About
TCGCore is a small, independent project for Magic: The Gathering players who want a constructed format that's actually theirs.
The concept
Standard, Modern, and the rest of the official constructed formats are fixed — the card pool is decided for you. This site flips that around: you build the format. Pick a legal set pool by hand, or spin the wheel and let the game choose for you from a numbered list of eligible sets. Silly, joke, and non-paper sets (Un-sets, tokens, promos, and the like) are excluded by default, and you can exclude anything else you don't want in the pool.
Once a format exists, its owner can maintain a banlist, mark sets as rotated out without erasing them from history, and invite friends with a shareable link so everyone can see the same rules. There's no built-in deckbuilder — when you're ready to build, the site links out to Moxfield, Archidekt, TappedOut, and Scryfall instead of trying to reinvent them.
Alongside the format builder, there's a small blog for MTG writing and updates about the project itself.
What's included
Playgroups & invites. Create a playgroup, share one invite link, and everyone who joins sees the same members, decks, and rules — no separate spreadsheets or group chats to keep in sync.
Build your own format. Standard and Modern fix the card pool for you. Pick or spin a set pool instead, ban individual cards, and mark sets as rotated out without losing the history — then link it to any playgroup.
MTG blog. Writing about Magic and updates about the project itself, right alongside the tool.
How this site is built
It's a hobby project, built and run by one person in the open rather than behind a big product team. It's also entirely "vibe-coded": every line was written together with an AI coding assistant rather than by hand, start to finish.
Under the hood it's a Next.js app with a small SQLite database, using the public Scryfall API for card and set data — Scryfall does the heavy lifting of knowing what a "set" is; this site just lets you filter, pick, and organize it.
It's intentionally simple: no ad network, no analytics trackers, no third-party scripts loaded on the pages you visit.
Privacy
Creating an account requires an email address and a password. Passwords are never stored in plain text — only a salted hash. Your email is used solely to identify your account; it isn't shared, sold, or used for marketing.
Beyond your account, the site stores what you put into it: the playgroups you create or join, the formats you build or link within them, decks and match results you log, and any messages, polls, or photos you post inside a playgroup. That data is visible to the members of the relevant playgroup, not the public at large — except a custom format itself, which is visible to other playgroups too if its owner leaves it public.
There are no analytics or tracking cookies on this site. Card and set lookups are proxied through Scryfall's public API, which is subject to Scryfall's own terms. Photos are re-encoded on upload to strip embedded metadata (including any GPS location your phone may attach to a photo) before they're stored.
Data is kept for as long as your account exists. You can ask to see, export, or fully delete your account and everything tied to it at any time — just get in touch (see below) and it'll be handled directly, no automated self-service flow needed at this scale.
Card images & copyright
Card images, names, and mana symbols shown on this site are sourced from the Scryfall API and remain the property of Wizards of the Coast. TCGCore is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Wizards of the Coast Fan Content Policy. It is not approved or endorsed by Wizards of the Coast. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.
Feedback
This site is actively developed, and feedback — bug reports, feature ideas, or just "this format thing is broken" — is genuinely welcome.