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 0.214 at the top to 0.109 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.

49 decks, most original first. Collector's editions are folded into the deck they reprint.

  1. 1
    0.214
  2. 2
    0.211
  3. 3
    0.209
  4. 4
    0.203
  5. 5
    0.198
  6. 6
    0.198
  7. 7
    0.196
  8. 8
    0.193
  9. 9
    0.192
  10. 10
    0.192
  11. 11
    0.189
  12. 12
    0.189
  13. 13
    0.186
  14. 14
    0.186
  15. 15
    0.180
  16. 16
    0.180
  17. 17
    0.180
  18. 18
    0.179
  19. 19
    0.178
  20. 20
    0.175
  21. 21
    0.175
  22. 22
    0.175
  23. 23
    0.171
  24. 24
    0.170
  25. 25
    0.168
  26. 26
    0.167
  27. 27
    0.167
  28. 28
    0.166
  29. 29
    0.164
  30. 30
    0.164
  31. 31
    0.164
  32. 32
    0.162
  33. 33
    0.161
  34. 34
    0.160
  35. 35
    0.159
  36. 36
    0.159
  37. 37
    0.159
  38. 38
    0.158
  39. 39
    0.154
  40. 40
    0.152
  41. 41
    0.150
  42. 42
    0.150
  43. 43
    0.149
  44. 44
    0.145
  45. 45
    0.143
  46. 46
    0.143
  47. 47
    0.137
  48. 48
    0.126
  49. 49
    0.109