Hey 👋 I’m the founder of Deck Guides. I’m a software engineer and passionate Magic player, and I built this site to address a challenge I kept running into as I tried to learn how to pilot decks well. Plenty of good write-ups exist, but many are short, high-level deck tech overviews. They’d provide thin sideboard plans without explaining the reasons behind each swap, or lay out a deck without getting into how to mulligan - the very things that are hardest to learn on your own. And plenty of times, the deck I actually wanted to learn had nothing written about it at all.
The detailed guides that do go deep are excellent, and there are genuinely great ones written by expert players in the community. But even the best of them go stale. The meta moves, and a guide written six months ago may or may not still hold up - I could never quite tell whether I was reading current advice or a snapshot of a format that no longer exists.
So I set out to build the resource I wanted: deep guides that explain the reasoning behind every mulligan, line, and sideboard decision - across a broad slice of the meta, kept current as things shift.
Early on, I tried using the popular AI chat apps for this, but they often weren’t quite reliable enough. They’d sometimes get the details wrong - misquoting a card, missing a rules interaction, or using outdated information about an archetype. In a strategy guide those details matter, since inaccuracies can point you toward the wrong decision.
So I built Deck Guides with that in mind. Rather than relying on a general chatbot, I designed custom systems that ground each guide in accurate, current data - real card text, the actual rules, and how each archetype is being played across the meta. The whole approach is data-driven: each guide is assembled from structured, regularly updated sources, not from whatever a model happens to remember. That foundation is what helps the guides get the details right, which is what makes the strategy advice worth trusting. Quality and accuracy are the priorities the systems are built around.
None of this is meant to replace the excellent guides that expert players write and share. Those were a big part of how I learned, and they’re worth your time. Deck Guides aims to be the broad, always-current layer alongside them - a place to find a thorough, reasoned guide for almost any deck you want to pick up, including the ones nobody else has gotten around to writing about.
Thanks for reading, and good luck at the table!
Questions or feedback? I’d genuinely like to hear it - [email protected].