Hey everyone, after a long hiatus during which I did a lot of adulting, and a lot of playing MTGA at the expense of creating MTGA content, I’m back to share a little tool I put together to help newer players who are building toward their first decks.

Trigger Warning – If you hate “net-decking”, then you should probably read no further, as what I describe below is basically super-net-decking.

Note: Please download the installer from one of the links on this post, as the files for manually installing have since been removed in favor of using one of the installers.

Okay.

You can download the tools from the following URL: https://clans.dailyarena.net/download/suggester/MTGADeckSuggester.zip

The first step is to download this file to whatever your preferred download location is (or just open it directly).

Unzip the folder to the location you want to run it from. There is one executable and a dll (Newtonsoft JSON.net). Create a shortcut to the exe if you wish (I might create an installer for this eventually, but there are some other changes I’d like to make, first).

Run MTGA Arena, and browse to the collection screen, and then run the executable. (You can do this out of order, but the program will show you a waiting screen until your collection information is dumped out to the MTGA real-time log file).

The program downloads a card database and some archetype information, loads your collection information from the MTG Arena log, and then computes some recommendations for decks that you can build with cards from your collection. It sorts the decks based on the wildcards you’d need to spend to craft each deck, shows you what cards you have and what cards you are missing for each deck, shows you the “Wildcard Cost” to you to craft the deck, suggests what your next booster purchase should be to maximize the chances of opening cards for the deck at random, and attempts to make some suggestions on card replacements from your library that you could use in the deck while waiting to open cards and/or collect wildcards.

Here is a screenshot from the program when run against a new account I created, which so far only has the cards you get for playing through the tutorial:

Sometime next week I will likely change the view so the deck tabs run down the left side of the screen instead of across the top, so you will be able to see more of them at a time.

Note that for the extreme beginner collection I have here, the program couldn’t come up with many decent replacement suggestions even for the easiest-to-build “good” deck in current Standard (Mono-Blue Tempo). At this point, I need to play more with the starter precons and start building my collection…or buy gems. If you click on the “Export w/Replacements” button when this is the case, it will export a partial list. I am considering disabling the button and adding some explanatory text instead.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the program only loads your collection once when it starts running. If you want it to pick up changes (after you open packs, etc.), you will need to close it and re-start it.

Alright, just wanted to get this out there. I hope someone finds it useful, and I don’t get too much hate for facilitating “net-decking”. Let me know if there are any features you’d like to see!

As always, feel free to send any questions, comments and criticisms to me here, on Reddit, on Twitter at @DailyArena or on Facebook via the @DailyArenaMTG page.

Cheers!

Joseph Eddy is a Father, Husband, Son, Brother, Software Developer, and Gamer. Magic is his favorite hobby, and he’s looking forward to seeing you all on Arena. He streams Magic Arena on a weekly basis (or more), but currently is unable to keep to a set schedule.