What bracket are Commander precons? The list, deck by deck

We ran Manamancer’s estimator over the 47 Commander precons since brackets launched: 38 read Bracket 2, 9 read 3, none higher. An estimate, not an official rating, with the cards behind it.

Aymeric Lamontagne

Nov 9, 2026

Wizards of the Coast does not rate precons. It used to offer a rule of thumb, that the average current precon sat at Bracket 2, and on October 21, 2025 it removed that line. So any list of what bracket each precon is can only be an estimate, and this one is labelled as one throughout.

Here is what the estimate finds. We ran the bracket estimator behind Manamancer’s Deck Stats over all 47 Commander precons released since brackets launched on February 11, 2025, up to the Star Trek decks due November 13, 2026. 38 land on Bracket 2, 9 land on Bracket 3, and none land on Bracket 4. The estimator is built never to say 1 or 5, so that spread is narrower than it looks.

The more interesting number is zero. Not one of the 47 shipped, or is due to ship, with a card that was on the Game Changers list on its release day. Two lists picked one up afterwards, when the list moved under them. Six others hold a two-card line according to Commander Spellbook, and one deck’s lines are not infinite at all.

This piece covers what Wizards currently says, what the estimator counts, the full table, the cards behind every deck above 2, and where a 2 in that table should not be trusted.

Decks

47 — 39 distinct lists

Estimated Bracket 2

38 — Nothing the estimator counts was found

Estimated Bracket 3

9 — 3 from a Game Changer, 6 from a two-card line

Estimated Bracket 4

0 — No hard gate tripped

Commander precons released February 14, 2025 to November 13, 2026. Estimates run November 4, 2026.

What Wizards says about brackets and precons

The answer to “what bracket are precons” has moved since launch, so the date matters.

• February 11, 2025. Brackets launch in beta. The average current precon is the stated reference point for Bracket 2, with Modern Horizons 3 Commander decks and Secret Lair decks named as outside that average.
• April 22, 2025. Eighteen cards join the Game Changers list, among them Seedborn Muse, which had just shipped in Abzan Armor. Wizards addresses the collision directly: that deck was finalized before brackets existed.
• October 21, 2025. The link is cut. Wizards says precons span too wide a range for one bracket to describe them, naming Modern Horizons 3 and Secret Lair decks against Starter decks. Bracket 2 stays, defined by the game it should produce. The same post removes ten Game Changers and adds minimum game lengths.
• February 9, 2026. Farewell and Biorhythm join the list. Wizards notes that many precons have run Farewell and that some will again, and says it is happy with having separated precons from Bracket 2.

So the honest current answer is that a precon has no bracket until someone gives it one. The official page, read November 4, 2026, still calls the system a beta and still makes it optional.

The tutor rule is gone, as you may have read. The October 2025 post removes tutor restrictions from the brackets entirely and leaves the most efficient tutors to the Game Changers list. A guide telling you to keep tutors sparse in Brackets 1 and 2 is repeating the February 2025 text.

The current definitions lean on what a game should feel like, plus how long it should last:

Game Changers are the one hard list: none in Brackets 1 and 2, up to three in Bracket 3, no limit in 4 and 5. Everything else in that table is a description of play, which is exactly what a decklist cannot show.

What the estimator counts

It is the same code that fills the Commander Bracket section of Deck Stats. It runs five checks, each sets a minimum, and the final number is the highest minimum.

The result is then held between 2 and 4. Bracket 1 and Bracket 5 are declarations of intent, so the estimator will not assign them. A deck that trips nothing therefore reads 2, which means nothing we count was found, not that the deck plays like Core.

One limit of the source material is worth stating. Wizards’ current page names combos, extra turns and mass land denial as barometers without setting limits, so the limits above trace to the February 2025 launch post. The April 2025 post was still listing the exact set of mass land denial cards as an open question. Those two rows are our reading, not a Wizards ruling.

All 39 lists, newest first

What “recent” means here: every deck in our catalog’s Commander and Secret Lair Commander lines released from February 11, 2025, the day brackets launched, through the Star Trek decks. An asterisk marks products sold with a Collector’s Edition. The eight Final Fantasy and Marvel Super Heroes Collector’s Editions have the same 100 cards as the regular decks, so they share a row and count in the 47. A dash means the estimator found nothing to raise the floor.

Four notes on scope. The Star Trek lists come from Wizards’ decklist page, because our catalog does not hold them yet; those decks were still unreleased when we read it, and their Collector’s Editions, which Wizards says hold the same deck, are outside the 47. The Dandân Deck is left out because it is an 80-card list with no commander. Secret Lair decks are in because they are Commander precons, though Wizards itself treats them as a different animal. The Hobbit has no row because our catalog lists no Commander deck for it.

Card data is our index as refreshed on November 3, 2026; combos were read from Commander Spellbook on November 4, 2026.

The eight lists above Bracket 2

Two moved by the list, not the deck

Abzan Armor shipped April 11, 2025 with Seedborn Muse. Wizards added the Muse to the Game Changers list eleven days later, for what it does on everyone else’s untap step, and addressed the deck by name in the same post.

Counter Blitz shipped June 13, 2025 with Farewell, a six-mana sweeper Wizards had explicitly declined to list that April. It joined the list on February 9, 2026, almost eight months after the deck was on shelves.

Neither deck changed. The estimator reads today’s list, so both show 3 today and would have shown 2 on their release days. Each holds one Game Changer and nothing else that moves the number, so that single card is the entire difference. If your table plays Core, that is a one-card conversation.

We checked the same thing across the other 37 lists, against all 65 cards ever on the list according to Wizards’ posts. The only other hit is Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger in Hatsune Miku, from August 2026, nearly ten months after Wizards took it off the list.

Six flagged by a two-card line

The estimator treats any two-piece Commander Spellbook line as Bracket 3 at least, because it cannot tell when the line would come together. We read all of them by hand, because they are not equally alarming.

Goblin Storm earns its number, and is the likeliest of the eight to be underrated by it. Cast Haze of Rage with buyback for four mana with Storm-Kiln Artist out and three spells already cast this turn, and the Artist makes at least four Treasures, which pay for the next cast. That is unlimited mana and a climbing storm count from a four-drop and a sorcery, in a deck that also runs Grapeshot. Wizards’ Bracket 3 asks for at least six turns; whether this deck honors that is the question a floor cannot answer, and a table should ask it.

Living Energy can end a game in combat. Attack with Aetherwind Basker and Lightning Runner while controlling at least six creatures, and each attack pays for the next combat phase, with everything untapping. It costs twelve mana across two creatures and needs a board first, which is about as telegraphed as an infinite gets.

Blight Curse has two versions: Blowfly Infestation with either Flourishing Defenses or Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons. Tokens die to -1/-1 counters, which put counters on the next token. Spellbook lists it as infinite death triggers, which is not a win by itself. But with Auntie Ool, Cursewretch on the battlefield, each counter on your own creature also draws a card, so it is not idle either.

Jeskai Striker can copy Expansion forever with Narset's Reversal or a charged Adaptive Training Post, given a first spell to start the chain. Alone the loop does nothing. The deck also holds Archmage Emeritus and Storm-Kiln Artist, so what the copies do depends on who else is on the battlefield.

World Shaper has The Gitrog Monster and Dakmor Salvage, a classic line that needs you over your hand size at cleanup. It mills your own library, and Spellbook’s result stops there. In a deck that counts lands in the graveyard it is real value, and it does not win the game on its own.

Everyone’s Invited! is where the label overreaches. Its six lines pair The World Tree or Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree with a card that makes every creature the right type (Maskwood Nexus, Arcane Adaptation or Rukarumel, Biologist). Pay ten mana, sacrifice the tree, and every creature in your library enters. That is an enormous turn, and it sits close to Wizards’ description of a Bracket 3 win, but Spellbook lists no infinite result for it, and Wizards’ barometer speaks of infinite combos. The estimator’s 3 stands in the table because that is what it returns; read this one as generous.

Where a 2 should not be trusted

Five caveats, because a floor is easy to read as a verdict.

First, a 2 cannot measure game length. The current definition of Core asks for at least eight turns and wins that are visible on the board. No check above reads either. Commander Spock can cast the top card of the library for free each time it enters or attacks, given enough differently named lands, and Landing Party still reads 2.

Second, three-piece lines do not count. Counter Blitz holds Gatta and Luzzu, Hardened Scales and Walking Ballista for infinite damage. Multiverse Reforged holds Dack Fayden, Helping Hand, Venser, Fervent Forger and Brainstorm for an infinite-token line, and still reads 2. Living Energy has three more of them. Wizards’ barometer is about two cards, so this is by design, but a third card is not a safety feature.

Third, the Star Trek 2s are the softest in the table. On November 4, 2026, nine days before release, Commander Spock was in Commander Spellbook’s card database marked as a spoiler, but a new card’s combos only appear once someone has added them. A line using a new card can be missing today and present next month. The same applies, less sharply, to every 2026 deck.

Fourth, the list moves. Every number uses the Game Changers list as of the November 3, 2026 index. Wizards’ February 2026 post asked for a slower pace of change; it did not promise none.

Fifth, the tutor row is noisy. It flags 17 distinct cards across these lists, with a maximum of four in one deck, and 13 of the 17 only fetch lands, many of them cards such as Farseek and Nature's Lore, whose text names a land type rather than the word “land.” The other four are Goblin Matron, Magda, Brazen Outlaw, Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree and Silver Surfer, Galactus's Herald. It moves no number, which is just as well.

Two things did come back clean under a separate check of every card’s text. No list holds an extra-turn effect, and none holds a land sweeper. The nearest land destruction is single-target, such as White Orchid Phantom, which the estimator rightly ignores.

If your precon is older

We ran the same code over every Commander and Secret Lair Commander list in the catalog, from 2011 on: 186 decks after merging Collector’s Editions. 150 read Bracket 2, 32 read Bracket 3 and 4 read Bracket 4. All four are old and all four trip the same row, through nonbasic-land sweepers: Mirror Mastery with Ruination, Nature of the Beast with From the Ashes, and Guided by Nature with Wave of Vitriol, in its 2014 box and its 2017 reprint. Whether those are what Wizards means by mass land denial is a fair argument.

That 2025 bar looks like a trend and the 2026 bar looks like a correction. We would not read it that way yet, for two reasons. First, 2025 is 14 decks, and two of its six are the decks the list moved under. Second, 2026’s new cards have had the least time to reach Commander Spellbook, so its combo count is the most likely to rise. Wizards said of Abzan Armor that it was finalized before brackets existed, and lead times like that could explain some of the earlier bars, but nothing here proves the design changed. A rerun next year, once the catalogue catches up, is what would settle it.

Modern Horizons 3, the set Wizards keeps naming as the outlier, sits just outside our window: three of its four decks read 2, and Creative Energy reads 3 through Farewell and two two-card lines.

What to do with your own precon

The table describes the natural weight class of each deck as printed. It stops being true the moment you change a card: the Wretched Ranks upgrade guide walks through one deck that stays a 2 on paper while plainly playing above it, and names the single cards that would move it.

Two practical uses follow. If your table sorts games by bracket, a 2 here lets you say that nothing in the box is on the list, then describe how the deck actually wins. A 3 here tells you which card or pair to mention before the game starts, which is what brackets were built for: a pregame conversation, not a verdict.

Deck Stats shows this same estimate for any Commander list, with the cards behind each row. The guide to reading Deck Stats explains the rest of the panel.

Browse the Commander precons — Every list above is in the catalog except Star Trek’s, not yet added. Copy one into your account and Deck Stats runs the estimate on it. An account is needed to save decks.

Wizards floated that idea in its February 2025 launch post, and has since cut precons out of the definition, which is a different direction. Until a box says otherwise, the number is ours, the floor is a floor, and the conversation is yours.

May your pregame talk be short and honest, and may it happen before anyone taps six for Farewell.