Archiving and Restoring Games
Archiving a game takes it out of every rating and every standings table while leaving the game itself intact. It is how a bad result gets removed on Nerd Leagues, and it is reversible — nothing is ever deleted outright, so a game archived by mistake can be brought back with its ratings restored.
What archiving does
An archived game keeps its page and its URL. Anyone who opens it sees a banner reading This game has been archived, and everything else about the page stays as it was — the players, the decks, the notes, the comments.
What changes is that it stops counting. The game drops out of all-time ELO and yearly ELO for every player and every deck in it, out of league standings, and out of the public games lists. Both ratings are then rebuilt from every remaining game, so the archived result is not merely subtracted — it is as if it had never been recorded.
Who can archive a game
The league commissioner, and only the league commissioner. Being the person who recorded the game does not grant it, and neither does being one of the players.
This has a consequence for games recorded outside a league: a non-league game has no commissioner, so there is nobody who can archive it. If you record a pod as Non-League and get the winner wrong, the result stands.
Where the buttons are
Two places, and they are labelled differently:
- Manage League → Game Management — a table of every game in the league, with a Delete button on each row. That button archives; it does not delete. Archived rows show Restore instead.
- The game's own page — Archive Game appears in the commissioner's panel on a game that somebody has flagged, alongside Dismiss Flag and Edit Game. It is not on an unflagged game, so archiving from the game page means a flag has to exist first.
The confirmation dialog spells out that the action is reversible, that the game will be hidden from normal views, and that rankings need a full rating rerun to catch up.
Restoring
Archived games stay in the Game Management list rather than disappearing from it, so restoring one is a matter of finding the row and pressing Restore. The game starts counting again and both ratings are rebuilt to include it. Same permission: commissioner only.
Archive, or edit
Archiving is the blunt option. When a game happened but the details are wrong, editing it keeps the game and fixes the record — and a commissioner reviewing a flag has both buttons in front of them. Reach for archiving when the game should not exist at all: a duplicate, a test entry, a pod that got recorded twice.
One difference matters. Archiving and restoring both rebuild ratings across the whole site; editing a game does not, so a corrected result does not move anyone's ELO until ratings are next rebuilt.
Season standings are a step behind
Seasons keep their own separate standings, and those are not rebuilt at the moment a game is archived. All-time and yearly ratings update straight away; a season table covering the archived game's date can still show the old numbers until ratings are rebuilt site-wide. Worth knowing before you go looking for a bug.
Where to go next
Most archiving starts with a flag — The Commissioner Role covers the review tools that sit around it, and MTG League Seasons explains the separate standings that lag behind.