MTG Salvation

I wanted to measure how much room for innovation certain commanders leave the deckbuilder. The more "auto-includes" for a particular commander the less innovative one can be while building the deck. To measure this I came up with a measurement which I call the "linearity index" of a commander.

This is how I measured the linearity index for each commander:

- I tally all the non-land cards in decklists for that commander in the decklist database that are less than 1 year old.
- I divide each number by the number of decklists to get a weighted count for each card.
- I sort all the weights in a descending order and take the top 20.
- I add up the top 20 and normalize to a percentage.

For example, the linearity index for Kaalia of the Vast is 75. That means that every card in the top 20 gets played on average in 75% of all Kaalia decks.

Here is the linearity index for the top 100 most played commanders (higher number means more linear, lower number means more flexible):

Naturally, 5-color decks leave more room for innovation while mono-colored decks are more stringent when it comes to card selection. However, 5-color dedicated combo decks such as Sliver Queen still appear much higher on the list while open-ended commmanders with fewer colors such as Athreos, God of Passage can appear lower on the list.

The most played deck is Oloro, Ageless Ascetic with 67 lists and the least played decks have 10 copies in the database.

Zur, the Combo Tutor Esper Commander, is only 58?

That strikes me as weird. Woulda thought he was in the 70% range.

Ghave the kombo king doesn't go into the 60's?

I'm curious about the impact of format-wide staples on this measure.

For instance, a quick check of the statistical breakdown and average decklists currently demonstrate a reasonably large quantity of the top 20 cards being played in the average decklists. From the statistical breakdown:


This is, of course, expected; as an average deck will tend to run large quantities the most popular powerful cards.

My theory is that a better measure of linearity would remove the staples, demonstrating the linearity of the commander alone. How is this list impacted if the most played 20 cards are removed from the decklists between the compilation of the average list and the sort by weighted value? Would this metric be a more accurate capture of the linearity of a commander?

Either way, bravo.

EDIT: conversely, there could be a "goodstuff" metric, which would relate to the number of staples in an average deck

Just spitballing some hypotheses for the index scores of various generals:

Zur - His innate tutoring ability means that beyond fetching the same two or three combo pieces which everyone runs, he can run a higher variety of things in his top 20.

Ghave - He combos with so many different things that there's a big leeway in what combos you can run with him.

Kaalia - She doesn't tutor so you need to run a relatively high density of Angels/Demons/Dragons and there's only so many ADDs out there worth running in Kaalia. Hence the high index.

It seems that the generals with the highest scores are those who needs or wants a critical mass of certain cards to function, and for the cards which goes with that general, a subset is clearly stronger so the same cards go into a lot of decks.

Wouldn't another factor be if there are 2 different builds for the same commander? For example, if one commander could be either aggro or control, if 50% of the builds are of each type and they are all identical with no overlap between builds, each card would appear in 50% of the decklists even though the commander is 100% linear for a particular strategy. But perhaps the main info to gather from this is how many different strategies are available to a given commander rather than how much variety exists within a strategy. Just something to consider when analyzing this data

I would argue that the more colors in a deck the more staples it will likely run resulting in less innovation.

Quote from Naethyn »

I would argue that the more colors in a deck the more staples it will likely run resulting in less innovation.

Progenitus and Child of Alara are last on the list...

Hmm, interesting. Any chance we could get the number of decklists considered for each commander?

There's definitely some interesting outliers. Kaalia, Nekusar, Roon, etc all make sense to be very linear, but why is GAAIV so high on the list? Seems like, other than "play colored spells with colorless mana in their costs" he doesn't really push in any particular direction. Ruric Thar, Erebos, Daxos, and Thrax all kinda fit into a similar spot, I think. My best guess is that, because the commanders don't give the deck any particular direction, the decks tend to reliably pick up a bunch of the generic goodstuff in their corresponding colors. The most "innovative" commanders are the ones somewhere in the middle, where the commander gives a few ways to build, without being totally directionless.

That said, anyone who's not running corpse dance in child of alara is a moron (jk).

Bravo! This is really awesome information.

I am surprised to see Sydri and Grand Arbiter so high on this list, considering they are basically "do everything" generals for their color combinations. I also expected Rafiq and Zur to be at the top. But I guess that confirms what I've been saying for a while, that General-centered Voltron is much more adaptable than straight aggro like Kaalia, Myael and Xenagos.

I agree with Fish, that decks with multiple builds might have a "bi-modal" distribution that drags down this index below what the true linearity is. For example, you can build Derevi either with or without the "prison" theme, with those choosing against that theme actively excluding otherwise strong cards for that general. Same thing I guess with Edric. Both generals have decks that practically build themselves, and are in my opinion among the most obvious and linear decks in this format. But those generals are also being used for other decks.

Amazing work scoeri, always appreciated the projects you do for this community.

Thank you.

Scoeri, I like the cut of your jib.

GAAIV is high on the list because it naturally leads most people who want to run it to also run a bunch of other tax effect cards (Propaganda, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, In the Eye of Chaos, etc.) and there are only so many of those available.

Quote from NoahS »

Ghave the kombo king doesn't go into the 60's?

Funny, I would've put him in the 30s-40s because Ghave combos with nearly everything. That said, Aura Shards, Earthcraft, and variants on Doubling Season and Grave Pact are auto-includes in Ghave, along with the usual Abzan auto-includes such as Seedborn Muse and Reveillark.

I'm just surprised Doran's 47.

If someone wants to check the decklists or do a manual tally you can always check this thread.

Sometimes that helps for better understanding the results.

Quote from donfuan »

can you do a list of all Grixis generals to see who's got the most room for creativity? Pleeease

This is the wrong way to look at this. There isn't a single general out there that doesn't have a lot of interesting and relatively unique playstyles off the beaten path, but no less effective.

When I see the word "auto-include" it bugs me a little. There are very few cards that I would consider to actively agree with the word, and of those, depending on the path that you take the deck, all of them are entirely cuttable.

As an example of the things you can do - When I look at Nekusar I instantly see four distinct styles of playing.

1) Group Draw - the classic, kill with the power of hug.

2) Storm - You're running him mostly for the colors, but if you actually manage to cast Nekusar he can either help you recover from a failed attempt or assist in the kill via his second ability.

3) Infect - I heard giving Nekusar Infect and then Wheeling is a great way to make friends win.

4) Control - You don't need to use his ability for anything more than a way to accelerate a lead and to slowly bleed your opponents dry. Grixis is already super strong in regards to this playstyle, and there are really a million ways to interpret this.

And there are more that could work!

Basically, don't take apart a deck because it's not "creative enough," take it apart if you're not having fun with it. If you really like the general, but hate the playstyle... do something different! Nothing's holding Edric back from being a dredge deck. Nothing's holding Kaalia back from being a combo deck. Nothing's holding Child of Alara back at all - baby's crazy bro. Hell, Oloro can even be played aggro. You'd be surprised at the amount of actual synergy that playstyle has with his abilities.

Go forth and do weird things. This is EDH.

Notice the high number of artifact commanders at the top. that is because they use such a high number of artifacts that are in the top 200.
Which is why Sydiri and Glissa who are actually quite versitile don't appear so. but I think it would be fair to say that glissa isn't really being used in all her possible options when the "best" way is so powerful.

I think the most striking thing is the difference between Roon, of the hidden realms and Derevi came out of the same box but one is solidly good stuff and the other results is a myriad of choice.

After reviewing the list for Nekusar, I found out my deck only runs 47 of the most popular cards for him. Guess that's what I get for building a Prison/Pillow-type deck based around him... lol

My Nekusar is tribal zombies, and he is in there mainly just to draw more zombies.

This info is really good, but for me it's more about breaking those expectations. When I looked at the earlier thread about the most common cards, I don't think I had less than 35 cards that weren't on the list for any deck. And that is a big source of pride for my deckbuilding.

Bump, because this is awesome information. I've heard people criticize certain Commanders for their builds being too obvious, while other commanders get criticized for the opposite reason of not enabling a clear strategy. If the shoe fits.

Quote from ilovesaprolings »

Sidisi and Ruhan are higher than Oloro or Marath? really?

Maybe that's because wedge colors have less cards to choose from?

If you want to check the results manually, check this thread.

Sometimes that helps for better understanding the results.

Any chance we can get the percentage for all 100 cards instead of top 20?

Quote from Drizzle »

Any chance we can get the percentage for all 100 cards instead of top 20?

I tried that first but while the first few cards are in lots of decks, cards later on the list are not. Adding more cards lowers the total average percentage to a point where every percentage is between 25-35%. I think its more interesting to have a wider margin between the first and the last deck.

FYI, I updated the first post to include a top 100.

Sol Ring is as blatant as it gets. Based off stats, EDH seems to be a 98-card format. Yawns.

Quote from scoeri »

Quote from Drizzle »

Any chance we can get the percentage for all 100 cards instead of top 20?

I tried that first but while the first few cards are in lots of decks, cards later on the list are not. Adding more cards lowers the total average percentage to a point where every percentage is between 25-35%. I think its more interesting to have a wider margin between the first and the last deck.

FYI, I updated the first post to include a top 100.

This list is very interesting, but this post puts things in perspective. What the index is actually telling us is the likelihood that a given deck has a "core" of commonly run staples. It says nothing directly about the other 65-75% of the deck.