Help & Tutorial

SpellRank is a Commander deck-building, ranking, and pod-balancing platform for Magic: The Gathering. It helps players understand the strength, strategy, synergies, combos, and play experience of a deck before sitting down to play.

SpellRank is an unofficial fan-made Commander tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.

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Navigate SpellRank

Home: Overview of SpellRank, recently analyzed decks, primary tools, and quick-start actions.
Build Deck: Create a new Commander deck using numbered positions 1–100.
Auto-Build: Generate a complete deck around a selected commander, target rank, strategy, set scope, and budget.
Analyze: Paste or upload an existing decklist for validation and analysis.
Cards: Search cards by name, set, type, color, mana value, Oracle text, functional role, and Commander legality.
Sets: Browse every Magic set synchronized from Scryfall, available as a filter throughout card search.
Decks: View saved decks, editable drafts, versions, legality status, and analysis results.
Compare: Compare up to four exact deck versions.
Pods: Estimate compatibility among four players and decks.
Rankings: Explore contextual card, commander, deck, synergy, and empirical rankings.
Matches: Create matches, join with a code, confirm results, and review match history.
Methodology: Review formulas, scoring versions, confidence rules, data sources, and known limitations.
Status: Review card-data freshness, set synchronization, current scoring version, and system availability.
Profile: Manage saved decks, preferences, match history, privacy, and tutorial settings.
Help: Restart the tutorial, search help articles, and review common questions.

Getting Started

What SpellRank is: SpellRank is a Commander deck-building, ranking, and pod-balancing platform for Magic: The Gathering. It helps players understand the strength, strategy, synergies, combos, and play experience of a deck before sitting down to play.
The problem it solves: Pods often disagree about what kind of game they are about to play. SpellRank turns that guesswork into a structured, explainable conversation.
Ways to begin: Build a deck manually, auto-build around a commander, analyze a pasted decklist, or explore cards and sets.
Limits: SpellRank estimates deck strength and compatibility. It cannot guarantee the result of a Commander game.

Building a Deck

Numbered positions: Positions 1–100 each hold one card. Position 1 is the primary commander and position 2 may hold a legal second commander.
Adding cards: Click an empty position, search, filter by set, review the card, and add it to that exact position. Cards can be replaced, removed, moved, or swapped.
Validation: Deck size, color identity, singleton rules, banned cards, and commander legality are checked continuously.

Auto-Build

Target Build Ranks 1–5: Rank 1 is theme-first and intentionally modest; Rank 2 is casual core; Rank 3 is upgraded; Rank 4 is optimized; Rank 5 is a tournament/cEDH construction target.
Build Rank is not the bracket: Target Build Rank is a SpellRank construction setting. It is not the same as the official Commander Bracket.
Options: Build from scratch, complete the current deck, rebuild around the commander, keep locked cards, move toward a higher or lower rank, restrict sets, apply a budget, allow or exclude combos, and set play-experience preferences.

Understanding Rankings

Structural Strength: Evaluates the complete decklist across win conditions and combo pressure, speed and mana acceleration, consistency and tutors, synergy and redundancy, interaction, card advantage, resilience, and mana-base reliability.
Score range and confidence: Every score reports a likely range and a confidence value. Missing data lowers confidence instead of scoring zero.
Why This Score?: Expand this panel on any report to see the cards and features that moved the result.
Goldfish threat window: The estimated turn range in which the deck can present a win with no opposition.

Commander Brackets

Official bracket: SpellRank evaluates bracket restrictions using the active official rules version and reports the result separately from any SpellRank score.
Game Changers: Cards on the official Game Changers list affect the bracket estimate.
Not official rankings: SpellRank's own scores are unofficial estimates and are never presented as official Commander rankings.

Experience Profiles

What it covers: Infinite combos, hard stax, soft stax, locks, mass land destruction, repeated extra turns, fast mana, free interaction, tutors, theft, chaos, heavy board wipes, and combat versus noncombat wins.
Why it is separate: A powerful combat deck and a powerful lock deck may be numerically similar but may not belong in the same social game.

Comparing Decks

Up to four decks: Comparison covers Structural Strength, official bracket, speed, consistency, interaction, resilience, combos, Experience Profile, and empirical rating when enough confirmed matches exist.

Pod Builder

Setup: Select four players and exact deck versions, set a desired bracket range, game-length preference, and combo, stax, land-destruction, extra-turn, theft and chaos preferences.
Pod Balance Score: Combines predicted win probabilities, experience agreement and data confidence. A pod is most even when each predicted chance is near 25%, though politics and variance mean nothing is guaranteed.

Match Results

Verified games: Create a match, invite your pod with a code, submit and confirm results. Confirmed matches feed the Empirical Match Rating.
Decks and pilots: Deck and player ratings remain separate. A strong pilot and a strong deck are not automatically the same thing.

Card and Set Data

Source: Card and set data come from the Scryfall API. Set filters cover the full synchronized set directory.
Search filter vs deck restriction: A set filter temporarily narrows search results. Deck-level set restrictions are enabled separately and constrain the whole deck.

Accounts and Privacy

Local storage: Decks, drafts and tutorial progress are stored in your browser. Signing in, when enabled, keeps that state with your profile instead.
Onboarding analytics: Only onboarding events such as steps viewed and actions selected are recorded. Card choices and deck contents are never recorded as onboarding analytics.

Troubleshooting

The tutorial will not save: If browser storage is unavailable the tutorial keeps running and progress is held for the session. Deck construction is never interrupted.
A highlighted control is missing: If a described control is not on the current page, the tutorial explains it in the panel and offers a button that navigates to the right page.
A card will not resolve: Unresolved card names are always reported, never substituted. Check spelling or use the card search.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Build Rank the same as the bracket?: No. Build Rank is a SpellRank construction target for Auto-Build; the bracket is the official Commander classification.
Can SpellRank tell me who will win?: No. SpellRank estimates deck strength and compatibility. It cannot guarantee the result of a Commander game.
Is SpellRank official?: No. SpellRank is an unofficial fan-made Commander tool. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast.