TurnZero HQ vs. Command Tower: Different Jobs, Same Commander Night

What Command Tower Is For

Command Tower (commandtower.app) is a web app built around the deck itself, not the game you play with it. It's a Commander deck-builder with a bracket advisor that tells you where a list sits on the official bracket scale before you ever bring it to a table. It doubles as a collection and inventory tracker, marking cards as "in use" once they're slotted into a deck so you know what's actually available to build with. There's a solo playtest simulator for running through a list on your own, price tracking and alerts for cards you're watching, and a community space for browsing other players' decks. It has a free tier and a $4/month Pro tier, runs in the browser, and doesn't have an iOS or Android app.

What TurnZero HQ Is For

TurnZero HQ starts where Command Tower stops, at the moment the deck hits the table. Life totals move with a tap or a drag, and Commander damage is tracked separately from life loss, broken out by attacker, so lethal damage is never a surprise. A join code connects a playgroup's games into one shared night that guests can join without an account, splitting into several pods at once if the room needs them, all feeding a single standings race. Moments turn the big plays into a shared feed tagged to the turn they happened, friends can follow the night live from anywhere, TV mode puts it on a screen for the room, and AI recaps close out each game and the night as a whole. Each deck earns an Elo-style MMR from its actual results over time, globally and within your playgroup. Personal Mode runs that same tracker scoped to your own side of the table when the rest of the pod isn't using an app, and Board State turns a once-a-round photo of the battlefield into a confirmed, AI-matched record of what was actually in play, which is how a decklist you built in Command Tower gets checked against what it really did. When a rules argument breaks out mid-game, Rulings answers it against your actual board with a judge-style outcome and cited comprehensive-rules sections and keeps it on record, TV mode drives a shared display for the room, and tournament mode runs Swiss-style pairing and rounds when a store is hosting a real event. It runs on iOS, Android, and web, and is free with a premium tier for the AI extras.

Where They Could Overlap: Read This Part Carefully

The one place these two tools might get confused for each other is "deck rating," since both apps surface something with that name, and TurnZero HQ actually has two versions of it. Command Tower's bracket advisor reads a decklist directly (cards, curve, combos) and estimates where it sits on the official 1-5 bracket scale before a single game has been played. TurnZero HQ's AI-powered Rate My Deck does something similar: it reads a decklist, calls out combos, fast mana, and tutors, and returns its own bracket estimate with specific upgrade paths, including a budget one. Where TurnZero HQ adds a second layer Command Tower doesn't have is deck MMR, earned strictly from results: an Elo-style rating that moves game by game with how a deck has actually performed at your table, reported both globally and inside your own playgroup. A deck can score well on a decklist-based bracket and still lose constantly against your specific playgroup, or the reverse, which is exactly why a results-based number is worth having alongside a list-based one.

TurnZero HQ's Rate My Deck: its own decklist-based bracket estimate with AI suggestions, separate from the results-based deck MMR.

Using Them Together

The natural workflow is sequential, not competitive. Build and refine a list in Command Tower, check where it lands on the bracket scale, track prices, and keep your collection organized. Then bring it to the table and let TurnZero HQ track what actually happens: life totals, Commander damage by attacker, and how that deck performs across a whole night and every night after. TurnZero HQ's deck-detail view can read decklists straight from Archidekt, Moxfield, and Manabox for display, so whichever tool you built the list in, you can see it inside TurnZero HQ once you're tracking games with it. Command Tower gets the deck ready; TurnZero HQ remembers what it did.

That loop is tighter than it sounds, because TurnZero HQ keeps a version history for every deck. Each edit snapshots the list, every game is tagged with the version that was actually played, and results split per version. So the cycle becomes: rebuild in Command Tower, play the new list, and get a straight answer on whether this version is beating the last one, rather than a lifetime win rate that blends six months of different decks under one name.

Frequently Asked Questions