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. 15 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
    0.234
  4. 4
    0.228
  5. 5
    0.227
  6. 6
    0.222
  7. 7
    0.218
  8. 8
    0.214
  9. 9
    0.213
  10. 10
    0.211
  11. 11
    0.210
  12. 12
    0.209
  13. 13
    0.209
  14. 14
    0.206
  15. 15
    0.204
  16. 16
    0.203
  17. 17
    0.203
  18. 18
    0.201
  19. 19
    0.199
  20. 20
    0.199
  21. 21
    0.198
  22. 22
    0.198
  23. 23
    0.198
  24. 24
    0.198
  25. 25
    0.197
  26. 26
    0.197
  27. 27
    0.196
  28. 28
    0.196
  29. 29
    0.196
  30. 30
    0.196
  31. 31
    0.196
  32. 32
    0.196
  33. 33
    0.194
  34. 34
    0.194
  35. 35
    0.193
  36. 36
    0.193
  37. 37
    0.192
  38. 38
    0.192
  39. 39
    0.192
  40. 40
    0.191
  41. 41
    0.191
  42. 42
    0.190
  43. 43
    0.190
  44. 44
    0.189
  45. 45
    0.189
  46. 46
    0.188
  47. 47
    0.188
  48. 48
    0.188
  49. 49
    0.187
  50. 50
    0.186
  51. 51
    0.186
  52. 52
    0.184
  53. 53
    0.183
  54. 54
    0.183
  55. 55
    0.183
  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
    0.179
  65. 65
    0.179
  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
    0.176
  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
    0.172
  89. 89
    0.171
  90. 90
    0.171
  91. 91
    0.170
  92. 92
    0.170
  93. 93
    0.169
  94. 94
    0.168
  95. 95
    0.168
  96. 96
    0.167
  97. 97
    0.167
  98. 98
    0.167
  99. 99
    0.166
  100. 100
    0.166
  101. 101
    0.166
  102. 102
    0.165
  103. 103
    0.165
  104. 104
    0.164
  105. 105
    0.164
  106. 106
    0.164
  107. 107
    0.164
  108. 108
    0.164
  109. 109
    0.164
  110. 110
    0.162
  111. 111
    0.162
  112. 112
    0.162
  113. 113
    0.162
  114. 114
    0.161
  115. 115
    0.160
  116. 116
    0.160
  117. 117
    0.159
  118. 118
    0.159
  119. 119
    0.159
  120. 120
    0.159
  121. 121
    0.158
  122. 122
    0.158
  123. 123
    0.157
  124. 124
    0.157
  125. 125
    0.157
  126. 126
    0.156
  127. 127
    0.156
  128. 128
    0.155
  129. 129
    0.155
  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
    0.149
  140. 140
    0.149
  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
    0.139
  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
    0.111
  164. 164
    0.109
  165. 165
    0.108
  166. 166
    0.106