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.

65 decks, most original first. Collector's editions are folded into the deck they reprint. 15 published inside the last year are hidden, because their salt, price and play rate are all still settling.

  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
    0.197
  19. 19
    0.197
  20. 20
    0.196
  21. 21
    0.196
  22. 22
    0.196
  23. 23
    0.196
  24. 24
    0.194
  25. 25
    0.193
  26. 26
    0.191
  27. 27
    0.190
  28. 28
    0.188
  29. 29
    0.188
  30. 30
    0.188
  31. 31
    0.183
  32. 32
    0.183
  33. 33
    0.183
  34. 34
    0.180
  35. 35
    0.180
  36. 36
    0.180
  37. 37
    0.179
  38. 38
    0.179
  39. 39
    0.178
  40. 40
    0.178
  41. 41
    0.177
  42. 42
    0.176
  43. 43
    0.176
  44. 44
    0.176
  45. 45
    0.176
  46. 46
    0.176
  47. 47
    0.173
  48. 48
    0.172
  49. 49
    0.172
  50. 50
    0.171
  51. 51
    0.170
  52. 52
    0.168
  53. 53
    0.166
  54. 54
    0.165
  55. 55
    0.162
  56. 56
    0.159
  57. 57
    0.157
  58. 58
    0.155
  59. 59
    0.149
  60. 60
    0.149
  61. 61
    0.139
  62. 62
    0.136
  63. 63
    0.134
  64. 64
    0.133
  65. 65
    0.133