Today, Wizards of the Coast announced CommandFest Online, a tabletop Commander event that will use webcams and the SpellTable service, and will be hosted by ChannelFireball. CommandFest Online will be held on Saturday June 6, 2020 and will be free to enter—though there will be a suggested $5 donation to the Red Cross.
“CommandFest Online will run all day on June 6th,” ChannelFireball said. There will be “casual games, silly rules, donation drives,” they continued, “and a stream over on Twitch with special guests Jimmy Wong, Josh Lee-Kwai, Gavin Verhey, Olivia Gobert-Hicks, LoadingReadyRun, PleasantKenobi, Eric Levine, Riley Knight and more!”
The games will be played on SpellTable, an online service that allows players to easily play tabletop games of Magic, virtually, with webcams pointed at their play area. SpellTable helps identify cards and tracks life totals, commander damage, and even whose turn it is. Players will also need to access ChannelFireball’s discord in order to find matches.
An example match on SpellTable.
ChannelFireball is offering a bundle called “CommandFest In a Box” for $99, which includes three Sol Ring promos (one foil, two non-foil), five Path to Exile promos (one foil, four non-foil), five foil Grand Prix lands, your choice of one of 20 playmats, a deckbox, 100 sleeves, a previous Grand Prix promo, and an “artist item.”
The CommandFest in a box bundle.
CommandFest Online is the follow-up to the three in-person CommandFests that Wizards and ChannelFireball hosted at the end of 2019 in Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Those events were extremely popular and Wizards promised more were being scheduled for 2020—but then the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to cancel everything from Grand Prix to Mythic Invitationals, Players Tour Series 2, and the Magic Pro League’s 2020 partial season.