<a class="edhrecp__link-a" content="Lorehold, the Historian|sos|284" href="#" target="_blank">Lorehold, the Historian</a> | art by<a href="https://raymondswanland.com/"> Raymond Swanland</a>
<a href="https://edhrec.com/articles/changelog-replacing-synergy-with-lift-on-edhrecs-card-pages">On October 1, 2026</a>, EDHREC debuted Lift on <a href="https://edhrec.com/commanders">/commanders</a> and <a href="https://edhrec.com/tags">/tags</a> pages, after getting them on /cards pages back in December.
<h2>Meet the EDHREC development team behind Lift</h2>
We checked in with a segment of<a href="https://spacecowmedia.com/about"> EDHREC's development team</a> to see how they integrated lift into the /commanders and /tags pages for this new feature rollout, as well as their individual takeaways for what this means for EDHREC's users.
<h3>Keattz, EDHREC Co-founder and Lead Software Engineer</h3>
Alongside <a href="https://edhrec.com/articles/edhrec-founder-don-miner-to-speak-at-mv-con-2025">our CEO Donald Miner</a>, Keattz helped build up the bulk of EDHREC in its early days to the website you see today.
<a href="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/keattz2.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-194720" src="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/keattz2.png" alt="keattz of edhrec" width="800" height="800" srcset="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/keattz2.png 800w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/keattz2-300x300.png 300w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/keattz2-150x150.png 150w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/keattz2-768x768.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></a>
Synergy scores have been on EDHREC as long as EDHREC has existed. What's it like pulling out a number that's been on the page that long?
Given how long it’s been there, I expect this change will shock some users. People are used to it being there, even if they weren’t using it for much. But the main sentiment was that it was confusing, especially when not-particularly-synergistic staples were marked as “high synergy.”
Once you spend some time with Lift, I think you’ll find it better for most tasks, or at least equal. For example it is way better at finding hidden gems (Synergy weighed popularity too heavily). And you can still use it to weed out staples — it’s just the scale is centered around 1, instead of 0.
We've seen many changes in features to the site in the last year, including implementing Lift to replace Synergy. When you look at EDHREC in 2027, what does it look like for users?
2026 was primarily a year of rebuilding. We rebuilt our data pipeline for big data, and cleaned up years of tech debt along the way. We’ve also been grinding away at some beefy UI improvements, more details on that soon.
In 2027, you can expect a faster cadence of new feature releases. Our dev team is bigger and better than ever. With our rebuilding phase complete, we’ll finally be able to release some long-awaited features that were held up by our old tech infrastructure.
<h3>Julia Maddalena, Data Scientist</h3>
Our "Duchess of Data" Julia is the mastermind<a href="https://edhrec.com/articles/from-synergy-to-lift-the-math-behind-edhrecs-new-era"> behind the switch from Synergy to Lift back in December</a>, creating the original writeup and assisting our developers with its continued implementation, as well as<a href="https://edhrec.com/articles/author/juliam"> assistant co-writer for the weekly Fire and Ice series</a>.
<a href="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-scaled.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-194719" src="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-1024x755.jpg" alt="julia maddalena of edhrec" width="1024" height="755" srcset="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-1024x755.jpg 1024w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-300x221.jpg 300w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-768x566.jpg 768w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-1536x1133.jpg 1536w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/SCMBeachHeadshots-01-2048x1510.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
Your original article pointed out that commander-card synergy wasn't nearly as broken as card-card synergy; the two metrics mostly agreed on direction. So why was it worth replacing anyway?
Even though generally speaking, negative synergy commander-card pairs have lift &lt; 1 and positive synergy pairs have lift &gt; 1, the magnitude changes which cards get surfaced at the top. As Keattz mentioned, synergy surfaced popular cards, whereas lift surfaces “hidden gems” or card pairings that are unique to that commander regardless of their baseline popularity. Furthermore, it is difficult to defend synergy mathematically, and it improves the user experience to maintain similar metrics between /commander and /cards pages. 
What made /commander and /tags pages the hard version of this problem? 
Commander pages are more complex under the hood because of the ability to filter on brackets, budgets, and tags. The calculations for lift must be done for every combination of these, which as you can imagine, requires a lot of compute power. However, we believed this was worth the investment so that users can see cards that are specific to the deck type that they are interested in. 
What's one thing you want users to know about this change that they probably don't?
Synergy served up a different set of popular cards than the “top cards” section, whereas lift is showing niche cards that appear with this commander at a dramatically higher rate than with other commanders in general. When you first land on a commander page, you may see high lift cards that are not relevant to the deck theme you are building, but that is easily changed by selecting the deck tags, for example, that are relevant to you. 
<h3>Raph, Data Engineer</h3>
Raph is a data and database engineer for EDHREC, having been with us for the last three years to help process and dig through chunks of our database to help us ship new and improved features.
<a href="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NGC7293-2004-Helix-Nebula-Wikipedia-10-09-2026_10_45_AM.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone size-large wp-image-194727" src="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NGC7293-2004-Helix-Nebula-Wikipedia-10-09-2026_10_45_AM-934x1024.png" alt="" width="934" height="1024" srcset="https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NGC7293-2004-Helix-Nebula-Wikipedia-10-09-2026_10_45_AM-934x1024.png 934w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NGC7293-2004-Helix-Nebula-Wikipedia-10-09-2026_10_45_AM-274x300.png 274w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NGC7293-2004-Helix-Nebula-Wikipedia-10-09-2026_10_45_AM-768x842.png 768w, https://cloudflare.edhrec.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/NGC7293-2004-Helix-Nebula-Wikipedia-10-09-2026_10_45_AM.png 1022w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 934px) 100vw, 934px" /></a>
/cards pages were released with lift in December of last year, what took so long to get it over to /commander, /tags and /combos?
Compute. Our Postgres instance can handle a lot, but what we were starting to ask of it in terms of compute was getting out of hand. We have been very busy behind the scenes moving our data pipelines into AWS and using the big data technologies there to crunch the data faster and more efficiently. 
Every filter combination on a commander page is its own slice of the data pie. What is the most rewarding part of being able to finally parse the data?
The filters are a great way to slice and dice the data we have. Don’t want to see all those bracket 4 and 5 decks? Pick a bracket from 2 or 3. Want to see decks made with only a specific tag under a commander? Pick a tag filter. Want to get complex and require a certain number of creatures or instants? Use the advanced filters! The most rewarding part is enabling users by giving them flexibility to see the slice of data they want. 
<h3>Synergizing With the New Lift</h3>
Of course, there were other staff members who helped directly or indirectly in shaping what Lift looks like on commander and tags pages, and we’d like to shout them all out as well for their awesome work in wrangling the data and details. And, we hope you’re excited to see what this new implementation of Lift brings to your EDHREC experience! And of course, stay tuned for even more insights into the folks working on EDHREC's newest features!

keattz

An Interview with the EDHREC Dev Team on Lift Scores