The Commander
Deckbuilder Guide

A Commander deck is one hundred cards, no duplicates, built around a single legendary creature. That last rule is what makes the format wonderful, and what makes building for it genuinely hard.

In a sixty-card format you can run four copies of your best cards and lean on consistency. In Commander you get one copy of everything. The deck cannot rely on drawing a specific card; it has to rely on the cards relating to each other, so that whatever you draw pushes in the same direction. A good Commander deck is less a pile of strong cards and more a web of small engines: this card makes tokens, that card rewards tokens, a third card turns the reward into more cards.

That web is exactly what is hard to see in a plain decklist, and it is why deckbuilding tools exist. This guide explains what those tools actually do, how the most popular ones work under the hood, and where Deckaugur fits among them. It ends with a full walkthrough of building and auditing a deck in Deckaugur itself.

What a Commander deckbuilder needs to do

Every deckbuilding tool, whatever its interface, is trying to help with some combination of four jobs:

• Discovery. Finding cards you did not know existed. There are over twenty-five thousand legal cards; nobody holds them all in their head.
• List management. Keeping the deck somewhere: adding, cutting, versioning, sharing, pricing.
• Judgement. Telling you something about the deck's quality: is the mana base right, are there enough win conditions, do the cards support each other?
• Testing. Shuffling up and seeing how the deck actually plays before you sleeve it.

No single tool does all four equally well, and the popular ones have each specialised in a different job. Understanding that specialisation is the key to using them together instead of expecting one site to do everything.

How EDHREC, Moxfield and Archidekt work

EDHREC: the popularity census

EDHREC is the discovery tool. It continuously aggregates publicly shared Commander decklists from deckbuilding sites and, for every commander, shows you which cards appear most often alongside it. Its well-known synergy percentage is statistical: it compares how often a card shows up in decks with your commander against how often it shows up in all decks that could legally run it. A card that is everywhere in Atraxa decks but rare elsewhere gets a high synergy score for Atraxa.

This is genuinely useful. If ten thousand players who built your commander converged on a card, that card deserves a look. EDHREC is the fastest way to learn the established shell for any commander, discover themes you had not considered, and avoid missing an obvious staple.

Its limit is built into its method: popularity is not the same thing as fit. EDHREC measures what people play, not whether those cards work in your ninety-nine. It cannot see that your version skipped the token theme, so the token payoffs it recommends would sit dead in your hand. Building straight from the top of the EDHREC page also tends to produce the same deck everyone else has, which is exactly what many Commander players are trying to avoid.

Moxfield: the list manager

Moxfield is where a huge share of the format keeps its decks. It is fast, clean, and built for list management: quick card entry, primers, versioning, pricing, collection tracking, and a goldfish-style playtest mode where you draw sample hands. Sharing a Moxfield link has become the default way to show someone your deck.

What Moxfield deliberately does not do is judge the deck. It will tell you the mana curve and the price; it will not tell you that you have six board wipes and no way to win after casting them, or that a third of your cards care about a creature type you run four copies of. It is a superb notebook, and a notebook does not read what you wrote in it.

Archidekt: the visual organiser

Archidekt occupies similar ground to Moxfield with a more visual approach. Its signature feature is category columns: you sort your deck into ramp, removal, draw, win conditions and whatever else, and see the deck as labelled stacks rather than one long list. For players who think in deck roles, this surfaces gaps at a glance; if the removal column is two cards tall, you can see it. It also offers collection tracking and price comparison.

The categorisation, however, is yours to maintain. Archidekt gives you the shelves; deciding what each card is, and whether the cards on different shelves actually cooperate, remains manual work.

Scryfall: the search engine underneath

Scryfall is not a deckbuilder but it belongs in this list because nearly every tool, Deckaugur included, is built on its card database. Its search syntax is the most powerful way to answer a precise question: every card under three mana in Golgari colours that mentions sacrifice, sorted by price. If you know what you are looking for, Scryfall finds it. It just has no opinion about your deck.

Where Deckaugur fits in

Deckaugur's job is the third one on the list: judgement. Instead of counting how often cards appear together, it reads what the cards say.

Every card in the pool is tagged along two dimensions derived from its oracle text: what it enables (the effects it produces: tokens, treasure, card draw, creatures entering the battlefield) and what it cares about (the effects it rewards). Synergy is then a concrete, checkable claim: card A enables something card B cares about. The engine is rule-based and deterministic. There is no language model guessing; every suggestion and every warning can be traced to specific tags on specific cards.

That distinction matters constantly in Commander. A card that triggers on Vampires entering the battlefield is excellent in a vampire deck and nearly blank anywhere else, even though it mentions +1/+1 counters. Popularity statistics blur this; reading the whole text keeps it sharp. It also works in the other direction: Deckaugur's warnings flag cards whose conditions your deck never actually meets, the polite way of saying a card is dead weight.

The other thing that sets Deckaugur apart is collection awareness. You can import your collection, filter suggestions to cards you already own, lock a deck to reserve its copies, and log trades and sales with a full history. Suggestions drawn from cards in your binder are worth more than suggestions that start with an order form.

To be equally honest in the other direction: Deckaugur is an early build by a solo developer. The tag dictionary covers the full pool and has been audited across many real decks, but not every archetype is documented equally well yet, and you will find rough edges. The About page tells that story plainly. It is free while it is being built.

How to use Deckaugur, step by step

1. Start with the demo, or create an account

The fastest way to see the engine work is the live demo deck: no account, no setup. When you want to build your own, sign up with email or Google. Your decks, collection and profile are tied to the account.

2. Pick your commander

Open the Workbench and type a commander's name; an autocomplete narrows as you type. Choosing the commander does more than fill a slot: it sets the colour identity that scopes everything else. Suggestions, search and the synergy map respect that identity by default, so you are never offered cards the deck cannot legally run.

3. Add cards, or paste an existing list

You can search and add cards one at a time, but if the deck already exists somewhere else, paste it. Deckaugur reads decklists exported from Moxfield, Archidekt, EDHREC and MTGO, as well as plain text lists, and recognises the format automatically. Thirty seconds after pasting a list you have a full synergy read on a deck you built years ago. This is the single best way to try the engine: bring a deck you know well and see whether the analysis matches your table experience.

4. Read the signals

As the deck grows, the Workbench panels update around it. Each panel answers a different question:

• Whispers from the Library ranks suggestions from the full card pool. A card only scores highly when the deck both produces an effect and rewards it, which keeps generically good cards from drowning out the ones that belong in this deck. Cycle past a suggestion, reject it permanently, or spot the combo and mana-efficiency badges on standouts.
• Something to Reconsider is the warning panel: cards whose conditions the deck never meets, with a suggested replacement where the engine has one.
• Synergy Clusters groups cards that share multiple combo tags, showing you the deck's engines as engines rather than as scattered entries in a list.
• Token Economy counts every token type the deck can produce and everything that triggers off it, so a tokens theme is measured rather than felt.
• The mana panel keeps curve and colour requirements in view while you build.

Every card in the deck list shows its synergy score, and clicking any tag pill filters suggestions to cards sharing that tag, which is the quickest way to deepen a theme on purpose.

5. Look at the StarMap

The StarMap draws the entire deck as a force-directed graph: every card a node, every synergy a line. Tight constellations are your engines; a card floating alone at the edge is a card with no relationships, and usually your next cut. Click any node for the card's detail. No other major deckbuilder shows a deck this way, and it changes how gaps and clusters read: you see the web instead of inferring it.

6. Build from what you own

Import your collection and the Workbench marks cards you own; an owned-only filter restricts suggestions to your binder. Locking a deck reserves its copies in the inventory, so two decks cannot silently claim the same card. When cards leave your collection, log the trade, sale or gift; the full history stays queryable, and a shopping-list export shows exactly which cards a deck still needs, with prices in your preferred marketplace.

7. Save, publish, copy

Decks save to your deckbox and can be published from your profile. Other players can browse published decks in the community section and copy any of them into their own library as a starting point; creators earn points when their decks are copied.

A workflow that uses every tool well

These tools are complements, not rivals, and the strongest deckbuilding process borrows each one for the job it is best at:

• Research on EDHREC. When starting a new commander, spend ten minutes learning the established shell and themes. Note what everyone plays, and decide deliberately where you want to differ.
• Search on Scryfall when you have a precise hole to fill and want to see every card that could fill it.
• Audit in Deckaugur. Paste the draft, read the warnings, check the StarMap for orphan cards, and let the suggestions surface cards the statistics missed because they are only good in a deck shaped exactly like yours.
• Keep the list wherever your playgroup lives. If your friends expect a Moxfield link, keep sharing one; the paste-import means the audit is never more than thirty seconds away.

The order matters less than the habit: statistics for discovery, text for judgement, and your own games for the final verdict.

Frequently asked questions

Further reading

• How synergy scoring works: what the score measures, how suggestions earn their rank, and why warnings fire.
• Audit your existing deck with paste-import: a step-by-step how-to for Moxfield and Archidekt users.
• Why your deck is missing removal: how interaction erodes out of a deck, and how much is enough.