unique and interesting decks. This also means that SDH may have a slightly higher power ceiling, but most of the best cEDH decks are 4- and 5-color decks, so that's not immediately obvious. (And, frankly, many of the uncommons happen to have Partner commanders anyway, like Rograkh Rograkh or Malcolm Malcolm .)

SDH and cEDH

SDH is essentially a spin-off format of cEDH cEDH . Unlike EDH, though, the rules and banlist are centered around competitive play. This is not because casual play is discouraged or disallowed: Regulating casual just doesn't make sense. Casual players regulate themselves: That's what casual play is! Competitive players, in contrast, agree to play the rules as written, so it only makes sense that the rules, as written, should regulate competitive play.

Whether this is competitive players being served by the rules, or casual players being protected against the rules, is a matter of perspective perspective .

Proxies

SDH follows Wizards' policy on proxies: Fully permitted outside of Wizards-sanctioned events.

Social Contract

The same sort of "rules" as cEDH apply: Play to win, and only to win. No kingmaking, no stalling, no spite plays, et cetera. There are some exceptions some exceptions to this, but relatively few, and relatively niche.

If there's no pregame conversation, it should be assumed that everyone playing is playing the best deck they possibly can, and exceptions to this should be communicated. If a deck pubstomps the others, this failure to communicate is the fault of all parties involved.

Rule Zero

Just like in Commander, you're welcome to ignore any and all of these rules in a consenting playgroup. You don't need a formal document to tell you this, of course, but this is included simply to maintain the precedent from Commander that mixing things up with friends is not "playing the game wrong".

That said, because competitive play generally plays without a "Rule Zero", this should be made explicit: For non-"serious" SDH play, it's fine for cEDH decks to play against competitive SDH decks; they are compatible formats in both structure and power level. In fact, many popular decks are coincidentally valid in both formats anyway, at which point the distinction is just a label.

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