The Commissioner Role: What It Can Do
An MTG league commissioner is the league member who can change settings, manage members, run seasons, configure Discord notifications, and resolve flagged games. The role belongs to whoever created the league.
Everything below assumes you're the commissioner of at least one league on Nerd Leagues. Most of the controls live in one place: the Manage League page.
How you become an MTG league commissioner
Whoever creates an MTG league becomes its commissioner — automatically, no toggle. They're added as the first member and as the league's commissioner in the same step. There's no commissioner election and no shared commissioner — exactly one person per league at a time.
The role can be transferred. Make Commissioner on a member's row in Member Management hands it over, behind a confirmation dialog: "Are you sure you want to transfer commissioner status to this member? You will lose commissioner privileges." The target has to be a league member, and you can't transfer to yourself. Once it goes through, the other member holds every permission on this page and you hold none.
Where to find your commissioner tools
The commissioner-only controls live behind a single button. From your league page (/leagues/<id>), click the More tab; the Manage League button appears only if you're the commissioner. That takes you to /manage_league/<id>, which is split into five collapsible sections: League Settings, Seasons, Member Management, Game Management, and Danger Zone.
Other members can see the league page itself, but the Manage League button is hidden from non-commissioners. If a non-commissioner navigates directly to /manage_league/<id>, they're bounced back to the public league page with a flash message.
League settings
The League Settings panel controls the league's identity and integrations:
- League Name — what shows up everywhere the league is referenced.
- Description — the blurb on the league page.
- Invite Code — the shareable code in /join_league/<code> URLs. You can edit it directly to whatever's available.
- Allow any member to invite players — when checked, any member can use the in-app Invite Friend button. When unchecked, only the commissioner can. (The shareable code link works for anyone either way.)
- Discord Webhook URL — paste a Discord webhook to fan out game and flag notifications to a channel. The Test button next to the field sends a sample message so you can confirm it's wired up before you save.
Save Changes commits all five at once.
Member management
The Member Management panel lists every member with their join date, a Kick button, and a Make Commissioner button on each non-commissioner row. Your own row is marked with a Commissioner badge and shows no Kick button; a self-kick is rejected even if the URL is crafted by hand, with the message "Commissioners cannot kick themselves. Transfer commissioner status first."
Kicks are one click plus a browser confirmation dialog ("Kick X from the league? This cannot be undone."). Kicking removes the member's row from the league entirely, which means their league ELO and league record are wiped on the spot. If they rejoin later, they start fresh at 1000.
Seasons
Seasons are commissioner-only. From the Seasons panel you can create them, edit them in place, archive them, and delete them outright:
- Create Season — title, description, and start/end dates. Title and dates are required; the description is optional.
- Edit — change any of those fields after the fact.
- Archive — toggle a season as archived without deleting it. Archived seasons stay in the league's history.
- Delete — fully removes the season and all of its per-season ELO history. There's no undo.
Seasons can overlap; a single game counts toward every active season covering its date. Season standings covers how each season scores its own leaderboard, and Creating and Managing Seasons walks through this panel field by field.
Fixing or removing games
An MTG league commissioner has two paths for cleaning up bad games. The first is reactive: when any participant flags a game (wrong winner, wrong players, wrong format, fake game, duplicate, or other), the game's page surfaces a Flag Details (Commissioner View) panel with three actions:
- Dismiss Flag — clears the flag and leaves the game and its ELO untouched. Use this when the flag was wrong.
- Edit Game — opens an inline editor for winner, players, format, and notes. Saving clears the existing flags, but ELO is not recalculated automatically. Use this when the metadata is off but the result was right; if the actual winner is changing, use Archive Game instead.
- Archive Game — soft-deletes the game and triggers a full ELO recalculation across the league. Use this when the result itself was wrong.
The second path is proactive. The Manage League page has a Game Management section listing every recorded game in the league, with Delete and Restore buttons. Despite the label, Delete is the same soft-archive action — it pulls the game from ELO calculations and recalculates the standings, and Restore puts it back and recalculates again. Use this when you don't need a flag to know a game shouldn't count.