Comment by theptip

That’s a fair point for Commander. But the GP seemed to be making a universal claim that ELO wouldn’t make sense in any case, even say Standard where the decks are <$500 (or Arena where you can get a meta deck for <$100, free if you have time to grind wildcards).

I think perhaps we could agree on an intermediate claim that Elo could work amongst the pool of players that can build any deck they want, which is a big pool for MTGA, and definitely a smaller pool for physical Standard, and probably very small for Commander.

I wonder if you could decompose the score by playing some games with a fixed deck too? Eg Arena challenges. How much of your overall Elo is just picking the right deck for the local meta, vs raw quality of plays?