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 0.130 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.

67 decks, most original first. Collector's editions are folded into the deck they reprint. 25 published inside the last year are hidden, because their salt, price and play rate are all still settling.

  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
    0.206
  11. 11
    0.203
  12. 12
    0.202
  13. 13
    0.201
  14. 14
    0.199
  15. 15
    0.197
  16. 16
    0.197
  17. 17
    0.196
  18. 18
    0.196
  19. 19
    0.195
  20. 20
    0.195
  21. 21
    0.195
  22. 22
    0.194
  23. 23
    0.193
  24. 24
    0.193
  25. 25
    0.193
  26. 26
    0.191
  27. 27
    0.189
  28. 28
    0.188
  29. 29
    0.188
  30. 30
    0.187
  31. 31
    0.187
  32. 32
    0.182
  33. 33
    0.182
  34. 34
    0.182
  35. 35
    0.181
  36. 36
    0.180
  37. 37
    0.180
  38. 38
    0.178
  39. 39
    0.177
  40. 40
    0.177
  41. 41
    0.176
  42. 42
    0.176
  43. 43
    0.176
  44. 44
    0.176
  45. 45
    0.176
  46. 46
    0.175
  47. 47
    0.174
  48. 48
    0.174
  49. 49
    0.173
  50. 50
    0.170
  51. 51
    0.170
  52. 52
    0.169
  53. 53
    0.168
  54. 54
    0.168
  55. 55
    0.166
  56. 56
    0.161
  57. 57
    0.158
  58. 58
    0.156
  59. 59
    0.154
  60. 60
    0.154
  61. 61
    0.149
  62. 62
    0.145
  63. 63
    0.138
  64. 64
    0.134
  65. 65
    0.133
  66. 66
    0.130
  67. 67
    0.130