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When to Use Recommander Instead of EDHREC

Hi! My name is Michael Celani, and I’m the site administrator for Recommander. Many folks ask me what the difference is between my site and EDHREC. Like EDHREC, Recommander aggregates Commander decks from across many different deckbuilding websites, distills them into statistics, and provides recommendations for your next brew. However, each tool excels at a different part of the building process.

My goal is not to create a replacement for EDHREC, but rather, a complementary tool that helps players on their deckbuilding journeys. While EDHREC is excellent at showing what people play and getting a deck started, I wanted Recommander to embody a philosophy of personalization and depth. Recommander was created not to be prescriptive, but instead to work with you to help you find the cards you want to play, whether that be by giving you more in-depth search tools or letting you configure exactly what kind of cards you want to see.

Here are the features built around that idea.

Recommendations for your whole deck

While EDHREC’s main focus lies in its per-commander statistics, Recommander’s is its import and recommend feature. When you want specific recommendations for your deck, import it from one of many supported deckbuilding websites and get personalized picks that are tailored not only to your commander, but to your entire list.

Aminatou, the Fateshifter
Buy
$20.75 €11.08

If you’ve built a deck that’s wild or strange for your given commander, Recommander will smartly pivot away from the tried-and-true strategies and listen to what you put in the 99. For example, my Aminatou, the Fateshifter deck is based around swapping permanents with opponents using cards like Switcheroo. That’s not a common idea for Aminatou, and Recommander can figure that out.

Give it a look, and try out the features below to learn how you can get even more information out of our recommendation system:

Commander Synergy
+39.4%
Synergy Range
+88.0%
  • Definitive
  • Staple
  • Unique
  • Other
Lift Distribution
Deck Stats

The Stats tab breaks your deck down against every other deck built for your commander. Commander Synergy shows how closely your cards are tied to your commander, and Synergy Range shows how much that varies from card to card.

The pie chart sorts your list into definitive cards that embody your deck’s playstyle, staples that don’t say much about it, and unique cards that are rarely seen with your commander. The lift chart below it shows where every card falls, from cards tied to your commander to cards that aren’t. Hover over a slice or a bar to see which cards are in it; on your own deck, clicking one takes you straight to those cards in your decklist.

Commanders

Recommander also works backwards from your 99: it ranks the commanders whose decks look most like yours. My Aminatou deck still puts Aminatou first, but other swap commanders are close behind.

Notably, you can see which recommended commanders are already in your deck, which is useful if you’re thinking about swapping.

Filtering

Use the filter button to trim down the possible set of cards that Recommander will show you. You can limit your results to a Scryfall search, or use one of your collections to have the site only recommend cards that you physically own.

Feedback

If you like a card and want to see more like it, or don’t like a card and want to see fewer like it, use the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons to steer Recommander’s results.

Once you’ve got a good look at the cards offered to you, you can use the refresh button on the page to update your recommendations.

Explain

Recommander can tell you why it recommended a specific card for your deck. Use the Explain button to show a window that breaks down how each card in your deck contributed to a candidate’s score. As you give feedback, explain also shows you how your thumbs up and thumbs down affected each card’s placement.

Settings

Once you sign in, you can change how Recommander determines what cards are staples, including by popularity, relevance, and presence in precons. You can also set how confident Recommander has to be before it shows you a result, and set privacy settings for your account.

Card and commander pages

Recommander also has a series of data pages on both cards and commanders that you can use to drill down into statistics about them. You can learn how popular they are, what cards are used alongside them, and potential replacements.

Instead of being ranked by raw popularity, Recommander ranks cards by relevance; it uses statistics to set common staple cards like Sol Ring aside. Because of that difference, EDHREC’s data pages are more suited for people who want to learn the format’s most popular cards, since it displays them front and center.

You can drill down into the statistics using filters. Limit the calculations to only consider decks that contain or don’t contain another card (say, only the Aminatou decks that run Switcheroo), or to decks in a certain color identity. You can also look up a commander’s cards by tag, so, as an example, you can find the best ramp cards for Y’shtola, Night’s Blessed.

Commanders may be part of a group of similar commanders, such as Tatyova, Benthic Druid and Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait. Use the similar button to view all the commanders in that group and see the common cards between them, or use the compare feature to build your own comparisons, like Aminatou against Zedruu.

Recommander has a robust, Scryfall-like search syntax that helps you find your next commander. You can filter by tag, oracle text, inclusions, and more. For example, ci:wub card:Switcheroo finds every commander within Aminatou’s colors whose decks run Switcheroo. You can use this if you need more flexible searches than just by name. Find out more on the Search Syntax page.

You can also see cards that are trending and fading: cards that are added to or cut from existing decks at a higher rate than normal for them. Follow these pages to find out which cards from new sets are winners (or losers).

API

If you’re an application developer, Recommander hosts a public-facing API. You can integrate recommendations into your own Magic tool, or use it to help in your content creation, with no need to provision any keys.

Which should you use?

EDHREC is excellent if you’re getting a build started or looking up the most popular commanders. Recommander is great when you’re refining a build and want more control over what you see. I hope you use both Recommander and EDHREC to learn about your favorite commander, and let me know what you think on the Discord.

Recommander is an independent fan project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by EDHREC. EDHREC is referenced by name for comparison only.