Andy Grimm Cassidy | photo by Nick Wolf

MagicCon Atlanta 2025 promises to be another smash hit for industry professionals and Magic players alike. This year, Space Cow Media CTO and Archidekt founder Andy Grimm Cassidy will be on stage alongside JMarGameDesign to talk Spellify, EDHREC's card guessing game, and plans for future games coming to EDHREC.

I interviewed Andy at MagicCon Vegas 2025 to get his perspective on working alongside friends to create Archidekt, a premier deckbuilder and collection tracker, as well as integrating into the Space Cow Media company galaxy.

The Beginning of Something Magical

LAS VEGAS - You wouldn’t know Andy Grimm Cassidy is the founder of Archidekt, a deckbuilding platform for Magic: The Gathering, if you walked by him at a MagicCon. But you know his site, and most recently, you know Archidekt’s banners posted at the event’s artist area, promoting the most recent of a litany of new features added to the site regularly.

But Grimm Cassidy, 29, has had an influence on how the greater Magic community conducts deckbuilding; and that influence is something he and his team take very seriously.

Grimm Cassidy hails from Buffalo, New York, a city he describes with affection. “Buffalo is the City of Good Neighbors,” he said. “A lot of that comes from digging each other out from piles of snow.” He might not outwardly acknowledge it, but there’s a Rust Belt, Midwestern mentality that puts community first, and it has shaped Grimm Cassidy's approach to Archidekt from its nascency.

His first Commander was Rhys the RedeemedRhys the Redeemed, converting a nostalgic 60-card Elf deck - the first deck he piloted that actually managed to beat his older brothers in the early 2000s - into a beloved Commander deck he still has to this day.

“We got back into it, I was like, ‘oh, Rhys is a legendary creature. I used to love this card. I'll just make this into an Elf deck,’” he said. “I just remember the first Commander game we played, we just had this board state where everyone had so much stuff, and I had 18 Elves on the board. And I was like, ‘this is the best format of Magic possible.’ Like, this is beautiful. And that's what got us hooked again.”

Building Archidekt

But Andy isn't only a Magic player. He's also a builder, in every sense of the word. Archidekt started during his college years at the University of Buffalo, following conversations between him and a group of software-engineering peers who were dissatisfied with existing deckbuilding websites.

“We (had) just graduated, so everyone had a bunch of free time, and obviously we wanted to share the decks online and stuff. Our big option at the time was TappedOut,” he said. “Now we have a bunch of fresh software engineers with new ideas looking at this relic of a website, and the tipping point was one of my friends had found a bug. He had reached out to the TappedOut folks, and they had been (dismissive). So a bunch of us got together and were just talking about the possibility of making something better.”

That interaction inspired Grimm Cassidy and his friend Mike Drewitt to create their own alternative.

Initially, he considered Archidekt merely a personal tool.

“In my brain, I was just building it for our friend group,” he said. “Mike said he always had the sense from the beginning it could become a business. I don't know if that's revisionist or not, but I definitely didn't suspect it would be a business until we did our official release on Reddit.”

The public launch brought both humbling critiques and a rush of enthusiasm, with commenters pointing out aspects of the platform that could be improved. But the positivity far outweighed the criticism, giving him and Drewitt the momentum needed to keep going.

“The big things that I didn't have a lot of experience with before Archidekt were UI design and user experience,” he said. “Maybe some time we’ll dredge up the original code, to look at the original iteration of Archidekt. There are a lot of unintuitive things. We were just green software engineers that just got out of college.”

Community-Forward

While Grimm Cassidy and Drewitt learned on the fly, the site quickly gathered a dedicated user base. They found managing community feedback rewarding, yet demanding. “We very quickly added a forum and a Discord so people could provide feedback. It adds a level of work,” Grimm Cassidy said. “But that's exactly what we wanted; we wanted to have this community-driven development.”

Andy attributed Archidekt’s growing popularity to its unique appeal: a tactile, visual approach. “What was important to us was to give it the feel of laying out your cards on a playmat,” he said.

This tactile experience has become the platform’s defining trait, deeply resonating with Commander enthusiasts who look for their deckbuilding platform to mimic the feeling of constructing a deck on a desk or kitchen table.

Finding the Space Cow Media Galaxy

A crucial turning point came with their integration with EDHREC, a symbiotic partnership beneficial for both sites that began as a data-sharing association. EDHREC founder Don Miner even approached Grimm Cassidy early on in Archidekt’s life, offering to buy the burgeoning website outright.

Fresh out of college and living with his parents, Grimm Cassidy turned down the tempting offer. “I could wait him out. I was having fun, so I could just continue on with that. And Don was obviously very understanding,” he said. “His policy is always just to help everyone in the Magic community out. It builds (the community) up, and you end up with these partners that have good will towards you.”

His patience paid off. Archidekt grew steadily, gaining popularity and financial viability. When the COVID pandemic hit, after a brief uncertainty, the site experienced significant and rapid growth as people turned to Magic, and specifically Commander, as an outlet during lockdowns and social distancing.

Eventually, Grimm Cassidy and Miner revisited their partnership, merging Archidekt with EDHREC under the Space Cow Media banner. “The sign of a good merger is that when you look back, everyone's happy,” Grimm Cassidy said. “And everyone's happy.”

Archidekt's Future Past

Grimm Cassidy’s long-term vision for Archidekt remains community-focused. “It’s just a matter of responding to the community and constantly improving our craft,” he said. For him, the project embodies dedication and continuous evolution.

Some of the more broad-reaching impacts on the community Archidekt has had weren't things he expected when beginning to craft what grew to become the site today. “The way Magic players now interact as a community has so much to do with how they brew decks and how they share decks,” he said.

And with the recent implementation of the Bracket System, there's an increased need for documentation - of Commander decks and the cards each deck contains.

“There now needs to be an understanding of ‘What combos are in my deck?’ You know, ‘How many Game Changers? How many extra turns?’ There's just this increasing need for documentation as the game grows larger,” said Grimm Cassidy. “There are just so many cards to search through. It’s tough to build Commander decks without tools now. So it's interesting that now we've become a part of this community. In a way, it's gratifying, for sure, and also sometimes humbling, because there's some responsibility.” 

Nearly a decade later, Grimm Cassidy reflected on seeing the Archidekt banner at the largest Magic event of the year. “That logo is something that I just made in some image editor eight years ago. That font is just a Google font that I picked, that I thought looked good. But that's not something anyone walking by would know,” he said.

The "Archidudes" with their banner at MagicCon Vegas 2025

“It's a weird disconnect to me; this is something so personal. I personally dragged the lines to make it, but it’s now something that people just walk by at a convention, and it's just another thing.” 

The banners bring up a mixture of emotions for Andy. “It's gratifying, it's humbling, and also has that weird kind of disconnect. There’s a lot of personal connection and a lot of personal meaning behind these projects. They're not just like faceless websites,” he said. “And that's one of the most gratifying things about this job. You are not often, as a software engineer, both the user and the developer. But for pretty much everything we work on at Space Cow, we are both, which is so much fun.

Spellify at MagicCon Atlanta 2025

And now, Andy Grimm Cassidy's work alongside Archidekt developer Ben helped launch an addicting card guessing game, Spellify. At MagicCon Atlanta, you'll get all the details on Spellify's launch, tips and tricks, and be able see inside the mind of one of the best deckbuilders and gamemakers in the business (and no doubt there will be a few surprises thrown into the mix).

And of course, you can always go play Spellify now if you just can't wait.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.