Player Guide

Everything you need as a player, from your first login to the record of a finished event.

Creating an Account

PlanesForge uses magic links instead of passwords. Enter your email address on the login page and you receive a one-time link that logs you in.

The link is valid for 30 minutes and works once. If it expires, request a new one.
Check your spam folder if nothing arrives within a minute.
You stay logged in for a week, on the device you used. After that, request another link.

Finding Tournaments

Tournaments lists everything upcoming and running: name, date, place, format and status. Open one for the full detail — player count, entry fee, the rules that apply, and whether registration is open.

Some events are unlisted. They do not appear in the list and are reachable only through the link the organizer sends you. Everything else about them works the same.

Registering

On a tournament page, click Register. If you are not logged in, you verify your email first.

Name — your full name, for the organizer.
Display name — optional. When set, this is what appears in pairings and standings instead of your name.
Email — where the organizer reaches you.
Postal code — required.
City and Country — city is optional, country defaults to Germany.

If you already have a profile, all of this is filled in for you. After registering you see the payment details, if the event costs anything.

Instant Tournaments

Some events are run as instant tournaments — casual evenings, spontaneous rounds, anything where nobody wants a registration phase. They work differently in three ways:

No registration. You check in on the spot and your entry is created at that moment, up to the player limit.
No payment step.
Decklists any time. You can paste your list during the event or after it, and it is always kept private (see below).

Paying

If the event has an entry fee, the organizer decides which ways to pay it. You see what applies after registering:

Online by card — you pay immediately through the checkout and your registration is marked paid without the organizer doing anything.
Bank transfer — IBAN and account holder are shown, along with any instructions the organizer added.
PayPal — a link to the organizer's PayPal.
Cash at the door — the organizer marks you as paid at the venue.

For everything except the card payment, the organizer confirms your payment by hand. Watch the payment deadline — miss it and your spot can be given away. If you need to cancel after paying, ask for a refund before the refund deadline.

Decklists

Where the organizer collects decklists, you submit yours from the tournament page or from your player area. Paste it as plain text:

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
2 Firebolt
...

Sideboard:
3 Pyroblast
2 Red Elemental Blast
...

The list is checked against the format — card pool, banned cards, deck size, copy limits — and shown back to you with card images so you can see what was understood. A card the format bans is rejected with the card named.

You can change your list until the first round is paired. Once it is, it is fixed.

Public or private

On a normal tournament, your list becomes visible to other players after the event is completed, and it counts towards the meta statistics.
On an instant tournament, your list is always private. It is never shown to anyone else, but it still counts towards that event's archetype breakdown — which is the point: the meta page stays useful without your list becoming public.

Your deck library

Lists you submit are kept in Decks in your player area. You can open a deck to see it in full, and reuse it at the next event instead of pasting it again.

House Rules

An organizer can give a single event its own banlist: extra cards banned, or cards released that the format normally bans. So a card can be legal at one Pauper event and not at another.

Whatever applies is written on the tournament page and on its meta page, so you can read it before you build. House rules never widen the card pool — a Pauper event can only release a card that Pauper itself bans, never let a rare in.

If the organizer changes a rule after you submitted, you get an email naming the cards in your list that are no longer legal, and you fix the list yourself on the tournament page. The organizer only sees how many lists are affected, never whose.

Check-in

Before the event starts, the organizer opens check-in. You must check in to confirm you are there — players who do not may lose their spot. There are three ways:

From the tournament page — a button appears once check-in is open.
By email link — you may get a mail with a direct check-in link.
By QR code — the organizer can display a code at the entrance that you scan with your phone.

Two things have to be in order first:

Your payment must be confirmed. Until it is, the button stays disabled. Instant tournaments have no payment step and skip this.
Your decklist must be submitted, where the organizer collects them. Check-in will tell you if it is missing.

During the Tournament

Pairings

When a round is published, Pairings shows every match with its table. My Round in your player menu shows only yours — opponent, table, and the result form.

Reporting your result

After the match, report it from My Round or the match report page: your wins, your losses, and draws if there were any.

What counts as valid follows the event's best-of setting. In a best-of-three, three game wins can be reported between the two of you and at most two by either — so 2-0, 2-1 and 1-1-1 all work, 3-0 does not. Once you submit, the organizer sees it.

Life counter

My Round carries a life counter for the match. It survives a page reload, so you will not lose the count.

Standings & Tiebreakers

Standings ranks players by:

Match points — 3 per win, 1 per draw, 0 per loss.
OMW% — the average match win rate of your opponents. Hard opponents help this number.
GW% — your win rate across individual games, not matches.
OGW% — the average game win rate of your opponents.

Why it is calculated exactly this way, and why you sometimes face someone on fewer points, is under Pairings & Standings. Short answers are in the FAQ.

Your Player Area

Player is your own area, with four views:

Forge ID — your record: every tournament you played, with wins, losses, draws, match points and the deck you brought. Your overall win rate sits at the top. This is also your public page if you set a handle for it.
Registrations — what you are signed up for and what still needs paying.
Matchups — how your decks have done against which archetypes, filterable by format and date.
Decks — your deck library.

Your Profile

Profile holds the settings, in tabs:

Profile — name, display name, email, postal code, city, country, avatar, a short bio, your preferred language, and the handle for your public Forge ID page.
Password — set or change one, if you would rather not use magic links.
Payment — your own payment details, pre-filled into registrations.
Favourites — organizers you follow, so you hear about their new events.
Organizer — turn your account into an organizer account and run your own tournaments.
Privacy — download everything stored about you as a file, or delete your account.
Calendar — your calendar subscription, below.

Calendar Subscription

You can subscribe to your upcoming tournaments from any calendar app — Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook and others.

Open Profile and the Calendar tab.
Copy the subscription URL.
Add it in your calendar app as a new subscription (often called "subscribe to calendar" or "add from URL").

Your events appear automatically and stay current — you do not re-subscribe when you register for something new. If the URL ever gets out, Regenerate issues a new one and the old one stops working immediately.

Meta statistics

Meta in the top bar leads to the deck statistics across every completed tournament in a format: which archetypes get played, how often they win, and how they do against each other. The page is open — you do not need an account to read it.

Only completed tournaments feed the numbers, and only decklists that have an archetype assigned. A match counts towards the win rates only when both sides have an archetype; byes and unreported games do not count at all. Everything is rebuilt nightly, and a tournament that has just finished shows up immediately.

Events that ran under house rules are left out of the format-wide numbers, because they were not quite that format. Their own meta page works as usual and names the rules that applied.

Archetype health

Next to each archetype sits a trend and a volatility rating. Both are part of Player Premium.

Trend compares the last eight tournaments in two halves: the average share of the field across the most recent four, against the four before them.

Rising — the share grew by more than 2 percentage points
Declining — it fell by more than 2 percentage points
Stable — the difference is somewhere in between

So it is not a comparison against one particular tournament, but between two groups of four. With fewer than two tournaments in the window, no trend is shown at all.

Volatility measures how much that share swings across those same eight tournaments — low, medium or high.

Three things worth knowing, so the number does not promise more than it delivers:

Volatility looks at the share of the field only, never the win rate. A deck that steadily makes up 10% of the field while its win rate jumps between 40% and 60% counts as barely volatile here.
It measures swing, not presence. A deck can appear at every single tournament and still be highly volatile if its share moves between 5% and 25%.
Tournament size does not weigh in. An eight-player event counts as much as a 128-player one. Across a run of small tournaments, the share swings more for purely statistical reasons.

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