"How fast does it win?" is the question every pregame conversation is really about, and it is the one a decklist can't answer by looking at it. So we built something that plays the deck.
Every analysis now includes a Turn Clock: the turn your deck kills its first opponent and the turn it clears the whole table, worked out from 1,500 games played with your exact list.
How it works
Each game is a goldfish: three opponents at 40 life who never block, remove, counter or race. The deck mulligans, plays its lands, ramps, tutors, draws, casts its commander and its threats, attacks, drains and poisons, and after every step checks whether it can assemble one of its own combos.
Every card is read from its own rules text: the mana it makes and whether it keeps making it, the cards it draws, what it can tutor for, its power and keywords, tokens, anthems, +1/+1 counters, drains, cost reducers and more. Payoffs fire once per event, so landfall triggers for every land and Panharmonicon doubles what enters. Extra turns are played out, X spells scale with your mana, and cascade, blink, clones, mana doublers, mill and Approach of the Second Sun all count. The graveyard is played too (Entomb into Reanimate, Muldrotha casting from it, Living Death), storm decks go off when the count is lethal, and a commander like Kefka transforms once there's mana for it. Combos come from Commander Spellbook for your exact list, with Spellbook's own mana and zone requirements, so a combo only counts when the deck can really run it.
Tutors play like a player would. They go for the missing piece of the combo closest to done, prefer the one that's cheapest to run, and only fetch cards they're allowed to find: Step Through finds a Wizard, Transmute finds a card of the same mana value, Entomb doesn't put anything in your hand.
What you see
Everyone gets the two headline turns, and a scale that places your deck next to our reference decks: precons clear the table around turn 10, tuned decks around 8, and cEDH lists around 7.
With Pro you also get:
- The win curve. The share of games won by every turn, for the first kill and the table kill.
- How it wins. Combo, combat, commander damage, drain or poison, and which combos close games.
- A typical game. One game that ends on the median turn, played out card by card.
- Deep Draw. The odds of having each key card by turn 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8, and the odds of holding a whole combo.
- What drives the clock. Every nonland card is swapped for a blank and the deck replayed with the same shuffles, to measure how many turns that card saves. It runs in your browser when you scroll to it.
That last one tends to surprise people. In one Dualcaster Mage deck we tested, Sol Ring saved almost nothing while every card that could find Dualcaster saved half a turn. The deck wasn't short on mana, it was short on its combo.
How accurate is it?
Read the number as your deck's speed limit, not a prediction of your next game. Real tables interact, so real games run slower, and a few plans aren't modelled yet: Doomsday piles, long chains of one-off loops, and cards whose effect depends on what opponents do. The panel lists any cards it couldn't read, so you can see what the clock is built on.
Every change to the engine is checked against a fixed set of real decks, from precons and casual lists to tuned and cEDH builds, and the groups must keep their order. We also run it over the 100 most-played commanders on EDHREC to find the strategies it doesn't read yet, and fix them in order of how many decks they affect.
Tell us if it's wrong
Under the clock there's one question: does this deck usually win around that turn in your games? Earlier, about then, or later. The answers are anonymous, and they're what we tune the clock against. The more decks we hear about, the closer the number gets to your table.
The full method is on How We Score.