By Colin Turzai

Often in the first few minutes of a commander game gearing up the following phrase can be heard uttered: “How powerful are we playing here?” the answers to that question are frankly just as useless as the question itself.  Answers can include anything from: cedh, tier x, 75%, full power x, x/10, fast vs slow, etc.
Now to clarify the provocative title I am not here to argue that power level discussion are bad or useless, I am only trying to start a discussion about whether or not the traditional questions and answers are actually giving you an answer that serves the purpose you intend. 
For example let’s take a scenario: 4 players, each of them playing a notoriously powerful commander (think something along the lines of Chulane, the Good Niv MIzzets, The Gitrog Monster, etc.) When those four commanders are revealed an informed player will likely begin to run through scenarios in their head of what exactly their opponents must be packing. And often, to understand what they are getting into such players will ask: “What power level have you built that at?”, and I would argue that asking that question is absolutely useless for one simple fact. 
Power levels by their very nature are arbitrary. If you need any evidence of that you only need watch a discussion about who can beat who in a fight, or peruse the comments section of a “death battle” video on YouTube. The arbitrary nature of power level is rooted in the fact that instrinctly the terms mean nothing in vacuum. Sure, a large enough group can come to consensus on what constitutes of a tier 1 deck vs a tier 2 deck but even in those cases that metric is meaningless if you don’t know what kind of deck you are going up against. 
Rather than telling people the power level of your deck I have had much more success in cultivating a successful information exchange by giving a summary of how the deck plays. This can include play patterns (this is a food chain deck), key words the deck cares about (this is a storm deck, this is a mill deck), or if nothing else informing my opponents if the deck contains infinite combos. With this kind of information your opponent can make an informed decision on what they think is going to help create a balanced game of decks whereas if someone simply said “I’ve got a tier one Zur deck” now all they know is that your Zur deck is whatever your budget considers “most optimal”. 
In my experience, cultivating a healthy metagame is all in the details and knowledge transparency. While this may not always be practical for when playing with newer players who may not know what you mean by terms like “midrange, stax, tempo, etc.” I think that at its core this method is much more useful than simply having a small four man conclave to adjudicate what it means to be a “competitive” deck vs a “focused” deck or an “optimized” deck. 
Terms only matter as much as they actually inform the people they are being used with, and if you don’t know what to expect from general tier terms then maybe this style will help you have a better overall experience.