Magic players have a strange relationship with truth. We think we know how our decks perform. We "feel" 60-40 in the matchup. We "always" lose game one and "usually" stabilize game two. We have an instinct about which decks beat us. And almost none of those instincts hold up to honest record-keeping.
I figured this out the hard way. Almost a decade ago, I was grinding Modern and Legacy at every LGS in town — three nights a week, sometimes more — and convinced myself I was a much better Modern pilot than I actually was. (Reader, I was not.) After one particularly humiliating tournament report, I started keeping a notebook. Just match results: deck I played, opponent's deck, who won, any sideboarding mistakes I noticed.
The notebook was an immediate education. There were matchups I "always" won that I'd actually been losing for months. There were sideboard cards I felt great about that, on review, never actually mattered. There were opponents I dreaded who I had a winning record against, and opponents I felt confident against who I was steadily 1-2 against.
That's the moment a stat tracker stops being a chore and starts being interesting: when it tells you something you didn't already know about yourself.
The notebook becomes a spreadsheet becomes an app
The notebook lasted about a year before it became a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet lasted about another year before it became a more complicated spreadsheet, and then a much more complicated spreadsheet, and eventually I was writing SUMIFS formulas that compared bracket performance across formats and started to feel like maybe a relational database was the right call.
It became one. By the end of my first semester at Harvard's grad program — between database systems lectures and trying to test for the next weekend's tournament — I had a Symfony app instead of a spreadsheet. Just for me. Just to scratch the same itch the notebook had: a place to put the truth instead of guessing at it.
People I played with regularly started seeing me logging matches. A few of them asked if they could use it. Some did. The early version was rough — half the columns didn't have validation, it didn't really know about Commander, the reports were ugly — but the people who tried it gave me feedback I built around. By 2020 I had a passable version of the site running for me and a small group of friends.
Then COVID happened, the local Modern and Legacy scene around me fell apart, and the project sat in a folder on my laptop for the next several years while I tried to figure out what counted as "playing Magic" in the new landscape. (Spoiler: not enough.)
This year I dusted it off, did the boring-but-necessary work of bringing it up to a modern Symfony version, added support for multiplayer formats so Commander and cEDH players could use it too, paid for hosting, and — after a private beta with a handful of friends — opened it up. That's the version you're looking at now. It's in public beta. Anyone can sign up. It's free, and will be forever.
A few things, plainly
A lot of "why I made a tool" posts are euphemistic about a few things. I'd rather just say them.
This is a passion project, and I'm happy for it to stay that way. I'm not trying to build a startup. I'm not trying to displace any of the great tools the Magic community already has. I'm trying to put a thing into the world that I myself want to use, and that I think a non-zero number of other data-curious players will also find useful. If that grows, beautiful. If it doesn't, I'll still be using it next month, because I still want to know whether I'm actually good at a matchup or just remember the wins.
I built it for competitive 60-card players first. Modern, Legacy, Pioneer, Pauper, Limited grinders — the people most likely to already have spreadsheets, and most likely to find value in trading the spreadsheet for something purpose-built. cEDH players too: same data-loving culture. Casual Commander players are welcome but probably not going to log every game, and that's fine.
I think the data could matter someday. Not yet. Right now it's a database with mostly my matches in it, and a handful of friends'. But the long, patient version of this site is one where there's enough community-contributed data that we can actually answer questions like "how often does this card decide a Commander game" or "what's the median game length in a given format" with real numbers instead of vibes. That takes time and volume. We don't have either yet. We will.
If any of this resonates
If you've ever caught yourself making a confident claim about your win rate that you couldn't actually back up, or if you just enjoy Magic data the way some people enjoy baseball data — give it a try. It's free. It's open. Sign up and start logging. Tell me what's broken; I read every piece of feedback that comes through the form.
The card it's named after, by the way, has always been my favorite. Accumulated Knowledge gets better the more times you play it. So does this site. So does anyone who keeps track of what they're actually doing at the table.
Thanks for reading. See you in the data.
— Andrew