Community Is Open: Follow Brewers, Like Decks, Talk Shop

Commander talk lives everywhere except next to the decks. Someone posts a list on Reddit, the good feedback gets buried under “needs more ramp”, and the Discord thread scrolls away by Friday. If you want to find a brewer whose taste you trust, you’re copying links into a notes app.

We don’t want to build another forum. Commander is about the four people at your table and the decks you bring to it, so that’s what we built around. Every conversation on Icarian hangs off a real deck or a real commander.

Starting today, Community is in the menu for everyone.

The feed: decks first

Open Community and you land on Social, a feed of what people are doing on Icarian: decks they’ve published, primers they’ve written (with the first few lines, so you can tell whether to keep reading), decks they’ve cloned, comments they’ve left, decks they’ve liked, and collection milestones. When a published deck changes by five or more cards, or swaps its commander, it shows up again as an update listing what went in and what came out, at most once a week. Each deck shows its commander art, so you can scan the feed the way you’d scan a table.

You don’t need an account to browse it. Signed out, you can read the feed, open any published deck and read its comments.

Down the side you’ll find Trending commanders, the five commanders getting the most attention this week, and once you’re signed in, Collectors to follow: people with published decks you don’t follow yet.

Follow people and commanders

When you find a brewer you like, open their profile and tap Follow. You can follow commanders too, straight from the commander’s page.

The Following tab is the quiet version of the feed. It shows only what the people you follow are up to (the decks they publish, their comments, their likes and their milestones), new decks and primers for the commanders you follow, and new comments on those commanders’ pages. It also shows the games from your pods, even when you don’t follow the person who logged them. Pod games never show on Social: only the people who played, logged them or belong to the pod see them. Follow your playgroup and a couple of brewers you trust, and that tab becomes the page you check first.

Profiles that show the collection

Your profile is the same page as your collection, as other people see it: your picture and bio, your collection’s value, your showcase cards, your published decks, the sets you’re chasing and your recent activity. Your private decks never show up there, and your profile looks the same to you as it does to everyone else, so there’s no guessing what people can see.

A For Trade tile links straight to the cards you’ve marked for trade. That’s the part I think matters most for a Commander group: “does anyone have a spare Swords?” stops being a group chat question.

Likes

Every published deck has a heart. Tap it to like the deck. The count shows on the deck and on its tile, and the owner gets a notification. It’s the cheapest way to tell someone their brew is good, and it gives everyone a quick signal for which decks are worth a look.

Comments, now with replies

You can comment on any published deck and on every commander page. Type [[Sol Ring]] and the card name becomes a link readers can tap.

Comments now take replies, one level deep. Reply to a reply and yours joins the same thread, tagged with the person you’re answering, so conversations don’t turn into a staircase. Everyone who has commented in a thread is notified when someone replies, so a question about your deck doesn’t go unanswered because you missed it.

Not every deck wants feedback. If yours is a finished pet project, turn off Allow comments in Edit deck. Existing comments stay, read-only, and nobody can add new ones. Turn it back on whenever you want.

Milestones

Finished a set you were collecting, or every card on a list you were chasing? That posts to the feed once, with a link to the set or list. It’s a small thing. Completing a set is also one of the few collector moments people actually want to share.

Getting started

1. Publish a deck from Tools → Edit deck. It’s private until you do.
2. Follow your playgroup and a few brewers from their profiles.
3. Check the Following tab before your next game night.

Coming up next: cloning someone else’s deck with credit back to them, exporting any list to Moxfield or Arena, and the Code of Conduct that keeps the comments friendly.

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Want your decks somewhere people can actually find and talk about them? Sign up for Icarian, publish a deck and open Community.