What the Plus/Minus Stat Means

+/- Spread is the plainest number on your profile. Win a game and it goes up by one for every side you beat; lose one and it goes down by one. It sits next to your ELO rating and your win-loss record, and it answers a different question from either of them.

How it is counted

Each game works out how many sides were at the table, then:

• If you won — you gain one point for every other side.
• If you lost — you lose one point, however many people were playing.

In a four-player Commander pod with one winner, the winner takes +3 and the three losers each take -1. The table nets out to zero. Win a two-player game and it is +1 against your opponent's -1.

Team games count sides, not seats. In Two Headed Giant, two teams means the winning pair each take +1 and the losing pair each take -1 — beating one other team is worth one point, not three, even though three other people were in the room.

What it tells you that ELO does not

ELO is about strength. It weighs who you beat, so a win over a 1300-rated deck moves you more than a win over a 900-rated one, and a rating can drift up or down without your record changing much.

+/- Spread ignores all of that and counts volume. It does not care how good your opponents were — only how many of them you have beaten, and how often you have been on the losing end. A spread of +18 means you have been winning big pods. A spread of -22 means you have been sitting in a lot of games somebody else won.

The two can disagree, and that is the point of having both. Someone who wins occasionally against very strong decks can hold a high ELO on a negative spread. Someone who wins often against a familiar pod can build a big positive spread with a rating that has barely moved.

Reading it against your record

Your win-loss record counts games. Your spread weights them by the size of the table, so it separates a player who wins four-player pods from one who wins the same number of duels. Two players can be 10-10 and sit at +20 and -1.

Where it shows up

The +/- Spread card appears on your account stats and on any player's profile, positive in green and negative in red. It is tracked everywhere ELO is: all-time and per year, globally and inside each league, for you and separately for each of your decks. A deck's spread is a fair way to compare two lists you pilot equally often.

Where to go next

How ELO Works on Nerd Leagues covers the rating this sits beside, and Adding Decks to an MTG League explains the per-deck records that carry their own spread.