Life Log

How a player loses

A seat is marked out the moment its life reaches 0 or less, its poison reaches 10, or, in Commander, one commander has dealt it 21 combat damage over the game (16 in Pauper Commander, as PDH Home Base's rules say; any number you set for a house rule). Brawl, Oathbreaker and Duel Commander don't use that rule, so commander damage starts switched off for them; you can switch it on in setup for a house rule. Those are the rules' own tests: rules 704.5a (life), 704.5c (poison) and 704.6c (commander damage). Commander damage also takes the same amount of life, since that is how it happens in a real game. Marking a seat out never ends the game on its own; you end it when the table agrees.

out if life <= 0 or poison >= 10 or damage from one commander >= 21 (16 in Pauper Commander)

Format presets and team games

Each preset sets starting life, commander damage and the player counts its format allows, and says where its numbers come from with the day they were read: Pauper Commander (30 life, out at 16 commander damage, PDH Home Base), Competitive Brawl (two players at 25, Wizards' June 8, 2026 announcement), Tiny Leaders, Canadian Highlander and 7 Point Highlander (two players at 20), Momir Basic (24), Archenemy, Archenemy Commander, Two-Headed Giant, its Commander night and Planechase (Comprehensive Rules effective September 25, 2026, and Wizards' format pages). A format page's link opens Life Log on its preset (/life/?preset= and the format's key) and names the format it came from; the setup it opens, and names typed into it, last through a reload until Start. Brawl's link opens two players at 25, as Brawl is played on MTG Arena; the Brawl (multiplayer) preset is three to six players at 30 (rule 903.12f).

Two-Headed Giant: two teams of two side by side, each team sharing one life total that starts at 30 and its poison counters, out at fifteen (rules 810.4, 810.10, 810.8d); with six players it is Three-Headed Giant, 45 life and twenty poison (810.11). A change on either teammate's seat moves the team's number on both seats, and the record says whose it was (810.9). The team takes its turn together, so Next turn passes from team to team (805.4). If either player on a team loses, the team does, and a player who concedes takes the team with them (810.8a, 810.8b). Two-Headed Giant Commander: 60 a team, and a team is out at 21 damage from a single commander or fifteen poison, as Wizards' Two-Headed Giant page says; commander damage is counted against the team, which is this site's reading of that page (the Comprehensive Rules don't address it). Archenemy: the archenemy at 40 against players at 20, the archenemy first, a reminder to set a scheme in motion each of their turns, and the team's turns together (904.2, 904.5, 904.6, 904.9); each team player keeps their own life, and the archenemy wins when the whole team is out (104.2c). Archenemy Commander: 60 for the archenemy and one shared 60 for the team; poison isn't shared, ten on one player is enough (904.13). The team wins and loses together, so a player who is out takes the team with them: this site's reading of 904.13b, which points to rules 810.8 and 810.9 for the shared life total.

The planar die has six faces: the Planeswalker symbol, the chaos symbol and four blank (901.3a), each equally likely. Rolling it costs as much mana as the times that player has already rolled it as a special action this turn, so the first roll is free (901.9); a roll a card's effect causes costs nothing and doesn't raise the next cost. On a team's turn each player rolls at their own cost (901.12d). Each roll is a line in the record.

planar die cost = rolls this player made this turn as the special action (0 for the first)

Commander damage and commander tax, per commander

Commander damage is counted for each commander on its own, not for each opponent. A seat can have one commander or two (partners, a commander with a Background, Friends forever, a Doctor's companion), and each of the two has its own chip on every other seat, its own count toward 21 and its own name in the record (rules 903.10a and 702.124d: the two commanders count separately). Eleven from one partner and ten from the other is not 21 from one commander. A game saved before October 18, 2026 kept one count per opponent; it reads as that opponent's first commander.

Commander tax: a commander cast from the command zone costs {2} more for each earlier time that player cast it from there this game (rule 903.8), and each partner counts only its own casts (702.124d). The chip on the seat counts a cast with each tap and shows what the next cast adds. In Oathbreaker, the oathbreaker and the signature spell each have their own count, as the Oathbreaker rules say (906.9 and 906.11). Captain keeps its own Seat tax.

next cast costs {2 x casts so far from the command zone this game} more, for each commander on its own

Commander damage: tap the seat's Cmdr chip and the table turns into the grid, each opponent's commander a tile where that player sits (two for partners), a tap adding 1, a minus in its corner taking 1 back; the seat whose damage it is holds the heading and Done.

The table's counters

Each seat counts poison, energy, experience and rad counters (rule 122.1), speed, how many times the Ring has tempted that player, the city's blessing, its dungeon and any counters you name yourself; the table as a whole has the monarch, the initiative, day or night and the spells cast this turn. Each change is a line in the record, so it can be undone like any other. When the monarch or the player with the initiative leaves the game, it passes at once to the active player, or to the next player in turn order if the active player is the one leaving (rules 725.4 and 726.4); that pass is its own line, and it passes back by itself if the player comes back into the game. In a two-player game nothing passes.

• Speed runs from 0 (no speed) to 4. When an opponent loses life during the turn of a player whose speed is 1 to 3, that player's speed rises by 1, once each turn (rule 702.179d). Life Log does this by itself, as its own line in the record, so the table can undo it alone; undoing the life loss that raised it takes the rise back too, unless another opponent's loss that turn still stands.
• The Ring lists the abilities a player's Ring has after 1, 2, 3 and 4 or more temptings, in our own words (rule 701.54c).
• The city's blessing stays for the rest of the game once a player has it (rule 702.131).
• Dungeons: Lost Mine of Phandelver, Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Tomb of Annihilation and Undercity, with each room's ability as the card says it and only the rooms its arrows lead to (rules 309 and 701.49). Moving into the bottom room completes the dungeon (309.7). Undercity is for the initiative (726.2). Baldur's Gate Wilderness isn't mapped, because Scryfall's text of it doesn't give its arrows.
• Spells this turn is one count for the whole table, by any player, the number storm copies (rule 702.40a). It goes back to 0 at Next turn.
• Day and night: at the untap step, day becomes night if the turn before had no spells from its player, and night becomes day if that player cast two or more (rule 731.2). The spell count holds every player's spells, so after Next turn the strip under the seats asks the question instead of deciding it.

A deck saved in this browser can be attached to a seat. The seat then takes its commanders from the deck's command zone (in Oathbreaker, the planeswalker as the oathbreaker), shows the counters its cards use even at 0 (from the same reading of each card's rules text and Scryfall's links that Decks' Tokens and extras uses), counts spells when the deck has storm, and offers its tokens in the token tray. Any other deck name is kept as text for the playgroup ledger.

The token tray

Each seat keeps its tokens by name, untapped and tapped. Making tokens multiplies the number the card makes by each card in play that changes it, as each card says (Scryfall's text, read October 18, 2026): Doubling Season, Parallel Lives, Anointed Procession, Mondrak, Glory Dominus, Adrix and Nev, Twincasters, Elspeth, Storm Slayer, Exalted Sunborn, Bard, King of Dale and Kaya, Geist Hunter's -2 double the tokens made under their controller's control; Primal Vigor doubles every player's tokens; Ojer Taq, Deepest Foundation triples creature tokens only; Xorn and Jolene, the Plunder Queen add one Treasure when Treasure is made.

When a card adds tokens and another multiplies them, the player making the tokens chooses the order the replacement effects apply in (rule 616.1), and the answer depends on it, so the two orders that give the most and the fewest are offered; with three or more such cards any other order lands in between, and the page says to type that count in.

tokens = made x each multiplier (no Treasure added)

add first: (made + added) x multipliers e.g. (2 + 1 Xorn) x 2 = 6

multiply first: made x multipliers + added e.g. 2 x 2 + 1 Xorn = 5

The total is a suggestion for the player to confirm: it can be changed before the tokens are added, and the record says when the table's count differed from the arithmetic. Other cards that change tokens (ones that make other kinds instead, or extra tokens of another kind) aren't in the list; change the total for them. Next turn untaps the new active player's tokens, as their untap step does (rule 502.3). Making tokens writes a line in the record, and undoing that line takes them off the tray again (as many as are still there, the ones made tapped first); tapping and untapping doesn't write one.

The turn clock and the chess clock

Every turn line in the record carries the time it was written, so a turn lasts from its line to the next turn's line. A game begun again in a match starts a turn and a recorded game result ends one. Time spent paused (Pause the game, in the turn clock) is taken out. The turn in progress shows beside its number and is left out of the stats until it ends. Undoing a mistaken Next turn gives that time back to the turn before it.

turn time = next turn line's time - this turn line's time - time paused in between

average = a player's turn times added up / that player's finished turns; longest = the largest one, with its turn number

The chess clock is optional: minutes each, plus seconds added after each of a player's own turns (the increment). It runs for the player whose turn it is and stops while the game is paused. Undoing a turn doesn't give a chess clock back what it charged. When a clock reaches 0 a line goes in the record, once; what that means is the table's rule.

The life graph and the recap link

The graph shows each seat's life at the start of the game and at the end of every turn, worked out from the record the same way undo does (replaying every line still standing). A match's graph is its last game. Each seat's line has its own dash as well as its seat color, the names sit at the line ends, and the same numbers are in a table under it.

A recap link carries, packed into the address after the #, the game's date and format, the starting life, each seat's name and color, the winner (if there is one), the turn count, each seat's life at the start and at the end of every turn, how each seat went out, and each player's turn count, average and longest turn, and whether the game was still going. It carries no record lines, decks or counters. Nothing is uploaded: whoever opens it sees the recap read only, and nothing in their Life Log changes.

The playgroup ledger

Each game in the ledger keeps its date, format, seats in turn order (seat 1 took the first turn), each seat's player and deck, the winner or no winner, how they won and the turn count. A finished Life Log game fills these in from its record: the seats from the player who took the first turn, the winner (the one seat not out), the turn count, and how they won when every other seat went out the same way (commander damage, poison, or conceding); otherwise it is left for you to say. Players and decks are matched by name, ignoring capitals.

Stats are counts and rates, never a judgment of a player or deck. A game with no winner is shown apart and left out of the rate.

win rate = games won / games with a winner

95% range (Wilson): p = w/n, z = 1.96; center = (p + z²/2n) / (1 + z²/n); half width = z/(1 + z²/n) x √(p(1 - p)/n + z²/4n²)

even share = average of 1 / seats in the pod, over the same games (25% in pods of four)

The range is the same formula as the site's match records (MS.REC.wilson). It is wide with few games: Chad winning 4 of 9 is 44%, with a 95% range of 19% to 73%. The even share is the rate a seat would have if every seat in its pods won equally often; it is there for comparison, not as a target. The same tallies are made by player, by deck (a player's deck) and by seat in turn order.

Merging. Copy a link to the ledger and open it on another phone. The games ride in the address, packed. Opening it shows how many games are new to that browser, how many are already there (the same game id) and how many look like a game already there (the same day, the same players and the same winner, under a different id, as when two phones log the same game). Merging adds the new ones; the look-alikes join only if you ask. A game in a link dated before Magic's first release (August 5, 1993) or after today is left out, and the page says how many. When a merge would take the ledger past 3,000 games, the page says first how many games already here it would let go. Deleting a game can be undone right after.

The pod builder

Pods are four players. When the count isn't a multiple of four, the rest go in pods of three, or of five if you choose (nine players are three pods of three, or one of four and one of five). Fewer than three players can't make a pod; up to 128 are seated, one per line, and a name listed twice is kept once.

A night's cost is 10 points for each time a pair of players shares a pod beyond the first, over all the rounds, and, if you keep close brackets together, 6 points for each step between the highest and lowest bracket in a pod. Each try seats the rounds one at a time from a shuffled order (sorted by bracket when you keep brackets together), trading two players between two pods whenever that lowers the cost against the rounds before; then it makes the same trades across the whole night until none lowers the cost. Up to 60 tries are made (fewer for big nights) and the lowest is kept, a pod that repeats an earlier pod exactly counting 1,000 more; the tries stop early once only the repeats no seating can avoid are left.

repeated pairs = for each pair of players, the times they sat together beyond the first, added up

The search is a good seating, not a proof of the best one. Checked against every possible seating, it reaches the fewest repeated pairs for 7, 8, 10 and 12 players over 3 rounds (6, 8, 2 and 6), and for 16 players over 4 rounds it finds a seating with none. Within each pod the seats are shuffled at random (the browser's cryptographic random numbers); seat 1 takes the first turn and turns pass to the left. Starting a pod in Life Log fills the new game with those players in that order.

How the record is kept

Taps on one counter of one seat (life, poison, commander damage from one commander, a commander's casts, energy, experience, rad, speed, the Ring, a named counter) and on the table's spell count that come less than 1.4 seconds apart are one change, logged as one line when you stop: five quick taps are "minus 5", not five lines. Holding a side of the life total repeats. Each line carries the turn number and the time. Undo strikes a line through and works the game out again from the start without it, so lines can be undone in any order and the totals always match what's left in the record. A pause and its end are moments in time, not changes, and stay. So do the lines Life Log writes to say what happened (who goes first, the chess clock, time called): Undo passes them by. Passing the turn counts any taps still adding up first, then skips seats that are out, sets the spell count back to 0 and untaps the new active player's tokens. The record keeps its last 5,000 lines; older lines are folded into the game's starting point, so undo stays exact. The copied record ends its summary with each player's turn times.

Where the game lives

Everything stays in this browser on this device, and nowhere else: no account, nothing sent to a server. The game in progress is kept under "lifelog", your last 30 finished games under "lifelog-past", the playgroup ledger under "lifelog-ledger" (up to 3,000 games; past that the oldest by date are let go, and the page says how many), the last pods you made under "lifelog-pods", the setup tab you last used under "lifelog-tab", and your last tournament match's round length and seat under "lifelog-tm". My Stuff's backup includes the finished games and the ledger. Clearing your browser's site data clears them. Starting a new game while one is unfinished keeps the unfinished one in your past games, marked unfinished, with no winner recorded; a game with nothing in its record yet isn't kept. If this browser's storage for the site fills up, the oldest past games are let go to keep saving the game in progress and to file a finished one, and the page says how many; if there is still no room, the page says the game isn't being saved, and End keeps it open. Recap and ledger links carry their data in the address itself. On the live site the page also keeps a copy of its own files, so it opens with no connection once it has loaded once; attaching a saved deck loads the site's card data the first time.

League seasons

A league season counts points your playgroup writes for itself (for a win, for each game played, for a game with no winner, and a bonus by how a game was won) over the ledger's games inside its days and format; ties share a rank, listed by wins, then fewer games. Shared as text, a picture or a link that carries the season and its games; with an account, the seasons travel with the sync (their standings are read from each device's own ledger).

Dice

Dice: D4 to D20, one to ten at once. The high roll for who goes first: every player (or team) still in rolls a d20; the tied highest roll again until one is highest; the rolls go in the record.

The rule zero sheet

The pod's rule zero sheet, on the setup before the game (and in play under Game): each player's deck (one saved in this browser, or a friend's deck link from mtgstuff, pasted or read from its QR code where the browser reads them), its commanders, colors and the Commander Brackets facts read from the list the same way Decks reads them (DECKCODE.bracketRead), copied as text. The decks named on the setup go to their seats at Start; a deck from a link is read from the link and nothing is saved in Decks.

Sources

• Magic: The Gathering Comprehensive Rules (effective September 25, 2026): 704.5a, 704.5c and 704.6c (state-based actions for life, poison and commander damage); 903.8 (commander tax), 903.10a (commander damage) and 702.124d (two commanders count separately); 122.1 (counters); 702.179d (speed); 701.54c (the Ring); 702.131 (the city's blessing); 309 and 701.49 (dungeons and venturing); 725 and 726 (the monarch and the initiative); 702.40a (storm); 731.2 (day and night); 616.1 (the order of replacement effects); 502.3 (the untap step); all paraphrased in our own words.
• Starting life totals: 20 for constructed and Limited, 40 for Commander, 25 for two-player Brawl and 30 for multiplayer Brawl (Comprehensive Rules 903.12f), 20 for Oathbreaker (Oathbreaker rules, May 2019) and 20 for Duel Commander (its rules update of November 2016, which also dropped the 21 commander damage rule). Brawl's rule 903.12h and the Oathbreaker rules leave commander damage out as well.
• Oathbreaker's command zone tax for the oathbreaker and the signature spell: the Oathbreaker rules, 906.9 and 906.11 (read October 18, 2026).
• Dungeon rooms and arrows, and the words of the cards that change token counts: Scryfall's card text (read October 18, 2026).
• The Wilson score interval: Edwin B. Wilson, Probable Inference, the Law of Succession, and Statistical Inference, Journal of the American Statistical Association 22 (1927), the same formula the site's match records use.

Tournament match

Game results and game starts are lines in Life Log's own record, so the score and who chooses come from those lines: game one's chooser (the die roll's winner in Swiss, the higher seed in a playoff), then the loser of each game, and after a drawn game whoever chose for it (MTR 2.2). The clock counts down from the start time plus the round's length plus any extension. The turns after time follow MTR 2.4: the active player finishes the turn, then five more turns in total. A helper, never the official clock. Logging writes the same match record the site's match form writes, with each game's result and seat.