Commander Finder
What commander
should you build?
Your first deck or your next one. Two ways in — both take about a minute, neither needs an account, and both end with five commanders and the reason each one suits you.
Every legal commander is eligible — 4,084 of them.
Question 1 of 7
Build around
What are you building around?
Add up to 15 cards you own or love. We'll find commanders that can legally hold all of them.
Picking a first Commander deck
The advice a new player gets is usually a list of somebody else's favourite commanders. It is not bad advice, it just answers a different question — the one that matters is what you want a game of Magic to feel like, and that is not something a leaderboard knows.
This tool asks about the feeling and works backwards to the colors, because that is the direction the decision actually runs. Nobody starts out wanting Golgari; they start out wanting things to come back from the graveyard, and Golgari is where that lives. If you already know your colors, the last question takes them and the rest still does the work.
The question everything turns on
How much bookkeeping you want is the question most commander quizzes skip, and it is the one that decides whether the deck gets finished. A commander with four triggers and a board state to track is a genuinely good card and a bad first deck, and being handed one is why a lot of people bounce off the format. It is a hard filter here — answer "minimal" and a complicated commander cannot appear in your results at all, however well it matches everything else.
Color identity, and why your pile of cards matters
A card is legal in your deck only if every colored mana symbol on it also appears on your commander. So the cards you already own set a floor: your commander's color identity has to cover the union of all of them. One off-color card can be the difference between a clean two-color deck and a four-color mana base you will fight for a year.
That is what the second door is for. Add the cards, watch the required colors appear, and if it goes wide the tool names the single card to drop and what dropping it buys you — rather than quietly returning worse answers.
Where the numbers come from
Every commander in Magic is eligible here, scored on what its own rules text says. Where a commander has been played enough in TurnZero to have a meaningful record, the result card shows its win rate across tracked games — at least 40 of them, or the number is noise dressed up as insight. Below that it shows how many tracked decks run it instead. Most commanders have no tracked play at all; that is normal and counts against nothing. Around 162 have some.
13 of them also carry a hand-written line on what a turn looks like. The rest get a plainer description generated from what the card does — true, and deliberately dull, because a generated sentence that reads like a person wrote it is one nobody checks.
Common questions
Is this free?
Yes, and there's no account. The quiz, the card-first search, the results and the share image all work signed out. Building the deck in the app is where an account comes in, and that's a separate step you can ignore.
How many commanders can it recommend?
Every commander that legally exists — 4,084 of them at the last build, from Magic's whole card catalog. That's deliberate: a hand-picked shortlist of favourites answers "which of ours suits you" rather than the question you actually asked, and it would go stale the day a new set released.
Where do the recommendations come from?
Each commander is scored on six things read off the card itself: what it wants the deck to do, how it survives removal, how much bookkeeping it asks for, how the table reads you, what it costs, and how many colors it needs. Complexity is a hard filter rather than a preference — if you ask for minimal bookkeeping you will never be shown a commander that isn't.
Why do some results show a win rate and others don't?
A win rate is only printed once a commander has at least 40 completed games tracked in TurnZero. Below that the sample is too small to mean anything, so the card shows how many tracked decks run it instead — a real number that can't be over-read. Most commanders have no tracked play at all, which is normal and doesn't count against them.
I already have some cards. Can it use those?
Yes — that's the second door. Add up to 15 cards and it finds commanders whose color identity can legally hold them, ranked by how many they cover. It also names the ones that don't fit and why, which is the fastest way to learn the color identity rule.
Can I just pick a playstyle, like mill or spellslinger?
Yes. The first question is written in plain language because most people starting out don't know the jargon yet, but "Or pick a style by name" underneath it opens all 20 named styles — mill, blink, aristocrats, stax and the rest — each with a one-line explanation of what it does. Every one links to a full guide, so you can read up on a style before committing a deck to it.
It asked about brackets. Does it know what bracket a commander is?
No, and nothing does — a bracket describes the deck you build, not the commander. Almost any commander can be built at Bracket 2, and a great many can be built at Bracket 4; what changes is the ninety-nine cards, which this tool doesn't pick. The answer is used as a nudge: aiming casual leans toward commanders that come as precons and cost little to start, aiming optimized leans toward ones with a real tracked record. Both questions are optional and skipping either costs you nothing.
What is color identity and why does it matter?
A card can only go in your deck if every colored mana symbol on it also appears on your commander. So a green card needs a commander with green in its identity. It's the rule that catches out every new Commander player, and it's why adding a single off-color card to your pile can wipe out most of your options.
Does it tell me what to put in the deck?
Not yet. This finds the commander. Building the other 99 is what the Deck Lab in the TurnZero app does, and 'Build this deck' on any result is the way through to it.