We're changing the way people play card games.

My Personal why — A letter from Ev:

My last big event before going off to college and taking a break from Magic was GP Chicago 2014. This was back in the day of Sphinx's Revelation in standard, and paper match slips at every event. It was my deepest GP run ever, and my only ever win-and-in for the PT invite. While I looked back at that event fondly, I often wondered during my 9-year hiatus how the tech for events would change.

Fast forward to 2023, I'm living in NYC and learn last minute there's a 20k event-series coming to town. I decide that I should play. I had only used Companion at local events + RCQs and hadn't been exposed to anything else.

On the taxi ride over to the event where I'm already cutting it close, I realize that I have no idea how I'm supposed to register, and that maybe paying at the stage might not even be an option, or be possible given the timing.

I open the convention site, and start the registration process on my tiny iPhone 13 mini. In the brief moment before starting registration, I had this joyful optimism for what the experience was going to be like. I remember thinking: "it's been almost 10 years! there's probably just a Grand Prix-app we use and everything will be easy and digital".

After that fleeting moment my excitement was met with cruel reality. Confusing account creation, unclear checkout flows, and worst of all, typing up my whole decklist, card by card on my phone, pinching-to-zoom as I go, anxiety steadily increasing as I'm more and more worried I messed something up, or that I won't be able to finish in time. On top of all that — there's no app, everything is done on a website. Luckily, I got it all finished right as we pulled up to the event.

Once 9am hits, I'm ready to go and excited to play the first round. 2 minutes, pass, 5 minutes pass, 10 minutes pass. Nothing super out of the ordinary but I'm starting to get curious as to what's up. An announcement comes over the speakerphone: "players, please refresh *[the website]*". I pull down to refresh..and nothing. I refresh again, and again. Nothing. Now my anxiety rockets back up to maximum — "what if I get a tardiness penalty?", "did I mess up registration and am not in the event?". I run to a judge and ask for help, they point me to the paper pairings board. Suddenly I'm back in Chicago, 2014. A million players huddled around the small-font paper trying to find their name.

The rest of the event more or less continued in this fashion. Some rounds I'd get my pairing digitally, some I wouldn't. I eventually just relegated myself to standing around by the pairings board so I don't need to play the guessing game.

While the Magic that day was great, too much of my mental capacity was spent worrying about the associated tech. I left that day feeling let down by the status quo.

While it's definitely true I was burned by my lack of preparation that day, it gave me a model for what everything going wrong feels like. As we've designed tools and built our app, we've been striving to create a future where a player with no knowledge of an event can sign up and submit a deck trivially on their phone, then play an event with no worries about whether they will get their match in a given place. We want to build a future where even the unprepared-ubering-to-Jersey-last-minute-anxious-Evans of the world can have peace of mind.

Software, when done well, should melt into the background. It should be something we don't have to think about while using. Tools should empower, not debilitate.