Guide

EDHREC salt score explained + saltiest cards

EDHREC's salt score rates how much Commander players dislike facing a card, on a scale from 0 (not salty) to 4 (most salty). It is the average of the votes cast in an annual community survey run by EDHREC: a measure of annoyance, not of power, which EDHREC itself calls “mostly for fun”. Below: what it measures and what it does not, how the survey runs, how Lotus Vault uses salt, and the 100 saltiest cards legal in Commander, with their roles and cheapest known price.

This guide was written entirely by AI, from Lotus Vault's code and the official sources listed at the end.

What the salt score measures

EDHREC, the Commander recommendation site, defines the score in three sentences: “Once a year, EDHREC surveys the community to rate the ‘saltiness’ of every card in the database. Anyone may participate in grading cards on a scale from 0 (not salty) to 4 (most salty). The resulting salt score is the average of all the votes a card received.” Its help pages ask the question the same way: voters are shown a card and asked, from 0 to 4, how salty that card makes them.

“Salt”, in player slang, is the frustration a card causes when it resolves against you, and the score puts a number on that feeling. When EDHREC launched the feature in May 2019, it called the result “a survey of moods, not a lab result”, and labelled its scale from 0, “sodium-free”, to 4, “drinking a bottle of soy sauce while swimming in the Dead Sea”. That 2019 launch drew over 500,000 votes in three days; no vote count was found for the recent surveys, so their size is unknown.

Each vote is a personal reaction, so a high score records that voters, on average, dislike facing a card — not why they do. And because the score is a plain average, it hides how many people voted on a given card and how far they disagreed. EDHREC's guide is candid about the whole exercise: “salt scores are mostly for fun.”

What salt does not measure

A number attached to a card is easy to read as a verdict on its strength. The salt score is not one:

Not power or win rate. When EDHREC launched the score, it was explicit that salt does not track win percentage, competitive viability or how fast a card closes out a game. A strong card few people mind facing can score low, and a slow card that frustrates the whole table can score high.
Not the brackets or the Game Changers. EDHREC's guide puts it plainly: “there is no connection between the salt scores and Commander Brackets or the Game Changers list.” The Commander brackets are Wizards of the Coast's scale for matching decks of similar power, and the Game Changers are a list Wizards maintains; neither is built from salt votes.
Not a ban list. A high score is an opinion, not a rule. Every card in the table at the end of this guide is legal in Commander, the saltiest included.
Not EDHREC's synergy score. Synergy, another EDHREC figure, measures how much more often a card is played with one commander than in decks of its colours in general. It has nothing to do with salt.

How the annual survey works

The vote happens once a year. Anyone can take part; each card's score is the average of its votes on the 0–4 scale, and EDHREC publishes the results as a ranking of the saltiest cards. Between two surveys the scores do not move, so the numbers you see today are a snapshot of one vote, not a running tally.

When this guide was updated, the latest survey was the 2025 one. Voting ran from September 29 to October 3, 2025, and EDHREC published the results on October 13, 2025. Stasis (3.06) and Winter Orb (2.96) kept the top two spots, both slightly down on 2024; Vivi Ornitier, a Final Fantasy card new to the survey, entered at third; Tergrid, God of Fright, Rhystic Study and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale climbed to fourth, fifth and sixth. Those are the scores EDHREC's ranking still showed on September 26, 2026.

EDHREC announced its 2025 vote in the last days of September, and when this guide was last checked, on September 26, 2026, no 2026 survey had been announced. Scores do shift from one survey to the next — Winter Orb lost 0.15 between 2024 and 2025 — so a card's salt is best read as a dated opinion.

How Lotus Vault uses salt

Lotus Vault stores one salt score per card in its catalogue: the score from EDHREC's 2025 survey, the latest when this guide was updated, loaded from EDHREC's own saltiest-cards data, which covers some 32,000 cards. A card absent from that data scores 0, and so does a card that has not been looked up yet. When a deck sent to Analyse holds cards never looked up, it asks EDHREC for their current scores on the spot. From there, salt feeds five things:

The deck report. Analyse and the deck builder's statistics show the deck total — every card's salt added up, each copy counted — the average per card, and the saltiest cards: every card scoring 0.5 or more, highest first, up to twelve. Scores are coloured yellow from 0.5, orange from 1 and red from 2.
The power level. Salt is one of the eight criteria behind the power level out of 10, and the lightest: 0.5 of 11 points of weight. It reads the deck total ÷ 6, capped at 10, so a total of 60 or more gives the criterion its full score. The total is used rather than the average, for the reason given in the next section.
The bracket estimate. For a deck with no Game Changer, mass land denial, extra turn or two-card combo, and at most two tutors, a deck total of 25 or more is one of five tuning signals, and with three of the five the deck reads as Bracket 3 rather than Bracket 2. That threshold is Lotus Vault's own judgement, not an EDHREC rule — the brackets guide explains the other four signals.
The playtester's bots. The three bots of the solo playtester are scripted to read salt, from a separate, shorter list of scores built into the playtester rather than the catalogue, so the two can disagree on a card. The average salt of the cards on the battlefield sets a threat level — low below 0.8, medium from 0.8, high from 1.5, critical from 2.5 — that reorders what a bot casts: land-fetching ramp ranks higher while the threat is low, removal climbs with each level, and board wipes jump ahead at high and critical. A bot attacks the opponent it rates most threatening, mostly by the salt of that player's board. In the current version, though, the bots are dealt no cards, so this reading has nothing to act on yet; the playtest guide describes what they actually do.
Which card pages ask to be indexed. Every card has a public page, but only some ask search engines to index them: the card must be legal in Commander, have its rules text and a known price, and be a Game Changer, a possible commander, or a card with a salt score of at least 0.3 and at least one role. The other pages stay open to everyone; they are simply not put forward to search engines.

Reading a deck's salt total

Read the total before the average. A Commander deck holds 100 cards, so the average is the total divided by about a hundred, and the sixty or so neutral cards every deck runs hold it down: it barely moves between a gentle deck and a salty one. The total keeps the difference visible. It is the same idea as Archidekt's “Salt Sum”, which EDHREC's guide describes as the total of every card's salt score in a deck.

Read it with the list of saltiest cards. A total of 25 can be ten cards at 2.5 or fifty at 0.5, and those are very different games for the other players. The list shows which one you are looking at.
There is no official scale for a deck. The survey rates cards, not decks: a deck total is a sum that a deck tool computes, with no official scale behind it. The 25 used by the bracket estimate is a Lotus Vault tuning mark, not a limit; comparing your own decks with each other tells you more.
A zero is not always a verdict. A card EDHREC has no score for reads 0, and so does a card not looked up yet. Neither adds anything to the total, so if Analyse says some scores are still loading, run it again a few seconds later before reading the number.

Salt is best used to open a conversation, not to settle one. A high total does not make a deck stronger or illegal; it points at the cards other players are most likely to groan at, which is worth mentioning before the game, alongside the deck's bracket.

What the saltiest cards have in common

Read down EDHREC's ranking and most of the top twenty, as it stood on September 26, 2026, share one trait: they restrict what the other players can do. Stasis, Winter Orb and Static Orb limit what untaps each turn; Armageddon, Obliterate, Devastation and Sunder take every land off the battlefield; Rhystic Study and Smothering Tithe tax opponents' spells and card draws; Drannith Magistrate stops opponents from casting spells from anywhere but their hand, commanders included; and Grand Arbiter Augustin IV makes their spells cost more. Others, like Thassa's Oracle, can end the game on the spot.

The Roles column of the table reads the same cards through Lotus Vault's role tags: up to four per card, taken from the Scryfall Tagger, a community tagging project, and drawn from a fixed list — ramp, removal, board wipe, draw, tutor, counterspell, tax and discard, among others. The line above the table names the five roles that come up most often among the hundred, counted from the list itself. A card with no role from that list shows a dash; the list has no role for locking the table, for instance.

The 100 saltiest cards legal in Commander

The table below lists the 100 cards legal in Commander with the highest salt score in Lotus Vault's catalogue, whose scores come from EDHREC's 2025 survey. Cards banned in Commander are left out, and so are cards with no score. Each row gives the card's type, salt, roles and the price of its cheapest known printing, and links to the card's own page; click the Card, Salt or Price heading to sort the table. The date under the table is the last time a salt score was refreshed in the catalogue, not the date of EDHREC's vote. For a card outside the hundred, search for it in Explore: every card page shows its EDHREC salt.

Most common roles among these cards: Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Removal, Draw

	Type		Roles
Stasis	Enchantment	3.06	—	€7.96
Winter Orb	Artifact	2.96	—	€8.52
Vivi Ornitier	Legendary Creature — Wizard	2.81	Mana dork	€32.29
Tergrid, God of Fright // Tergrid's Lantern	Legendary Creature — God // Legendary Artifact	2.80	Land ramp, Reanimate, Creature removal, Artifact removal	€15.21
Rhystic Study	Enchantment	2.73	Draw, Tax	€36.73
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale	Legendary Land	2.68	Board wipe, Creature removal, Tax	€2,755.24
Armageddon	Sorcery	2.67	Board wipe, Removal	€4.80
Static Orb	Artifact	2.62	—	€3.64
Vorinclex, Voice of Hunger	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	2.61	Ramp	€7.10
Thassa's Oracle	Creature — Merfolk Wizard	2.59	Win condition	€13.62
Grand Arbiter Augustin IV	Legendary Creature — Human Advisor	2.58	—	€10.55
Smothering Tithe	Enchantment	2.58	Ramp, Tax	€35.88
Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	2.57	Draw, Discard	€8.84
The One Ring	Legendary Artifact	2.55	Draw, Protection	€98.53
Humility	Enchantment	2.51	Creature removal	€52.51
Bilbo's Gambit	Instant	2.50	Counterspell	€1.44
Proft, Sinister Mastermind	Legendary Creature — Human Rogue	2.50	Creature removal	€0.04
Samut, Tyrant of Naktamun	Legendary Creature — Human Wizard	2.50	—	€3.79
Yuriko, Blade of the Mighty	Legendary Creature — Human Samurai	2.50	—	€0.11
Drannith Magistrate	Creature — Human Wizard	2.46	—	€9.88
Expropriate	Sorcery	2.45	Extra turn, Land ramp	€11.49
Sunder	Instant	2.44	Board wipe, Bounce	€1.64
Obliterate	Sorcery	2.42	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal	€1.39
Devastation	Sorcery	2.41	Board wipe, Creature removal	€13.75
Ravages of War	Sorcery	2.39	Board wipe, Removal	€19.56
Cyclonic Rift	Instant	2.36	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€23.48
Jokulhaups	Sorcery	2.36	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal	€2.47
Apocalypse	Sorcery	2.34	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€3.73
Opposition Agent	Creature — Human Rogue	2.32	Tutor	€23.97
Urza, Lord High Artificer	Legendary Creature — Human Artificer	2.31	Ramp	€14.86
Fierce Guardianship	Instant	2.30	Counterspell	€53.02
Hokori, Dust Drinker	Legendary Creature — Spirit	2.27	—	€0.90
Back to Basics	Enchantment	2.23	—	€4.57
Nether Void	World Enchantment	2.23	Counterspell, Tax	€385.56
Jin-Gitaxias, Progress Tyrant	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	2.22	Counterspell, Copy spell	€7.82
Braids, Cabal Minion	Legendary Creature — Human Minion	2.21	Creature removal, Artifact removal	€0.57
Worldfire	Sorcery	2.20	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€15.50
Toxrill, the Corrosive	Legendary Creature — Slug Horror	2.19	Board wipe, Draw, Creature removal	€13.61
Aura Shards	Enchantment	2.18	Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€14.48
Gaea's Cradle	Legendary Land	2.17	Ramp	€272.97
Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy	Legendary Creature — Human Druid	2.15	Ramp	€11.83
Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow	Legendary Creature — Human Ninja	2.15	Bounce	€2.47
Blood Moon	Enchantment	2.13	—	€6.13
Farewell	Sorcery	2.13	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€3.81
Teferi's Protection	Instant	2.13	Protection	€28.61
Rising Waters	Enchantment	2.11	—	€0.53
Decree of Annihilation	Sorcery	2.10	Board wipe, Draw, Creature removal, Artifact removal	€0.89
Smokestack	Artifact	2.08	Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€1.00
Winter Moon	Artifact	2.08	—	€0.75
Orcish Bowmasters	Creature — Orc Archer	2.07	Creature removal	€36.61
Edgar Markov	Legendary Creature — Vampire Knight	2.05	—	€26.50
Tectonic Break	Sorcery	2.05	Board wipe, Removal	€4.58
Sen Triplets	Legendary Artifact Creature — Human Wizard	2.04	—	€3.27
Warp World	Sorcery	2.04	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€0.37
Emrakul, the Promised End	Legendary Creature — Eldrazi	2.03	Extra turn	€22.57
Sheoldred, the Apocalypse	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	2.03	Lifegain	€76.41
Scrambleverse	Sorcery	2.02	—	€2.04
Thieves' Auction	Sorcery	2.02	—	€1.54
Force of Will	Instant	2.01	Counterspell	€17.17
Narset, Parter of Veils	Legendary Planeswalker — Narset	2.01	—	€0.75
Glacial Chasm	Land	1.99	—	€17.49
Ruination	Sorcery	1.99	Board wipe, Removal	€1.34
Mindslaver	Legendary Artifact	1.98	—	€1.28
Epicenter	Sorcery	1.97	Board wipe, Removal	€1.42
The Ur-Dragon	Legendary Creature — Dragon Avatar	1.97	Land ramp, Draw	€32.69
Notion Thief	Creature — Human Rogue	1.96	Draw	€1.14
Void Winnower	Creature — Eldrazi	1.96	—	€13.85
Jodah, the Unifier	Legendary Creature — Human Wizard	1.94	Anthem	€1.38
Force of Negation	Instant	1.91	Counterspell	€51.48
Storm, Force of Nature	Legendary Creature — Mutant Hero	1.91	Copy spell	€4.03
Wake of Destruction	Sorcery	1.91	Removal	€1.36
Deadpool, Trading Card	Legendary Creature — Mutant Mercenary Hero	1.90	Draw	€12.55
Mana Drain	Instant	1.89	Counterspell, Ramp	€43.96
Blightsteel Colossus	Artifact Creature — Phyrexian Golem	1.88	Recursion	€26.87
Dictate of Erebos	Enchantment	1.88	Creature removal	€13.75
Boil	Instant	1.87	Board wipe, Removal	€0.24
Winota, Joiner of Forces	Legendary Creature — Human Warrior	1.85	Protection	€1.97
Global Ruin	Sorcery	1.84	Board wipe, Removal	€0.48
Mana Breach	Enchantment	1.84	Bounce	€0.38
Acid Rain	Sorcery	1.83	Board wipe, Removal	€82.19
Catastrophe	Sorcery	1.83	Board wipe, Creature removal	€1.99
Emrakul, the World Anew	Legendary Creature — Eldrazi	1.83	—	€5.45
Time Stretch	Sorcery	1.83	Extra turn	€3.31
Demonic Consultation	Instant	1.82	—	€8.62
Grave Pact	Enchantment	1.82	Creature removal	€19.88
Impending Disaster	Enchantment	1.82	Board wipe, Removal	€0.40
Ulamog, the Defiler	Legendary Creature — Eldrazi	1.82	Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal, Mill	€15.09
Underworld Breach	Enchantment	1.81	Reanimate	€6.63
Consecrated Sphinx	Creature — Sphinx	1.80	Draw, Tax	€24.27
Divine Intervention	Enchantment	1.79	—	€99.34
Thoughts of Ruin	Sorcery	1.79	Board wipe, Removal	€0.66
Ad Nauseam	Instant	1.78	Draw	€7.81
Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm	Legendary Creature — Dragon Spirit	1.78	Tax	€5.80
Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	1.78	—	€39.67
Seedborn Muse	Creature — Spirit	1.77	—	€9.22
Boiling Seas	Sorcery	1.76	Board wipe, Removal	€0.33
Cataclysm	Sorcery	1.76	Board wipe, Creature removal, Artifact removal, Enchantment removal	€2.25
Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	1.76	—	€19.51
Magus of the Moon	Creature — Human Wizard	1.75	—	€4.50
Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite	Legendary Creature — Phyrexian Praetor	1.74	Board wipe, Creature removal, Anthem	€17.27

List updated on October 17, 2026

Look up the salt score of any card: every card page in Explore shows it, next to its rules text, cheapest price and printings. For a whole deck's total, send it to Analyse.

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Related guides

Sources

Last updated: September 26, 2026