Brew, Buy, Build: How We Build Decks
I’ve been playing Commander for years, and I’ve noticed that deck building follows the same pattern every time (for me). Not the idealized version where you methodically construct a perfect 100 but the real version, where ideas sit half-formed for months and you’re sleeving up cards 30 seconds before game night.
Every deck I build goes through three phases: Brew, Buy, Build. And every phase has friction that existing tools don’t solve.
Brew: From Spark to List
It usually starts with a commander or a mechanic. I saw Yurlok of Scorch Thrash and knew I needed to build mana burn—a mechanic that hasn’t existed since 2010. I’m a sucker for cards that snap everyone out of autopilot and force the whole table to think differently.
When inspiration hits, I create a deck with just that commander and nothing else. A bookmark for future me. Sometimes I don’t come back to it for months until something on Reddit or YouTube reminds me, and then it’s a research flurry. EDHREC, Scryfall, YouTube primers, other people’s lists. I’m not netdecking. I’m building a mental model of how the deck could play.
When I actually sit down to brew, I start with win conditions. Decks that just durdle and can’t close games are annoying for everyone. From there it’s synergies that enable those wins, then removal, then lands and ramp last. The mana base is the least creative part and the least dependent on your commander.
The hard part is stopping. There are always more cards to cut, and always one more hidden gem to find. As someone who played in the 90s and then took a two-decade break, there’s a massive backlog of cards I’ve never seen. I love the treasure hunting. I love finding synergies that aren’t on the front page of EDHREC. But that search never really ends. The only thing that stops brewing is game night. I need a deck to play tonight, so I stop.
Buy: From List to Order
Once I have a list, I need to figure out what I already own. My budget isn’t purely financial, it’s about matching the power level of the pods I play with. No point building something that makes the table miserable.
The buying itself is solved. Mana Pool and other services make that seamless. The pain is everything before checkout: figuring out which cards I already own, and more importantly, where they physically are. Binders, boxes, other decks. The collection is scattered, and cross-referencing a digital list against physical reality is tedious.
Build: From Boxes to Sleeves
This is where it all comes together or falls apart. I know I own that card. I added it to my collection. But where is it? This is the chaos that eats time on game night.
I don’t share cards between decks. I know people who do, but for me, each deck stands alone. I’d rather proxy than shuffle cards around and add to the logistics nightmare. Every deck needs to be grab-and-go.
Why We Built Icarian
Most deck builders treat your list as abstract: 100 cards that exist in theory. We built Icarian to treat your deck as real. Your actual collection. Your actual cards. The ones you can find and sleeve up tonight.
That means tracking what you own, where it is, and what’s available when you’re building something new. It means showing you the gap between “cards in this list” and “cards in your hands.” It means making the Brew → Buy → Build pipeline feel less like juggling spreadsheets.
What’s Next: Finding Cards You Didn’t Know You Needed
The treasure hunting problem, finding synergies that aren’t obvious, is one we think about a lot. EDHREC is invaluable, but popularity creates a feedback loop. Cards show up because they’re in lots of decks, and they’re in lots of decks because they show up. The weird, overlooked stuff gets buried.
We’re building AI-powered recommendations that work differently. Instead of “here’s what’s popular,” we’re looking at what your deck is actually trying to do, the mechanics, the synergies, the win conditions and surfacing cards that fit your strategy. Cards from sets you missed. Cards that never hit the front page but do exactly what you need.
The goal isn’t to replace the treasure hunt. It’s to make it better. To help you find the cards you didn’t know you were looking for.
Icarian is in open beta. If you’re tired of juggling spreadsheets and want to build decks with your actual collection, sign up here.