Here’s the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we’ll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.
Ok… I’m listening 🤔
In this system, your deck would be defined by its highest-bracket card or cards.
This now becomes an eternal battle over which cards are in Tier 3 and which cards are in Tier 4 imo.
For example, if Ancient Tomb is a bracket-four card, your deck would generally be considered a four. But if it’s part of a Tomb-themed deck, the conversation may be “My deck is a four with Ancient Tomb but a two without it. Is that okay with everyone?”
This seems kinda gnarly to me. Perhaps it can work though by farming this decision out to every single play group.
My plan back in the day was to use a % of synergy to rank decks with a hypothetical perfect mana base (all land enters untapped and tap for half your deck colors) being worth 20% and the remaining 80% being calculated by the amount of your deck that contribute to your win condition and the efficiency of those spells.
This won’t necessarily describe “power” in the sense we use now as much as the efficiency of success, cheaper spells, functional duplicates, and perfect mana well inherently be more likely to do what they do than the same deck with pet cards and filler.
I get the idea, but I don’t see how that works effectively in practice. There are a lot of cards that are not good on their own, and only good in the context of a combo. Does having one of those cards in your deck make it better? No, it probably makes it worse. You need the entire combo for one of those cards to matter.
It works for those 1 off value piece cards like Dockside, Tomb, Sol Ring, etc. But multi card combos is where I think it will fail(or at least over score a deck that doesn’t include a full combo).
@luxyr42@mike Obviously we haven’t seen this enacted yet, but I wonder if it’ll end up being similar to the Arena Historic Brawl ranking system.
I know Amazonian has run into issues where including a high-power card in a low-power deck bumps her up to a high-power tier despite playing a pile of durdle cards.
I guess that’s what the conversation is for.
But also, there’s never been a good way to rank commander deck power so *shrug* can’t be worse than what we already have
Yeah I completely agree. There is so much context with all the cards that I don’t know how they do this. It’s really just four different ban lists they’re now managing. And that I think sucks so much fun out of the decks that it almost becomes what’s the point even.
Ok… I’m listening 🤔
This now becomes an eternal battle over which cards are in Tier 3 and which cards are in Tier 4 imo.
This seems kinda gnarly to me. Perhaps it can work though by farming this decision out to every single play group.
My plan back in the day was to use a % of synergy to rank decks with a hypothetical perfect mana base (all land enters untapped and tap for half your deck colors) being worth 20% and the remaining 80% being calculated by the amount of your deck that contribute to your win condition and the efficiency of those spells.
This won’t necessarily describe “power” in the sense we use now as much as the efficiency of success, cheaper spells, functional duplicates, and perfect mana well inherently be more likely to do what they do than the same deck with pet cards and filler.
I get the idea, but I don’t see how that works effectively in practice. There are a lot of cards that are not good on their own, and only good in the context of a combo. Does having one of those cards in your deck make it better? No, it probably makes it worse. You need the entire combo for one of those cards to matter.
It works for those 1 off value piece cards like Dockside, Tomb, Sol Ring, etc. But multi card combos is where I think it will fail(or at least over score a deck that doesn’t include a full combo).
@luxyr42 @mike Obviously we haven’t seen this enacted yet, but I wonder if it’ll end up being similar to the Arena Historic Brawl ranking system.
I know Amazonian has run into issues where including a high-power card in a low-power deck bumps her up to a high-power tier despite playing a pile of durdle cards.
I guess that’s what the conversation is for.
But also, there’s never been a good way to rank commander deck power so *shrug* can’t be worse than what we already have
Yeah I completely agree. There is so much context with all the cards that I don’t know how they do this. It’s really just four different ban lists they’re now managing. And that I think sucks so much fun out of the decks that it almost becomes what’s the point even.