Smart Deck Recommendations
You’ve probably used deck building tools that recommend cards based on keyword matching. Search for “lifegain” and you get every card with “gain life” in the text. Useful, but not smart.
The problem is that deck synergy isn’t about keywords, it’s about resource flow. A lifegain deck doesn’t just want cards that gain life. It wants cards that gain life repeatedly, cards that trigger when life is gained, and cards that convert life total into value. Those are three different things working together.
We built Icarian’s recommendation engine to understand that difference.
Why We Built This
The most common approach to card recommendations is co-occurrence analysis: look at what cards appear together in existing decks, and recommend cards that frequently show up alongside what you’ve already picked.
The problem? Popular cards are popular. Once a card becomes a staple in an archetype, it shows up in more decks, which makes it show up in more recommendations, which puts it in more decks. The rich get richer.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle that’s hard to break out of. You end up seeing the same 50 cards recommended for every aristocrats deck, every lifegain deck, every tokens deck. Cards that would be perfect fits but haven’t achieved critical mass in the data never surface.
We’re not saying co-occurrence recommendations are wrong, in fact it’s the opposite. They’re genuinely useful for seeing what the community has converged on. But we think there’s room for a complementary approach. One that asks “what does this card actually do, and does that mechanically fit what your deck is trying to accomplish?”
That’s what we built. Our recommendations won’t always match the popularity contests. Sometimes they’ll surface a card you’ve never seen in your archetype before, not because it’s a hidden gem trying to be clever, but because its mechanics genuinely complete a circuit in your deck that the popular options don’t.
Teaching a Computer What Cards Actually Do
The foundation of our recommendation system is something we call the concept graph. It’s a knowledge structure that maps every Commander-legal card to a vocabulary of what it does, not just what it says.
Instead of treating card text as a bag of words, we classify cards into a structured ontology:
- Resources: Things that exist in the game: creatures, tokens, life total, cards in hand, graveyard size
- Actions: What cards do: gain life, create tokens, draw cards, ramp mana
- Payoffs: What cards want: triggers on life gain, rewards for creature deaths, bonuses for spell casts
- Roles: Deck-building functions: ramp, removal, card advantage, protection
A card like Soul Warden isn’t just “a lifegain card.” In our system, it’s tagged as an action (gains life when creatures enter) that produces the life resource. Meanwhile, Ajani’s Pridemate is a payoff that consumes that same resource. It wants life gain events to trigger its growth.
The Resource Graph: Understanding Synergy as Flow
Here’s where it gets interesting. Every action and payoff concept has resource relationships, that is, what it produces and what it consumes.
Think of your deck as a supply chain:
- Token generators produce creature resources
- Sacrifice outlets consume creature resources and trigger death events
- Death payoffs consume those death events and convert them to value
When we analyze your commander, we map out this entire resource flow. What does your commander produce? What does it consume? What resources does it want more of?
Then, when we score candidate cards, we’re not just checking if they share keywords with your commander. We’re checking if they complete circuits in your resource graph. Are they filling gaps where you have high demand but low supply?
From Concepts to Archetypes to Scores
Individual card concepts are powerful, but decks are built around strategies. That’s why we layer deck archetypes on top of the concept graph.
Each archetype—Lifegain, Aristocrats, Tokens, Spellslinger, and all the others—defines which concepts serve as enablers (cards that make the strategy work), payoffs (cards that reward you for executing the strategy), and anti-synergies (cards that work against your plan).
When you select a commander, we automatically detect which archetypes they support based on their card concepts. Teysa Karlov? Strong aristocrats signals – she doubles death triggers. Omnath, Locus of Creation? Landfall all the way.
Your commander’s archetype profile then shapes every recommendation:
- Archetype alignment: Does this card support your detected strategies?
- Resource synergy: Does this card produce what your commander consumes, or benefit from what your commander produces?
- Role coverage: Does your deck need more ramp? More removal? More card draw?
- Conflict detection: Does this card have effects that work against your strategy?
The final score combines all of these factors to surface cards that genuinely fit your deck, not just cards that happen to share a keyword or appear in a lot of decklists.
What This Means for You
When you’re building a deck in Icarian and browse recommendations, you’re not seeing a keyword search or a popularity ranking. You’re seeing cards ranked by how well they complete your deck’s resource circuits and support your commander’s detected strategies.
Ask for ramp cards, and you’ll see mana dorks and rocks ranked by how efficiently they accelerate your specific deck. Browse sacrifice outlets, and aristocrats-friendly options float to the top if that’s what your commander wants.
The goal isn’t to replace your deck-building intuition or tell you to ignore what other players are running. It’s to give you a different lens, Hopefully one that might surface options you wouldn’t have found otherwise, backed by real mechanical analysis instead of “everyone else picked this.”
Always Improving
The concept graph isn’t static. We continuously refine our understanding of card mechanics, add new archetypes as the format evolves, and improve our analysis based on what we learn. As the Commander card pool grows, so does our ability to find the connections that matter.
If you’ve been frustrated by seeing the same recommendations everywhere, give Icarian a try. We built something different.
Ready to build smarter? Create your free account and see what your commander really wants.