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 0.105 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.

153 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
    0.211
  9. 9
    0.210
  10. 10
    0.210
  11. 11
    0.208
  12. 12
    0.206
  13. 13
    0.206
  14. 14
    0.203
  15. 15
    0.203
  16. 16
    0.202
  17. 17
    0.201
  18. 18
    0.199
  19. 19
    0.198
  20. 20
    0.197
  21. 21
    0.197
  22. 22
    0.197
  23. 23
    0.196
  24. 24
    0.196
  25. 25
    0.195
  26. 26
    0.195
  27. 27
    0.195
  28. 28
    0.195
  29. 29
    0.194
  30. 30
    0.193
  31. 31
    0.193
  32. 32
    0.193
  33. 33
    0.193
  34. 34
    0.192
  35. 35
    0.191
  36. 36
    0.191
  37. 37
    0.191
  38. 38
    0.189
  39. 39
    0.189
  40. 40
    0.188
  41. 41
    0.188
  42. 42
    0.187
  43. 43
    0.187
  44. 44
    0.186
  45. 45
    0.185
  46. 46
    0.182
  47. 47
    0.182
  48. 48
    0.182
  49. 49
    0.182
  50. 50
    0.181
  51. 51
    0.180
  52. 52
    0.180
  53. 53
    0.180
  54. 54
    0.180
  55. 55
    0.178
  56. 56
    0.178
  57. 57
    0.178
  58. 58
    0.178
  59. 59
    0.177
  60. 60
    0.177
  61. 61
    0.177
  62. 62
    0.176
  63. 63
    0.176
  64. 64
    0.176
  65. 65
    0.176
  66. 66
    0.176
  67. 67
    0.176
  68. 68
    0.175
  69. 69
    0.175
  70. 70
    0.174
  71. 71
    0.174
  72. 72
    0.173
  73. 73
    0.173
  74. 74
    0.172
  75. 75
    0.171
  76. 76
    0.171
  77. 77
    0.170
  78. 78
    0.170
  79. 79
    0.170
  80. 80
    0.169
  81. 81
    0.169
  82. 82
    0.169
  83. 83
    0.168
  84. 84
    0.168
  85. 85
    0.168
  86. 86
    0.167
  87. 87
    0.166
  88. 88
    0.166
  89. 89
    0.166
  90. 90
    0.165
  91. 91
    0.164
  92. 92
    0.164
  93. 93
    0.163
  94. 94
    0.162
  95. 95
    0.162
  96. 96
    0.162
  97. 97
    0.162
  98. 98
    0.161
  99. 99
    0.161
  100. 100
    0.160
  101. 101
    0.160
  102. 102
    0.159
  103. 103
    0.158
  104. 104
    0.158
  105. 105
    0.157
  106. 106
    0.156
  107. 107
    0.156
  108. 108
    0.156
  109. 109
    0.156
  110. 110
    0.155
  111. 111
    0.155
  112. 112
    0.155
  113. 113
    0.154
  114. 114
    0.154
  115. 115
    0.152
  116. 116
    0.152
  117. 117
    0.152
  118. 118
    0.151
  119. 119
    0.151
  120. 120
    0.150
  121. 121
    0.150
  122. 122
    0.149
  123. 123
    0.149
  124. 124
    0.149
  125. 125
    0.148
  126. 126
    0.147
  127. 127
    0.146
  128. 128
    0.146
  129. 129
    0.146
  130. 130
    0.145
  131. 131
    0.144
  132. 132
    0.144
  133. 133
    0.143
  134. 134
    0.143
  135. 135
    0.143
  136. 136
    0.140
  137. 137
    0.139
  138. 138
    0.138
  139. 139
    0.138
  140. 140
    0.134
  141. 141
    0.133
  142. 142
    0.131
  143. 143
    0.130
  144. 144
    0.130
  145. 145
    0.126
  146. 146
    0.125
  147. 147
    0.123
  148. 148
    0.121
  149. 149
    0.116
  150. 150
    0.110
  151. 151
    0.107
  152. 152
    0.107
  153. 153
    0.105