EDHREC x Cardmarket

If you're a Magic player, you've probably heard of Commander, originally known as Elder Dragon Highlander or EDH for short. After all, it's the most popular way to play Magic nowadays, likely because it allows you and your friends to customize your group's play experience however you want. You can focus on power or synergies, fun or flavor, certain themes or settings, and you can even mix things up across decks. Not least, you can build your decks from a pool of more than 30,000 different cards. Of course, that number is great in more than one way. Where do you even start when you build a Commander deck from scratch? How do you pick your commander from among the more than 2,900 options? And how do you shave your build down to exactly 100 cards, when there are hundreds that would fit any possible purpose and thematic direction?

Well, we have a recommendation for you. More accurately, Cardmarket has a partner whose mission is all about giving EDH recommendations!

EDHREC's Mission

Fun is somewhat subjective, and every group may have its own ideas of what makes for a good time. However, if you and your friends like to play Magic of the Commander variety, there's a decent chance you'll enjoy similar things as other Commander players. This is where data can be useful, and it is exactly where EDHREC comes in. EDHREC.com builds upon the fact that a lot of people share their Commander decklists online, in particular their favorites. Looking at any one of these lists for inspiration might be hit or miss, and even looking at just a couple is almost too much information for a single human to process. But when you look at thousands upon thousands of decks, you'll see certain trends emerge. Luckily, there's EDHREC to complete this task automatically, so you don't have to.

Instead you can just check out the most popular commanders of the past two years and look up that sits in first place or that claims the 256th spot (at the time of writing). You can also limit this ranking to decks from the past month or the past week and filter by any possible color combination. You could filter by card type and find that is the people's favorite planeswalker commander. You can exclude or include Universes Beyond and can use tags to find commanders that offer, for example, card draw or ramp. Of course you can set all kinds of filters for mana value, power, toughness, et cetera too.

You may also be interested in the most popular cards overall, ranked by the percentage of decks where people chose to include them. So 84% of all decks contain a and 35% of all green decks contain a , and once again you can filter by all of the same criteria mentioned above. The percentages here even account for recency of a card's release. For instance, when you look at five-color cards, both and score 10%. But this means the older card is found in 10% of about half a million possible decks, whereas the brand-new card shows up in 10% of far fewer decks.

Even better, EDHREC offers plenty of ways to view how different cards correlate with each other. When you take a closer look at the page for Dr. Eggman as a commander, for example, you'll see that 81% of Eggman decks include , compared to just 4% among all decks in the same color combination. And when you look at the EDHREC page for this Gearhulk, you'll see that the most popular commander to use with it is indeed the Eggman, followed by (name checks out).

The people at EDHREC write articles about various topics relevant to the Commander format as well. They also discuss them on their weekly video podcast, the EDHRECast, and they help to build a better community. So whether you're looking for data or insightful commentary, EDHREC has you covered.

EDHREC's founder and original data miner, Don Miner, can truly be proud of what he and his team accomplished. "EDH decks are a big form of expression," he said in an interview last year. "I think we're helping people express themselves and get inspired by scanning around on EDHREC, and I think that's pretty cool."

Ultimately, it's all about making Commander more accessible to everyone, no matter which level they're at. "I think people will be creative when they want to be. [But] you shouldn't force everybody to have to be creative. You shouldn't be mad at somebody for playing a precon. That's some gatekeeping […]," said Miner.

Cardmarket's Contribution

In its own way, Cardmarket is all about making Commander, and Magic in general, more accessible too. We do our part by providing the European community with the best possible marketplace. Here you can get the cards you want at the lowest prices and can sell those you don't want to the biggest audience. But while our means differ, the greater ends align. So we're happy to have found such a natural ally in EDHREC and to support its operation. After all, EDHREC helps plenty of people—not least to discover the cards they want to buy on Cardmarket.

Another aspect of our cooperation is of course that we share our price data with EDHREC. Together the users of Cardmarket determine what the definitive, fair market value of any Magic card is across Europe, and having these values on another website benefits everyone: us, them, and the whole community. EDHREC doesn't just list prices under each card image but also within its Clipboard feature. The Clipboard allows users to add individual cards from articles or card pages and to view aggregate pricing for ease of purchase. And if you filter the list of top commanders on EDHREC by the lowest possible price, you'll see where you can get the current (at time of writing) #4, , #15, , or #44, , each for less than a buck—only on Cardmarket.

We're excited to find out what the future holds for EDHREC and its team, and we're proud to have them as our partners. We hope you'll enjoy their work just as much as we do!