As a general rule of thumb, optimized games see players win (or lose) from around turn four or later. Sometimes you might draw a crazy hand that wins turn one, but that’s not the goal of your deck.

Bracket 4 has all the power of CEDH without the CEDH meta.

No two card combos need a little explaining. At this point in the brackets, combos are ok as long as you are casting them later in the game. At the upgraded level, you might have some tutors, but they’re not of the same quality or quantity as the optimized decks. Demonic Tutor is always going to be better than Search for Glory. But the later is much more flavorful in my legends deck.

The combo discussion also includes lockouts and game-enders, not just infinite combos. This covers things like Natural Order for Craterhoof Behemoth. Sure, it’s not “infinite,” but it’s close enough. Similarly, lockouts don’t win the game, but they functionally end the game. This could include things like Knowledge Pool and Drannith Magistrate.

Reminder, combos are fair game after turn six. The goal of this bracket is for highly interactive games. Here, players are rewarded for setting up engines and protecting them. You should not be surprised to see a combo from the blue player who drew 20 extra cards over the last two turns. You should not be shocked that a green player has ten mana on turn six.

Bracket 1 isn’t all about illegal commanders. There are plenty of lower-power commanders or unique ideas you can play with. My Volo, Itinerant Scholar deck is a great example. It is four decks in one. An 80-card mono blue deck, and four 20-card decks of the other colors. Whenever I sit down for a game with Volo, I choose a secondary color and mix it into my blue deck. This deck is sub-optimal because I am trying to balance four themes all at once. On the other hand, it is a lot of fun.

Currently, my Volo deck runs a couple of combos and game changers. To help stick with the bracket 1 theme, I keep those cards in the off-color decks. That way, I can make the deck more or less powerful depending on my opponent’s preferences.

I discuss this deck in great detail in another article, and show how you can brew your own mix-and-match deck! You can check it out here.

Each bracket is ultimately a mix of hard requirements and vibes. When evaluating your deck, start with the hard requirements. This can give you a good starting point. If you have no game changers and no combos, you’re good, right? Not quite.

Vibes are the next key part. Some decks are incredibly powerful without many powerful cards. My go-to example is Zada, Hedron Grinder. When a spell targets Zada, it targets all your other creatures. This is incredibly powerful with cantrips and mana-generating spells. Expedite becomes an Ancestral Recall or with multiple creatures. Sudden Breakthrough buffs your board and nets you treasure. With zero game changers, Zada is a force to be reckoned with.

Building a bracket 2 Zada deck takes discipline.

Some of you might take that as a challenge. Others will wonder “what’s the point”.

The brackets circle around game changers a lot. What are they? Each game changer is powerful. But they come in different flavors. I won’t go into great detail on all of them. You can find a full list on Scryfall by searching is:gamechanger.

I can see some clear categories of game changers emerge.

Enlightened Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Demonic Tutor, searching your library is powerful. About 20% of the game changers are tutors. There is clearly power in searching your deck. There are plenty of other tutors that are not game changers. Tutors at a low cost and high flexibility are the targets here. We will discuss this in more detail later, but consistency is a core part of a powerful deck.

This class of card shifts the whole game around them. Notion Thief, Braids, Cabal Minion, and Drannith Magistrate all cause the table to stop and say: “Does anyone have an answer for that?”

These cards are not unbeatable. If they are removed quickly, everyone is fine. But, left unanswered, the game can grind to a halt. “Dies to removal” is a fair retort in a more tuned environment. But, in lower brackets, removal can be less common, or without tutors, it is harder to find your removal in time. A random Tergrid, God of Fright, in a 99-card deck is probably fine. However, a deck that can consistently find Tergrid with tutors and back her up with Braids might become problematic.

Not all game-warping effects are like Braids, Cabal Minion. Grand Arbiter Augustin IV makes spells harder to cast. Consecrated Sphinx makes every card pull your opponent ahead. Glacial Chasm makes attacking impossible. The list goes on.

The game-warping cards mostly sit in the “not banable” camp, yet if you’re caught off guard, they feel unstoppable.

Cards that are cheap and get you ahead on mana fit here. Sol Ring, despite meeting this criteria is not considered a game changer, but we are refering to all it’s close friends. Mana Vault, Mox Diamond, and Chrome Mox are popular examples. They all have a relatively low cost to make them good in your deck. Grim Monolith and Lion’s Eye Diamond require more build-around but also fit in. A single piece of fast mana is usually fine. It might lead to a lopsided game if played early. Generally, a single piece of fast mana is fine.

Jamming all the fast mana you can find into your deck is a sure-fire way to consistently get ahead of your opponent. Without a sufficient cost, fast mana breaks the game. Mox Amber is a great example of fast mana with a cost. There is real power, and you can abuse it. But it needs a bit of work.

Gaea’s Cradle and Mishra’s Workshop also fit in here. They might require some work to get going, but both are fantastic ways to steal a high power game.

This last group is all best-in-class for what they do. Cyclonic Rift, Jeska’s Will, and The One Ring all come to mind. None of them wins the game on their own, but they sure make it a lot easier to win.

This is the category we will likely see grow the most over time. Fast mana and tutors are well-studied card types. It’s rare for Wizards of the Coast to add to these.

Game-warping effects often came from a pre-commander world, or the notorious “fire design” phase of Magic’s life.

Raw power can appear out of nowhere.

Jamming all the fast mana you can find into your deck is a sure-fire way to consistently get ahead of your opponent. Without a sufficient cost, fast mana breaks the game. Mox Amber is a great example of fast mana with a cost. There is real power, and you can abuse it. But it needs a bit of work.

Gaea’s Cradle and Mishra’s Workshop also fit in here. They might require some work to get going, but both are fantastic ways to steal a high power game.

Being consistent is another huge factor in your bracket. Once you reach bracket 3, combos are expected later in the game. But what happens if you just get lucky? Your opening hand has a Gyre Engineer. You play it turn three. Then next turn, you top deck a Freed From the Real. You now have infinite green mana.

Bracket 3 is where intent comes to mind.

This situation can happen, but it’s not every game. Consider your options, too. Even if a combo is theoretically possible before turn 6, do you have protection? Infinite mana is great, but do you have a payoff?

We can apply everything in the combo section to the other cards in your deck. Think about ramp and redundancy. What’s the ramp spell rock in Commander? Sol Ring is a safe bet. But what’s the second best? Rampant Growth, Arcane Signet, Llanowar Elf, there’s an argument to be made for any of them.

Card choice is dictated by your deck’s goals. In my Kethis the Hidden Hand deck, my ramp package looks like this.

And here is the entire Deck.

I want to cast Kethis on turn three, ideally turn two. The ramp achieves this goal by focusing on mana dorks that produce off-colors. Elves of Deep Shadow, Avacyn’s Pilgrim, and Birds of Paradise achieve this.

As my friends and I tuned our decks, we began including fetchlands. This made Deathrite Shaman more appealing.

In CEDH Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh lets you play cards that want a commander in play. Fierce Guardianship, Jeskas Will, and Deadly Rollick come to mind. He is also great fodder for Diabolic Intent, Culling the Weak. Commander choice elevates these spells to something greater.

Commander brackets are a mixture of hard requirements and best judgment. This makes them tricky to pin down. Deckbuilding tools such as Moxfield can provide a guideline. However, Magic is so big that we need to take any automatic rating with a handful of salt. Remember, these tools cannot detect combos or intricate synergies in your deck. They cannot calculate the “average turn to do your thing”.

Brackets 1 and 5 are pretty clear-cut. Here, your deck is built with a very specific idea. Bracket 1 it’s a silly gimmick.

In bracket 5, the gimmick is always winning.

Bracket 4 can be summarized in two questions.

1. Are you playing a known CEDH deck?
2. Are you making any compromises?

If you answered “no” to both of those questions, you are likely in bracket 4.

The biggest confusion for many players is going to be bracket 2 vs bracket 3.

The only hard difference between both of them is the amount of game changers, and the turn you expect someone to win on. Take my Kethis deck from before. I only run one game changer. This puts me in bracket 3. If I remove that one game changer am I bracket 2? Of course not. It would be mean-spirited to pretend it was. Similarly, adding Ancient Tomb, Mishra’s Workshop, and Mana Vault does not turn Kethis into bracket 4. These are arguably bad cards that would only make my deck worse.

Brackets are fluid.

While there are some hard lines in the sand, they are also a place for player expression. When designing your next deck, try to consider where it fits in the brackets. Let us know what you think of brackets, and be sure to buy your bracket 5 staples at Three for One Trading.

Ben Guilfoyle started playing Magic in 2015. They love to research the design of Magic. Why was this card banned? Could this silver border card actually see play? Cards that push the limits of design is what excites them. You can usually find them playing cube. This ties into their second passion: numbers. With a background in physics and statistics, they love to get in the weeds when building decks. Crunching numbers is their specialty.