With over 20,000 cards to pick from, making a deck in Magic the Gathering can be a daunting task, even for the most veteran of players. This is especially true in the Commander format, where the card pool is almost totally open to you. There's no denying that it's overwhelming.

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There's no need to stress, though, as the Magic community has made lots of tools to help ease your deckbuilding process. Here are the top five you need to bookmark for when you next go to brew your latest build.

5 Commander Spellbook

COmmander Spellbook

Commander Spellbook is "the search engine for EDH combos", and is a fantastic way to search for powerful combos. From the homepage, you can put in a card and find any combos that use it, or you can use the advanced search to look for combos by anything from a specific outcome, the colour identity of your commander, or even how many cards are needed to pull it off.

Commander Spellbook is great because it can help you tune your Commander deck to the power level of your playgroup. It can be used to find combos to put in, but it can also be used to help pin down any accidental combos you weren't intending. There's nothing worse than somebody comboing off at a low-power game, especially when even that player didn't realise it could happen beforehand.

4 StrictlyBetter

StrictlyBetter

One of the quirks of the Commander format is that it's easy to use cards that mostly do the same thing as another card, just slightly worse. For example, a Cancel and a Counterspell do the same thing, but Counterspell costs one generic mana less. That's what StrictlyBetter works out for you.

The best time to use StrictlyBetter is when you've finished a rough draft of your deck and are looking to make a few finishing touches. Copy the decklist into the site, and it will scan its community-driven directories to see if any of your cards could be replaced with something better. Each suggestion is voted on by the community, meaning you can easily see cards that some people think are better, but might not be the best alternative.

Of course, Commander as a format is all about player expression. Don't feel as though you must be running the best possible card in every situation – Underground Sea may be better than a Sunken Hollow, but is also vastly more expensive, and maybe it's a step too far for your deck's power level. StrictlyBetter is just a good way to find easy improvements when you're struggling to know where to go next.

3 Moxfield

Moxfield

There are lots of deckbuilding sites out there, like TappedOut, Archidekt, and MTGGoldfish, but Moxfield is by far the easiest and most powerful one of the lot.

As a deckbuilder site, Moxfield's main goal is to help you organise and track your deck, draft new ones, or share your decks with other people. Through it, you can set the format you're building for, and it can easily help you avoid accidentally putting in illegal cards. It can count your mana costs to help you get the right amount of lands, track your mana curve to avoid any unfortunate spikes in mana costs, and you can even look through other users' submissions for suggestions.

One of the really good things about Moxfield is the number of ways you can organise your cards in the deck view. While you can stick with the default card type listing, you can group and sort your deck in loads of different ways, like mana cost, colour, rarity, the set it debuted in, and even custom tags. It's so easy to tag cards as things like "ramp", "draw", or "removal" to ensure you're hitting everything a deck needs to be able to do.

More than just a deckbuilder, though, Moxfield has lots of resources that help you test or improve your deck. It has full integration with EDHRec (more on that later), and even has 'goldfishing' feature that help you playtest your deck.

2 EDHRec

EDHRec

EDHRec is the number one database for the Commander format, collating thousands of decklists together to make a resource that can help you build almost any deck possible.

EDHRec ranks Commanders based on their popularity, which is useful to see where the meta is at, but more helpfully it also shows which cards are most commonly played in that Commander's decks. For example, say you want to build a deck for Kwain, Itinerant Meddler. You can search for Kwain, and then scroll down to see all the top cards used in decks that run it as a Commander, like Dictate of Kruphix, Teferi's Ageless Insight, Kami of the Crescent Moon, and Laboratory Maniac.

Each type of card is also individually listed, so if you're looking for lands to put in a Kwain deck you can scroll to the lands section on EDHRec and see Prairie Stream, Hallowed Fountain, Glacial Fortress and Command Tower are the most popular.

Alternatively, it can also sort by the themes of the deck you want to build, instead of a specific Commander. If you know you want to build a Planeswalker-heavy "Superfriends" deck, going to the Planeswalkers theme page shows you that Atraxa, Praetor's Voice, Carth the Lion, Esika God of the Tree, and Sisay, Weatherlight Captain are the most popular Commanders for it, while cards like Oath of Teferi and Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God are the most popular cards in the 99.

EDHRec is a huge resource that can help take the decision anxiety out of making a deck. Whether you're looking for those last cards to add, or want inspiration for your next deck, it's one of the best community resources the Magic community has ever built.

1 Scryfall

Scryfall

There are a lot of cards to sort through when building a deck. Though you could look through Gatherer, the official Magic database, Scryfall is a much more powerful alternative that's simultaneously a lot easier to use.

From the homepage, you can search through the names of any card ever published. For example, typing "Dig" can show you Dig Through Time, Gravedigger, Hamonic Prodigy, Dig Up, and more. This is good for finding a specific card you want to check, and through it you can see official rulings relating to the card, images of most of its prints, what sets it's legal in, and even find secondary market prices for it. But individual cards are just the tip of the iceberg of what Scryfall can do.

The advanced search is incredible, and through it, you can search through every card's rule texts, flavour text, colour identity, look up full set galleries, find specific artists, and even find which cards mention your favourite characters. There are loads of unofficial categories to look through as well, such as whether a card's double-sided, has an etched foil version, have hybrid mana, or virtually anything else you could want to look for.

For most deckbuilding, the most important things to search by are the text field, which searches the main rules box on every card, colours to find the right colour cards for your deck, and the type line to weed out creatures from sorceries, or look for the exact creature type you want.

Scryfall is an absolute powerhouse of a tool. It might take a little while to get to grips with its quirks and syntax, but once you have, finding exactly what you need for any deck is a breeze.

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