About
Last updated 2026-09-06
The Black Grimoire is a free deck builder for Magic: The Gathering Commander and Brawl, built by one person and shared publicly for feedback from the Magic community. It provides a full 99-card build for any legal commander, a public catalogue of scraped decklists, and a collection viewer, all without an account.
Who built it
Karolis Paulikas is a solo developer based in Lithuania. This site and the underlying deck-building engine are a solo project, not a company product, built and maintained by one person outside of full-time work.
That means updates ship in bursts rather than on a fixed release schedule, and support runs through a single contact form rather than a ticketing system. It also means every design choice on this site, including the decision to keep it free and accountless, was made by one person who plays Commander and Brawl and wanted a tool that explains itself.
Why it exists
Existing deck-building tools either lean on manual curation or a single popularity signal. This one combines a trained recommendation model with a rule-based synergy graph that reads the commander's actual oracle text, so every suggestion has a stated reason instead of just a rank number. See the methodology page for the full breakdown, including its limitations.
The engine also checks every build against Wizards of the Coast's official Commander Bracket rules, so a deck built for a casual table does not accidentally include a two-card infinite combo, and a cEDH build is not held back by restrictions meant for lower brackets.
The data
3,996,039 public decklists scraped from Moxfield, Archidekt, EDHREC as of 2026-09-06. Moxfield lists are excluded from the public deck catalogue pending written permission, though the corpus keeps training on them internally, and that exclusion is reversible the day permission is granted.
No tournament win-rate data exists in this corpus. Every popularity number on this site — in the builder, the catalogue, and the methodology page — is derived from likes and views, and that limitation is documented rather than smoothed over.
Get in touch
The contact form is the only way to reach the developer — no public email or phone number is listed. The same form also handles bug reports and feature ideas, and every message is read personally rather than routed through a support team.