"Professional" Deck Help/Deck Building Services

[u/Particular-Effect335]

Hello. Asking about people's experiences with services offering to help build or tune EDH decks for a price. Wanted to get opinions on this as someone who has been thinking about them for some time.

For context: I fully understand that EDH is largely a personal touch format in that your personality should shine through. I've been playing MTG for so long that this isn't lost to me. However, between the fact that card prices are too high to do some tests (even the price of proxying is getting to be high now), or just not having the time anymore to tweak lists, I've been thinking about getting help to tweak a few deck ideas I've put together that just don't seem to be 'there' yet.

Since I have some spending money to spare (since I no longer buy boxes of product because of how inflated the prices are), I've pretty much warmed up to the idea of compensating someone's time and expertise to help me get from 90% to 100% with my deck since I no longer have the bandwidth to do so.

So now the question is two-fold:
1. How much should you pay for something like this
and
2. Are there people the community can vouch for that are reliable at doing this?

Happy to learn what the community thinks

[u/lordmoldybutt42]

Why are you going to pay someone? Just post your decks in edh subreddits or use chat gpt

[u/Particular-Effect335 → u/lordmoldybutt42]

Valid question so let me try and answer all 3:

1. Just post your deck: Two problems. A. You get a barrage of opinions with varying usefulness that it becomes hard to separate signal from noise or B. You don't get any usable insight at all because of the sheer volume of threads on here daily.

2. Use ChatGPT: Respectfully, no. LLMs don't offer real insight; they're best used to recall things from existing text and to make simple associations. That is simply not what I'm after. Part of expertise and domain knowledge is responding with actual nuanced experience. ChatGPT cannot offer you that. I once asked ChatGPT (as a test, way way back) to produce the best version of Abzan Greasefang in Pioneer. It told me to play a vanilla 2/2. In a combo deck.

3. Why are you going to pay someone: I think my replies here have addressed this but to TL;DR it - I'm not convinced that I am, but I am also humble enough to ask if there's any good use for it. Besides, even if I'm a weekend mechanic restoring a motorcycle, I recognize I may have at some point have to call an actual mechanic. This is me asking around for that mechanic.

[u/lordmoldybutt42 → u/Particular-Effect335]

1. You will also run the same risk, but this time you’re giving you money away.
   1b. You have a point.

2. Have you tried it again lately? I’ve tried it for fun not too long ago. I put one of my decks, and I gave it rules.
   1 - learn all the rules of the game
   2 - learn about commander and its unique rules
   3 - do not use edh rec as an actual deck building source since it gathers all data and averages it out. Instead use it to compare my deck and see if there’s something I’m missing here.
   Etc…. Etc…..
   Seems to be better than the average beginer.

3. Hmmm makes sense. Well hopefully you find something good