I've been playing Magic: The Gathering since 1994, right after Revised came out. I was hooked immediately. Shivan Dragon was the coolest thing I'd ever seen on a card.

Fast forward to October 2012. A group of us started a sealed league with a handful of friends in Portland. We called it the Sealed League o' Champions. Return to Ravnica had just dropped and we were fired up. We'd meet up at this dive bar downtown called Tugboat on Tuesday nights, crack packs, play matches, talk trash. It was exactly the kind of Magic I'd always wanted to play - not FNM with strangers, but a real league with your actual friends where the standings carried over and rivalries built up over months.

The Spreadsheet Era

At first we tracked everything through our Facebook group. People would post their card pools, we'd email around a spreadsheet for standings, and someone would manually calculate rankings at the end of each round.

It lasted about two rounds. The ranking formula kept breaking. Someone would fat-finger a cell and blow up the whole sheet. Nobody could agree on how tiebreakers should work. And half the time people forgot to update their records.

I'm a software guy by nature, so I did what any reasonable person would do - I stayed up way too late one night and started building a web app.

Draft Addict

The first version lived at draftaddict.net. It was ugly. It barely worked. But it could track match results and calculate standings without breaking, and that alone was a massive upgrade over the spreadsheet.

Once the guys in the league started using it, the feature requests came fast. "Can it track our card pools?" Sure. "Can we trade through it?" I'll figure it out. "Can it run a virtual draft so we don't have to find a night all 10 of us are free?" That one took a while.

The app grew because the league needed it to. Every weird edge case, every rule debate, every Tuesday night at Tugboat turned into another feature. Our live drafts used to take 6 hours with 10 people in a room. The virtual draft engine cut that down to people picking on their phones whenever they had a minute.

Card pool tracking also meant nobody could slip an extra card in between rounds. Every pick, every trade, every deck list change is logged. If a rare shows up in your deck that was never in your pool, it's pretty obvious. That alone solved a lot of arguments.

The Name Change

At some point draftaddict.net became draftalot.com. Honestly I don't remember the exact reason - I think it just sounded better. We kept building.

By 2015 the app was over 23,000 lines of code. We had ELO ratings, analytics, trading, autopick, wish lists, a message board. I added a warning that pops up if you try to draft a common in your first few picks because one of our guys kept accidentally picking garbage while eating a sandwich. That's the kind of feature you only build when you actually use your own product.

Tugboat eventually went out of business and the league floated around to different spots over the years. Some of the original crew moved away. But the core group kept playing. Six of us from the original 2012 lineup were still going strong over a decade later.

Coming Back to It

In early 2025 I started poking at the code again. Some new AI tools helped me finally fix the speed problems that had been bugging me for years. Features that had been on the to-do list for 7 years started getting knocked out. The site went from something I maintained out of obligation to something I was excited about again.

We added 30+ achievement badges, a draft chat, a trading block, dark mode, and a bunch of other stuff the league had been asking for. The app is now well over 50,000 lines of code and handles everything from virtual drafting to ELO rankings to card analytics.

Why I'm Sharing It

From early on, one of my goals was to take this app public and make it available to other leagues and card shops. It took longer than I expected. A lot longer. But the reason Draftalot works is because it was built by someone who actually runs a league - not by a product team guessing at what players need.

Every feature exists because someone in my league asked for it, or because I got annoyed enough at a manual process to automate it. That's a different kind of product than something designed in a conference room.

If you run a draft league, or you've been thinking about starting one, give it a shot. The free version covers the basics and the paid version is five bucks a month. I built it for my friends, but it works for yours too.