Playgroup Live: two months of updates

Hi everyone,

Back in April we quietly opened Playgroup Live, our take on online Commander, to testers. Since then we have not slowed down. We have shipped an update to the board almost every couple of days, so instead of a dozen tiny posts here is the big picture of what has landed and why it matters for your games.

If you have not tried it yet: import a deck from Archidekt or Moxfield, or paste a decklist, head to https://playgroup.gg/live_sessions/new and play a real game with your pod. Every game is logged to your playgroup stats automatically, card by card.

Watch any game, and listen in You can now spectate in-progress public games live from the In Progress tab on the games page. Spectators see the board and event log in real time, and can hop into voice with one click to follow the table talk. No account needed just to watch or listen. Want to chime in? Log in and use Ask to speak, and the host can wave you on.

Play with strangers Not everyone has three friends online at the same time. You can now browse open lobbies and join pickup games with players from across Playgroup. Hosts flip a switch to make their lobby discoverable, and pickup games feed a brand new global player leaderboard. Play pickup games and watch your global rank move on the Result screen after each match.

Rate the Table When a game ends there is now a proper send-off. The whole pod picks the winner or calls a draw, records how it was won, rates the game for fun, and salts the decks and cards that earned it. You can crown a Card of the Game, rate how your own deck performed, and hand out endorsements. All of it shows up afterward on your game, deck, and playgroup pages, so the story of the night sticks around. Draws now affect Elo too, and finishing places are tracked so a hard-fought second place finally counts for something.

Solo, but not alone Playtesting solo used to be pure goldfishing. Turn on Sparring in Settings and a phantom opponent will occasionally counter your spells, remove your threats, and wrath your board, at a cadence measured from thousands of real games. Every reaction tells you why it fired, and you decide whether you had an answer. Pick Light, Realistic, or Cutthroat. It is off by default.

Now on tablets Full games now play on iPad and Android tablets in landscape, with long-press menus, tap-to-preview, pinch zoom, and finger friendly controls throughout. Phones can spectate and browse for now, with proper play coming later. Add Playgroup Live to your home screen for a full-screen, app-like board. It is still early, so tell us what breaks.

A board that actually knows the cards This is where most of the work went. Playgroup Live now understands a huge amount of real Commander gameplay without you moving cards around by hand:

One-click Scry, Surveil, Cascade, and Discover, prefilled from the card, plus a single Reveal and Cast dialog that digs for Jodah, Niv-Mizzet, Genesis Wave and friends.
Face-down done right: Morph, Disguise with ward, Foretell, and impulse draws like Jeska’s Will, all without ever leaking the card’s identity.
Group exiled cards into piles to track your Ixhel or impulse stacks, and reveal a face-down card to a single player.
A shared Stack zone, colored marker beads for stun and dungeons, keyword counters, Monarch, Speed, and Until end of turn power and toughness boosts.
Room cards, planeswalker and Saga starting counters, one-click emblems, and drag-and-drop Scry and Surveil.
Text chat, judges, and friendlier lobbies Talk to your pod without voice, in the lobby and in game, with a chime and a speech bubble so you never miss a message. A new Help button reaches a neutral judge in our Discord when a table dispute comes up. Hosts can turn on Friendly mulligans, and the lobby now tells everyone exactly what it is waiting for.

Faster, smoother, steadier We spent real time on performance: smoother boards with lots of cards in play, lower memory use, softer shadows drawn far more efficiently, and lighter defaults on modest machines. We also hardened reconnects, host handoff, and disconnect handling, so a dropped connection no longer strands the table. If the player whose turn it is drops, anyone can skip their turn after a short grace period.

And on the website You can now log past paper games from the tracker and have them count toward win rates, Elo, and rank leaderboards. Playscore Leagues can reward finishing places, not just wins.

That is a lot, and it is all shaped by the people actually playing. If you have ideas, complaints, or a card interaction we handle badly, come find us on Discord: https://discord.gg/wAG8aApDU5.