My friend asked me this in response to my initial post about Theros Limited. It gave me the idea that maybe I should try and see what I can learn on my own with this set.
And then I stumbled upon Josh Silvestri’s Theros Limited stats (second half of article), gleaned from Magic Online replays. The kind of stats I’ve dreamed of for years of playing MODO. In a nutshell, the spreadsheet has win-loss records for every time a card was played in a game, attempting to measure the impactfulness of that card in the format. I immediately copied the spreadsheet to my own account and started playing around with it, but then I questioned the absolute value of it. Was I seriously sitting on a true cheat sheet for the format?
I remember when I was in high school in 2005 (the draft set was full Kamigawa block) I read a pick order for green. (Pick orders used to be a lot more popular back then.) And it said Shinen of Life’s Roar was the best Green common for the third pack. In a draft at my local game store, I ended up with a Green deck with four of those, so I thought my deck had to be super awesome, until I actually laid out my deck and struggled to get 23 cards that I liked together. One of the better players looked at my deck and started cutting cards for me, starting with my Shinen’s. “Isn’t that the best card in the set?”
“Yea, but where are your fatties? He’s not that good by himself and with what you’ve got in your deck.” I 1-3’d with my pile in a lot of games where my 1/2’s did effectively nothing.
I think back then, if I had gotten my hands on this spreadsheet, I would have taken this and tried to apply it as literally as possible, just like I did with pick orders – always take the card with the highest win and call it a deck. Numbers never lie, right? Moneyball anyone? But they do lie sometimes!
Take God’s Willing for example. If you filter the spreadsheet by White commons, God’s Willing wins the most in the games it was played, with a whopping 58.5%. and it makes sense – it’s so cheap it’s easy to leave up the mana and create a blowout situation. But someone with a lot of drafting experience, or deckbuilding experience in general, should know that you wouldn’t want as many as you can get in your deck – I’d rather have 6 Wingsteed Guards (the second winningest White common) than 6 God’s Willings.
And you can kind of get that from the spreadsheet – God’s Willing shows up in half as many games as Wingsteed Rider, which shows up much more than any other White common. What the spreasheet also doesn’t capture is the times God’s Willing flounders in someone’s hand because it was a blank. They tried to bias against expensive bombs since you won’t always get to cast those spells, but it would have been nice to also bias against combat tricks not doing anything and sitting in hand.
Similar to not wanting to take 6 God’s Willings is taking cards based on your mana curve, or other situations. A premier four-drop like Rumbling Baloth in M14 might be the best card in a vacuum in a pack, but if my pile already has a lot of great four drops, I might be more inclined to take something to fill out the lower parts of my curve, like a ramp spell. Other times, the value of a card is very specific to the strategy your going for – Dream Twist in Innistrad was great in self-mill decks but chaff in more standard decks. Such a spreadsheet doesn’t express these situations.
Besides the caveats of purely looking at the numbers, the spreadsheet (and pick orders in general) are kind of a crutch.
They don’t force me to do my own card evaluations. In my first drafts of Theros (and most sets in general), I usually get my face bashed when I have what I thought were decent looking decks, and I’m forced to examine why I’m losing and why my opponents are winning. Some of the questions I had were things like “How impactful is are the expensive and situational removal spells?” and “Are bigger vanilla creatures as impactful as building a big man with Bestow?” By looking at the spreadsheet, I can easily see that Bestow creatures are often the best cards at common, and the expensive and situational removal spells are mediocre to bad.
And I guess it would have been a valuable learning experience for me to draw my own conclusions. But it’s not all that different from asking friends who have played a lot their opinions on cards and strategies in general. On the one hand, the spreadsheet aggregates lots of opinions into cold hard win percentages. But on the other hand, when I talk to a human I get to ask them why and build my knowledge base for future sets, and so I form an idea of when to deviate from the common use case.
Along the same lines, from the spreadsheet I can pick out what would be a strong signal that a color is open. Without it, I either need someone to tell me what they think the signals are in the format, or have such confident card evaluation skills to know that a particular card shouldn’t still be in the pack, or I need to go over a draft and see what colors would have been the ones to be in, and go back and see what cards would have indicated that (and sometimes this can be wrong, because of particularly strong or weak packs). But now I can just use the win percentage data and look at a middle pick in pack 1 and see that a certain card wins too much and is played too often for it to still be in the pack.
Finally, the spreadsheet would prevent me from getting creative and going deep with new deck strategies. If I stuck with the standard pick orders for standard attacking and blocking decks and the packs didn’t give me good rares or a lot of premium commons, I might just throw my hands up and say “Welp, packs were bad.” But what there are certain cards that are good in certain kinds of other cards, as long as I know to draft with those fringe cards in mind? The spreadsheet doesn’t capture that. And what about offbeat decks that pull together a lot of weird parts to do something very powerful, like a Trading Post control deck, or the Spider Spawning self-mill deck from Innistrad? Cards for those decks aren’t going to make sense in a general pick order for a format (and often the presence and strength of those kinds of strategies are the hallmark of a great draft format).
The point I’ve been trying to make is that this spreadsheet (and pick orders in general) are a fine tool for getting a jump start on learning the format, but they don’t always tell the whole story of cards in a format, and they aren’t the be-all, end-all source of truth for a format. There’s too much value to be gained outside of what a pick order to lean on it, and it’d be silly for someone who wants to grow as a player to rely on them and other aggregate measures of the metagame instead of learning and debating what makes cards, decks, and entire formats tick. Magic’s too deep to distill down to averages.
Magic with fourouttheforty 