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 0.106 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.

151 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
    0.214
  9. 9
    0.213
  10. 10
    0.211
  11. 11
    0.210
  12. 12
    0.209
  13. 13
    0.209
  14. 14
    0.206
  15. 15
    0.204
  16. 16
    0.203
  17. 17
    0.203
  18. 18
    0.201
  19. 19
    0.199
  20. 20
    0.199
  21. 21
    0.198
  22. 22
    0.198
  23. 23
    0.198
  24. 24
    0.197
  25. 25
    0.197
  26. 26
    0.196
  27. 27
    0.196
  28. 28
    0.196
  29. 29
    0.196
  30. 30
    0.196
  31. 31
    0.194
  32. 32
    0.194
  33. 33
    0.193
  34. 34
    0.193
  35. 35
    0.192
  36. 36
    0.192
  37. 37
    0.191
  38. 38
    0.190
  39. 39
    0.189
  40. 40
    0.189
  41. 41
    0.188
  42. 42
    0.188
  43. 43
    0.188
  44. 44
    0.186
  45. 45
    0.186
  46. 46
    0.183
  47. 47
    0.183
  48. 48
    0.183
  49. 49
    0.180
  50. 50
    0.180
  51. 51
    0.180
  52. 52
    0.180
  53. 53
    0.180
  54. 54
    0.180
  55. 55
    0.179
  56. 56
    0.179
  57. 57
    0.179
  58. 58
    0.179
  59. 59
    0.178
  60. 60
    0.178
  61. 61
    0.178
  62. 62
    0.178
  63. 63
    0.177
  64. 64
    0.176
  65. 65
    0.176
  66. 66
    0.176
  67. 67
    0.176
  68. 68
    0.176
  69. 69
    0.175
  70. 70
    0.175
  71. 71
    0.175
  72. 72
    0.174
  73. 73
    0.173
  74. 74
    0.173
  75. 75
    0.173
  76. 76
    0.172
  77. 77
    0.172
  78. 78
    0.172
  79. 79
    0.171
  80. 80
    0.171
  81. 81
    0.170
  82. 82
    0.170
  83. 83
    0.168
  84. 84
    0.168
  85. 85
    0.167
  86. 86
    0.167
  87. 87
    0.167
  88. 88
    0.166
  89. 89
    0.166
  90. 90
    0.166
  91. 91
    0.165
  92. 92
    0.165
  93. 93
    0.164
  94. 94
    0.164
  95. 95
    0.164
  96. 96
    0.164
  97. 97
    0.162
  98. 98
    0.162
  99. 99
    0.162
  100. 100
    0.161
  101. 101
    0.160
  102. 102
    0.160
  103. 103
    0.159
  104. 104
    0.159
  105. 105
    0.159
  106. 106
    0.159
  107. 107
    0.158
  108. 108
    0.158
  109. 109
    0.157
  110. 110
    0.157
  111. 111
    0.156
  112. 112
    0.156
  113. 113
    0.155
  114. 114
    0.155
  115. 115
    0.154
  116. 116
    0.154
  117. 117
    0.152
  118. 118
    0.150
  119. 119
    0.150
  120. 120
    0.150
  121. 121
    0.149
  122. 122
    0.149
  123. 123
    0.149
  124. 124
    0.149
  125. 125
    0.149
  126. 126
    0.147
  127. 127
    0.147
  128. 128
    0.146
  129. 129
    0.145
  130. 130
    0.144
  131. 131
    0.143
  132. 132
    0.143
  133. 133
    0.143
  134. 134
    0.143
  135. 135
    0.139
  136. 136
    0.139
  137. 137
    0.138
  138. 138
    0.137
  139. 139
    0.136
  140. 140
    0.134
  141. 141
    0.133
  142. 142
    0.133
  143. 143
    0.126
  144. 144
    0.126
  145. 145
    0.124
  146. 146
    0.123
  147. 147
    0.119
  148. 148
    0.111
  149. 149
    0.109
  150. 150
    0.108
  151. 151
    0.106