Where it all began
Hey, I'm Anthony, a designer-turned-developer and the solo founder behind DeckCheck. I came up through architecture and design, not formal software training, but I've always chased solutions to real-world problems. I started playing Magic: The Gathering more than a decade ago, fell head over heels, and haven't stopped since. In late 2022, a buddy showed me Commander, a multiplayer format where everyone brings a deck they built themselves, and my obsession hit an all-time high.
But Commander had a problem. Every competitive game with a serious community ends up with some kind of rating system to keep matchups fair. Chess has ratings. Online games have matchmaking. Nobody wants to watch a high school football team take on an NFL team, because everyone knows how that ends. Commander had nothing like that, and as it became the main way people play Magic, mismatched games became its biggest problem.
Sitting down with strangers was like joining a poker game where the world champion and someone who learned the rules last week share a table, except nobody knew which was which. Most players weren't hiding anything. They just had no reliable way to measure how strong their own deck was. So it was no surprise that most games went badly, and I walked away from too many of them frustrated.
Then, right around that time, AI went from a party trick to something that felt real. In early 2024, Anthropic released Claude 3 Opus, and I asked it to rate the power level of a deck I knew inside and out. It nailed it. It wasn't perfect, but it was close enough that the idea for DeckCheck hit me on the spot: if AI could read my deck that well, maybe it could read every deck at the table and give Commander the rating system it never had.
So I built a simple webpage to test the idea and shared it on Reddit. Could it rate everyone else's decks as well as it rated mine? People showed up to find out. They tested it hard, told me when it was wrong, and asked for more. That loop of build, listen, refine never stopped. What began as a one-page power calculator grew, one feature at a time, into the deck builder it is today.
Where it is now
The idea that started DeckCheck grew up. The DeckCheck Threat Index is the result of years of player feedback and more than one rebuild, and it doesn't just spit out a number. It reads a Commander deck the way an experienced player would, then writes a full analysis of how the deck plays: its strengths, its weak spots, and how much of a threat it is at the table. It also gives the deck a score and places it in one of Commander's official power brackets. It's the most accurate deck rating around.
And it works at real tables. Game stores use DeckCheck to run successful tournaments at different power levels, both at my own local game store and at other stores across the country. I started DeckCheck because games with strangers kept going lopsided. Now stores use it to make those games fair.
Where it's all going
Every so often, something changes how Magic is played. When the internet went mainstream, online deck builders and card shops changed the game for good. Suddenly you could look up any card, build a deck from anywhere, and buy single cards from sellers across the country. But deck building tools haven't changed much since. Most are still very good spreadsheets: a place to store your deck list, check prices, and copy what everyone else is playing.
I believe AI is the next big shift, and DeckCheck is my bet on it. I don't mean AI that paints the art or builds your deck for you. I mean AI as an instrument: a tool that reads your deck, understands what you're going for, and helps you get there. For the first time, software can feel like it was made just for you.
That's the idea behind every tool on DeckCheck. Your deck, your budget, the cards you own, and the people you play with shape the advice, not the average of everyone else's decks. I'm not just adding smarter tools to the old way of building. I want to change how deck building itself works.
The goal is to make DeckCheck the best place to experience Magic off the table, and to keep raising the bar for what a Magic app can be.
