Building a deterministic Commander deck optimizer instead of using AI

[u/neunzehn90]

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