How Game Recording Works in Nerd Leagues

Recording a game is how a night of Magic turns into a rating. You enter who played, which decks they brought, and who won; everyone's ELO moves as soon as you submit. It works for league nights and for a random pod at your kitchen table, and the flow is the same either way.

Two ways in

Play Game in the nav opens a choice between two cards:

• Already Played — the manual form. Enter a game that has already finished.
• Start New Game — the Life Tracker. Track life totals while you play, and the game is recorded from the result when you finish.

The rest of this article covers the manual form. It has three panels, numbered in order.

1. Game Setup

The first field is the League dropdown, and it has to be answered before you can submit. It lists the leagues you belong to, plus Non-League — a real choice rather than a fallback, for a pod that is not part of anything. You do not need the other players to be members yet; anyone you add to a league game who is not in that league is added to it.

Below that:

• Format — EDH, Standard, Historic, Pioneer, Brawl, Historic Brawl, Pauper, Pauper EDH, Draft, or Pack War.
• Sub Format — the shape of the table: Multiplayer by default, or 1v1, Two Headed Giant, Multi Two Headed Giant, 3v3, Sphere of Influence, or Emperor.
• Number of Players — 2 through 12, four by default. Changing it adds or removes rows in the players table.

2. Players

One row per seat, with columns for Username, Deck, ELO, Image, and Winner.

The username field suggests people you are already connected to: yourself, your friends, their friends, and anyone who shares a league with you. Someone with no connection to you will not appear — send a friend request or get them into the league first.

The deck dropdown fills with that player's decks in the format you chose, so a deck saved as EDH will not show up on a Pauper game. If the deck they played is not saved yet, the + button beside the dropdown adds one on the spot with just an owner, a format, and a name. The ELO column shows what that deck is rated going in, and the image column shows its art.

Tick Winner for every seat that won. More than one is fine, and Two Headed Giant needs it.

3. Notes

A free text field for the story of the game — the turn-three blowout, the mistake nobody noticed until later. Card names in [[Card Name]] brackets turn into real card links.

What has to be filled in

Submit Game checks four things and tells you which one is missing: a league (or Non-League) is selected, at least one winner is ticked, every row has both a username and a deck, and no username appears twice.

What happens when you submit

Ratings update immediately. There is no confirmation step and no waiting period — the moment the game is in, every player's ELO, record, and +/- Spread reflect it, and you land on the game's page where the result is laid out.

Everyone else in the game hears about it: an in-app notification, an email if they have game notifications turned on, and a post to the league's Discord channel if the league has one configured. Anyone who was in the game can flag it if you got a detail wrong.

One thing to watch: the game is stamped with the time you recorded it, not the time you played. There is no field for when the game happened. If you are catching up on a stack of games from last month, they all land on today.

League games and non-league games

A non-league game still counts. Your global ELO, your record, and your deck's rating all move exactly as they would in a league. What a league adds is a second, separate rating for you and your deck inside that league, plus standings, seasons, and a commissioner who can fix a bad result. A non-league game has no commissioner, so a mistake in one cannot be resolved by anyone.

Where to go next

For the league version of this form, with the standings and season context around it, read Recording an MTG League Game. For what the numbers do afterwards, How ELO Works on Nerd Leagues covers the rating math.