Drag entries into a tier, or select one with the keyboard and press a number key from 1 to 5 to place it. Your list is saved in this browser only.
How to use it
Drag any entry into a tier row. If you prefer the keyboard, tab to an entry and press a number: 1 for S, 2 for A, 3 for B, 4 for C, 5 for D, and 0 to send it back to unranked.
Type into the box to add your own cards or decks. The list is seeded with the Final Fantasy legendary creatures so there is something to move around immediately, and Clear all wipes the board if you would rather start empty.
Your list saves to this browser. It is not uploaded, not attached to an account, and not shareable by link, which also means nobody else can see it.
Pick your criterion before you rank anything
Most tier lists are useless, and they are useless for one reason: the person making the list never decided what they were measuring.
“Best” is not a criterion. These are:
Raw power in a vacuum. How strong is the card if mana were free and it always resolved. Useful for Commander discussions, misleading for constructed.
Power for the cost. Rate, which is what actually decides constructed playability. A hugely powerful eight mana card and a very efficient two mana card can both be S tier here, for opposite reasons.
Format impact. How much does this card change what other people build. Some cards are not individually strong but warp a format by existing.
Beginner friendliness. How easy is this to pilot correctly. Completely different ordering from every criterion above, and the most useful one for a list aimed at new players.
Budget value. Power per dollar. This produces the most practically useful list for most readers and almost nobody makes it.
Pick one, say which it is, and rank consistently against it. A list that silently switches criterion halfway down is why tier list arguments go nowhere.
The mistakes that make a list wrong
Ranking by memory of a card being good. Formats change. A card that was S tier three years ago may be unplayable now, and lists tend to preserve reputations long after the reality moved.
Ignoring the format. A Commander tier list and a Modern tier list of the same cards look almost nothing alike, because Commander is singleton, multiplayer, and forty life. Always state the format.
Over-populating S. If a third of your entries are S tier, the tier communicates nothing. A useful S tier is small, usually under ten percent of the list.
Ranking cards you have not played against. Reading a card and playing against a card produce different assessments, and the gap is largest for cards whose strength is in how they constrain opponents rather than in what they do.
Confusing popularity with power. Play rate measures accessibility, familiarity, and price as much as it measures strength. A cheap, easy card is played more than a stronger, expensive, harder one.
Where tier lists are genuinely useful
Worth defending the format, because the criticisms above could read as dismissing the whole idea.
Tier lists work well for:
Limited pick orders. In draft you make a decision in seconds with incomplete information, and a rough tier ranking of a set is exactly the right tool. This is the use case tier lists were effectively invented for.
Narrowing a large pool. When there are two hundred options and you need twenty, sorting into rough buckets is far more tractable than producing a full ordering.
Communicating a judgment fast. A tier list conveys relative assessment across many items more efficiently than paragraphs would.
They work badly for anything where the correct answer depends on the rest of your deck, which is most constructed deckbuilding decisions. A card that is C tier in general can be the single best card in a specific shell, and no tier list captures that.
A practical method
If you want a list that holds up, this order works.
- Write your criterion down in one sentence, and the format it applies to.
- Dump everything into unranked first. Do not rank as you go.
- Pull out the obvious S and D tiers. The extremes are easy and give you anchors.
- Sort the middle against the anchors, not against each other. “Is this closer to my S example or my D example” is a much easier question than a full pairwise comparison.
- Check the S tier is small. If it is not, your criterion is too generous.
- Sleep on it and revisit. The entries you move on the second pass are the ones you were ranking by reputation rather than by your stated criterion.