(Sowing Salt | Art by Hideaki Takamura)

Sowing Salt

In each of the last several years, EDHREC has run a Salt Vote, in which the community is invited to decide, on a 0-4 scale, just how "salty" each card is. The aggregated scores, across millions of votes, are attributed to cards as a "Salt Score", and you can learn a little more about those scores and see the Top 100 Saltiest Cards on this page.

The EDHRECast has an episode in which they discuss the saltiest Commander decks, and Luminarch made some really excellent graphics detailing the saltiest cards in different categories. I highly recommend checking out both to get a sense of what voters think of as salty. Generally speaking, it's mostly cards that don't let opponents play.

I thought I would take a different approach and look at the Saltiest [Things] - by looking at the average Salt Scores of cards within each category.

Saltiest Sets

First up, the Saltiest Sets, looking at the average Salt Score of cards that were first printed in a given release.

Clicking the set name will take you to a Scryfall search that lists cards in the relevant category. A couple of things stand out from this list:

• The Secret Lair Drop Salt is driven mostly by the mechanically unique commanders from the Walking Dead series. Players were very unhappy with the idea that those cards and mechanics would only appear in a form tied to a specific, non-Magic IP, and only be available in the Secret Lair product (a decision which Wizards has since walked back).
• New Phyrexia featured a number of cards with the salt-inducing Infect mechanic, along with Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite.
• Alpha just has a lot of plain ol' busted cards, as does Urza's Saga.

Saltiest Subtypes

What about subtypes? The subtypes you most immediately think of are creature subtypes, like Elf, Goblin, Vampire, and so on, but planeswalkers have subtypes that align with their name, and other card types have subtypes like Aura, Equipment, Vehicle, Lesson, Food, etc. Before looking at the list, can you guess what the saltiest subtypes are?

Praetors top the list; they're a bunch of bombs that really benefit their controllers and decimate opponents. Then there's a long list of planeswalkers, led by three of the most notorious: Teferi, Oko, and Narset.

Curses make sense as the saltiest enchantment type, since they explicitly single out one player. A little further down the list, we see a run of very imposing creatures: Gods, Incarnations, Eldrazi, and... Slugs? I guess Toxrill, the Corrosive is at play there. If you scroll down to the Sodium-free end of the list, you'll see that Deserts, Crocodiles, and Camels are among the least offensive, so your River Nile theme deck should be good to go.

Saltiest Mechanics

The next table is a little more specific, as it focuses on the average Salt score of cards with various keyword mechanics.

If you see an opponent play creature with Annihilator, it usually means you're losing; there's a reason people are always trying to cheat those onto the battlefield. Eminence gets votes as unpalatable because it diminishes the importance of actually casting and controlling your commander. Miracle tends to feel pretty cheap and luck-driven (which it is). The distaste for Council's Dilemma is almost entirely driven by Expropriate. And of course, Infect mostly speaks for itself.

Saltiest Mana Costs

Moving to a slightly more abstract dimension, consider the saltiest mana costs:

Most of the top of the list are hard cards to cast, driven by one or two cards in each category. Scrolling down a bit, you can see that opponents don't like to see , , or anything with in the cost. can sometimes indicate your opponent is ramping really quickly, and seems to be a sweet spot where a lot of unpleasant blue cards find themselves.

If you don't want to offend, look to the bottom of the list and consider playing (with one notable exception), , (sorry Boros), , or /.

Saltiest Scryfall Tags

The next two tables take advantage of the incredible Scryfall Tagger project. It's a huge, crowdsourced folksonomy in which cards are tagged with abilities, mechanics, or other aspects that aren't easily parsed through Oracle text search.

The top of this list is essentially a guide to unwritten-rule violations and ways to alienate your playgroup: land destruction, extra turns, sweepers, counterspells, and stax pieces. If you want to be invited back, consider avoiding these.

On the friendlier end of the list are a bunch of obviously ineffective cards, or cards that are limited in scope. Planeswalker sidekicks don't see much play outside of precons for a good reason (although I would love to see a deck that really used them in an interesting way). Stuff that scales-with-multiple is generally not an effective strategy in Commander, a singleton format. French vanillas are, with a few exceptions, pretty pedestrian, and a little color change doesn't seem to scare anyone.

Saltiest Artistic Elements

Finally, and also thanks to the Tagger project, what are the art elements your opponents are most likely to become incensed over?

The top of this list is mostly hilariously self-explanatory: nothing good seems to come out of Tolaria or New Phyrexia, Bolas Horns, or larger-than-landscape monsters, all of which are usually major threats. Wizards, with their spirals, orbs, and blue magic, are usually trying to prevent you from doing what you want. Oddly, you could make a pretty threatening deck with nothing but illustrations featuring children!

On the other end of the list, you're not scaring anyone with your Selesnya combination Treefolk/Centaur tribal deck.

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Thoughts? Questions? Critiques? Suggestions?

Let me hear them! I think we've spilled enough salt here to tide us over until next year, but I would love to hear about how you think about salt when deckbuilding. Do you care about alienating your opponents in your quest to win, or are you trying to maximize the collective fun of the group? Is it hard to optimize across two (or more) dimensions simultaneously? If you've built any particularly salty or low-sodium decks, I'd love to see the lists and hear about your experiences! As always, if you aren’t already, please follow me on Twitter.