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 0.133 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.

80 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
    0.213
  9. 9
    0.210
  10. 10
    0.209
  11. 11
    0.206
  12. 12
    0.204
  13. 13
    0.203
  14. 14
    0.201
  15. 15
    0.199
  16. 16
    0.199
  17. 17
    0.198
  18. 18
    0.198
  19. 19
    0.197
  20. 20
    0.197
  21. 21
    0.196
  22. 22
    0.196
  23. 23
    0.196
  24. 24
    0.196
  25. 25
    0.196
  26. 26
    0.194
  27. 27
    0.193
  28. 28
    0.192
  29. 29
    0.191
  30. 30
    0.191
  31. 31
    0.190
  32. 32
    0.190
  33. 33
    0.188
  34. 34
    0.188
  35. 35
    0.188
  36. 36
    0.187
  37. 37
    0.184
  38. 38
    0.183
  39. 39
    0.183
  40. 40
    0.183
  41. 41
    0.180
  42. 42
    0.180
  43. 43
    0.180
  44. 44
    0.179
  45. 45
    0.179
  46. 46
    0.178
  47. 47
    0.178
  48. 48
    0.178
  49. 49
    0.177
  50. 50
    0.176
  51. 51
    0.176
  52. 52
    0.176
  53. 53
    0.176
  54. 54
    0.176
  55. 55
    0.173
  56. 56
    0.173
  57. 57
    0.172
  58. 58
    0.172
  59. 59
    0.172
  60. 60
    0.171
  61. 61
    0.170
  62. 62
    0.169
  63. 63
    0.168
  64. 64
    0.166
  65. 65
    0.165
  66. 66
    0.164
  67. 67
    0.164
  68. 68
    0.162
  69. 69
    0.162
  70. 70
    0.159
  71. 71
    0.157
  72. 72
    0.157
  73. 73
    0.155
  74. 74
    0.149
  75. 75
    0.149
  76. 76
    0.139
  77. 77
    0.136
  78. 78
    0.134
  79. 79
    0.133
  80. 80
    0.133