Nerd Leagues
Paste a Commander decklist and find out which bracket it lands in — plus a full audit of your ramp, draw, interaction, mana base and price.
// Commander line, or we'll guess.
Save the list, track its games, and watch the bracket move as you tune it — free.
Start FreeThe bracket system gives Commander players a shared vocabulary for power level, so a pod can agree on the kind of game it wants before anyone shuffles. It runs from Bracket 1 (Exhibition), built around a theme rather than winning, through Bracket 2 (Core), roughly the precon experience, to Bracket 3 (Upgraded), Bracket 4 (Optimized) and Bracket 5 (cEDH). Brackets are a conversation tool, not a rule — the point is to set expectations before the game, not to police deckbuilding.
Once you know your bracket, the more useful question is usually why. The sections below are the same numbers this tool reports for your list, with the rules-of-thumb most Commander players build against.
Most Commander decks want 34–38 lands. 36 is the common starting point and it is hard to go far wrong there. Push toward 38–40 if your curve is high or you are light on ramp; drop toward 32–34 only if your average mana value is genuinely low and you are running a lot of cheap card selection.
Two things distort the count. Cheap ramp effectively acts as extra lands, so a deck with twelve ramp pieces can run fewer. And modal double-faced cards with a land back are counted separately here, because they are not really a land slot — the audit shows them as a distinct number rather than quietly inflating your land count.
Around 10–12 pieces is the usual target, and green decks often run more. Ramp here means mana rocks, mana creatures, land-fetch spells like Cultivate and Rampant Growth, and cost reducers — anything that gets you ahead of the curve.
Counting ramp is genuinely fiddly, which is why this one is labelled an estimate on the page. A spell that searches for a basic land is ramp; a spell that searches for any card is a tutor. They read almost identically in card text, so a naive count files Cultivate and Farseek alongside Demonic Tutor. This tool separates them.
A reasonable baseline is 8–12 pieces of card draw and 8–12 pieces of targeted interaction. Card draw is the most commonly under-built category in casual Commander: a deck can look fine and still run out of gas on turn seven.
The draw number is split into repeatable and one-shot, because they are not interchangeable. Ten cantrips is not the same as three enchantments that draw every turn, and a single total hides the difference — especially since "draws a card" riders on creature bodies inflate the count without really being card advantage.
Two to four suits most decks. Fewer and you have no answer to a board you cannot race; many more and you start undoing your own development. Decks built around a wide creature board usually sit at the low end, while control decks run more.
In practice, Game Changers and two-card combos. Running even one card from the Game Changers list, or a combo that wins with two pieces, generally moves a deck to Bracket 3. Four or more Game Changers, mass land denial, or a lock combo pushes it to Bracket 4.
That is why this tool shows the specific cards behind the verdict rather than just a number — a bracket you cannot interrogate is not much use when you are trying to tune a deck down for a particular table.
Not really — and that surprises people. Bracket 2 is defined as a deck that plays extra turns but runs no Game Changers and no two-card combos. So when you strip the cards that were raising your bracket, you land on Bracket 1, not 2. Reaching Bracket 2 from above would mean adding extra-turn spells, which is a strange way to tune a deck down.
That is why the tool offers Bracket 3 and Bracket 1 as cut-down targets and never Bracket 2. It reports where your cuts would actually land rather than inventing a path to a bracket the rules can't reach.
Brackets 4 and 5 allow exactly the same cards, so no decklist can prove which one it is. The difference is intent — whether you are playing to win against a competitive metagame. Rather than invent a rule Wizards did not write, decks that land in Bracket 4 get a set of cEDH signals here (low curve, fast mana, tutor density, free interaction, low land count, compact combos) and you make the call.
Land count, curve, price, Reserved List and Game Changers are exact. Ramp, tutors, interaction and the mana base are pattern-matched from card text and are labelled as estimates on the page. A card can legitimately count twice — Solemn Simulacrum is both ramp and card draw — and that is shown rather than forced into one bucket.
Cards we could not identify are listed explicitly instead of being dropped, because an audit that quietly undercounts is worse than one that admits a gap. What this deliberately will not do is guess your deck's strategy or tell you what to add: it measures what is in the list.