Delvefall

← The deck lens

The most original Commander precons

Every preconstructed Commander deck, ranked by how unusual its cards are. Not how strong, not how expensive, and not how popular: how little the rest of Magic looks like it. A card scores high here when nothing else in the game does what it does.

What most original means here, and what it doesn't

Every card scores 0 to 1: one minus how close its nearest match anywhere in Magic gets, so 0.30 means something out there is 70% like it. A deck's figure is the average across its most original half of nonland cards, so it climbs by holding cards with less competition, never by holding more cards. On the board below that runs from 0.244 at the top to 0.106 at the bottom.

On the newest decks this is still settling. A new deck reads as more original than it will look in five years, and that is half real: design space fills up, so a card printed today has had nobody to copy it yet.

It is not measuring how good or how expensive a deck is. Against the decks' median EDHREC rank the correlation is r = -0.05, which is nothing. Original and popular turn out to be unrelated, and both are on this board as separate rankings for exactly that reason.

It is partly measuring how recent a deck is (r = +0.46 against release year). Some of that is real: design space fills up, so a card from 2011 has had fifteen years of imitators, and being imitated is the opposite of being unique. The ranking still separates decks inside a single era, which is what the era buttons are for.

Read from the top HALF of each deck's nonland cards, a share of each deck rather than a fixed number, so a deck holding 53 nonland cards and one holding 66 are judged on the same slice of themselves. Half rather than a third because a third of a commander deck is mostly the mana base's neighbours and the staples every deck brings, and reading deeper than half only pulls every deck toward the same middle.

166 decks, most original first. Collector's editions are folded into the deck they reprint. 13 of them came out inside the last year and are marked new. Read those placings with the note above in mind.

  1. 1
    0.244
  2. 2
    0.236
  3. 3
    0.232
  4. 4
    0.227
  5. 5
    0.226
  6. 6
    0.222
  7. 7
    0.218
  8. 8
    0.213
  9. 9
    0.211
  10. 10
    0.210
  11. 11
    0.210
  12. 12
    0.209
  13. 13
    0.209
  14. 14
    0.206
  15. 15
    0.203
  16. 16
    0.203
  17. 17
    0.203
  18. 18
    0.199
  19. 19
    0.198
  20. 20
    0.198
  21. 21
    0.198
  22. 22
    0.198
  23. 23
    0.198
  24. 24
    0.197
  25. 25
    0.197
  26. 26
    0.197
  27. 27
    0.196
  28. 28
    0.196
  29. 29
    0.195
  30. 30
    0.195
  31. 31
    0.195
  32. 32
    0.195
  33. 33
    0.193
  34. 34
    0.193
  35. 35
    0.193
  36. 36
    0.193
  37. 37
    0.192
  38. 38
    0.192
  39. 39
    0.191
  40. 40
    0.191
  41. 41
    0.190
  42. 42
    0.190
  43. 43
    0.189
  44. 44
    0.189
  45. 45
    0.188
  46. 46
    0.188
  47. 47
    0.188
  48. 48
    0.187
  49. 49
    0.186
  50. 50
    0.186
  51. 51
    0.185
  52. 52
    0.183
  53. 53
    0.182
  54. 54
    0.182
  55. 55
    0.181
  56. 56
    0.180
  57. 57
    0.180
  58. 58
    0.180
  59. 59
    0.180
  60. 60
    0.180
  61. 61
    0.180
  62. 62
    0.179
  63. 63
    0.179
  64. 64
    0.178
  65. 65
    0.178
  66. 66
    0.178
  67. 67
    0.178
  68. 68
    0.178
  69. 69
    0.178
  70. 70
    0.178
  71. 71
    0.177
  72. 72
    0.177
  73. 73
    0.176
  74. 74
    0.176
  75. 75
    0.176
  76. 76
    0.176
  77. 77
    0.175
  78. 78
    0.175
  79. 79
    0.175
  80. 80
    0.174
  81. 81
    0.173
  82. 82
    0.173
  83. 83
    0.173
  84. 84
    0.173
  85. 85
    0.172
  86. 86
    0.172
  87. 87
    0.172
  88. 88
    0.171
  89. 89
    0.171
  90. 90
    0.170
  91. 91
    0.170
  92. 92
    0.169
  93. 93
    0.169
  94. 94
    0.169
  95. 95
    0.168
  96. 96
    0.167
  97. 97
    0.167
  98. 98
    0.166
  99. 99
    0.166
  100. 100
    0.166
  101. 101
    0.165
  102. 102
    0.165
  103. 103
    0.164
  104. 104
    0.164
  105. 105
    0.164
  106. 106
    0.164
  107. 107
    0.163
  108. 108
    0.162
  109. 109
    0.162
  110. 110
    0.162
  111. 111
    0.161
  112. 112
    0.161
  113. 113
    0.160
  114. 114
    0.159
  115. 115
    0.159
  116. 116
    0.159
  117. 117
    0.159
  118. 118
    0.158
  119. 119
    0.158
  120. 120
    0.158
  121. 121
    0.157
  122. 122
    0.157
  123. 123
    0.156
  124. 124
    0.156
  125. 125
    0.156
  126. 126
    0.156
  127. 127
    0.155
  128. 128
    0.155
  129. 129
    0.154
  130. 130
    0.154
  131. 131
    0.154
  132. 132
    0.152
  133. 133
    0.150
  134. 134
    0.150
  135. 135
    0.150
  136. 136
    0.149
  137. 137
    0.149
  138. 138
    0.149
  139. 139
    0.148
  140. 140
    0.148
  141. 141
    0.147
  142. 142
    0.147
  143. 143
    0.146
  144. 144
    0.145
  145. 145
    0.144
  146. 146
    0.143
  147. 147
    0.143
  148. 148
    0.143
  149. 149
    0.143
  150. 150
    0.139
  151. 151
    0.138
  152. 152
    0.138
  153. 153
    0.137
  154. 154
    0.136
  155. 155
    0.134
  156. 156
    0.133
  157. 157
    0.133
  158. 158
    0.126
  159. 159
    0.126
  160. 160
    0.124
  161. 161
    0.123
  162. 162
    0.119
  163. 163
    0.110
  164. 164
    0.109
  165. 165
    0.107
  166. 166
    0.106