Frequently asked questions
How is this different from EDHREC?
EDHREC shows you what other people play with your commander, and it does that brilliantly. We cite its numbers as evidence throughout. EDHTuner starts from your actual 99: it reads your cards' rules text to find what your build is missing, names cuts from your own deck with reasons, and playtests every suggested swap in thousands of simulated games. Popularity data can't do those last two things, because they depend on the deck you pasted rather than the average deck.
How is it different from deck power-level raters?
Sites that grade a deck 1-10 give you a score. The score doesn't tell you what to change. What you get here is the change itself: specific adds, specific cuts, each with a stated reason and a playtest result, plus a land-count verdict measured on your own curve.
Do the playtests actually mean anything?
They're paired solo games, the same shuffles with and without a swap, so the measured difference really is the card. That's a strong test of speed and consistency and an honest zero on everything an opponent brings: removal, politics, blockers. We only let the simulator veto swaps that make your deck meaningfully slower. It never ranks the suggestions. The methodology page spells the whole thing out.
Does it see combos?
It knows a curated set of two-card combos and can suggest the missing half of a pair you already run. It doesn't chase down every loop the way a real combo database does, and cast-loop engines read smaller than they play in the goldfish games. If you want every combo, Commander Spellbook is the right tool and we're happy to point you at it.
What do the brackets and "GC" mean?
The five Commander brackets from the official bracket system, with Game Changers (Wizards' official set of outsized cards) counting toward your bracket's cap. Over the cap, we name the minimum trims and their stand-ins. Under it, we tell you how much headroom you have.
What leaves my browser?
The analysis itself runs entirely on your machine. No part of the engine runs on a server.
What a completed run sends to our own feedback store is the commander name, deck count, bracket, app version, the deck you analyzed, and the analysis it produced: the swaps, the cuts, and the reasoning behind them. We read those to check what we're actually recommending to people, which is the only way to tell whether the suggestions are any good. Keeping the finished analysis means we can look at a run exactly as you saw it, instead of guessing from card names alone.
Each page load also sends how long the app took to start.
If we can't read the deck you pasted, the error report carries back the first few lines we couldn't read, whatever those lines happen to hold. A broken paste is impossible to fix without seeing what broke it.
Voting on a swap, sharing a link, or sending an issue report sends the deck along with what you're reporting on.
All of these records expire on their own. Votes, reports and failed pastes are deleted after 90 days, start timings after 30 days, and analyses and shared decks after a year.
Nothing is sold or shared. None of it is tied to a name, an email address or an account, because we don't have any.
Site traffic is measured with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies.
Why did it suggest cutting a card my deck is built around?
Sometimes the text read misses a mechanical relationship. That's why every card has a lock: hover a cut, click the padlock, and we never suggest cutting that card again. If a suggestion looked wrong, use "report it" on the page. Real reports are how this gets better, and past reports have turned into permanent fixes within days.
Is the card pricing an ad?
Buy links go to ManaPool, an affiliate link that may earn us a commission, plus TCGplayer and Scryfall with no affiliation. We compute the suggestions before any price is looked up, and no affiliate relationship influences them. You'd get the identical result with the links removed.
Is it free? Do I need an account?
Free, no account, and shareable: you can copy any analysis as a link that replays the same result for anyone who opens it.