FAQ
What this site is, where the data comes from, and how the numbers on every other page are worked out.
General
What is Mana Screw?
A stats and history site for a Magic: The Gathering community based in Szeged, Hungary -- every event's standings and round-by-round matches are fed into the app that turns the data into permanent player history: ELO ratings, records, streaks, deck performance, and awards, all browsable across Events, Players, Series, Statistics, and Player of the Month.
Page guide
What's on the Events pages?
The list shows every event -- name, format, date, and player count -- filterable by format and year. An event's own page shows:
- A podium for the top 3, if the event had one
- Full standings -- rank, match record, tiebreaker percentages, the deck played, and Elo change for the event
- The round-by-round match list -- click a player's name to highlight every match they played
- A visual bracket tree above the standings, for events that ended in a top 4 or top 8 cut
What's on a Players page?
Everything scoped to that one player, top to bottom:
- Match and game record, including win percentage
- An activity countdown to when they'd be flagged inactive
- Current and best win/loss streaks, and a “form” strip -- their last 10 results, most recent first
- A donut chart of which formats they've played
- Trophy counts for 1st/2nd/3rd-place finishes
- Elo history and performance-over-time charts
- Tables of events attended, and which were unbeaten or perfect runs
- Opponents and decks played, each with a full win/draw/loss breakdown -- click a deck for its own page, with the same breakdown scoped to just that player-deck pairing
- Two donut charts of the colors and archetypes they've played
- Player of the Month awards and Honours
- A head-to-head comparison against any other player you pick, including win/loss streaks scoped to just the two of you
What's on a Series page?
- A podium for finished series
- Final standings, ranked by placement points earned across every event in the series
- A points-over-time chart
- A card per event in the series with its own mini-standings
- A head-to-head matrix -- every pairing's win-draw-loss record, plus a callout for whichever two have played each other the most
What's on the Statistics page?
Site-wide numbers, filterable by format and year:
- Event, match, and draw counts, and how often each format gets played
- A breakdown of how matches finish -- how many end 2-0 versus 2-1, for example
- Placement and podium leaderboards, split by general events, small events, and combined
- Peak Elo, the most common matchups and player/deck pairings, and the biggest single-event Elo swings
- Best win-streak and best unbeaten-streak leaderboards
- How many distinct decks are in circulation
- The Honours leaderboard
- An Elo-over-time chart overlaying every public player's rating history
What's on the PotM page?
Every month's top 3, most recent first, as gold/silver/bronze cards -- or switch to the Calendar tab for a year-at-a-glance grid, one cell per month, that you can page through year by year.
Data
Where does the data come from?
Tournament organizers submit each event's results after it finishes -- final standings and every round's match scores.
What does a “public” player mean?
Whether a player's detailed stats are visible to everyone. As someone might not want their full history exposed, only those are visible who have opted in to it.
Stats & ratings
What is Elo, and how does it change?
A rating that rises after strong results and falls after weak ones, adjusted after every match based on the strength of the opponent faced -- beating a higher-rated opponent gains more than beating a lower-rated one. It's tracked both overall and separately per format, since a player's strength can differ between them.
When does a player become “inactive”?
A player is flagged inactive once they haven't played at least two events within the trailing 60 days. A player's own profile shows a live countdown to that point rather than only the stored flag, which updates the next time an event is imported.
How is Player of the Month decided?
Each player's best 4 qualifying events that month (3 or more rounds) are ranked by average tournament points percentage, with total Elo change as the tiebreaker.
Are stats calculated live when I load a page?
No -- they're computed once when an event is imported and stored, not recalculated from raw match data on every visit, so pages load fast regardless of how much history is behind them.
What counts as a “small” event vs. a “general” one?
An event with fewer than 8 players is small; 8 or more is general. Placement and podium leaderboards are broken out both ways (plus combined) so a run of small weeknight events doesn't drown out results from larger ones, or vice versa.
What are Honours?
Named awards for a top-3 finish in a series, or in a bracket/Store Championship event -- shown on a player's profile linking back to whichever event or series earned it.
Something is missing?
I have a question that's not listed here.
We're always adding new questions and improving our documentation. If you have a specific question, feel free to reach out to us!