Who Tracks the Trackers?

Editorial Disclaimer

This post was originally published by Spencatro on 05/22/2018. Spencatro has since gone on to work at Wizards of the Coast (Dec 2018). MTGATracker remains a 3rd-party project that is not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, and is published pursuant to the Wizards of the Coast Fan-Content Policy. The views and opinions expressed in this post are strictly those of the author, and do not reflect the official position, policy, views, or opinions of Wizards of the Coast. No authors were compensated by any parties for the authorship of this post.

Welcome to MTGATracker’s new online publication, Who Tracks the Trackers?! We’re starting this blog for a few reasons. First and foremost, WTTT will serve as our primary way of disseminating cool stuff we find in MTGA data, collected through MTGATracker. We’re inspired by publications like FiveThirtyEight, and aspire to be the Nate Silver’s of MTG: we want to to provide interesting, useful, and statistically sound observations about the MTGA meta. Second, WTTT will be a good place to write & stash posts about technical challenges we’ve faced with MTGATracker, and how we solved them. Finally, we may also occasionally touch on social, or even political subjects as they relate to MTG. We’ll try not to land on these topics too much, but especially today, it’s important to understand and acknowledge that just about everything in life is political- including how we play MTG, and how we treat each other when we do so.

I’m sure you may be curious: why are we starting yet another MTG blog? The answer is easy: MTGATracker provides us with a unique chance to get access to data in some forms that were previously only accessible to Wizards of the Coast. We also want to provide an opportunity for content creators to write their own interpretations on the anonymous data aggregations we can generate without having to put the effort up front of creating & maintaining a blog of their own. We hope to keep the barrier to guest entries low; the only barrier to getting published on WTTT should be the quality of your writing! Should we be analyzing, releasing, and commenting on this data, a move that will almost certainly lead to faster-solved metas? We don’t really know, but we hope to all find out together!

Today at launch, our core contributers are Spencatro, the lead dev on MTGATracker, and daphpunk, our lead editor on WTTT. Today the WTTT team is small, but we hope to grow a community of writers & analysts, as MTGATracker itself grows.

MTGATracker users may be wondering what this means for their user data & privacy. User data is and always will be private, to the letter of MTGATracker’s privacy policy; authors will always either get anonymous, aggregated data, or they will have to sign non-disclosure agreements with us before they will be allowed to access any raw MTGATracker data.

If you’re interested in breaking out onto the MTG content creation scene, we hope you’ll consider writing content for WTTT. If there’s a story you want to track down, we might be able to provide you with the data you need to get there, and you’ll be able to do it without the hefty setup of managing your own blog platform.