The Deck Page, Rebuilt Around the Way You Brew

The deck page is where most of us spend our time on Icarian, and it was also the page that fought you the most. Add a card, scroll back up to the search box. Make a change, wait a beat for the charts to catch up. Open a card’s menu, hunt for the action you wanted. None of it was broken. All of it added up.

So we rebuilt it. Same deck, same rules, same data. A page that keeps up with you.

Your commander, front and center

Your commander’s art now fills the top of the page, with the deck’s numbers on a frosted panel over it: cards out of 100, the deck’s value, and whether it’s legal. If it isn’t, the panel says so in red, and one tap shows exactly what to fix. If you’ve logged games with the deck, your record sits right there too.

The commander card sits beside the numbers with its own menu, so changing a printing or swapping a commander is one tap away. On a phone, the commander becomes the first row of the list instead.

An add bar that stays put

This is the change I notice most.

The add bar sticks to the top of the screen on a computer and to the bottom on a phone. Type a card name, add it, keep typing. You never lose your place in the list. Search results tell you when you already own a card (“You own 2”), so you know before you add it whether it’s coming from your binders or your shopping list.

One menu for every card

Every card in the list opens the same menu, a sheet on a phone: add another copy, change the printing, switch it to foil, add it to your collection, move it to Considering or remove it. All in one place.

Each row also shows whether you own the card at a glance: in your collection and free to use, already built into this deck, owned in another printing or finish, tied up in another built deck, or not in your collection at all. Hover or tap the mark for the details.

Charts that keep up

The stats used to load a moment after the page and then reload themselves after every change. Now they come back with every change, already current. No extra wait.

On a computer, the mana curve and color distribution sit in the left column under the card preview, so they stay on screen while you scroll the list. Card types and lands sit under Considering. Bars are colored by color identity, and every one has a tooltip.

Two small additions do a lot of work:

• Click a mana curve bar and the cards at that mana value light up in the list. Your three-drop slot looks crowded? Click it and see exactly who’s there. Press Esc to clear.
• Color distribution counts your sources. Each color shows its pips and how many of your lands make it against how many it should have, for example “4 of 7 sources”, in red when you’re short. Fetch lands count for each color they can find.

Lands are now measured as a count against the 33 to 40 range most Commander decks land in, instead of a percentage.

Anyone looking at a published deck sees the same banner, list and charts, signed in or not, just without the editing controls.

Brew, tidied up

Brew is the guided way to fill a deck one stage at a time: pick a gameplan, set up your lands, then add synergy, ramp, removal, card draw and tutors from our recommendations. How it works hasn’t changed. How it looks has.

Recommendations are now card tiles with the price on a white tag and a badge when you already own the card. Each tile has one Add button and one menu, where you can send a card to Considering or tell us it’s not right for this deck. Every stage shares the same filter panel, and the step row shows how far along each stage is. On a phone, filters fold into a single button so the cards get the screen.

Starting, editing and building

Starting a deck got the same card-first look: partners show up as card tiles, and you name the deck over your commander’s art. Importing a decklist is one clean form, and if an import fails, the reason shows right above the button and nothing you pasted is lost. History now groups changes by day, and anyone who can see a published deck can see how it changed, except building and unbuilding, which stays private because it reveals what you own.

Building from your collection is where you mark a deck as physically put together. Icarian picks which of your copies go in and sets them aside so they stop counting as up for trade. Big numbers show how many cards are covered and how many are missing, and each card shows the copy we matched, or lets you pick one.

The deck tools

The Tools menu holds four ways to get a deck onto the table:

• Budget finds cheaper printings of your cards.
• OG-ify finds the oldest printings.
• Buy lists what you still need, with copies grouped (Island ×3) and prices at TCGplayer, Card Kingdom and Manapool. It copies the exact printings your deck uses, so the store sends the version you picked.
• Bracket breakdown explains the deck’s Commander bracket, card by card. (There’s more to say about brackets in a separate post.)

Budget and OG-ify show your card next to the one you could swap to, both as images with prices. Tick the ones you want and a bar at the bottom shows how many you’ve picked and what they save.

Primers that read like a primer

A primer is the write-up that lives beside a deck: how it plays, how it wins, what does the heavy lifting. The reading page now opens on your commander’s art, lists its sections down the side on wide screens so readers can jump around, and shows the removal, ramp, draw, wipe and tutor sections as card images with prices and roles instead of a list of names.

Editing folds every section to a single row until you open it, so reordering a long primer is just a drag. The print version is still a plain white page.

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The deck page is the heart of Icarian, and it finally feels like it. Open one of your decks and add a few cards.

New here? Sign up for Icarian and build your first deck with the collection you already own.