About

Commander (EDH) deckbuilding demands exactly 100 cards: 1 legendary creature as commander plus 99 singleton cards whose color identity falls within the commander's identity. Miscounting lands, violating the singleton rule, or drifting outside the color identity produces an illegal deck that any playgroup or event will reject. This generator queries the Scryfall database in real time, enforces the identity constraint C_card ⊆ C_cmdr, applies a mana-curve heuristic, and returns a complete, rule-compliant decklist you can import directly into deck managers. It approximates a balanced distribution assuming casual power level; competitive builds require manual tuning of interaction density and win-condition redundancy.

Formulas

The EDH color identity rule constrains every card in the 99 to a subset of the commander's identity. Formally:

C_card ⊆ C_cmdr

where C_card is the set of mana symbols appearing in a card's mana cost, rules text, and color indicator, and C_cmdr is the commander's full color identity drawn from the set {W, U, B, R, G}.

The generator distributes nonland cards across mana values using a target curve weight vector:

w(cmc) =

{

0.18 if cmc ≤ 20.28 if cmc ∈ {3, 4}0.12 if cmc ∈ {5, 6}0.06 if cmc ≥ 7

where w(cmc) represents the fraction of nonland slots allocated to each mana value band. The remaining 0.36 fraction fills the land base. Total deck size is fixed:

N_total = 1 + N_lands + N_nonland = 100

where N_lands ≈ 36 and N_nonland ≈ 63. The singleton constraint requires all card names be unique except basic lands (n_copies ≤ 1 for nonbasics).

Reference Data

Card Type	Recommended Count	Percentage	Role in Deck
Commander	1	1%	Identity anchor, always accessible from command zone
Creatures	25 - 30	25 - 30%	Board presence, utility, win conditions
Instants	8 - 12	8 - 12%	Interaction, removal, counterspells, combat tricks
Sorceries	6 - 10	6 - 10%	Board wipes, tutors, mass draw
Artifacts	8 - 12	8 - 12%	Mana rocks, equipment, utility
Enchantments	5 - 8	5 - 8%	Persistent effects, pillowfort, value engines
Planeswalkers	0 - 3	0 - 3%	Recurring value, removal magnets
Lands	35 - 38	35 - 38%	Mana base, color fixing, utility lands
Mana Curve ≤ 2	10 - 14	-	Early ramp, interaction, card selection
Mana Curve 3 - 4	14 - 18	-	Core engine pieces, midrange threats
Mana Curve 5 - 6	6 - 10	-	High-impact spells, finishers
Mana Curve 7+	2 - 5	-	Bombs, haymakers (need ramp support)
Card Draw Sources	10+	-	Prevent running out of gas in long games
Ramp Sources	10 - 12	-	Accelerate to high-impact plays
Removal / Interaction	8 - 12	-	Answer opponent threats, maintain board parity
Board Wipes	3 - 5	-	Reset when behind, punish overextension

Frequently Asked Questions

Every card fetched from Scryfall is checked against a Set of already-included card names. If a duplicate name appears (which is rare with random queries but possible), the card is discarded and a replacement is fetched. Basic lands are exempt from this check per Commander rules, allowing multiple copies of Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, and Forest.

The tool queries the Scryfall API individually for each card slot to guarantee true randomness within the specified color identity. Scryfall rate-limits requests to 10 per second, so generating 99 cards requires at minimum 10 seconds of network time. The progress bar reflects real API calls, not a simulated delay.

Yes. The Scryfall random endpoint draws from all sets where the card is legal in Commander format. This includes supplemental products (Commander decks, Battlebond, Conspiracy) and standard expansions. Cards on the official Commander banlist are excluded by the legal:commander query filter.

Scryfall's identity parameter accounts for all mana symbols in cost and rules text, including hybrid symbols (e.g., {W/U}) and Phyrexian symbols (e.g., {G/P}). A card with {R/W} in its cost has color identity {R, W} and will only appear in decks whose commander identity includes both red and white.

The generator implements retry logic with exponential backoff. Each failed request is retried up to 3 times with increasing delay. If retries are exhausted, the card slot is skipped and a basic land of a matching color is substituted. A toast notification reports the number of fallback substitutions so you know the deck may need manual adjustment.

The text export uses the standard format of 1 CardName per line, which is accepted by MTGO, Moxfield, Archidekt, and TappedOut. Arena does not support Commander as a native format and uses a different import syntax, so direct Arena import is not guaranteed for all cards.