About The Pod Companion

My name is Gant. I play Commander, and I build things — mostly software, sometimes for fun, sometimes for money. The Pod Companion is where those two overlap.

The tools

The site started with a single question I found myself answering for pod-mates every time we sat down to brew: how many sources of each color do I actually need? There are good articles about it, but nothing that let you punch in a specific deck and get a straight number in under ten seconds. So I built the mana base calculator, and then realized the calculator worked better as a small cluster of pages, each one aimed at the specific version of the question a player is actually typing into a search bar. The deck mana audit came next: paste a decklist (or a Moxfield, Archidekt, or TappedOut link) and get a spell-by-spell report of what your mana base can and can't cast on time. Everything runs live in your browser with exact math — nothing is estimated from a lookup table.

The game logger and stats

The newest part of the site is the game logger. Make a free account, and after each Commander game you can record it in under a minute: who played what, who went first, who won, how everyone else died. In return you get the stats every pod argues about — win rate per commander, your colors, whether going first actually matters at your table. Your log is private to you by default.

Every logged game also feeds the public global stats page: an anonymous, site-wide picture of what Commander really looks like at real tables. Anonymous means exactly that — no player names, usernames, accounts, or dates ever appear there, only aggregate dimensions like commanders, colors, turn order, and how games end. The privacy page spells out what's stored and how to delete it; the short version is that your data is yours, deleting your account removes what identifies you, and I don't sell anything to anyone.

The app

The Pod Companion app is the other half of the project. I want a life tracker that feels good to use during a real four-player game — big touch targets, no accidental taps, no ads shoved into the middle of a turn — and one that captures the stats the website's logger records by hand, automatically, while you play. The app shares its accounts and backend with this site by design: games you log here and games the app will track land in the same place, under the same sign-in. It is under active development for Android. It is not out yet, and I am not going to fake screenshots or invent a launch date to pretend otherwise.

Free, and staying that way

Everything I build here is meant to be free and useful — the tools, the logger, the stats, all of it. Ads on the site help pay for the domain and the time; they are not the point of it, and nothing useful sits behind a paywall. If the site has earned a coffee and you feel like chipping in, there is a support the developer page — entirely optional, and nothing ever unlocks behind it. If you find a bug, an incorrect number, or a page that is not carrying its weight, please email me and I will fix it.

Thanks for reading, and go brew something interesting.

— Gant