What factors go into rating your deck?

[Candlemane]

"Casual"
"Competitive"
"A 7"

There is a lot of discussion surrounding how we determine the power level of our decks in order to better facilitate Rule 0. But what actually goes into that decision? By what metrics do you personally use to reach a decision on the power level of your deck?

Some considerations you might have:
How fast does your deck intend to win?
How consistent is your deck?
How important is winning to you when you play?
How well can your deck interact with your opponents, and is it capable of disrupting their potential win?


As a follow up question, what sort of things would be included in your ideal scale in order to find your ideal category and best matchup?

If I had to give only one number to the three decks I have on a permanent basis right now, it would be a 6 for Aminatou, 6 for Omnath, and 4 for Niv-Mizzet Reborn. This is all largely by design rather than lack of available budget or cards. I like to win, but I also like to tell stories, and an epic struggle to me is better than a Mike-and-Trike plaster.

Now, if I had to give them a range of numbers, Aminatou could be 6-7, Omnath 6-7 maybe 8, and Niv 4-5. I'd increase each because Aminatou she CAN combo out turn 4, but it has to be a native draw, though she has some bad tutors and a few backup combos. Omnath can go 0-60 in a turn or two, so it can be quite explosive, though no combos to win right-off (Strong synergies, though), and struggles without being able to deal damage. Niv is a personal challenge where it has all gold cards excluding lands and Chromatic Lantern. It's quite fun (though Boros doesn't contribute much), but besides some synergies so far it's nothing to be afraid of, and lacks any interaction at instant speed besides some charms and a few removal spells.

For me, rating decks has a lot to do with interaction and at what speed / how much does it interact with. If you're just slamming behemoths onto the field and attacking, then I'd rate it lower overall because 1-3 wipes and you're poop (I play in a group with a lot of mass removal, so that informs my opinion here). If you add some recursion and therefor pressure, it goes up a notch or two. Back in the day, my Tariel deck never lost (except that one time where I intentionally walked into a losing battle for a friend), but the games took 2 fudging hours minimum. Back then I'd rate it a solid 7 since it was lands, mana rocks, mass removal, and creatures that did stuff. These days if it was around I'd say it's a solid 5 because of the introduction of new cards to fight that kind of strategy, or mitigate it.

By and large, I've strived away from any competitive deck, with Aminatou being the closest I'm willing to go. Just not how I like to have fun, but I don't hold it against anyone who does. Just don't use it three games in a row please (I recently learned why Brago is competitive the hard way XD)

[Rorseph]

In Legacy and Modern I've commonly referred to this effect as the "ships passing in the night" problem where decks feel like they're operating on axes that do not really intersect.

Thank you for a concise way to describe this phenomenon!

My friend has a Sultai infect/proliferate deck that's an absolute pile, but it wins pretty consistently because poison counters are an avenue of attack that's really hard to defend against. Getting in early with a Blighted Agent or Blight Mamba before people are fully shields up and then you can proliferate away to your hearts content. Just enough counter magic and recursion to make things stick. Brutal! However, on paper it doesn't look like much of anything at all. Good synergy around your deck's theme can really make difference. See also Feather, the Redeemed.

[Gashnaw]

What is "A 7"?

[pokken]

Everyone I have ever talked to agrees that my Ephara deck is either a 6, 7, or 8. So that's maybe a decent starting point, I dunno.

[darrenhabib]

Everyone I have ever talked to agrees that my Ephara deck is either a 6, 7, or 8. So that's maybe a decent starting point, I dunno.

Just thinking about algorithms some more, I think trying to literally rate a deck out of 10 is going to be a bit too much subjectivity.

I think it would be better to categories cards into levels of more like "High powered", "Competitive", "Casual", "Low powered".
That way you are more showing decks in terms of number of card levels, rather than literally trying to assign exact points, which lets face it going to be very subjective, and very hard to maintain from a balance point of view,

Just to give your example of allocating points..

SPOILER

Show

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Cultivate - 1 point
arcane signet - 10 points
windswept heath - 15 points
llanowar elves - 20 points
deathrite shaman - 25 points
birds of paradise - 30 points
chrome mox - 40 points
mox diamond - 50 points
mystical tutor - 60 points
vampiric tutor - 70 points
sol ring - 80 points
mana crypt - 100 points

Even though you don't mean it to be anything truly real, it does show just how hard it would be to allocate actual points, because I could argue about the value of every ones worth from a technical and biased point of view. The more disagreement you have about a systems values, the less impact it will have as a trusted and reliable method.

I think a more maintainable system would be to assign more like a ranking.
Cultivate - Casual
Arcane Signet - Competitive
Windswept Heath - Competitive
Llanowar Elves - Competitive
Deathrite Shaman - Competitive
Birds of Paradise - Competitive
Chrome Mox - High powered
Mox Diamond - High powered
Mystical Tutor - High powered
Vampiric Tutor - High powered
Sol Ring - High powered
Mana Crypt - High powered

Then the same goes for combos, where you might have..
Green Sun's Zenith + Dryad Arbor = Competitive
Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker + Zealous Conscripts = Competitive
Isochron Scepter + Dramatic Reversal = High powered
Flash + Protean Hulk = High powered

I just feel like simplifying the system is going to be overall easier.

Then you can show decks in terms of % of number of High powered versus Competitive versus Casual versus Low powered.
If you do an analysis of cEDH deck which you can check out here => https://cedh-decklist-database.xyz/primary.html
You'll find a ratio of the deck will have over a certain % of High powered cards. Lets just say that its 40% of the overall cards/combos need to be High powered in order to make a cEDH looking deck.

Lets say the stats of your deck look something like this..
High powered 5%
Competitive 50%
Casual 30%
Low powered 15%

You could make a rating out of 10 off of this, but its just better to make the generalization that it lies between Competitive and Casual, tending towards Competitive.

---

Just thinking about the exact scenario of when cards can be Casual or Low powered on their own, but with the right mix of cards then are more like Competitive or maybe even High powered.

Defiant Strike probably by itself is Casual.
But ..
Feather, the Redeemed (as commander) + Defiant Strike = Competitive.
Feather, the Redeemed (as 99) + Defiant Strike = Casual

If Feather, the Redeemed was actually part of the 99, I would personally only rank that combo as Casual, because waiting for Feather to make Defiant Strike better is not exactly Competitive.
So the system still allows for commander rankings for synergies.

I like this system more because it doesn't matter how many combos/synergies get registered by the deck list, they show up as a % of your deck, rather than literally adding up numbers which honestly might not mean anything as you just so happen to make a deck that has 100! (factorial) so even though you assign 1 point (or whatever to each synergy) the numbers add up to some ridiculous amount.
If all the average of those are just Casual however, then you can see that the % of the deck is still just Casual and doesn't have a point rating of a zillion zillion or whatever.

[pokken]

I like this system more because it doesn't matter how many combos/synergies get registered by the deck list, they show up as a % of your deck, rather than literally adding up numbers which honestly might not mean anything as you just so happen to make a deck that has 100! (factorial) so even though you assign 1 point (or whatever to each synergy) the numbers add up to some ridiculous amount.
If all the average of those are just Casual however, then you can see that the % of the deck is still just Casual and doesn't have a point rating of a zillion zillion or whatever.

My intention is to just see what the numbers look like and then try to kinda, curve-fit I think is the right term? So say like:

1. CEDH Sushi Hulk comes out at 1100 points
2. my Ephara deck comes out at 400 points
3. Joe schmoe's precon comes out at 175 points

We can start looking at that and understand either ways in which the point values are wrong or ways in which the scale needs to be fit to reach a "x/10" number.

If the numbers were like that, it would probably tell us that the top end is weighted a bit too high and the middle power decks are rated a bit low -- so we might have a scale where:

>1000 = 10
999 to 600 = 9
599 to 500 = 8
499 to 400 = 7

What leads me to numerical values are that you can describe very fine distinctions and change them over time. No amount of mox diamond being "competitive" illustrates how much weaker it is than mana crypt but 50 vs. 100 tells the story very well.

The difficulty with numbers is that there are cascading assumptions; if I change nature's lore from 1 to 10, for example, it shoves almost every card nearby it up a few points by necessity.

But my expectation is you'll wind up with a list of maybe 400-500 cards that actually have meaningful effects on power, and then 1000-2000 relationships, so that's a very manageable dataset.

If you're interested here's the expanded swag I took at a beginning of point values. And I completely accept that I got a lot of them wrong. I'm going to try to get a working analyzer script going this weekend and see how it looks with just my card values however.

[CrazyPierre]

Good convo going on, love it.
So when I build a deck my primary concerns are:
A)Do I want to win?
B)How much fun should my opponents have? I define "fun" as interactivity, using the combat step, and everyone getting to do stuff.

My self-ratings:
Jasmine Boreal: 0-2 on desire to win, it's theme jank. My opponents boardstate matters a lot for the Paladins and Hand of Justice, though Hand of Justice killed a friend's Bear Cub the other day, I felt shame, but the Hand of Justice swings wide. :-(
Kaseto: 4-5 on desire to win. I will just swing in for Commander Lethal and the deck plays Git Probe, Force of Will, spot removal and draw. But no combos. It's red-zone like Jasmine.
Radha, Heir to Kheld white-border tribal: 0-1 on desire to win, incidental wins happen, hey Manabarbs is a real thing and so is Inferno, party people.
Jor Kadeen: Probably 4-6. It will have a Stoneforge Mystic, Land Tax, Scroll Rack, Swords but again no infinite combos and wants to win in the red zone.
I have had "7"s in Thrun the Last Troll / Sigarda, Host of Herons with Ride the Dilu Horse and Berserk and stuff, and mono-black Oloro Ad Naus but I do not play those anymore as they were not fun for the tables.

[WolfWhoWanders]

I find it pretty hard to rate my decks. Most of my time has been spent playing at the kitchen table, only in the last year or so have I ventured into the wild more often and felt the need for the power level conversation. I find it hard to take seriously. Most people will say their deck is casual and then bust out things like narset into a windfall. Some people say their deck is strong and bust out Prossh and your like "oooh, I see" and it turns out to be jund dragons. Of my decks, I guess I postulate that:
Volrath - clone tribal, could go anywhere from 4 to 7. Probably my best deck to play against new faces you're unsure of
Ilharg - Can be really good, can just fall apart. Maybe 6 or 7?
Dakkon - 7ish. esper landfall with a decent control package and some mld. Don't play this much in the wild to avoid whining about mld.
Kykar - mirroweave jank tribal, maybe a 5 or 6 with some explosive plays
Tolsimir - pre con level
Uro - unsure how to gauge this one, seems like it could go up to 8 or even 9 with some more combo protection. Extremely resilient simic doomsday list. Doesn't go "infinite" but can loop things for days.
Greven - pretty aggressive deck but tends to scare people into focusing me. I think my playstyle of trying to be evenhanded prevents me from winning more with this one but it's real fun to go "Greven smash" 7 maybe 8 if I played it right
Queen Marchesa - another good one for most tables, it's an aikido style deck with a sunforger package but no way to tutor for sunforger.
Phelddagrif - I used to play a list based off dirkgently's primer, prior to that I played it like evil grouphug that wanted to deck the table, now it is bant forced attacks with some pillowfort. Kind of goofy, maybe a 6 because it is surprisingly consistent and I've been playing pheldy for years
Tuvasa - enchantment list I built for my girlfriend, honestly a very strong deck but made with a new player in mind. Played at 6, probably a 7.5 if I played it
Heliod - non combo soul sister deck, fairly predictably mono white. Only played a couple times, maybe a 6
Rankle - kind of a mean deck premise but not that hard to play around. Maybe a 6 that can be a real asshole
Skeleton ship - I think super friends are kind of busted in more casual metas and not that viable in stronger ones (at least this one I think) Loaded with oppressive cards though, maybe a 7

Having read through this post writing it, I have to wonder if I have some deck builders bias. And then I wonder how many others over/underestimate their decks. And after that I wonder how much value that really gives to having this conversation prior to games is. It's such a subjective topic

[BaronCappuccino]

Where do people think your average pub-stomp Kaalia deck would fall in the 1-10 ratings? I ask because it's the closest parallel to the Rakdos Thrumming-Apostles deck I've got currently, after lots of tweaks. While it's a bit more all in on a single combo payoff than Kaalia, both fairly religiously seal the deal around turn 4 or 5, and both lose to commander players with IQs above room temperature.

[pokken]

Where do people think your average pub-stomp Kaalia deck would fall in the 1-10 ratings? I ask because it's the closest parallel to the Rakdos Thrumming-Apostles deck I've got currently, after lots of tweaks. While it's a bit more all in on a single combo payoff than Kaalia, both fairly religiously seal the deal around turn 4 or 5, and both lose to commander players with IQs above room temperature.

7ish. You shouldn't play those types of decks when you don't expect people to run removal, and people usually start running meaningful amounts of removal and tapping out less in the 6-8 range.

I don't really understand the appeal of those kinds of decks in general though tbh, Like...you either get to do nothing or you win, there's not a lot of medium?:P

[BaronCappuccino]

Where do people think your average pub-stomp Kaalia deck would fall in the 1-10 ratings? I ask because it's the closest parallel to the Rakdos Thrumming-Apostles deck I've got currently, after lots of tweaks. While it's a bit more all in on a single combo payoff than Kaalia, both fairly religiously seal the deal around turn 4 or 5, and both lose to commander players with IQs above room temperature.

7ish. You shouldn't play those types of decks when you don't expect people to run removal, and people usually start running meaningful amounts of removal and tapping out less in the 6-8 range.

I don't really understand the appeal of those kinds of decks in general though tbh, Like...you either get to do nothing or you win, there's not a lot of medium?:P

You aren't wrong - if such a deck has a purpose, it's as a gatekeeper. I think lots of people go through a similar evolution, where you start in a good place, all naïve and just having fun playing with timmy cards, and you think you and your friends are about as powered as Commander gets, and then there's a gatekeeper deck -- for me it was a Jhoira -- that makes you realize you're really not playing the same game, and the average CMC of your next deck is 2/3 of what you were playing, and the dollar value 3x, and your commander story begins for real. Eventually, you realize the deck that warped your mind wasn't even all that great.

[UnNamed1]

Power level is an interesting question. I personally look at lines to win the game and the consistency of the deck. Finally I look at how well the deck can play when behind.

For example, I'll try to give an accurate representation of my current decks below:

Thrasios/Tymna: Solid 9. Runs multiple infinite/combos that mean I can win the game should I choose to. Has lots of interaction, can easily sit at a table of 7 power decks as the "archenemy" and survive without too much trouble. Has won as early as turn 2, consistently at turn 3. Has a nice price tag to reach this point. Average CMC is roughly 1.8.

Thassa, Deep Dwelling: I would say a 6. Has 2 win cons that have a couple lines in order to achieve them. Lots of interaction but at a higher mana cost than TnT. Can very easily get out of control in a single turn, flies under the radar at most tables. Average CMC is closer to 3 but ramps pretty hard. Consistently fun to play and wins over 40% of the time. My cheapest deck to date.

Muldrotha: Probably that "7" everyone talks about. Consistently has a massive board presence, doesn't need Muldrotha to win. Very easy to set opponents behind or get into loops of destroying everything the opponents play. Basically a beater deck, with a destruction/milling sub theme. Denies resources across the board but weak to counterspells/removal, but even then, you're playing Muldrotha. Doesn't have a "turn X I win" to it, but is a grindy mid-range deck that is resilient.

Vaevictis Asmadi the Dire: I would say a 4, but it is my newest and least played deck. Can be mana screwed by not having the draw power my other decks have, you are at the mercy of top decking. It's dragon tribal. Average CMC is roughly 4/5 with a total count of 20 some 4+ CMC dragons. Realistically built to be a combat matters deck with ETB dragons. Almost no interaction, pretty much just permanents being put on the battlefield. No tutors, no hard ramp outside of mana dorks. Weak to removal/board wipes as there is no recursion in the deck either.

Alela: Might be off on this one but I would say 4 power. It's a voltron deck that makes a horde of faeries. Very weak to removal, low creature count outside of some tribal/searching creatures. Once you have removed Alela 3+ times I am probably out of the game. Can end the game in a turn being Voltron, but cannot kill the table. Low average CMC but not enough ramp. Probably going to rebuild soon, don't enjoy the voltron playstyle.

Urza, Lord High Artificer: Currently being built. I expect it to be around a power level of 7/8. I am trying to not make it oppressive and to focus on combat. However, I have already seen lines of infinite mana in deck, but I did not include anything to make use of the infinite. Will have interaction and consistent ramp. Average CMC is about 2/3 (not finished yet, might add in some high cost artifact creatures). The goal of this deck to swarm with artifacts and use indestructible Karnstructs to beat down the enemies. Might drop the power to a 6/7 as I am trying to not abuse the strength of the commander, and I have no Stax pieces in the deck.

Overall, I try to read the table. I might bring my Thrasios and Tymna deck to a table to 6/7's but not try to combo out soon, but rather try to have a more natural progression. not tutor for win-cons, not try to win on turn 3. I know this is looked down on by some people that "oh you had your win but didn't take is" but I enjoy just playing the game. I will protect myself but let the rest of the table do their thing. Muldrotha has been handed over to my girlfriend. She loves the destruction but I am trying to teach her more threat assessment, sometimes she guns for me simply because I have mana crypt on the board. Thassa is probably my most fun deck for casual games. Has a ton of ETB interactions and isn't as "controlling" as my TnT. Vaevictus needs more tweaking but should end up being a fun casual deck. Urza will be interesting. I know a lot of people have already said if I play Urza I will be hated of the table. I am trying to talk to them and make it so the deck is not oppressive. Really the reason I want to play him is artifacts are my favorite "tribe". We will see though, I try to play to the table I sit at.

[Gwathnar]

I usually look at stuff like the mana base (duals, shocks, fetches) first but I cannot use that alone as I own all the noted cards so I usually do run them even in my tuned down decks.

Next step would be the mana rocks, if I'm building something lower power then I won't be playing all the zero drop rocks. I'll be running signets, talismans and the like. Again just because I have a Mana Crypt doesn't mean the deck is bonkers powerful.

Then it's tutors. Honestly, imo, the best way to power up or down a deck is the tutors. If you are packing all the tutors in your deck then you can likely assemble a win quicker.

Mana curve also plays a big role though I do try to keep my decks under 4CMC.

[BaronCappuccino]

CMC, price and the average turn it goldfishes a win have always been the metrics I use to get a ballpark, but I've found them unreliable for the most part. My Baral Polymorph deck hit high marks in all three, but was something of a predictable one trick pony. One year, I spent two grand on every ancient black expensive card ever, with no results to show for it. I think the opinions of others and results in real games are the only way to get an accurate idea.

[UnNamed1]

CMC, price and the average turn it goldfishes a win have always been the metrics I use to get a ballpark, but I've found them unreliable for the most part. My Baral Polymorph deck hit high marks in all three, but was something of a predictable one trick pony. One year, I spent two grand on every ancient black expensive card ever, with no results to show for it. I think the opinions of others and results in real games are the only way to get an accurate idea.

Honestly, I feel like my expensive deck is the same way. I have put a lot of money into it, I love playing it, it's reliable, and puts me in an interesting spot at most table's. Much of the lgs I go to have turned against TnT as commanders as I know at one point we had 4 people playing with them as commanders. I still have the deck together as it is a legitimate cEDH deck, but I have drifted from playing them as much and branching out to my other decks. As a result these decks are getting stronger just by natural progression, I feel like I am never done editing decks....