75%

[xeroxedfool]

call them 75% decks, Meaning they are 75% of the way to an optimal build and just good enough to beat a deck built to be 100% optimal if I play tight and get lucky.

By Jason Alt, Posted on February 13, 2014 Original Article

" 75%" Deck building" is going to be a term that is new to a lot of readers. To me, it sums up the philosophy I've had for the format for years, simply being given a name. Basically, a 75% EDH deck is a deck that is built optimally, but purposely avoids being built for a 100% flawless game. Sometimes it's for the sake of fun, sometimes it's for the sake of budget. In my experience most 75% decks will be able to play in a competitive environment with little to no trouble, while playing casual games without feeling too strong or too weak. This leads to what I feel is a generally more enjoyable experience to everyone in the game.

-Robert McEachern, December 7, 2015 Original Article


To be sure I understood the concept of 75% commander decks I did a little research on the subject. These quotes are taken from articles found at the top of a google search. The articles are old, from many years ago. I'm assuming they are some of the first publications on the subject.

I never looked at a commander deck under the lens of percent optimized. In the past couple of years I have noticed the tag and concept used quite frequently on this forum and MTGS. My opinion on the subject is that it fine for the format, I have no issue with anyone using the tag or deck building philosophy, nor do I think anything bad or negative about the subject.

My question, and point of this discussion, is how is the concept is applied to particular decks and commanders? I will now list a few questions and ideas I've had in the hope that the members of the forum can help me broaden my understanding of the concept.

1. Can certain commanders ever be 75%? Zur the Enchanter, Edgar Markov, or Thrasios, Triton Hero for example.

2. When one builds a 75% commander deck where do the percentage points come from? How much of this is felt through intuition and how much is calculated mathematically?

3. Is there any sort of metric that can be applied universally? For instance, purposely not running Dual Lands. Or choosing to run Diabolic Tutor over Demonic Tutor vs running no tutors.

4. If applying 75% literally, does that mean I can run 74 optimal cards and then 25 fun/pet/non-optimal cards and then have successfully built in that fashion? Could I then tune up or down percentage points to fit my meta appropriately?

[WizardMN]

I think 75% is viewed more philosophically rather than mathematically. That is, it is simply a designation given to a deck that plays powerful cards, or tries to be "tuned" to an extent, without going all out into the "best" cards. There isn't a formula that is used to get to that 75% (or 60% or 78% or any other number).

So to answer your questions:

1) Yes. Any deck can be 75%. Edgar, for example, is just a super good tribal general. He is explosive and resilient but it doesn't mean he has to be overpowered. Just using small Vampires to generate value isn't close to putting him at 100% territory as a board wipe can cripple the deck.

Thrasios is one that I have never seen become a problem in multiplayer. Not to say it can't; just that I haven't seen it. I know there are more concerns with that deck in cEDH but cEDH should, by the very nature of the format, be trying to do more than "75%". In fact, I am not entirely sure why 4 mana, Scry 1, Draw 1 (more or less) would automatically be considered overpowered and impossible to reign in.

Zur is a little tougher. There are a few other generals like him where building a deck to be less competitive is actually somewhat difficult due to the nature of the general. Now, Zur doesn't have a lot of protection, but if he swings once, he can get that protection. And a free tutor and free "cast" of an enchantment every turn can centralize the game towards needing to get rid of Zur. I don't think there is any general who can't be built at 75% but Zur is one that might be toeing the line.

2) See above: there is no formula for the numbers.

3) Dual lands are, in my opinion, so innocuous in the terms we are talking about as to not matter. Yes, they make mana more consistent but that is it. I wouldn't ever consider someone running Duals to automatically be running more than a 75% deck.

However, I would lean towards an abundance of tutors causing the deck to go a little higher but, even then, it is more about what the rest of the decks consists of. If you are playing all the good tutors, but all your creatures and spells are overcosted then it definitely isn't over 75%.

4) No. However, your last sentence there is important. You absolutely should tweak your deck to better fit your meta or what you want your meta to be. If everyone is playing precons. and someone comes in with a tuned Narset deck to take all the turns, they are just being a dick. You can work with your group to have them improve their decks, but there is nothing wrong with toning yours down to make it fun for everyone. There is a balance to be achieved in a playgroup. But the goal shouldn't be to "make my deck 75%". It should just be to make it fun for everyone.

In general, I think 75%, as a designation, leaves a lot to be desired because it really doesn't mean anything. At least, the number itself doesn't mean anything. It is simply a shorthand way of designating a deck as one that is built for fun without it being a deck that cares solely about winning as fast as possible. Perhaps it is a deck that has all the best of a certain subset of cards with a few pet cards thrown in. Or is one where they focus on long, grindy games of Magic rather than trying to combo out before turn 5.

I don't think there is a true consensus on what makes a deck "75%". As I said, I don't think ABUR duals changes this, but someone else might. In reality, it should be viewed as something that illustrates an concept rather than a hard and fast number.

[darrenhabib]

It has to be exactly 75%. If it's 74.8763% then you cannot use this term. If it's 75.3567% I'm sorry but a no go as well.

It's easy to calculate your deck percentage using this formula..




Right, so I'm just pointing out that this term is just an arbitrary number to say that your deck is somewhere in between being a casual deck to being a really good top tier deck.
If there was a way to apply real numbers then maybe some of them would come out around 60% and some would be more like 90%, but because we are just going by gut feel for how far along the way we feel a deck strength is compared to the best decks you've played against, we just generalize to saying the deck is "three quarters of the way compared to a top tier deck".

I guess the problem with just trying to use the term "Focused" or "Optimized" is that it still doesn't tell you how your deck compares to others. I mean you can make an "optimized Antelope tribal deck", but it turns out it can never win.

I feel like the decks I post on threads are more like 90%, so that's why I use the tag "Competitive". But I have plenty of decks I don't post and many of them are more like 75%. My "75%" decks come from the fact that I build around a theme (often dictated by the commanders abilities) and then no matter how much I tune it to work around the theme, it will never operate at the top level of efficiency compared to the strongest deck you can make.
So I don't often handicap myself on purpose, I let the general jankiness of the theme take care of that for me

[lyonhaert]

2. When one builds a 75% commander deck where do the percentage points come from? How much of this is felt through intuition and how much is calculated mathematically?

3. Is there any sort of metric that can be applied universally? For instance, purposely not running Dual Lands. Or choosing to run Diabolic Tutor over Demonic Tutor vs running no tutors.

4. If applying 75% literally, does that mean I can run 74 optimal cards and then 25 fun/pet/non-optimal cards and then have successfully built in that fashion? Could I then tune up or down percentage points to fit my meta appropriately?

The better guideline for building, IMO, is that the power level of the deck is matched with your meta such that it wins 1/N games, where N is the number of players. You could think of this as "the other 3 players win 75% of the games", though that's not what 75% was supposed to be related to originally.

Jason Alt actually did a series of articles on this that were an interesting read. The series produced a series of sub-guidelines, such as "tutors or card draw, but not both". In that example, it didn't even matter if the tutors or card draw were good ones, but that it was the combination that drove up the deck's consistency (and thus power level). So it's possible to have a power-matched ("75%") deck that uses Vampiric and Demonic on the tutor side or Necropotence|Fifth Edition on the card-draw side, but it'll depend on your meta. Necropotence might be too much and Greed more appropriate for the meta in terms of card draw. NB: All of the sub-guidelines, though, were not rules but examples based on various "75%" decks of different ways to self-limit in the deckbuilding.

So it's definitely not universal or literal. It's almost always relative to the power level of those you're playing with. Your group can even still have decks of varying power levels, though that is also going to take some coordination so that y'all aren't mismatching your tiers. Harder to do with random pods at a the LGS, though.

Also, it's easier to start at a lower level and bring it up to "75%" than to try to bring it down.

1. Can certain commanders ever be 75%? Zur the Enchanter, Edgar Markov, or Thrasios, Triton Hero for example.

Some commanders you can just build with pet cards instead of "enablers" or other "subpar" choices. Some commanders need a unique spin, such as building as a different archetype than is typical for that commander.

---

I tend to think of building for "75%" as similar to putting on a weight vest or using extra resistance. You can do the same thing as you were doing anyway, but now it takes more effort and concentration.

One of the limiters I'm using and have seen others use is rotating out win conditions once you've been able to achieve them enough times that you want to give something else a chance. For example, in mono-black decks Exsanguinate is common, and in Chainer cards like Gary / Kokusho are pretty ubiquitous. I was using one of those on most of my wins for a time and simply wanted to see if I could still get the job done with combat and milling instead, and it definitely makes me work more for the win. Another option, especially when going tutorless, is to split up whatever effect (could also mean making sure your combos are more than 2 cards, sometimes more than 3). In the case of lifedrain like Exsanguinate I could split that to Pestilence Demon plus Whip of Erebos (or Loxodon Warhammer). Without tutors I have to somewhat luck into drawing/milling the combination and get them both on the battlefield, but they're both good for the deck individually, too (plus I often can't kill the table with PD on its own because suicide black -- my life total is often pretty low until I find some lifegain).

As far as individual cards, there are lots of toned down "subpar" choices like using Dragon Throne of Tarkir / Overrun / Pathbreaker Ibex instead of Craterhoof Behemoth. I don't think these kind of substitutions often bring the power level down a whole lot because it's more often the number of tokens you were able to produce that's the threat rather than how much you were able to pump up their power. But there are times that "budget choices" can help make the effort to win take a wee bit more work and shift the balance in the right direction.

I think that, more often, limiting power via individual cards is more easily done by avoiding synergy/combo "enablers" to some degree (Panharmonicon, Ashnod's / Phyrexian, Rings of Brighthearth, Deadeye Navigator, Doubling Season, Strionic Resonator -- cards that really amp up what the deck is doing or make it explode when they're around, but don't stop the deck from doing its thing when they're not around).

[ISBPathfinder]

The term of 75% is one I really only heard of in the last year to be honest and I saw it kind of loosely in discussion so I guess it might mean a little different to me. For me it is:

• Either not using combos or non optimized ones. Optimized combos use less cards and often set up with tutors. Non optimized combos might use 3+ cards to go off, not go infinite, or be questionable as to the consistency that they actually close out the game when executed.
• Not using mass land destruction, stasis, hardcore stax effects.
• In terms of speed, the deck shouldn't regularly be able to kill a table of four before turn 7. The actual turn and consistency of speed aren't really super defined for me and this is personal thoughts but if its faster than that on average then its probably a little higher tuned than I would consider a 75% deck. I could see possibly saying something later than turn 8 even but beyond those turns there are a lot of strategies that can end games at any point.
• Excluding cards for social or personal reasons rather than running the most optimal cards.

I really only picked up the term in passing conversation though so it was just sort of my own take away from what I was picking up.

[Rumpy5897]

A bunch of good points in the thread already. Treating 75% as a commander-agnostic measure of build quality is meaningless due to the innate power spread of lists centred on different legends. That said, it's a good description for the power rung below CEDH and pub stomp "casual terror" decks (think your Wanderers, your Narsets, you get the idea). If you're pursuing a stronger concept, you've probably made some build concessions to slow the deck down and decrease consistency, likely in the form of some card advantage/tutoring or the crazier support pieces. The main danger is that the games tend to devolve into wrath crawls, at least from my experience. Everybody's jamming some wipes, as they're the best bang for your buck answer in EDH, everybody's engines are relatively slow, and any time someone gets ahead someone else will pop a reset to bring them back down. I'd say my group operates in the lower regions of this general power designation, and it's quite nice - a mixture of strong commanders built jankily, and janky commanders built strong.

[Sinis]

My understanding is that it's a self-imposed limitation on the kinds of cards you play, so that you don't have to pull your punches in actual gameplay. That might mean eschewing tutors, so you don't just find a game-winning combo every time. Or, it might mean excluding any kind of infinite combo in your deck, so you can't tutor for it, and tutors function mostly for finding answers or 'fair' threats.

1. Absolutely. If you build a Zur deck with no enchantments, it would be well below "75%". So, it stands to reason you just have to find the enchantments that put Zur above 75%. I think there's a definite answer: Necropotence and Solitary Confinement make up the worst of it, and heavy handed toolbox answers like Rest in Peace, Darksteel Mutation, or dedicated combo pieces like Solemnity make up the rest.

Once you remove those, is there a viable Zur deck that's not super terrible? I would say yes, like Astral Slide decks. I would say Astral Slide Zur is 75% if you're leaving out the stuff I mentioned.

I would also venture that you could do the same for almost any given general; Thrasios is only problematic if you have infinite mana, are playing an incremental value game, or are trying to draw a card off Tymna the Weaver.

2. As others have said, it's not mathematical. I would have rather they called it a "80% deckbuilding philosophy", because -- if I had to guess -- it more than likely conforms to the Pareto Principle, where 20% of the cards cause 80% of the problems. I don't doubt in my Zur example above, that those cards occupy almost 20% of the enchantments in a Zur deck that is unfun to play against.

3. My position on resource reliability has always been to ask what are you doing with it. If you (hypothetically) use Black Lotus and a Mountain to play Channel and Fireball, you're playing well above 75%. If you use Black Lotus and a Mountain to power out a Hill Giant, you're playing well below 75%. Arguably, the Black Lotus isn't the offender, here.

4. I would say 'no'; it's not strictly a math, thing.

-----

A lot of the criteria I've posted has to do with exclusions, or negative criteria; take this or that out, and your deck is 75%. I also think that if you're including some (relatively terrible) cards with the intent to use them a lot, you're probably in 75% territory, and that there is positive criteria as well.

Trading Post is my favourite example. You would (IMO) never see Trading Post in an optimized decklist; the card is not good in some deep technical way. If you had it in your deck, and are activating it for something every turn, it is very likely that you're playing a 75% list.

[onering]

I mean, it isn't that hard to build Zur to 75 percent or even more casual, you just have to realize that the effect is so good on its own that you need to step back on certain staples or ensure that he's mostly searching up mediocre stuff. Focusing on enchantment based removal and obscure cards rather than sticking in necropotence and protection makes a huge difference.

[ISBPathfinder]

Zur is a hard one to scale down but most of it comes down to including less than optimal cards. There is a build in my meta for Zur that is cycling based and almost all of the enchantments in his list have to due with cycling or can cycle.

I agree though, its not easy to go a less optimal path with Zur. It can be done though.

[Rorseph]

What about building an optimized deck that does something frivolous? For example, a deck that is really consistent, but it plays expensive artifacts to enable the playing of even more expensive creatures and spells. That's sort of the way that I approach 75% personally. Optimize a mediocre deck and run with it.

[toctheyounger]

I think 75% is viewed more philosophically rather than mathematically.

Pretty much this. I think it's pretty hard to give specific percentages, but the concept should be more viewed as 'what my intent is with this deck' moreso than 'this is an exact representation of how well you can expect my deck to perform'.

Example - for a couple of reasons, I generally build for 75%. Partly this is budget constraint, but also I don't enjoy dedicated combo. I like the arm wrestle, so I build to maximise the amount of games I experience this. That being said, I try to game hard and I won't generally pull punches, which a lot of other people who play '75%' decks see as too OP - these are people who bring what I'd consider jank casual decks and advertise them under the same banner I use. That sort of indicates to me that it's a bit of a lazy term to cover far more build paths than it ought to, but there's not really a better way to put this on a scale, so we use what we have.

I don't think either myself or my complainants are wrong, I just think typifying a variety of deck builds is not something that's easy to do, and this particular term means a different things to different people.

To me, it means minimal dependence on hard tutors, less than optimal landbase, and non reliance on combo for victory (by which I mean the deck might have combo, but it might be janky enough to be hard to implement, or not be the prime goal of the deck).

It gets even messier when you're considering specific commanders like the aforementioned Zur, Edgar, et al. They can be built with 75% in mind, but a lot of the time that might scale differently to someone else's 75% Chainer, or Aurelia, or whoever else. Case in point is Narset - I remember building a couple of jank decks with her that still got really stupid really quick, so I just decided if no one else enjoyed playing against her I wasn't interested in playing with her at the helm.

Ultimately I decided a little while ago the term itself means very little to me, and I'll mostly go up against any deck that I come across. Mostly. I just try to pick my most ideal deck to scale to the majority of the table in power level, try to pick something that isn't specifically metagaming, and hope for everyone to take it all with a grain of salt and enjoy the game for what it is.

[xeroxedfool]

Thank you all for your insightful responses. They have been very helpful. It seems the term "75%" is about 3/4ths of the way defined, almost poetically.

[Sinis]

Thank you all for your insightful responses. They have been very helpful. It seems the term "75%" is about 3/4ths of the way defined, almost poetically.

I would not hold you to account if this entire thread was to set this joke up.

+1 on the responses. I like seeing other people's point of view on it, since it is variable (though, to a lesser degree of other contentious terms like 'casual', or 'fun').

[ISBPathfinder]

Yea I think the one thing everyone agrees to is that its the idea of not being optimal. Given the high starting life and the efficiency of combo in this format being optimal is almost always portrayed as combo wins so either running less efficient ones, not running the tutors for consistency, or something to intentionally not be super fast.

I agree that the idea of 75% not being completely defined. I am not really sure we can define it given how ambiguous of definitions we have been using. Its possible that if someone like sheldon tried to define it that a harder term / concept would form for it but I think its a bit of an ambiguous concept usually focusing on being at least a step or two removed from CEDH.

[xeroxedfool]

Thank you all for your insightful responses. They have been very helpful. It seems the term "75%" is about 3/4ths of the way defined, almost poetically.

I would not hold you to account if this entire thread was to set this joke up.

+1 on the responses. I like seeing other people's point of view on it, since it is variable (though, to a lesser degree of other contentious terms like 'casual', or 'fun').

Lol. I wish. I thought of that this morning.

[onering]

What about building an optimized deck that does something frivolous? For example, a deck that is really consistent, but it plays expensive artifacts to enable the playing of even more expensive creatures and spells. That's sort of the way that I approach 75% personally. Optimize a mediocre deck and run with it.

Id say that counts. Some strategies and commanders, when kept on theme, have a low enough ceiling that their 100 percent is on par with the 75 percent versions of better decks. Often though, these commanders and themes are themselves 75 percent versions of other decks. It's when you get into the weeds and start building optimized versions of horror tribal that you really hit this criteria.

[insomnia]

sorry too necro the thread

i just combo won a game on xmage that i titled as 75% that caused extreme salt from one player on turn 15 or so

complete with expletives he said i was cEDH but i dont see it as whilst the Memnarch list (see footer) is highly tuned it is including stuff like Darksteel Forge and alot of the 3cmc counters and its alt wincon costs 10 mana to execute

the win was with dramatic cepter via transmute artifact/merchant scroll which for sure is included in many cEDH decks so i cannot fully disagree with his salt but i seem to be stuck in a gray area between 75% and 100% power, compared to @benjameenbear 's list maybe it is 90% or 85%, no idea

i did execute the combo and then conceed so they could continue playing, which normally wouldnt generate salt but well no, whichever

upshot is i feel this label is useless, it means different things to too many different people and thus i will in future label games as "degenerate combos encouraged" if i want to play Memnarch without needing to see the dramatic crying infinite hate combo enacted

[lyonhaert]

sorry too necro the thread

i just combo won a game on xmage that i titled as 75% that caused extreme salt from one player on turn 15 or so

complete with expletives he said i was cEDH but i dont see it as whilst the Memnarch list (see footer) is highly tuned it is including stuff like Darksteel Forge and alot of the 3cmc counters and its alt wincon costs 10 mana to execute

the win was with dramatic cepter via transmute artifact/merchant scroll which for sure is included in many cEDH decks so i cannot fully disagree with his salt but i seem to be stuck in a gray area between 75% and 100% power, compared to benjameenbear 's list maybe it is 90% or 85%, no idea

i did execute the combo and then conceed so they could continue playing, which normally wouldnt generate salt but well no, whichever

upshot is i feel this label is useless, it means different things to too many different people and thus i will in future label games as "degenerate combos encouraged" if i want to play Memnarch without needing to see the dramatic crying infinite hate combo enacted

I suppose this is where a pre-game conversation about what win conditions were acceptable would be handy. Maybe they were expecting battlecruiser with no combos. It does look like an optimized list, even if it's not fully optimized. And you have to keep in mind that some people often start getting salty long before they explode and let it actually be known. They probably didn't suddenly get salty on turn 15.

But also it was turn 15 and the game was good to end.

The 75% thing is to me more of a guideline relative to one's meta, which isn't really going to be a thing on xmage or cockatrice for the most part if you're doing games with random folks. If you're in a medium-powered meta where battlecruiser is the norm, a 75% deck from that meta is going to look entirely different than a 75% deck from a high-powered meta where tutors and combos and counters are the norm.