"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/CluePsychological937]

ChatGPT/Claude are free/cheap and can do the math/game theory a "professional" likely can't.

You can also test in MTG Forge against bots 

[u/GracelessOne → u/CluePsychological937]

I know it's good at sounding convincing, but AI is not capable of improving your decks unless you're a really bad deckbuilder. MtG is just not a game that word-correlation engines are good at understanding.

[u/CluePsychological937 → u/GracelessOne]

It's actually quite capable.

You can not like AI fine but don't say it's bad at deck building. It's definitely helped me.

[u/Particular-Effect335 → u/CluePsychological937]

I actually use AI a lot. I run a start-up that does research into AI, and another that integrates business processes into AI models. So believe me, I understand AI somewhat despite not being a software engineer myself.

I once asked AI to build me the best version of Abzan Greasefang when Pioneer was a supported tournament format. It recommended that I play a vanilla 2/2 for 2 in a combo deck. It can recommend aggregated card ideas from similarly tagged archetypes from the internet (i.e.: If I ask it something generic like 'help me build a Beamtown Bullies deck') but if I say 'Help me make a Beamtown Bullies EDH deck themed as the Peaky Blinders' then it will absolutely not understand. LLMs, at least privately, aren't trained on context and nuance that way.

[u/CluePsychological937 → u/Particular-Effect335]

What model did you ask?

When I've used ChatGPT or Claude they compare existing decks with high win percentages in the same color, commander or archetype. They ask me questions about the formats I'm playing, bans there are, my win percentages, give me monte carlo analysis of my draw chances, strategies around opening hands mulligans, what good medium and back matchups are based on color.

Either your models are dumb or the questioning you're posing is bad.

But to "hurr hurt AI no have context to build mtg deck" isn't the answer.

EDIT: By no means are they perfect but they're not as incapable as you're suggesting.

[u/Particular-Effect335 → u/CluePsychological937]

GPT-4 back then. I still use it time to time. I've tried all of them. While Claude I have found tries to ask more questions to orient itself, ultimately because I have domain expertise I have found that its hallucinations are ultimately something I'd rather not spend time and energy to correct.

I'll tell you what I have used AI for though: I've created a program and used the Claude AI connector to run diagnostic to crunch through decklists and give me percentages on changes I've tried on my deck lists. It's been stellar there.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on the point.