About

About The Pod Companion

Free MTG deckbuilding tools, a game logger with real stats and a Commander app, built by one player, not a company.

Nekusar, the Mindrazer · Art by Mark Winters

My name is Gant. I've played Commander for about eight years, and I build things, mostly software, sometimes for fun and sometimes for money. The Pod Companion is where those two overlap. My favorite deck is Nekusar, the Mindrazer, so if you've ever taken damage for drawing a card, I'm sorry.

The tools

The site started with a question I kept running into while brewing my own decks: how many sources of each color do I actually need? There are good articles about it, but nothing let me punch in a specific deck and get a straight number in under ten seconds. So I built the mana base calculator, and then realized it worked better as a small cluster of pages, each one aimed at the specific version of the question a player actually types into a search bar. Then I wanted to see the same thing for a whole deck at once, and that became the deck mana audit: 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 guides

Some questions aren't math. When a new precon comes out, I want to know what it's like out of the box and what I'd change first, so I write precon upgrade guides. The Commander blueprints start from nothing instead: one 100-card build for a single commander, worked through card by card and laid out at three brackets.

Short videos

The same numbers also go out as short videos a few times a week: what a precon is worth, which Commander cards moved in price, and new commanders as they're previewed. Follow along on YouTube, TikTok or Bluesky.

The game logger and stats

The question math couldn't answer was whether going first actually matters at my table. That takes real games, so I built 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, and the answer to that turn-order question for your own 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, with big touch targets, no accidental taps, and no ads shoved into the middle of a turn. I also want it to capture 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. 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. It's 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