How cards are scored

Two signals, one score

Vulcan Highlander's approach is inspired by a combination of Canadian Highlander's points list, and EDHPowerLevel's impact scores. Canadian Highlander uses points to limit the number of high-powered "game changer" cards in a deck. Vulcan Highlander takes this concept a step further, to tackle widespread power creep across hundreds of cards.

Scoring tens of thousands of cards based on their merits via human (or AI) judgement would be a dauntingly huge and error-prone task, rife for arguments and disagreements. Instead, we use a formula very similar to EDHPowerLevel's to determine an impact score for every card. This score is a weighted blend of a price rating and a popularity rating, based on data from EDHREC. For nonland cards the price rating is weighted at 1.25 and the popularity rating at 0.75. Nonbasic lands are scored on the same two ratings, but popularity counts about half as much. The most popular nonbasic lands are not constrained by color and can provide useful effects in any deck. Basic lands always cost 0 points.

The price input is the card's market price in US dollars, capped at $100. Past that point, price measures how few copies were printed rather than how strong the card is. We take the second-cheapest vendor quote rather than the cheapest. This mitigates the possibility of a stale or erratic low price listing resulting in an incorrectly scored card.

The popularity input is the card's rank among all Commander-legal cards based on how many decks run it, using EDHREC's data. A legendary creature's rank counts the decks it commands as well as the decks playing it in the 99. EDHREC's data covers only the most recent 2 years on a rolling basis, which is perfect for our purposes. It means older cards can't accumulate more popularity over time: all cards are evaluated on the level playing field of current popularity.

For further details see the "Discover the algorithm behind this tool" section at EDHPowerLevel, as our approach to impact scoring is inspired by theirs.

A note on cards banned in Commander

At least for now, Vulcan Highlander uses the same banned list as Commander. Banned cards inherently lack relevant price and popularity data for Commander. In the future, after we have more real-world feedback on our pointing system, we may unban and manually point some of the currently banned cards.

Translating impact scores to points

A card's number of points is determined by its impact score:

The lower bands are deliberately wider. Power creep lives in breadth: hundreds of good-not-broken cards, not a handful of outliers. About 2,000 cost a single point, about 215 cost 2, and only 48 cards in the entire format cost 3 or more.

Some landmark examples:

• 1 point: Arcane Signet, An Offer You Can't Refuse, and every shock land
• 2 points: Necropotence, Badgermole Cub, and the original dual lands
• 3 points: Cyclonic Rift, Sensei's Divining Top, Roaming Throne
• 4 points: Demonic Tutor, Rhystic Study, The Soul Stone
• 5 points: Chrome Mox, Mana Vault, The One Ring

Why 50 points?

The point budget was determined by analyzing Commander decks from MTGGoldfish, which is a gold mine of historical deck lists. We focused on Commanders that have maintained their popularity over time and support numerous different deckbuilding strategies (such as Atraxa, Praetors' Voice). So the decks we analyzed included a wide variety of cards, and we could see how the composition of decks changed over time for the same Commanders. We focused specifically on decks built in 2016 and 2020. We also made sure to exclude deck lists that had been later modified to include newer cards, and we excluded deck lists that were clearly scratchpads and not real decks.

We determined that a budget of 50 points sits between 2016 and 2020 decks. The median 2016 deck fits with about six points of headroom, experienced as room to upgrade, while a typical 2020 deck does not fit without trimming. This targets the goal of the Vulcan Highlander format: to play Commander at a typical power level from the 2016-2018 era, while still allowing the inclusion of newer cards. But you can't just fill your deck with power-crept cards: with a limited point budget, you must choose carefully.

What the points cannot see

Points are determined card-by-card and do not attempt to take into account infinite deck building possibilities. A deck built as a tight synergy engine plays stronger than its point total suggests, and a random pile of expensive staple cards plays weaker. This has always been true in every Magic format. The elegance of the point system is that we can follow market signals for scoring cards instead of taking on the impossible task of individually evaluating the relative merit of every card in every possible deckbuilding strategy.

Guarding against future power creep

The impact scores are based on a current evaluation of EDHREC data (July 2026), compared to our 2016-2020 baseline. Assuming the current power creep trend continues, that means many older cards will drop further in price and popularity over time, which would lead to their points also dropping. That would defeat the purpose of the Vulcan Highlander format. If and when this happens, we have a snapshot of our current evaluations, so we have a baseline for recalibrating how impact scores translate to points. For example, Soul Warden (first printed in 1998) is a 1 point card and continues to be a Commander staple. If a new "strictly better" similar card is printed, then Soul Warden's price and popularity would drop (I'm looking at you, Liliana the Faultless). If this pattern continues, we would recalibrate how we translate impact scores to points, so that a card like Soul Warden remains at 1 point and doesn't drop to 0. This approach preserves Vulcan Highlander's goal of keeping power creep in check.