March 2026

Pulling Magic Commander Rankings from EDHREC

I'm working on a tool to help me build Magic Decks^mdb. It'll let me search and assemble cards from data via Scryfall^sf. I also want to see other folks are doing. For example, which are the most used commanders. I'm grabbing data from EDHREC^edh for that.

This is the script I'm using to pull in the raw data.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import json
import urllib.request

url = "https://edhrec.com/commanders"
output_path = "commanders.json"

def get_json():
    response = urllib.request.urlopen(url)
    html = response.read().decode('utf-8')
    parts = html.split('<script id="__NEXT_DATA__" type="application/json">')
    content = parts[1].split('</script>')
    data = json.loads(content[0])
    with open(output_path, "w") as _out:
        _out.write(json.dumps(data, sort_keys=True, indent=2, default=str))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    get_json()

The code's a little brittle in terms of doing a split to pull out the data instead of more advanced parsing with something like Beautiful Soup^bs. That's not a big deal. If they change the page and things break I'll just update the script.

-a

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Endnotes

The EDHREC data uses Scryfall IDs. Combining data sets is no fuss, no muss.

Footnotes

^{mdb ⤴}

Magic Deck Builder

The little tool I'm making to make Magic decks. Still very much a work in progress at press time.

^{sf ⤴}

Scryfall

The place to search for Magic cards. Even better, they provide bulk data downloads.

^{edh ⤴}

EDHREC

Fantastic fan content for all things Magic. They've got articles and stuff which I'm sure are great. I'm only there for the deck lists and rankings though.

^{bs ⤴}

Beautiful Soup

For those times when doing simple splits doesn't get you what you need, try Beautiful Soup. It's the only way to fly with python HTML parsing.