How We Score

How We Read Your Deck

A decklist (pasted text or a Moxfield/Archidekt/TappedOut import) is parsed into a commander and a 99, then every card name is enriched against live card data — oracle text, mana cost, color identity, type line — so the rest of the pipeline works from real rules text, not just a name.

Every card is checked against curated lists for tutors, ramp, fast mana, extra-turn spells, mass land denial, and Game Changers. Curated lists catch the well-known staples, but new cards and rarer effects would slip through a name-only list, so most categories also run an oracle-text fallback: anything with "search your library" that isn't a land counts as a tutor (fetch lands search your library too, but they're land fixing, not tutoring — lands are excluded from this check on purpose); anything that says "take an extra turn" counts toward extra turns; anything that destroys or saccs all lands counts as mass land denial; artifacts, dorks, and lands that search for or produce mana count toward ramp. Game Changers are the one exception— that list is exact and curated only, straight from WotC's official list, with no oracle-text guessing, because a heuristic here previously mislabeled ordinary powerful cards as Game Changers.

WotC Brackets

The bracket is decided purely by the stipulations above — Game Changer count, fast mana, combo timing, extra turns, mass land denial — never by the power score. A deck's number can independently land high or low depending on tutors, curve, and salt, but that never changes which bracket it was placed in.

Power Score Formula

The 0–10 score starts as a weighted blend of eight metrics, all calculated from the decklist and live card data:

Each metric is its own 0–10 sub-score before weighting — for example Ramp Density is min(10, ramp% × 70), Tutor Count is min(10, tutors × 0.9), and Combo Presence is min(10, combos × 3.2) — scaled so real cEDH counts actually reach the top of the range instead of plateauing around 6.

That weighted total is then adjusted so the 0–10 scale actually spans its full range instead of bunching in the middle. Up to +0.8 is added for oracle-text synergy density and up to +0.4 for interaction density (both explained below), then everything above 6.0 gets stretched — 6 + (raw − 6) × 1.3, so a raw 7.0 becomes 7.4 and a raw 9.0 becomes 9.8 — so genuinely stacked decks can actually reach 9–10 instead of the formula compressing everything into the middle of the scale.

Finally, the number is clamped to agree with the bracket it was placed in, so a deck never shows a score that contradicts its own bracket: Bracket 5 decks land at 8.6 or higher, Bracket 4 at 6.8 or higher, Bracket 3 caps at 7.4, Bracket 2 caps at 5.8, and Bracket 1 caps at 4.2. This keeps the weighted formula (which only knows about tutors, combos, curve, and salt) from ever quietly disagreeing with the bracket (which is decided purely by the WotC stipulations above).

Sub-scores for Speed, Consistency, and Saltiness are derived from subsets of the same metrics and displayed as independent meters on the results page.

Deck Profile — Synergy, Interaction & Resilience

Beyond the curated card lists, every card's actual oracle text is scored against 10 synergy axes: blink/ETB, graveyard, sacrifice, tokens, +1/+1 counters, spellslinger, artifacts, lifegain, landfall, and reanimator. Each axis only scores if the deck has both an enabler and a payofffor it — for example the graveyard axis needs both a way to put cards there (mill, discard, surveil) and a way to benefit from that (flashback, escape, delve, threshold) — and the axis score is the smaller of the two counts, so a pile of enablers with nothing to pay off with earns nothing. The axes that clear a minimum threshold (3, or 0 for the always-relevant legendary-synergy axis) show up on your results as the deck's signature synergies, and the sum of all axis scores (capped at 10, scaled ×0.45) becomes the deck's Synergy rating.

Interactionis measured as a density, not a raw count — what share of your nonland cards are removal, counterspells, or board wipes (oracle-text patterns like "destroy target", "counter target spell", or "destroy all"), and what fraction of those are instant-speed. Scoring off density rather than a flat card count means a small, efficient interaction suite in a lean decklist scores fairly against a bigger suite in a bloated one — a deck needs a genuinely dense, mostly-instant-speed interaction package to approach the 10 cap, not just a dozen or so ordinary answers.

Resiliencecomes from protection effects (hexproof, indestructible, protection from, ward, shroud, phasing, can't be countered), recursion (return a card from your graveyard), and how strong the deck's token-rebuild capacity already scored on the Tokens synergy axis. Speed and Consistency — the same numbers shown as their own meters on the Power Score panel — plug straight into the radar alongside Interaction, Synergy, and Resilience, so the five-axis Deck Profile shown on every analysis is a genuine cross-section of the same underlying math, not a separate guess.

Bracket Pathtranslates all of it into plain language — exactly which cards or thresholds would move your specific deck up or down a bracket (e.g. "cut your 2 Game Changers to drop to Bracket 3", or naming the specific combo pieces to cut), reasoned directly from your deck's actual flagged cards rather than a generic rule of thumb.

Mana Base Simulation

Every deck also gets goldfished — 10,000 simulated gamesof just drawing and playing lands, mana rocks, and dorks, with no opponent on the other side of the table. Each game shuffles the deck, draws a 7-card opening hand, and mulligans once for free (Commander's free Commander mulligan) if that hand has fewer than 2 or more than 5 lands. From there it plays a land every turn when one is available — preferring an untapped land that fixes a scarce color — and casts any affordable mana rocks or dorks greedily, cheapest first, before checking how much mana was actually available that turn. The simulation is seeded, so the same decklist always produces the same numbers.

Lands that come into play tapped, or only untapped under a condition (checking a type you control, a land count threshold, and similar), are modeled honestly rather than treated as always-untapped — a deck full of tapped duals will show it in the numbers. Mana rocks come online the turn after they're cast; mana dorks the same, accounting for summoning sickness.

From those 10,000 games we report your tipping point — the earliest turn from which the deck reliably (80%+ of games) has enough mana for a spell at its own average mana value — a cast rate for every individual card in the deck (the odds you actually have the mana and the right colors to cast it on its own curve turn), and an overall mana-base letter grade built from the tipping point, colored-source deficits, opening-hand quality, how often early lands enter untapped, and the deck-wide cast rate.

Colored-source requirements are solved individually per color: for every colored pip demand in the deck (a card's color and the turn it wants to be cast), we calculate — using the deck's exact size, not a lookup table — how many sources of that color you'd need for a 90% chance of having enough by that turn, then keep the toughest demand per color as what the deck actually needs. Reactive instants (counterspells, removal spells built to be held up rather than slammed the moment they're castable) get a couple of extra turns of grace before they're allowed to set a color's toughest demand, so the mana base isn't built around treating your interaction like it has to resolve on curve. Your recommended land count comes from a regression formula based on the deck's average mana value and how much ramp it runs (mana rocks get partial credit toward the ramp term, since — unlike a land — a rock can be removed or drawn dead late).

This is a goldfish simulation, so it's an honest floor for consistency, not a ceiling: it does not model opponent interaction, card draw spells, tutors, cost reducers, cycling, or fetch-land thinning. A deck with a pile of card draw or tutors will, in practice, be more consistent than these numbers alone suggest — the simulation tells you what your lands and ramp can do on their own.

Combo Detection

Every analyzed deck's commander(s) and 99 are checked against a live combo database covering thousands of known interactions, returning exact combo lines, prerequisites, and results. If that lookup can't be reached, EDHcheck falls back to a curated list of around 30 well-known 2-card infinites (e.g. Thassa's Oracle + Demonic Consultation, Kiki-Jiki + Pestermite) and checks whether every card in a combo appears in the decklist. Whichever source finds more combos is used. Detected combos are shown step-by-step in the Breakdown panel and feed directly into both the Bracket assignment (an early combo can push a deck to Bracket 4 or 5) and the Combo Presence power-score component.

Data Sources

• Scryfall API — Card images, oracle text, mana costs, color identity, and USD prices.
• Commander Spellbook— Live infinite-combo detection for the deck's exact commander(s) and 99.
• EDHREC Salt Data — Community salt scores for roughly 65 of the most-flagged annoying cards.
• Moxfield / Archidekt / TappedOut — Deck imports via their public JSON export endpoints.

Consent tooling (Cookiebot) and ad tooling (Google AdSense) do not change the core deck scoring model. They are independent of bracket and power calculations.