Energy RefractorEnergy Refractor | art by Maria Poliakova

Earlier this year, we replaced Synergy with Lift on /cards pages. Today, we're excited to roll out the same change on /commanders, /tags and /combos pages!

What's new?

Synergy is being replaced with Lift. Why? Mainly two reasons:

1. Mathematical Basis

Synergy had no mathematical basis. We invented it a long time ago and the results seemed good (or at least interesting?), so we didn’t ask questions!

Later on we hired our data scientist Julia, and she asked many questions. After a thorough investigation, she found a similar metric with a real mathematical basis: Lift.

2 . Finding Hidden Gems

Synergy puts too much emphasis on popularity (i.e. inclusion). This often results in High Synergy sections littered with less-than-interesting staples.

Sure, PropagandaPropaganda is good in Y’shtola, Night’s BlessedY’shtola, Night’s Blessed, but calling it high synergy is a bit of a stretch. Plus, it would’ve been near the top of the page anyway.

High Synergy -> Mildly High Lift

Lift, on the other hand, excels at finding hidden gems, i.e. high-synergy cards that may not be popular, but are proportionally more popular in this context. 

Mild Synergy -> High Lift

For instance Tandem Lookout, a consistent draw engine in Y'shtolaY'shtola.

What is Lift?

Simply put, Lift is like Synergy, but division instead of subtraction.

Note that synergy was a percentage centered around 0, but Lift is a ratio centered around 1.

Technical Details

To review last year's article, lift is defined as: how often two cards are run together, relative to what random chance expects. The formula below demonstrates what this means on commander pages.

However, we can simplify this by cancelling two terms, and moving one.

Now we’ve arrived at a formula that is simply a ratio of two familiar terms. The numerator is the inclusion rate, which you see under every card.

The denominator is the inclusion rate in potential decks, referring to a card’s popularity in the larger dataset.

Check out the shift from Synergy to Lift for more technical details. And stay tuned for an upcoming interview article with some of EDHREC's developers and Julia, our Duchess of Data!