[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 <a href="https://www.mediavine.com/events/">upcoming speaking engagement at Mediavine Con 2025</a>. Let's dive in.
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity)
<h3>Stepping into the Sun</h3>
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."
<h3>Starting the REC Engine</h3>
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.”
<h3>The Magic of Data</h3>
<div id="attachment_167438" style="width: 842px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-scaled.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-167438" class=" wp-image-167438" src="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-scaled.jpg" alt="Don Miner Commander MagicCon Vegas 2025" width="832" height="491" srcset="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-300x177.jpg 300w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-1024x604.jpg 1024w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-768x453.jpg 768w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-1536x906.jpg 1536w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DonSonMCVegas2025-2048x1208.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 832px) 100vw, 832px" /></a>Don Miner gets in a game of Commander with his son at MagicCon Vegas 2025.</div>
That business sense turned a passion project into something sustainable. By 2022, he merged EDHREC with <a href="https://archidekt.com/">Archidekt</a> under the <a href="https://spacecowmedia.com/">Space Cow Media</a> 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.” 
<h3>Commander and Community</h3>
<div id="attachment_167435" style="width: 974px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-scaled.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-167435" class=" wp-image-167435" src="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-scaled.jpg" alt="Don Miner EDHRECast Meet and Greet Atlanta 2025" width="964" height="720" srcset="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-300x224.jpg 300w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-1024x765.jpg 1024w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-768x574.jpg 768w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-1536x1147.jpg 1536w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/EDHRECastMG_Atlanta_2025_16-2048x1530.jpg 2048w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 964px) 100vw, 964px" /></a>Don Miner enjoying a Meet &amp; Greet with the EDHRECast.</div>
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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@TheManaSource">The Mana Source</a>, The Professor of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@TolarianCommunityCollege">Tolarian Community College</a>, and Jimmy and Josh of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/@commandcast">Command Zone</a>, 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.”
<h3>The Landscape of Tools</h3>
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 <a href="https://www.cardsphere.com/">the recent acquisition of trading platform Cardsphere.</a>
 “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.”
<h3>Spreading the Word</h3>
<a href="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Don-Miner.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-167434" src="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Don-Miner.png" alt="Don Miner MVCon graphics" width="589" height="736" srcset="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Don-Miner.png 1080w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Don-Miner-240x300.png 240w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Don-Miner-819x1024.png 819w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Don-Miner-768x960.png 768w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 589px) 100vw, 589px" /></a>
Miner's headed to Boston to attend an upcoming <a href="https://mvcon.mediavine.com/2025/8197627">Mediavine Conference 2025</a> 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 <a href="https://spacecowmedia.com/">Space Cow Media</a> 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.

An Interview with EDHREC Founder Don Miner

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 <a href="https://mcatlanta.mtgfestivals.com/en-us/experience/panels-and-events/panel-information.html?gtID=909459&amp;panel-name=Solving-Spellify-The-EDHREC-Guessing-Game" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Andy Grimm Cassidy will be on stage alongside JMarGameDesign to talk Spellify</a>, 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 <a href="https://archidekt.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Archidekt</a>, a premier deckbuilder and collection tracker, as well as integrating into the <a href="https://spacecowmedia.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Space Cow Media</a> company galaxy.
<h2>The Beginning of Something Magical</h2>
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 <a class="edhrecp__link-a" content="Rhys the Redeemed" href="#" target="_blank">Rhys the Redeemed</a>, 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.”
<h2>Building Archidekt</h2>
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.”
<h2>Community-Forward</h2>
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.
<h2>Finding the Space Cow Media Galaxy</h2>
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 <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/donaldminer/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Don Miner</a> 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.”
<h2>Archidekt's Future Past</h2>
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 <a href="https://edhrec.com/articles/edhrec-guide-to-commander-brackets" target="_blank" rel="noopener">the Bracket System</a>, 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 <a href="https://edhrec.com/top/game-changers" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Game Changers</a>? 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.
<div id="attachment_165481" style="width: 516px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/archidudes-BA3ja1kd-1.jpeg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-165481" class=" wp-image-165481" src="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/archidudes-BA3ja1kd-1-300x214.jpeg" alt="The &quot;Archidudes&quot; with their banner at MagicCon Vegas 2025" width="506" height="361" srcset="https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/archidudes-BA3ja1kd-1-300x214.jpeg 300w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/archidudes-BA3ja1kd-1-1024x731.jpeg 1024w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/archidudes-BA3ja1kd-1-768x548.jpeg 768w, https://edhrecstatic.com/articles/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/archidudes-BA3ja1kd-1.jpeg 1200w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 506px) 100vw, 506px" /></a>The "Archidudes" with their banner at MagicCon Vegas 2025</div>
 “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.
<h2>Spellify at MagicCon Atlanta 2025</h2>
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 <a href="https://edhrec.com/games/spellify" target="_blank" rel="noopener">go play Spellify now</a> if you just can't wait.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

founder

An Interview with EDHREC Founder Don Miner

An Interview With Archidekt Founder Andy Grimm Cassidy