Magic Numbers

This week I look into what makes top 17Lands.com users win more in draft than others do. From their color preferences, pick orders, which cards they prioritise, include in their decks, there are hints on what is the key to their success in draft and I try to unlock them digging through the data.  Also I get attacked by my cat.  Reminder: This podcast is a recording of a stream, which rel...

This week we look at the data related to Brokers family in SNC Drafts. Brokers (also known as Bant) and related color pairs (WUG, WU and WG) are the menace of SNC draft format, having significantly higher win rates than other color combinations. But as the colors become more contested over times, time to look at what cards in other color combinations do well against the Brokers. Which colors have...

This episode focuses on what are draft signals and how to find the best way to read them. You will hear a lot of content creators talking about "strong signals" or "signal X is open" during draft, but what exactly are signals? I try to define exactly that and go even several steps further. I look at SNC draft data and try to figure out what is a meaningful signal during the draft. On my quest to d...

This time we look at the new limited format of the Streets of New Capenna. Which color combinations are the most successful? Which color combinations are the most open? How to build a good mana base for the 3 color decks popular in the format? Which cards are the format all stars, and which ones over-perform in a particular color combination. All answered by exploring the data from ~23 000 drafts...

This week we preview the Streets of New Capenna. Traditionally before each set release we meet at SLKerstens twitch channel to discuss the format in our pre-release set review. But instead of looking at each card, we build our versions of each deck, based on pure theory crafting. This time SLKerstens, JasonILTG, Tajoordan and me talk about our hopes and expectations o the new set, cards to watch,...

This week I look at the advantage of being on the play. Why do we win more when on the play, why starting gives you the advantage in later game and how does this advantage look like depending on the game length. Choosing to be on the play is a good heuristic, but I also look at when would it be theoretically good to choose to go second. And try to use 17Lands data to find decks that would, at leas...

This week I have a special guest, Alex Nikolic, AKA Chord_o_Calls. A streamer, podcaster, great limited player and, imho the best card evaluator in the game. I got all his 17Lands data, analysed them and this episode is a great reveal. I show Alex what I learned from his data, we compare self-perception to numbers, and explore the uncharted world of personal M:tG data. We look at the totality of l...

This episode I am talking about the effect a copy number of a card has on its win rate. All based on 17Lands data for Kamigawa Neon Dynasty. Which cards are best as one-offs, which ones you want as many as you can and everything in between. But the episode is not only NEO-specific. I am trying to see which types of cards (e.g combat tricks, graveyard recursion) fall predominantly to a certain cate...

This episode is all about the ecology of the deck and Archetypist: a tool developed by Pekka Pulli and me that lets you visualise deck similarity and a localised win rate of similar decks. This allows to show clusters of particularly successful builds for each archetype. I look at clusters of each each archetype and try to figure out what makes those decks tick, what is missing from the less succe...

Today I will be looking at differences between how late you will see cards in Pack 1 and Pack 3 of the draft. We will look at the 17Lands ALSA measure to find those differences. What is ALSA you might ask? Well I will describe it in detail and even visualize it. Looking at differences between P1 and P3 may seem unnecessarily deep, but there are big differences between how we draft pack 1 and pack...

Today I look at the early evolution of the Kamigawa draft format. How did Arena users' evaluations change over the first two weeks? What does it mean to your drafting? I also try a new method of quantifying if a deck is aggro, midrange or controlling and look at the colour combinations from that perspective to see what do they "want" to achieve. And I shed some light on the Neon Dynasty worst-kept...

This week I look at the differences between NEO Draft and Sealed - which cards do differently, which cards to consider more carefully while building your pool. Apart from that, I look at the Artifact-Enchantment spectrum within the format. What are the optimal numbers of those two types in your deck, are there any trends in relation to the number of cards of those types you play? Based on that I a...

Today we look into the early data from Kamigawa BO1 drafts. I try to explain how Ninjas can sneakily influence win rates of other cards and how to see just how naughty they have been with the data (spoiler: the effect is not that big but can lead you to thinking some cards are a bit better than they really are). I also look at which color pairs are open and speculate a bit on which colors can impr...

This episode is a primer for the new set, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty. I look at the vital statistics of the set, look at how the removal aligns with the creatures and compare it with some previous sets, to get you up to date on which conditional removal is particularly interesting and which can be potentially a dud. Then I go through all 10 archetypes, looking at cards that are key to them and trying...

A bonus episode: audio of the Kamigawa Neon Dynasty skeleton discussion between myself, SLKerstens and JasonILTG. Cards to watch, combinations to test and a good general overview of what NEO has to offer. And it seems it has to offer a lot.  VOD of the stream can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6et5lk3Mr0&feature=youtu.be You Do You, Mana Junkie by essesq (c) copyright 2020 L...

This week I look at the numbers behind Double Feature drafts on Arena based on 17Lands data. Which colour pairs do best, why splashing sometimes matters, what cards over and underperform, what are the top commons and uncommons for each colour and why. I also look at each colour pair and talk about best signpost, best cards and overachievers worth mentioning for (almost) each of them. Watch on YouT...

Look at the VOW draft from the perspective of the whole format and a general look at the format evolution. What are the stages of the format getting mature? How can you use data to position yourself well in a more settled format? What numbers should you be looking at and at what stage? How does card evaluation change and how does it impact color pair strength? See the episode slides: https://bit.l...

How does BO1 hand smoothing work? Based on +500k first hands from 17Lands.com, I could decipher what is going on.  And knowing what it does and how it differs from paper/BO3 will help your deckbuilding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8ijQCd55hI You Do You, Mana Junkie by essesq (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/esse...

I look at Evidence Based Forcing: When and how to force decks, plus how to use data to do it in an organised fashion. Drafting the hard way is hard, but actually proper forcing is not easy either. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26QC8Vzgw9Y You Do You, Mana Junkie by essesq (c) copyright 2020 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://dig.ccm...