We Analyzed 17,000 Commander Decks – Here’s What We Found
March 27, 2025
ScryCheck has now run analysis on 17,603 Commander decks. That’s a lot of decklists, a lot of vectors, and a lot of data that says genuinely interesting things about how people actually build for the format. Here’s what stands out.
The average Commander deck is a 5.7
Across all 17,603 analyzed decks, the mean power level is 5.67. That puts the average right at the boundary of what ScryCheck calls “focused casual” — a deck with a clear game plan and intentional card choices, playing at a moderate pace. Not a precon, not optimized, but somewhere in the middle.
The distribution has some interesting shape to it. Power levels 4, 5, and 6 each hold between 17-22% of all decks, forming the bulk of the community. Brackets 3 and below cover roughly 70% of the data. The high end (power 8+) represents about 18% of analyzed decks — a meaningful slice, but not the majority.
Power level distribution across all 17,603 analyzed decks.
Bracket 3 is where most decks live
The bracket breakdown confirms something most regular players probably feel anecdotally: Bracket 3 is the largest group by a lot. 40% of analyzed decks land in Bracket 3, more than Brackets 1 and 2 combined.
What’s striking is that Bracket 4 — which many players think of as the high-power tier — contains nearly 29% of decks. But the number that really tells the story is how wide the power range is within each bracket.
The bracket label hides a massive power swing
This is the finding that surprised us most. Within each bracket, the range of actual power levels is far wider than the bracket label implies. Bracket 1 and 2 are reasonably tight. Bracket 3 and 4 are not.
Casual
avg 2.3
Upgraded
avg 3.82
Enhanced
avg 5.15
High Power
avg 7.01
cEDH
avg 9.64
Bars show the 10th–90th percentile power level range within each bracket. Vertical line marks the average. Excludes the top and bottom 10% of outliers in each bracket.
Bracket 2 is the tightest of all five — just 1.2 points from the 10th to the 90th percentile. That bracket is well-defined. Bracket 4 is the widest at 2.6 points, and the ranges for B3 and B4 actually overlap: a power-6 deck can land in either, depending on which Game Changers it runs.
The Bracket 4 spread is where it gets uncomfortable. The typical B4 deck (middle 80%) falls somewhere between power 5.7 and 8.3, average at 7.01. That gap — 5.7 to 8.3 — is the difference between a focused casual deck and a near-cEDH build. Both are Bracket 4.
This is the core problem with using brackets as your only pregame signal. As we showed with real decks, The Ur-Dragon (power 5.1) and a Niv-Mizzet combo deck (power 8.5) are both Bracket 4. The bracket label alone doesn’t distinguish them. The power level does.
Half of Bracket 3 decks have at least one combo
The overall combo rate across all analyzed decks is 56%. But that number gets a lot more interesting when you break it down by bracket.
Methodology note: a “combo line” means a card interaction that produces deterministic or effectively game-winning advantage when assembled (for example, infinite mana, damage, cards, turns, or a lock that closes the game). This includes both intentional package combos and incidental overlap between otherwise fair cards. It does not mean a deck is dedicated combo, and it does not model pilot skill, mulligan decisions, or table politics.
| Bracket | Decks with a combo | Avg combo lines |
|---|---|---|
| B1 — Casual | 5.8% | 0.1 |
| B2 — Upgraded | 17.2% | 0.4 |
| B3 — Enhanced | 50% | 1.7 |
| B4 — High Power | 85.4% | 5.3 |
| B5 — cEDH | 98.7% | 11.3 |
Bracket 1 is nearly combo-free at 5.8% — basically just incidental overlap. Bracket 2 is low at 17%. Then Bracket 3 hits the inflection point: exactly half of Bracket 3 decks have at least one detected combo line, averaging 1.7 lines each.
The jump to Bracket 4 is sharp. 85% of Bracket 4 decks have combos, with an average of 5.3 lines per deck. By Bracket 5, it’s essentially universal — 98.7%, averaging 11 lines.
The Bracket 3 number is the one worth sitting with. Players who specifically seek out “non-combo tables” and agree on Bracket 3 might be surprised to find a coin-flip chance that any given deck at the table has combo potential. Most of these aren’t dedicated combo decks — they’re decks where two or three cards happen to go infinite together, even in a build that isn’t trying to assemble them. But they’re there.
Token Strategy is in nearly 7 out of 10 decks
This one surprised us. Token Strategy is the most commonly detected theme across all analyzed decks, appearing in 12,080 of 17,603 decks — 69%. At first pass, that seems implausibly high. But it makes sense when you remember how broad the category is. Treasure tokens, food tokens, clue tokens, blood tokens. Decks that make Servo tokens as a byproduct of an artifact strategy. Decks where the commander incidentally creates tokens to protect itself.
The top detected themes tell an interesting story about how Commander players actually build:
Decks can have multiple themes. Percentages are out of 17,603 total decks.
Blink/Flicker and Stompy both sitting at 50% reflects how broadly those strategies scale across archetypes. Aristocrats at 46% makes sense given how many commanders have sacrifice-adjacent text. Storm at 33% is the one that gives us pause — Storm as a detected theme doesn’t mean the deck is a dedicated storm deck, but it does mean a third of analyzed decks have enough spell-chaining that ScryCheck’s engine flags it.
What the average deck’s vectors look like
Aggregated across all 17,603 decks, the average vector scores paint a recognizable picture of how Commander decks are typically built:
The gap between Mana base / Threats (79) and Speed / Consistency / Interaction (61-64) is telling. Players tend to build with good lands and threatening win conditions, but underinvest in the cards that help them find those pieces consistently and interact with opponents along the way.
The Consistency gap in particular shows up in real games as the deck that has powerful cards but can’t reliably access them. It’s the most common single weakness in the decks we see — not bad cards, just not enough ways to find the good ones.
Black is king, by a little
Color identity distribution doesn’t tell you what a deck does, but it does reflect what colors players are attracted to. The breakdown across all decks (a deck can include multiple colors):
Percentages are of decks that include each color. Adds to more than 100% since most decks are multi-color.
The spread is tighter than you might expect — about 6 percentage points separates the most and least common color. White being last surprises almost nobody who’s been following Commander discourse. Black being first, barely edging out Red, fits with how flexible it is as a color in the format.
A note on this data
These numbers come from decks that ScryCheck users chose to analyze — which is a self-selected sample, not a random slice of all Commander decks in existence. Players who seek out an analysis tool skew differently from the broader format population. They’re probably more likely to be tuning, more curious about their deck’s real power level, and more likely to be in communities where power level conversations come up.
With that caveat in place: 17,603 decks is still a meaningful sample, and the patterns feel consistent with what experienced players already know anecdotally. We’ll update this post as the dataset grows.
Want to see where your deck falls in the distribution? Run it through ScryCheck and get a full breakdown across all five vectors.
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