Yearly ELO: Annual Resets and Historical Records
Yearly ELO is a second rating that starts over at 1000 every January. Your all-time rating keeps climbing across your whole history on Nerd Leagues; your yearly rating asks a smaller question — how are you doing this year. Every game updates both at once.
Why two ratings
An all-time rating rewards longevity. Someone who has played four hundred games has a rating built on all of them, and a newcomer who shows up in March cannot catch them inside a year no matter how well they play. The yearly rating puts everyone back on 1000 in January, so a good year is visible on its own terms.
It also gives a group something to compete over that ends. Last year's champion starts this year level with everybody else.
Where to find it
Anywhere ratings are shown, there is a row of year tabs — All Time first, then one tab per year you have games in. Switching tabs swaps every number below it: the ELO Rating card, Win - Loss, and +/- Spread.
The tabs are on your own account stats, on any player's profile, and on a league page, where they also cover per-year member standings and per-year deck standings.
What resets and what does not
The reset is a fresh starting point, not an erasure. Every past year keeps its own record, so your 2025 rating still reads whatever you finished 2025 on, permanently.
Yearly ratings are tracked at the same four levels as all-time ratings: you globally, each of your decks globally, you inside each league, and each deck inside each league. A player who is 1000 on their 2026 tab in one league can be 1140 on their 2026 tab in another.
Which year a game counts toward
The year a game lands in is the year it was recorded, not the year it was played. A game from late December that nobody got round to entering until January counts toward the new year. If a group cares about the boundary, the fix is to enter December's games before the year turns.
Yearly ratings and seasons
Seasons cover similar ground and are worth telling apart. Yearly ELO is automatic, applies to everyone, and always runs January to December. A season is something a commissioner creates with whatever start and end dates they want, and seasons can overlap. A group wanting a spring split and a summer split wants seasons; a group wanting a clean annual leaderboard already has one.
Archived games
Archiving a game removes it from the yearly rating for its year as well as from the all-time rating, and both are rebuilt from the games that remain.
Where to go next
How ELO Works on Nerd Leagues covers the rating math that both systems share. MTG League Seasons is the custom-dated alternative, and MTG League ELO explains the per-league ratings that also get a yearly copy.