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.

153 decks, most original first. Collector's editions are folded into the deck they reprint. 13 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
    0.232
  4. 4
    0.227
  5. 5
    0.226
  6. 6
    0.222
  7. 7
    0.218
  8. 8
    0.213
  9. 9
    0.211
  10. 10
    0.210
  11. 11
    0.210
  12. 12
    0.209
  13. 13
    0.209
  14. 14
    0.206
  15. 15
    0.203
  16. 16
    0.203
  17. 17
    0.203
  18. 18
    0.199
  19. 19
    0.198
  20. 20
    0.198
  21. 21
    0.198
  22. 22
    0.198
  23. 23
    0.197
  24. 24
    0.197
  25. 25
    0.197
  26. 26
    0.196
  27. 27
    0.196
  28. 28
    0.195
  29. 29
    0.195
  30. 30
    0.195
  31. 31
    0.193
  32. 32
    0.193
  33. 33
    0.193
  34. 34
    0.193
  35. 35
    0.192
  36. 36
    0.191
  37. 37
    0.191
  38. 38
    0.190
  39. 39
    0.190
  40. 40
    0.189
  41. 41
    0.189
  42. 42
    0.188
  43. 43
    0.188
  44. 44
    0.187
  45. 45
    0.186
  46. 46
    0.185
  47. 47
    0.183
  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
    0.180
  56. 56
    0.180
  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
    0.178
  64. 64
    0.177
  65. 65
    0.177
  66. 66
    0.176
  67. 67
    0.176
  68. 68
    0.176
  69. 69
    0.176
  70. 70
    0.175
  71. 71
    0.175
  72. 72
    0.175
  73. 73
    0.174
  74. 74
    0.173
  75. 75
    0.173
  76. 76
    0.173
  77. 77
    0.173
  78. 78
    0.172
  79. 79
    0.172
  80. 80
    0.172
  81. 81
    0.171
  82. 82
    0.171
  83. 83
    0.170
  84. 84
    0.170
  85. 85
    0.169
  86. 86
    0.169
  87. 87
    0.168
  88. 88
    0.167
  89. 89
    0.167
  90. 90
    0.166
  91. 91
    0.166
  92. 92
    0.166
  93. 93
    0.165
  94. 94
    0.164
  95. 95
    0.164
  96. 96
    0.163
  97. 97
    0.162
  98. 98
    0.162
  99. 99
    0.162
  100. 100
    0.161
  101. 101
    0.160
  102. 102
    0.159
  103. 103
    0.159
  104. 104
    0.159
  105. 105
    0.159
  106. 106
    0.158
  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
    0.156
  114. 114
    0.155
  115. 115
    0.155
  116. 116
    0.154
  117. 117
    0.154
  118. 118
    0.154
  119. 119
    0.152
  120. 120
    0.150
  121. 121
    0.150
  122. 122
    0.150
  123. 123
    0.149
  124. 124
    0.149
  125. 125
    0.149
  126. 126
    0.148
  127. 127
    0.148
  128. 128
    0.147
  129. 129
    0.147
  130. 130
    0.146
  131. 131
    0.145
  132. 132
    0.144
  133. 133
    0.143
  134. 134
    0.143
  135. 135
    0.143
  136. 136
    0.143
  137. 137
    0.139
  138. 138
    0.138
  139. 139
    0.138
  140. 140
    0.137
  141. 141
    0.136
  142. 142
    0.134
  143. 143
    0.133
  144. 144
    0.133
  145. 145
    0.126
  146. 146
    0.126
  147. 147
    0.124
  148. 148
    0.123
  149. 149
    0.119
  150. 150
    0.110
  151. 151
    0.109
  152. 152
    0.107
  153. 153
    0.106