The Mobile Life Tracker: What It Is and Why It Records Your Games

The Life Tracker is a shared life counter that records the game when you finish. Everyone at the table joins one lobby, each player tracks their own total on their own phone, and when someone ends the game and picks the winners, Nerd Leagues writes the result and moves everyone's rating. No one has to fill in the record form afterwards.

Three ways to play

Play opens Choose your way to play:

• Quick Play — Offline life tracker - no account needed. Local to your phone, and it records nothing.
• Create Lobby — Host a game and invite friends. This is the one that records.
• Join Lobby — Enter a code or scan QR to join someone else's.

Only the middle two are online. Quick Play is a life counter and nothing else.

Creating a lobby

Create Lobby asks for three things: a League, a Format, and it hands you an Invite Code. The league is required — a Life Tracker game always belongs to a league, unlike the manual record form, which has a Non-League option.

Your own account needs a deck and a league before the online buttons work. Until then the home screen greys them out behind a lock icon, under the line Create a deck and join a league to play online.

The code looks like burning-colosseum-42. Others join by typing it, by scanning the QR code off your screen, or by tapping the matching nerdleagues.com/join/... link.

Starting life

Starting life follows the format, so nobody sets it by hand: 40 for EDH, 30 for Pauper EDH, 25 for Brawl and Historic Brawl, and 20 for everything else — Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, Historic, Pauper, Draft, Sealed, and Pack War.

During the game

Each player gets a tile with their life total, and taps move it. Beyond life, the game screen tracks:

• Poison and commander damage — commander damage per source, so the tracker knows who dealt what.
• Ping All — Deal damage to all players in one action, with an Include Self toggle for the symmetrical ones.
• Eliminations — at zero life the app asks how they went out, with a row of causes (Damage, Combat Damage, Combo, Drain, Mill, Concede, plus a joke option) and Keep Playing for a player who is not actually dead yet. Lethal commander damage or poison gets a straight Eliminate instead.
• Cards and Combos — pull up a player's decklist mid-game, and the combos found in it.

Lose signal and the app says Reconnecting... Changes will sync when restored, then catches up when you are back.

Ending the game

When one player is left the app raises Game Over?, offering End Game or Continue Playing. End Game asks who won, more than one seat allowed, then Record Game writes it.

What lands is a normal recorded game: it is linked to the lobby's league, anyone in the pod who was not a member of that league is added to it, ratings move immediately, and the usual notifications and Discord post go out. It can be commented on, flagged, and archived like any other game.

Where to go next

Recording an MTG League Game covers the manual form for games the tracker was not open for, and How ELO Works on Nerd Leagues covers what the result does to everyone's rating.