About Accumulated Knowledge

Why this exists

Accumulated Knowledge started as a notebook.

I was grinding Modern and Legacy at every LGS in town — three nights a week, sometimes more — and started writing down which deck I played, who I played against, and how it went. I was trying to figure out where I was actually losing games, because "I lost to that deck" wasn't telling me what I needed to fix.

The notebook became a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet got out of hand. By the end of my first semester at Harvard's grad program, I had a Symfony app instead.

The card it's named after, Accumulated Knowledge, has always been my favorite. You play it once, it's a cantrip. You play it four times, and suddenly you're up nine cards. The whole point of the card is that small data compounds into something useful. That's exactly what this site is about.

Other people I played with regularly started asking if they could use it. Some did. Then COVID hit, the local competitive scene fell apart, and the project sat. This year I cleaned it up, added multiplayer/Commander support, and put it on the public internet. That's the version you're looking at.

What we believe

The Magic community has a thriving ecosystem of incredible tools — for building decks, browsing metas, tracking prices, theorycrafting, and a hundred other things. Accumulated Knowledge isn't trying to be any of those. It's a passion project, built first for me and now offered to anyone else who finds it useful: a place to log what actually happened in your matches and games, and to see — in your own data, and in everyone's data combined — patterns you'd otherwise just be guessing at.

A few choices we've made along the way:

• One tracker for every paper format you play. Modern, Legacy, Pioneer, Pauper, Limited, Commander, cEDH — track them all in one place. The site is built for players who play more than one thing.
• Real numbers, openly browsable. Deck, format, and archetype stat pages are public — no account needed to see them. Search engines can find them. Other players can link to them.
• Bracket-aware Commander tracking. Commander brackets are a first-class part of the data model, so we can talk about cEDH, casual, and everything in between as the distinct things they are.

The near-term value is personal: stop guessing where your win rate comes from. The long-term hope is that the data, in aggregate, gets useful enough to inform real questions — about Commander brackets, banlist debates, pace of play, whatever the community is currently arguing about. That part takes volume and time. We're not there yet. We will be.

Who it's for

If you keep a notebook, a spreadsheet, or just a running mental tally of how your matches go: this is for you. Specifically:

• Modern, Legacy, Pioneer, Pauper, and Limited grinders who want better answers than "I think I'm 60% in that matchup."
• cEDH players who treat Commander like the competitive format it is.
• Anyone tracking across multiple decks, formats, or playgroups — even casual ones — who'd rather have actual numbers than vibes.

If you're a casual Commander player who shows up for the social side and doesn't want to log anything during a game — that's totally fair. You may still get value from the aggregate analysis we publish as the data grows.

What we track. What we don't.

We track what you tell us about each event, match, and game: the deck, the opponent's deck, the result, and optionally start/end times and turn count. We don't — and won't — require decklists, card-level tracking, or anything else that turns logging into a chore. If we add card-level features later, they'll be optional.

Your data is yours. We surface aggregate community stats (formats, decks across users, archetypes) on public pages, but your individual match history stays behind your account.

Public beta

The site is in public beta. There's a feedback link in your account menu, and I read everything that comes through it. If you sign up and something is broken, missing, or wrong — tell me. The roadmap is genuinely shaped by what people ask for.