Frequently asked questions
- What is EDH Tags?
-
A deckbuilding reference for Commander / Elder Dragon Highlander (EDH). For each commander, it shows which kinds of cards people play with it,
grouped by the tags the Scryfall community has given those cards, such as "draw engine", "spot removal" or "gives trample".
- Where does the data come from?
-
Which cards go in each commander's decks comes from EDHREC.
Tags come from Scryfall Tagger, a community tagging project.
Card names, links and images come from Scryfall.
EDH Tags is not affiliated with EDHREC, Scryfall or Wizards of the Coast.
- How do I use this website?
-
Say, you are building a new deck for Kros, Defense Contractor.
EDHREC tells you which cards are most commonly added to Kros decks.
However, for whatever reason you don't want to add them (too expensive, hard to find, you want to be unique, etc.), you can instead look at similar cards that synergize with a Kros deck.
This is where the Scryfall Tagger comes in. This is a community project that tags cards with keywords describing their mechanics.
Instead of showing you the most popular cards for Kros, EDH Tags shows you the most popular / most synergistic tags for a Kros decks.
This allows you to find some underplayed cards that still synergize well with Kros or cheaper options that do the same thing as the most popular cards.
- What does total inclusion mean?
-
Each card EDHREC lists for a commander has an inclusion rate which is defined as the percentage of that commander's decks that play it.
A tag's total inclusion adds up the inclusion rates of every listed card with that tag.
Roughly, it is how many cards with that tag you would find in a typical deck.
A total of 3.0 means about three. The "Most popular" tab ranks tags by it.
- What does the Synergy tab show?
-
Tags a commander plays much more than commanders usually do. Each tag's total inclusion is divided by its average
total inclusion across every commander on EDH Tags (currently 2,688),
so "20x" means 20 times the average. To keep one-off cards from dominating, a tag needs at least
3 cards and a total inclusion of
1.0 or more to appear.
The average covers commanders of all colors, so a commander's colors alone can push some tags up.
- What does the card count mean?
-
How many of the commander's listed cards have the tag. A tag can have many cards but a low total inclusion
if each of them is only played in a few decks.
- How many cards are looked at for each commander?
-
The cards EDHREC lists on the commander's page, usually around 250.
Cards only played in a handful of decks are not included.
- Why are some tags hidden?
-
A few tags describe a card's wording or name rather than what it does in a game, so they are not ranked:
alliteration, unique-type-line, single-english-word-name, namesake-spell, and intervening-if-clause.
Tags for a set's card cycles, which start with cycle-, are hidden for the same reason.
Tags that are too broad/ubiquitous to be useful are also hidden: activated-ability and triggered-ability.
- Why don't broad tags like "removal" show up?
-
Scryfall attaches cards to the narrower tags under a broad one, such as "removal-creature" or "spot-removal",
so the broad tag itself has no cards. Look for the specific tags instead.
- How often is the data updated?
-
Card and tag data from Scryfall is refreshed every day.
The 1,000 most popular commanders on EDHREC are refreshed every day too.
Any other commander is fetched from EDHREC the first time someone opens its page, and again once its data is more than
2 days old.
- Why did a commander page take a moment to load?
-
It was probably being fetched from EDHREC for the first time. Later visits load straight from the database.
- Why can't I find a commander?
-
Search only covers cards that can be your commander: legendary creatures/vehicles/spacecraft, plus cards whose text says they can be your commander.
Partner pairs and Backgrounds aren't supported yet, so search for one card of the pair instead.
- A commander says EDHREC has no data. Why?
-
EDHREC may not have a page for it yet, which is common for brand-new or rarely played commanders,
or EDHREC may have been unreachable. Try again later.
- Was AI used in the development of this web application?
-
Yes. However, I have 10+ years of building web applications so AI was only used to help with repetitive coding tasks, not to generate content or make design decisions.
-
Note that this project follows responsible guidelines and best practices:
- Rate limited API calls.
- Data attribution to Scryfall and EDHREC.
- Strictly no art or creative content generation.
- Is there an API?
-
Yes, two read-only JSON endpoints:
GET /api/search?q=kros finds commanders by name.-
GET /api/commanders/kros-the-miststalker returns a commander's most popular
and most synergistic tags, with each tag's total inclusion, synergy and the cards behind it.
Each endpoint allows 2 requests per second per IP address.