[Don Miner, Virginia Beach 2025. Photos by Nick Wolf]

Do you remember the first time you stumbled across EDHREC on your Magic deckbuilding adventures? Ever wondered where it came from, and where it's going? Don Miner, founder of EDHREC, was interviewed at length at MagicCon Vegas 2025, about the creation of and continued development on EDHREC, as well as his upcoming speaking engagement at Mediavine Con 2025. Let's dive in.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity)

Stepping into the Sun

LAS VEGAS - Don Miner founded and helped build EDHREC, one of the most powerful digital tools for Magic: The Gathering’s most popular format of Commander, but at heart, he’s still just a guy messing with code and looking to do right by the community he helped build.

“I think we've had the luxury of hiding behind the websites for a long time,” Miner said, referring to EDHREC and its sibling deckbuilding platform, Archidekt. “But we're part of the community, and we've been downstairs (at MagicCon Vegas) playing games. It’s time people understood a little more about who we are and what we’re trying to do.”

That’s why he’s telling his story during a break in Commander games on Saturday of the weekend of Magic Con Las Vegas 2025. And that story isn’t linear, but a winding arc of startups, side projects and serendipity.

Born in 1985 and raised in Maryland, he discovered in himself a passion for computer science in high school that he’s carried through to adulthood, guided by supportive parents and teachers. “It was easy. It was natural to me,” he said. "I guess I never liked doing things I wasn’t good at."

Starting the REC Engine

After undergrad at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), he entered the workforce in 2005 as a software engineer, a career path he didn’t need a lot of time to discover was the wrong path. “And I was like, ‘I hate this,’” he said. 

He was told at the time that returning to grad school is the educational equivalent of “hitting the snooze button.” So he hit the snooze button, and kept hitting it until he earned a PhD in computer science. His dissertation focused on multi-agent systems, predicting how large groups of semi-intelligent agents behave in the context of things like pandemics, traffic simulations, and digital ecosystems. 

But sometime in the midst of a government job doing big data work with Hadoop, a lucrative stint in tech sales, and the eventual launch and sale of his own consulting firm, Miner pivoted again. EDHREC, which began as a Reddit bot, became his full-time gig, in a way that was part kismet, part determination, with a fair helping of simply needing to get his wheels going again after selling his firm.

“At some point I got excited about business stuff,” he said. “I know it's weird to a lot of people, but there’s just a lot of theory and other interesting things about business. So, I started reading research papers about business.”

The Magic of Data

Don Miner gets in a game of Commander with his son at MagicCon Vegas 2025.

That business sense turned a passion project into something sustainable. By 2022, he merged EDHREC with Archidekt under the Space Cow Media banner — a tongue-in-cheek name born out of a joke about cooking steak on re-entry from space. At the time, Miner said they didn’t think anybody would ever see that name. “So it really doesn't matter what it is, because we were still gonna interact with people as EDHREC and Archidekt, right? It's kind of like the parent company.”

For Miner, community is everything, and he doesn’t shy away from the criticisms EDHREC has received over the years about "homogenizing the Commander format," but he counters that it’s all about access. “I mean, I think we are (homogenizing), I just don't think it's a bad thing,” he said. “I think people will be creative when they want to be. You shouldn't force everybody to have to be creative. You shouldn't be mad at somebody for playing a precon. That's some gatekeeping shit.”

That mindset is core to most of what Miner seeks to accomplish in Magic, to create and foster tools that make the game easier to enter and more fun to explore. “I think EDH decks are a big form of expression,” he says. “I think we’re helping people express themselves and get inspired by scanning around on EDHREC, and I think that’s pretty cool. That's what I like hearing.”

That passion for the game is generational now, passed down to his kids. “They're a huge influence on me in terms of EDHREC,” he said. “I actually draw a lot of inspiration from them. I've managed to get them all into Magic at this point so I get to see what they care about when they're using digital tools.” And it's not at all what he expected, he admits. 

“It's like a new perspective. Pretty much the only digital tool my oldest kid does is Scryfall. He types in ‘T:Dinosaur,’ and that's literally the only thing he uses, right?” he joked. “I was like, ‘dude, you know, we have a Dinosaur page on EDHREC,’ and he's like ‘it's not the same.’ Talking to them and seeing what they're going through, I think it's been fun.” 

Commander and Community

Don Miner enjoying a Meet & Greet with the EDHRECast.

The deeper message of his story, though, is about ownership. Not in a tangible way, necessarily, but of culture. He’s quick to highlight content creators like Wedge of The Mana Source, The Professor of Tolarian Community College, and Jimmy and Josh of the Command Zone, all of whom helped amplify EDHREC early on in its development. “They asked for nothing in return,” he said. “They just saw me as a dude trying to do something.”

Now, he’s been paying that ownership of the culture of Magic forward, as Miner’s role has expanded to include mentorship, thus passing the ladder down instead of pulling it up. “I think it keeps me honest. Like, I think as soon as I feel like I need to start protecting my territory inside of Magic, that's when things falls apart,” he said. “At the end of the day we all might compete, like for example Moxfield and Archidekt compete. But I honestly wish the Moxfield guys all the best. I know that sounds kind of corny, but whenever I'm in the position to help them out, I will.”

One example of cross-collaboration he shared involved pernicious spammers attacking all sites in the Magic space. “We have this group DM where we just all were trying to figure out how to solve the scammer issue,” he said. “I think that's been a really cool thing, helping people push their things forward. If we're in the position to help, we love that.”

In the “regular” business world, said Miner, it wasn't like that. It was all competition, no collaboration. “At the end of the day, it's cool that literally all of us can really only care about the game, and it is the best thing for all of us to do, right?” he said. “It's not just we're good people. Literally caring about the game is the best business.”

The Landscape of Tools

It’s been a successful model for Miner, and by extension EDHREC and now Space Cow Media, and he’s been allowing it to guide his decision-making to this day with the recent acquisition of trading platform Cardsphere.

“It was something where, when they announced that they were going under, honestly, my first thought was, ‘I should have been helping them more, you know, so that this wouldn't have come to this,’” he said. 

Miner said the primary reason Space Cow Media acquired Cardsphere was because he simply felt like Cardsphere “needed to exist” in the landscape of tools for Magic players.

“When I saw all the users pissed about it going away, I was like, ‘I don't care about the economics. We'll figure that out,’” he said. “The fact is these guys have a niche that some people require, and this thing needs to exist. It's important for a community-driven place to have a way for people to sell their cards to other individuals. So that's why we picked it up. That's been something we've been working on a lot lately, and we're really happy with it. We're getting to the point now where we're trying to share the good news about Cardsphere.”

It’s just another example of Miner’s mentality; allowing passion for Magic and its world of players to guide business decisions, instead of the other way around.

“If it's good for the community, and we have the means to do it, that's what we would like to do.”

Spreading the Word

Miner's headed to Boston to attend an upcoming Mediavine Conference 2025 in early November. MVCon is designed to bring together business leaders and creators to trade knowledge, spark new ideas, and strengthen inter-business connections. The CEO of Space Cow Media will be sharing his insight regarding scaling business ventures on the MVCon stage as a featured speaker.

As always, Miner and the rest of the Space Cow Media team is working to refine its slate of products, and one of the best ways to do that is through user input. EDHREC began as a simple idea to make Commander more accessible and welcoming. Two decades later, it's still growing through collaboration and community.

And anyone who's tooled around on EDHREC, shared a list on Archidekt, or traded a card on Cardsphere is part of that story. Miner and SCM love hearing those experiences; explore, experiment, and share what inspires you, below or across social media.

Follow Don Miner and Space Cow Media for updates on EDHREC, Archidekt, and Cardsphere, and keep an eye out for Miner’s talk at Mediavine Conference 2025 to see how data, collaboration, and community can keep pushing Magic forward.