The Commander Spellbook project exists to catalog all reasonable Commander/EDH combos and to make them easily available across all modern digital platforms.
The idea to catalog combos started off as a Discord Server in February 2020. Once the Discord reached ~5000 members and ~1000 combos in May 2020, I began working on a website.
TL;DR: I optimzied for community and made everything Open Source.
Many individuals have tried to build a combo database over the last decade, but they've all failed due to the headache involved in finding those combos and keeping them updated in a Forum Post or Blog up to date. Many of the issues revolved around a single individual being the gatekeeper. Therefore, I've opted to solve for that problem by enlisting the community to catalog combos via Discord (which is how we obtained over a thousand of combos in a matter of months). I also opted to host the website and the database for free, forever, so people can take over this project by cloning this repository, or the Google Sheet, respectively, if I ever step away. This mindset allowed me to find other individuals passionate about working on this project in their free time.
First and foremost, I am an iOS developer, and not a web developer. I am also not going to pretend to be a web developer, so therefore, a good chunk of the site's code is fairly ugly, due to me frankensteining this website together via Bootstrap tutorials and code snippets I've found online. While I enjoy architecture patterns and implementing best practices, I did very little to none of that here, as my goal was to move the combos from out of Discord and onto a better long-term solution -- the Commander Spellbook website, which is now hosted on GitHub Pages.
I also decided that I wanted to make the financial upkeep for this project as cheap as possible. At the moment, here is what I pay for with respect to this project:
- Discord Nitro: $99/year
- Domain Name: $20/year
- GitHub: Free
- Google Sheets: Free
- Cloudflare: Free (for now)
- LetsEncrypt SSL Certificate: Free
- The website is hosted off this repository for free using Github Pages: http://www.CommanderSpellbook.com
- The database is hosted for free on Google Sheets.
- The Google Sheets API for all the combos can be found here.
Massive thanks to @harryfino, creator of the Moxfield project, for helping me solve many of my JS and CSS headaches.