Commander Brackets
Wizards of the Coast's official system for saying how hard a Commander deck hits.
Two players pull out their Commander deck. One built a precon bought last week, the other plays a list refined over two years. The game is over before it started, and nobody had fun.
Brackets exist to avoid that. It is a scale from 1 to 5 that Wizards published in 2025, used to tell each other before playing: “my deck is a bracket 2, and yours?”. It is not a rule of the game, it is a shared vocabulary to agree at the table.
The five levels
1Exhibition
The theme deck, built to tell something rather than to win. All the dragons, or all the cards with a cat on them. Winning is a bonus, not the goal.
2Core
The level of a preconstructed deck bought in a store, or of a home-built deck made without hunting for the rare card. Games last, everybody plays. It is the most common level around a kitchen table.
3Upgraded
A refined deck: the cards were picked one by one, the mana base is careful, there are a few expensive cards. It can contain up to three cards from the Game Changers list (see below).
4Optimized
The deck built to win, with no budget or list limit. As many Game Changers as you want, deliberate combos, games that end fast.
5cEDH
Competitive Commander. Decks are built to win as fast as possible against other decks built to win as fast as possible. It is a format of its own, with its own culture.
The Game Changers list
Wizards keeps a list of 53 cards judged powerful enough to change the nature of a game on their own. It serves as a safeguard for the brackets: a 1 or 2 deck contains none, a 3 deck accepts up to three, and beyond that you are in 4 or 5.
The list is reviewed every three or four months by the Commander Format Panel. Tapt rereads it automatically every week. Last reread on 2026-10-30.
- Ad Nauseam
- Ancient Tomb
- Aura Shards
- Biorhythm
- Bolas's Citadel
- Braids, Cabal Minion
- Chrome Mox
- Coalition Victory
- Consecrated Sphinx
- Crop Rotation
- Cyclonic Rift
- Demonic Tutor
- Drannith Magistrate
- Enlightened Tutor
- Farewell
- Field of the Dead
- Fierce Guardianship
- Force of Will
- Gaea's Cradle
- Gamble
- Gifts Ungiven
- Glacial Chasm
- Grand Arbiter Augustin IV
- Grim Monolith
- Humility
- Imperial Seal
- Intuition
- Jeska's Will
- Lion's Eye Diamond
- Mana Vault
- Mishra's Workshop
- Mox Diamond
- Mystical Tutor
- Narset, Parter of Veils
- Natural Order
- Necropotence
- Notion Thief
- Opposition Agent
- Orcish Bowmasters
- Panoptic Mirror
- Rhystic Study
- Seedborn Muse
- Serra's Sanctum
- Smothering Tithe
- Survival of the Fittest
- Teferi's Protection
- Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern
- Thassa's Oracle
- The One Ring
- The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
- Underworld Breach
- Vampiric Tutor
- Worldly Tutor
Why Tapt does not work out your bracket
On a Commander deck, Tapt shows a marker, not a bracket. The difference matters.
Wizards defines a bracket by four criteria. Tapt counts three: the cards from the Game Changers list, mass land denial (based on Scryfall roles), and the two-card combos your deck already assembles (based on Commander Spellbook). Extra turns only count when chained: Tapt flags them without drawing a conclusion.
Even those three leave room for judgment: a combo can be meant for the end of the game, and no database knows every combo. Tapt therefore says what it can prove, a floor: “Bracket 3 and up” means your deck cannot be below. The rest is for you and your table to judge.
The marker appears on your Commander decks in the editor, on the page of a shared deck, and on the preconstructed decks.
Source: official Wizards of the Coast announcements on the Commander Brackets. Magic: The Gathering is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, and Tapt is not affiliated with it.
Read on the blog
- Preconstructed Commander decks: price and bracketHow much a preconstructed Commander deck costs, what it contains and what bracket it plays at: all of it reads on a precon's page in Tapt, with local prices.
- Commander combos: find them, read them, place themHow to read a Commander combo, look up the ones in your cards in Tapt's library and know what a two-card combo changes to your deck's level.
- Commander brackets explained: the 5 power levelsThe five Commander brackets, the Game Changers list and how to tell your table what level your deck plays at, before anyone shuffles a single card.