A Commander League for Everyone.

[Chairforce]

I like the idea, but it seems borderline impossible to find a workable standard to quantify a decklist's powerlevel.

The Volcanic Island & Torpor Orb in an optimized Narset, Enlightened Master shell are decidedly not the same as the Volcanic Island & Torpor Orb run by a janky Lord of Tresserhorn beatdown list.

Any assessment would need to go beyond "It does/n't contain X card, ergo it belongs into Y rank", and I don't really see a way of doing that without also prompting discussions of the "hey, why is that guy allowed to run X card on this table but I'm not?"-kind.

Plus, EDH has some of he biggest potential for variance from one game to the next - you can play 3 games with the same deck without ever drawing the same card twice. Which prompts the issue of consistency vs. explosivity - like how do you tier a deck with two cards that can combo as early as turn 2, but has no tutors to set it up? Is that rank X or rank Y? And how many tutors am I allowed to add before I get ranked up?

[Shredwick]

So since the precons are regarded as bottom tier (even though you could build worse decks, and I've beaten tuned, non-precon decks with the Saheeli precon with only a couple non-game-changing mods), just base the people's decks based off of win percentages against them.  over 50% earns a D or C grade.  A deck that can beat that deck over 50% of the time earns the next higher grade, and so on and so forth.  Or am I over-simplifying this?

[robort]

First scenario is what happens to the player who buys a pre-con deck and there isn't anybody at the lower level?
That could be the only deck they own.

What happens if I am in a Tier but a week comes up where there are a few people absent in that same tier? I am not gaining any points in the league because of it. I am in say D league but nobody shows up in D league that week but I am not allowed to play against 3 others in Tier C.
The point system has to be consistant in all Tiers to make it completely viable.

Seems to me that all the tiers are different leagues of their own.

Prize support: Here is what we did as a suggestion for you. Everyone paid $5.00 per person for the entire season of the league. We took the money and gave it to our LGS and turned it into store credit. I think we had 12 of us playing so that was $60 in store credit. 1st place received $35 in store credit, 2nd received 15 in store credit and 3rd got 10 in store credit.

The whole thing about having a league is having everyone on the same level. Having different tiers won't be the same level.

[Aetherium Slinky]

There exists a solution but it involves a lot of games: place all decks against each other in random pairs and crunch the numbers to figure out the Power Quotient of each deck. Then adjust boundaries to fixed area intervals on the bell curve and boom you have your tiers. Then play again.

My main point is that it's possible to rank the decks from worst to best based on win percentages against other decks. Is there a way to abuse this knowledge?

[Morganator 2.0]

I like the idea, but it seems borderline impossible to find a workable standard to quantify a decklist's powerlevel.

Nope, it's been done time and time again. There are tier lists quantifying the best commanders and a decklist database of all the best decks. When you've gone up against the strongest decks out there, you get a very good sense of what makes a good deck. The most important qualities are consistency, speed, and resilience; but that's a whole discussion of its own.

Tier List: https://deckstats.net/decks/86132/1184089-cedh-tier-list/en
Database: https://cedh-decklist-database.xyz

MustaKotka brings up some very good points with skill level. It's especially true of some competitive decks that are hard to pilot.

I can't see a solution in any case. If someone starts winning more often, how am I supposed to know if it's due to them upgrading the deck versus their skill with the deck increasing? I could alternatively just say decks can't change ranks, but then there will be cases where a deck turned out to be stronger than expected (this could very easily happen when a new commander gets released). I won't want that deck to overpower the decks in it's rank. But is the deck overpowering or just the player?

At this point, I need empirical data. I have to make this league and then see what happens.