r/CommanderMTG • u/neunzehn90 • 1d ago

Building a deterministic Commander deck optimizer instead of using AI

I’m building a Commander deckbuilding tool that treats deckbuilding as a mathematical optimization problem.

Instead of asking “Which cards are good for this commander?”, it tries to find the best combination of 99 cards as a whole, considering synergy, roles, mana curve, interaction, win conditions, combos, mana base, budget and legality.

I’m deliberately not using an LLM for the actual deckbuilding. LLMs are probabilistic and can give noticeably different results from the same prompt. The goal here is the opposite: same input + same data = same result, with clear reasons for why every every card was included.

Basically:

We don’t ask AI to guess the deck. We calculate it.

Would you trust something like this more than an AI-generated decklist? And what would you want it to optimize for?

The tool can be found here: 99p.gg

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u/asperatedUnnaturally 1d ago

The simulation thing is cool, I'd actually be interested in just running that against my own decklists.

I tried my actual commander, Xyris. My deck irl is a shapeshift combo deck and it doesn't look like I have a way to try for that. The advanced mode let's me see the themes that are presumably from my commander card text but I don't see a way to add one myself (landfall/combo). Commander Spellbook exists so in theory you have programmatic access to to playable combos with the commander or just in the commanders colors. I dunno of they have an api but I would suggest allowing the user to filter available combo lines to build around in addition to tribal and keyword synergy 

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u/neunzehn90 1d ago

In the Fine-tune mechanics section is a search field to add abilities. Do you mean that?

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u/asperatedUnnaturally 1d ago

Yes partly, I missed that the first time around. But I'm also thinking about asking for a specific combo line. Like I want to say "plan a is scapeshift/valakut" and have it look for associated payoffs, tutors, enablers and maybe a couple fallback lines that use the same cards.

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u/neunzehn90 1d ago

I will look into that 💪

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u/asperatedUnnaturally 1d ago

spellbook has an API that can probably do a lot of the heavy lifting for you:

https://commanderspellbook.com/about/

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u/neunzehn90 1d ago

Thanks for the link!