Commander Deck Builder

Overview

Structured process for building an MTG Commander deck from scratch. Guides the user through commander selection, preference gathering, and skeleton generation, then hands off to commander-tuner for refinement.

Every card recommendation MUST be grounded in actual card oracle text from Scryfall — never from training data.

The Iron Rule

NEVER assume what a card does. Before including any card in the skeleton, look up its oracle text via the helper scripts. Training data is not oracle text.

Exception: During commander discovery (recommending commanders to a user who doesn't know what to build), you may use training data to generate a shortlist of candidates. But every recommended commander MUST be verified before presenting — write all candidate names to a JSON list and batch-lookup in one call: scryfall-lookup --batch <candidates.json> --bulk-data <bulk-data-path> --cache-dir <working-dir>/.cache.

Progress Tracking

Before starting Step 1, create a TodoWrite list with one item per top-level Step in this skill, in order: