Origins of the Competitive Pauper Commander Decklist Database (cPDH DDB)
The DDB, now cPDH Library, began in May 2021 as a means to gain a broader community insight on what was considered to be “competitive” Pauper Commander. Other efforts within the community at the time attempted to leverage the singular expertise of a few select individuals – and that didn’t seem quite right.
So, we reached out to a number of other brewers within the community to develop a broader consensus moving forward – and the infamous Google Spreadsheet DDB was born! After a few months of discussions and relationship building with Timmyt1000™ and BudgetBrews.club, we stood up the first official DDB Selection Committee, and the rest was history. Under that system, the cPDH Decklist Database thrived as a volunteer organized, compendium of player submitted decks where the decks adhered to a list of standards for public consumption.
By the beginning of 2023, there was a sea change in the way the public was using the DDB as a resource. It was no longer treated as the go-to resource for the most contemporary decks being played in meta, but rather, as a long form resource for sample cPDH decklists. It only made sense at that point to reconceptualize our efforts and rebrand the resource into the cPDH Library.
“Where’s competitive edge in that,” you might ask? This is why we love you… In order to best represent the data collecting function of our metagame analysis project, the new landing page for the cPDH Library features a small compendium of the most successful Commanders based on their recorded performance data. As folks play those Commanders and submit more and more match data, that list will morph and grow in kind to reflect which decks are truly best within the format.
Origins of cPDH.guide
After about a year of community-based analysis on competitive archetypes, commander and color viability, etc., we still felt like we were missing something – something critical. By that point, we had heavily discussed (and speculated) on the effects of various archetypes on the larger meta, but we had no real way of proving those claims.
Thus, in May 2022, we were the first to make publicly available all of our gameplay data from games played within the Tryhards Community (now, Common Connoisseurs) – and it exploded from there. For the first time ever, brewers were incorporating meta trends and analysis into the construction of their decks, in real time. It was such a boon to the meta, we wanted to more widely distribute the data in an effort to assist the cPDH Community, at large.
Due to the Tryhards Community rebranding efforts in January 2023, this presented an opportunity to stand up cPDH.guide as it’s own entity. Thus, a dedicated Discord server was established and functional team members put in place.
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