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A Little Tool to Make AI Better at Magic: The Gathering Deckbuilding

Published: at 06:14 PM

I play a lot of Magic: The Gathering, and sometimes I attempt to deckbuild and I want to chat with an AI about the deck I’m making. But all of the AIs hallucinate if you only give them a list of names (as exported by a tool like ManaBox where I build my decks).

So I made this little “enricher” that goes through the decklist and for each card fetches all of the relevant details about the card and also groups and sorts the list in a logical way. From my experience this makes it a lot more useful to collaborate with an AI around deckbuilding.

The problem

When you export a decklist from ManaBox, you just get names and quantities like “1 Lightning Bolt” or “2 Sol Ring”. Paste that into Claude or ChatGPT, and they’ll confidently make up mana costs, invent abilities, and generally give you advice based on their imagination rather than actual card data.

I’ve tried exporting my list directly from ManaBox into Claude, and it’s just terrible. The AI hallucinates a whole bunch about the cards because it doesn’t actually know what they do.

The solution

I made a little web app that tries to at least solve the missing knowledge. It’s called the MTG Deck Enricher, and it does exactly what it sounds like: it takes your decklist and enriches each card with the real information from Scryfall’s API.

You paste in your decklist (as exported from ManaBox—I haven’t tested Moxfield lists yet), and the tool goes through each card and fetches the mana cost, power and toughness (for creatures), oracle text (the actual rules text), type line, and all the details that matter and it also works with doublesided cards and cards with multiple spells in them.

It also groups and sorts the cards logically (creatures together, artifacts together, lands at the end) and provides statistics like how many creatures you have, how many artifacts, etc. This is especially useful because AIs sometimes miscount when you just give them a raw list.

The result is a formatted decklist with all the card details that you can copy and paste directly into your AI chat tool of choice so there is a better chance of getting good feedback.

This is a very niche tool, I know. But if you’re like me who attempt to build decks and wants to use AI to help think through them you might find it useful too.

You can find the tool here if you want to try it out.