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 0.242 at the top to 0.128 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.

92 decks, most original first. Collector's editions are folded into the deck they reprint. 25 of them came out inside the last year and are marked new. Read those placings with the note above in mind.

  1. 1
    0.242
  2. 2
    0.234
  3. 3
    0.231
  4. 4
    0.226
  5. 5
    0.222
  6. 6
    0.218
  7. 7
    0.213
  8. 8
    0.210
  9. 9
    0.208
  10. 10
    0.207
  11. 11
    0.206
  12. 12
    0.203
  13. 13
    0.202
  14. 14
    0.201
  15. 15
    0.199
  16. 16
    0.198
  17. 17
    0.197
  18. 18
    0.197
  19. 19
    0.196
  20. 20
    0.196
  21. 21
    0.195
  22. 22
    0.195
  23. 23
    0.195
  24. 24
    0.195
  25. 25
    0.194
  26. 26
    0.193
  27. 27
    0.193
  28. 28
    0.193
  29. 29
    0.193
  30. 30
    0.191
  31. 31
    0.190
  32. 32
    0.189
  33. 33
    0.188
  34. 34
    0.188
  35. 35
    0.187
  36. 36
    0.187
  37. 37
    0.185
  38. 38
    0.184
  39. 39
    0.183
  40. 40
    0.182
  41. 41
    0.182
  42. 42
    0.182
  43. 43
    0.181
  44. 44
    0.180
  45. 45
    0.180
  46. 46
    0.180
  47. 47
    0.179
  48. 48
    0.178
  49. 49
    0.177
  50. 50
    0.177
  51. 51
    0.177
  52. 52
    0.177
  53. 53
    0.176
  54. 54
    0.176
  55. 55
    0.176
  56. 56
    0.176
  57. 57
    0.176
  58. 58
    0.175
  59. 59
    0.174
  60. 60
    0.174
  61. 61
    0.173
  62. 62
    0.170
  63. 63
    0.170
  64. 64
    0.169
  65. 65
    0.169
  66. 66
    0.169
  67. 67
    0.168
  68. 68
    0.168
  69. 69
    0.168
  70. 70
    0.166
  71. 71
    0.165
  72. 72
    0.164
  73. 73
    0.162
  74. 74
    0.161
  75. 75
    0.161
  76. 76
    0.159
  77. 77
    0.158
  78. 78
    0.156
  79. 79
    0.155
  80. 80
    0.154
  81. 81
    0.154
  82. 82
    0.149
  83. 83
    0.145
  84. 84
    0.141
  85. 85
    0.141
  86. 86
    0.138
  87. 87
    0.134
  88. 88
    0.134
  89. 89
    0.133
  90. 90
    0.130
  91. 91
    0.130
  92. 92
    0.128