Glossary

Every term mtgmatic uses, in plain English.

Bracket: Commander's power scale, 1 to 5, from a themed Exhibition deck up to tournament cEDH. It's how you tell the table what kind of game to expect. Brackets are self-assigned: we estimate one from the cards a deck plays, and the owner has the final say.
Card condition: How worn a card is, on the five-step scale the whole trade uses: near mint (NM), lightly played (LP), moderately played (MP), heavily played (HP) and damaged (DMG). It changes what a card is worth, never what it does — a heavily played Sol Ring casts exactly like a mint one. Exports from other sites carry these same codes, which is why we store them.
Card count: How many cards the deck holds. Commander is exactly 100 with your commander among them; the 60-card formats set a minimum and let you go over.
Category: A label you put on a card yourself, like Ramp, Card Draw or Wincon, as opposed to something the card already is, like its type or its mana value. A card can carry several; the first one decides which section of the decklist it is filed under. Nothing checks them and nothing is required: they are how you say what a card is FOR.
Cheapest printing: Most cards have been printed in several sets at different prices. These numbers come from the cheapest normal printing we can find, which may not be the one pictured.
Color identity: Every mana symbol on a card, including the ones in its rules text, sets its color identity. In Commander, each card in your deck must fit inside your commander's color identity.
Colour balance: Your deck’s colour requirements beside what its mana base can actually produce. The bar is the share of coloured mana symbols in your cards’ costs; the tick is the share of your mana sources that make that colour. When the tick sits well left of the bar, you are asking for a colour more often than you can reliably make it, which is the usual reason a list that reads fine plays badly.
Commander: The legendary creature your deck is built around. It starts in the command zone, you can cast it whenever you could cast a creature, and it returns there each time it dies.
Cost to complete: What you would still spend to finish this deck, counting only the cards you don't already have in your collection.
Deck value: What the whole deck would cost to buy today, using the cheapest normal printing of each card.
Draw odds: The chance of having drawn at least so many of a kind of card after seeing a given number of cards. Seven is your opening hand, eight is after one draw step, and so on. It is worked out with the hypergeometric distribution, which is drawing without putting cards back, and it counts your library only, so in Commander that is 99 cards and not 100.
EDHREC rank: How popular the card is in Commander decks worldwide, according to EDHREC. A lower number means more people play it.
Keywords: Shorthand for rules a card would otherwise have to spell out. “Flying”, “Trample” and “Ward” each stand for a paragraph of rules text. Tap any keyword to read what it does.
Legality: Whether the deck follows its format's rules: deck size, how many copies of a card you may run, the banned list, and in Commander your commander's colour identity.
Mana cost: What you pay to cast the card. A colored pip needs one mana of that color; a number means that many mana of any kind.
Mana curve: How many cards you have at each mana value. A smooth curve means you usually have something worth casting on every turn.
Mana value: The total mana a card costs, whatever the colors. A cost of {2}{G}{G} has a mana value of 4.
Maybeboard: A shortlist. Cards you're considering but haven't committed to, which don't count toward your 100.
Playable vs AI: How many of this deck's cards our rules engine can play right now. The card pool grows every week, and a deck needs all 100 supported before you can take it into a game.
Power / toughness: How much damage a creature deals in combat, and how much damage it can take in one turn before it dies.
Proxy: A printed stand-in for a card you don't own, for playtesting at home. Proxies aren't legal in sanctioned tournaments and must never be sold.
Rarity: How often the card turned up in booster packs. It drives price, not power, and plenty of commons are Commander staples.
Sideboard: Cards kept beside the deck rather than in it. Commander doesn't use a sideboard in official play, so these never count toward your 100. They're the cards you swap in between games at the kitchen table.
Tokens: Cards that create tokens need those tokens present at the table. This is every token this deck can make, so you know what to bring.
Type line: What the card is. Its card types come first, then any subtypes after the dash.