Commander Powertable

[Aetherium Slinky]

Other than that, your examples for the given categories should help to evaluate. Just note: a mono color deck may use just basics and have the most efficient manabase possible. That should be considered in the examples.

Yeah, I didn't take that into account... Maybe the scale is relevant to gameplay, not the actual cards themselves.

0 - can produce mana
1 - can produce relevant colours one turn behind the curve
2 - can produce relevant colours one turn behind the curve and consistently
3 - can produce multiples of relevant colours immediately
4 - can produce multiples of relevant colours immediately and consistently
5 - can produce multiples of relevant colours immediately, consistently and has utility lands or above curve land ramp (e.g. Coffers, Urborg, City of Traitors, Ancient Tomb)

Better? A monocolour deck with just basics will get a 4. A shock-fetch-ABUR-dual rainbow monstrosity will also get a 4.

Perhaps that's the key: we can quantify the differences if we talk about how quickly or effectively something can be achieved and if any of the categories contribute to that. A sort of "relative actions per round", if you will. That doesn't really care whether you're an infinite combo deck (if you discount the turn you win) or a heavy tax player (you can still make big effects per round compared to your opponents if they can't play anything).

And ok, 0-5 it is (scoring out of 6), I'm not going to argue about that.

[Aetherium Slinky]

Just adding weight to a few key categories could be a nice middle ground between accurate representation and speed.

Again, weights are essentially just an artificial way to expand a category. A scale of 0-5 with a weight of 2 is just 0-11. You should be able to quantify the difference between a 7 and an 8, otherwise weights don't make any sense. This is why I actually proposed cutting some categories short. Mana base is a good one: maybe six categories is a bit too much, adding a .5 weight to it would give us three categories to work with.

See this:
0 - Produces relevant colours one turn behind the curve
1 - Produces relevant colours immediately
2 - Produces relevant colours ahead of curve.

Clean and simple, adds a lower modifier/weight to the whole thing (as in don't average averages, just tally up all points and divide by maximum score).

[CleanBelwas]

Just adding weight to a few key categories could be a nice middle ground between accurate representation and speed.

Again, weights are essentially just an artificial way to expand a category. A scale of 0-5 with a weight of 2 is just 0-11. You should be able to quantify the difference between a 7 and an 8, otherwise weights don't make any sense. This is why I actually proposed cutting some categories short. Mana base is a good one: maybe six categories is a bit too much, adding a .5 weight to it would give us three categories to work with.

See this:
0 - Produces relevant colours one turn behind the curve
1 - Produces relevant colours immediately
2 - Produces relevant colours ahead of curve.

Clean and simple, adds a lower modifier/weight to the whole thing (as in don't average averages, just tally up all points and divide by maximum score).

I see what you're saying, but the important part about weight is that it provides context. Different decks will add their weight to different categories depending on what they want to achieve, and weight allows them to do this without having to come up with the subtle variations between the examples given. It can be universal in it's application and can be calculated with ease, meaning you don't have to quantify the difference between a 7 and an 8.

I think it would depend on what scoring system you went with. Weights are good when you take an average. If your preferred method is calculating a score derived from a total score, then they aren't.

If you want to say "I have a 3.5 star deck" then weighting is fine.
If you want to say "My deck scores 42 out of 50" then weighting is less useful, like you say, you just reduce the number of potential score options available for the less important or more universal categories to the deck.

[CleanBelwas]

And ok, 0-5 it is (scoring out of 6), I'm not going to argue about that.

The point I made and dexflux agreed with was that scoring should be 1-6, not 0-5. It's not just about scoring out of 6, but making sure that those scores are reflective.

Realistically, no one using this is likely to have a deck that scores a 0 in a category, so really it's a 1-5 system as it stands.

Changing that to be a 1-6 system means that it is harder to sit on the fence about your deck. You have to think "Is my deck a bit better at this than normal, or a bit worse".

People have a tendency to sit on 3 out of 5 because it's easy, especially if they are not really sure, but given that the aim of this is to encourage people to come up with accurate summaries of their deck's power level, not allowing fence sitting should hopefully go some way towards that.

[Judaspriester]

Just adding weight to a few key categories could be a nice middle ground between accurate representation and speed.

Again, weights are essentially just an artificial way to expand a category. A scale of 0-5 with a weight of 2 is just 0-11. You should be able to quantify the difference between a 7 and an 8, otherwise weights don't make any sense.

While I understand your comment on weights, I don't exactly agree with you here. Weighting the whole thing like CleanBelwas initially mentioned, would blow things off. but without a weight things start to group in the middle. besides that, since we only have natrual numbers for the categories and the weight is also natural, it stays in the same number of categories. they just change from 0,1,2,3,4,5 to 0,2,4,6,8,10.

This is why I actually proposed cutting some categories short. Mana base is a good one: maybe six categories is a bit too much, adding a .5 weight to it would give us three categories to work with.

See this:
0 - Produces relevant colours one turn behind the curve
1 - Produces relevant colours immediately
2 - Produces relevant colours ahead of curve.

Clean and simple, adds a lower modifier/weight to the whole thing (as in don't average averages, just tally up all points and divide by maximum score).


About your suggestion about lands, well, I don't think it would work that good. I may be wrong, but i think between a) shocks,  b) shocks + fetches and c) shocks + fetches + duals are big differences in consistence, especially with 3+ colors. in your 3 category model I'm not sure if I shall put all 3 cases in 1, or a) in 1 and b) & c) in 2. In both cases it feels wrong for me.

The manabase is a difficult topic, because it's nearly irellevant for mono (like deflux already pointed out) and becomes more and more important with each additional color.


In general, I think we should maybe slow down a little. There will always be corner cases that break this powertable, even if we spend a whole year discussing. for me it should be primally an indicator for the deck power besides the feelings of the player(s).

If you want to say "I have a 3.5 star deck" then weighting is fine.
If you want to say "My deck scores 42 out of 50" then weighting is less useful, like you say, you just reduce the number of potential score options available for the less important or more universal categories to the deck.

CleanBelwars wrote this while I was typing, and I think he's on the right track here. At least for me this table goes towards "I have a 3.5 star deck".

[Morganator 2.0]

I wasn't kidding when I said that I need to find a better way of averaging the ranks. You're going to see that the middle score (2.5 in our case) will have higher variance than the extremes (0 and 5). Fortunately...

Wait... Shoot...

Do you know what my favorite thing about Deckstats is? The stats.

Almost forgot to say that.

There are several different ways of determining ranks. All kinds, because, unfortunately, no one has really figured out the best way to rank things for all situations, or even most situations. It's not like a chi-squared test or ANOVA, which are based on measured data. Rank tests are often based on opinion. There is no way to determine which sugar is "tastiest" because what tastes good to you is based on opinion. Some people like glucose most, some like fructose, and some weirdos might like chitin best. So while you can gather people's opinions, there is no exact measure.

One of the other issues with rank tests (besides being based largely on opinion) is that not all categories have the same strength. For this one that we just did, we valued having a perfect land-base with ABUR duals and fetches just as good as having a super-consistent combo. Which is of course not the case. But how much more important is the combo? If we add more weight to it, how much more do we add? This will likely end up being based on an arbitrary value.

I'm going to do some thinking tonight, and looking at different rank tests. There's got to be a good one for what we want here.

[Aetherium Slinky]

Considering mana base is meant to help a combo perhaps it would be wise to only look at the combos and their redundancy as criteria. Thus we imply that a good mana base (good protection, tutors etc) will add to the consistency, which is probably what we're sort-of measuring here. Consistency and effectiveness.

[Soren841]

Combo consistency shouldn't be a category. It's a product of the entire process. You should look at things like how many cards is your combo,  how expensive are they, how dead are they outside of the combo, do you have an easy way to assemble the combo (Flash Hulk) or do you have to manually get all your combo pieces.

[Green Magic]

Good guide for deck building. My style doesn't score well, as I'm at almost exactly 2.0 for all my decks, but I win 35-45% of my games. I think it applies more for CEDH and decks hoping for turn 3-4 wins. One thing that I think it's missing is card draw. Command Zone always talks about the two things every deck needs is card draw and mana ramp.

[CleanBelwas]

Good guide for deck building. My style doesn't score well, as I'm at almost exactly 2.0 for all my decks, but I win 35-45% of my games. I think it applies more for CEDH and decks hoping for turn 3-4 wins. One thing that I think it's missing is card draw. Command Zone always talks about the two things every deck needs is card draw and mana ramp.

I was thinking about this too. Maybe there is an argument that tutors should be changed to card advantage. Like you say, it's common thing every deck wants, but also there are some decks that don't care as much about specific cards. My Jhoira deck I used in a previous example doesn't really care a about any one card in particular, so while I run trophy and trinket mage and the like, tutoring isn't a huge part of what makes it win, it's just the raw card advantage.

Could be an idea for a potential change.

[Judaspriester]

Good guide for deck building. My style doesn't score well, as I'm at almost exactly 2.0 for all my decks, but I win 35-45% of my games. I think it applies more for CEDH and decks hoping for turn 3-4 wins. One thing that I think it's missing is card draw. Command Zone always talks about the two things every deck needs is card draw and mana ramp.

I was thinking about this too. Maybe there is an argument that tutors should be changed to card advantage. Like you say, it's common thing every deck wants, but also there are some decks that don't care as much about specific cards. My Jhoira deck I used in a previous example doesn't really care a about any one card in particular, so while I run trophy and trinket mage and the like, tutoring isn't a huge part of what makes it win, it's just the raw card advantage.

Could be an idea for a potential change.

Hmm.. one option would be change tutors to card advantage, or (my personal preference, at least right now) sharpen the definition of utility, so that it's clear that card draw also counts in this section.

[CleanBelwas]

Good guide for deck building. My style doesn't score well, as I'm at almost exactly 2.0 for all my decks, but I win 35-45% of my games. I think it applies more for CEDH and decks hoping for turn 3-4 wins. One thing that I think it's missing is card draw. Command Zone always talks about the two things every deck needs is card draw and mana ramp.

I was thinking about this too. Maybe there is an argument that tutors should be changed to card advantage. Like you say, it's common thing every deck wants, but also there are some decks that don't care as much about specific cards. My Jhoira deck I used in a previous example doesn't really care a about any one card in particular, so while I run trophy and trinket mage and the like, tutoring isn't a huge part of what makes it win, it's just the raw card advantage.

Could be an idea for a potential change.

Hmm.. one option would be change tutors to card advantage, or (my personal preference, at least right now) sharpen the definition of utility, so that it's clear that card draw also counts in this section.

Yea that sounds like a decent option too. It's you're brain child too so by all means go with your preference.

On a similar subject, how do we feel about Consistency as a category instead of Tutors? Tutors are basically there to provide consistency, but not every deck cares about specific cards (I keep coming back to Jhoira) and therefore run many tutors, but they can still be consistent.

The caveat to that, of course, is that consistency is quite a vague and subjective term anyway, whereas tutors are much easier to define and measure, which is more inkeeping with what we're trying to achieve here.

What are your thoughts?

[dexflux]

Good guide for deck building. My style doesn't score well, as I'm at almost exactly 2.0 for all my decks, but I win 35-45% of my games. I think it applies more for CEDH and decks hoping for turn 3-4 wins. One thing that I think it's missing is card draw. Command Zone always talks about the two things every deck needs is card draw and mana ramp.

I was thinking about this too. Maybe there is an argument that tutors should be changed to card advantage. Like you say, it's common thing every deck wants, but also there are some decks that don't care as much about specific cards. My Jhoira deck I used in a previous example doesn't really care a about any one card in particular, so while I run trophy and trinket mage and the like, tutoring isn't a huge part of what makes it win, it's just the raw card advantage.

Could be an idea for a potential change.

Hmm.. one option would be change tutors to card advantage, or (my personal preference, at least right now) sharpen the definition of utility, so that it's clear that card draw also counts in this section.

Yea that sounds like a decent option too. It's you're brain child too so by all means go with your preference.

On a similar subject, how do we feel about Consistency as a category instead of Tutors? Tutors are basically there to provide consistency, but not every deck cares about specific cards (I keep coming back to Jhoira) and therefore run many tutors, but they can still be consistent.

The caveat to that, of course, is that consistency is quite a vague and subjective term anyway, whereas tutors are much easier to define and measure, which is more inkeeping with what we're trying to achieve here.

What are your thoughts?

Depends on how you define consistency. It's of course a much broader term, but you can tell if a deck is consistent or not (as per probability of card draw, tutors, etc.). A problem would be that consistency as a concept bleeds into the rating of manabase, since a good manabase helps being consistent. Therefore, I would like to keep that separated. But: you could argue for measuring raw draw power somehow - how many cards you can draw at which efficiency is usually a great indicator of deck strength (if the drawn cards are not total jank, but we're assuming that decks are built to win with this evaluation method). 

[Judaspriester]

Well, I would like to get rid of this wague categories and use stuff that's kinda clear defined in stead. Tutors is a clear defined subject, you can count them and then think about the rating, but usually end up in a range like 3 or 4 stars.

consistency would be interesting, since it tells alot about the deck quality. but the problem is how do you want to measure this? For some archetypes like combo or storm, it can be kinda easy, since you aim to finish off at turn X and you're usually able to say how likely this will happen. But if you play voltron, it's not that easy to say you've finished the table at turn x. Okay, this would result in a lower value since it's more inconsistent, but unless you've got a clear and somewhat consistent gameplan it gets harder and harder to measure this.

[Aetherium Slinky]

The numeric values describe consistency. You say it's hard to measure: this is exactly what we're doing through these criteria. Seriously, what do you think the number at the bottom should describe? "Power level" is too vague; does it measure consistency, raw combo speed, lock potential or what.

I say that it should measure consistency and effectiveness. These two combined usually means "tendency to win". That was my proposal. Feel free to disagree.

Consistency is a percentage of games where you were able to execute your strategy successfully.
Effectiveness or efficiency is [your progress towards win]/[their progress towards win]. As long as it's above 1 you're winning. You could get all fancy with differentials if you want, I don't care at the moment.

You can't really put a numerical value on something if you don't even know what you're trying to measure! Consistency is a sum of its parts: you need good mana base, draw, tutors, protection and a solid winning strategy, possibly redundant. Efficiency is the same: good ramp, low CMC and fewer moving parts. All in all: use things that you can count or observe directly and use them to establish consistency and efficiency and any other qualities that are hard to measure subjectively.