May 12, 2026 · 2 hr 15 min · 17 segments
Card win rates can be misleading if you don't look at them with some amount of granularity. Two color pairs have a very different base win rate? Card played in both can look middling. Card is only…
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You know, when you think about metagame, you think about constructed, but metagame in limited is real, and as I mentioned to the chat before I started the recording, this presentation is largely based on the talk I was doing to the Team Cosmos before the Pro Tour, which by the way, they aced it.
So, uh, hopefully, at least in part, this talk helped them, uh, um, helped them crystallize their ideas about limited.
And part of the talk w- that was important I, like, I thought was looking at the metagame of Arena and then trying to figure out what the metagame could look like in the actual Pro Tour.
Because metagame in limited is a real thing, and one thing that put me on the right track was maybe Corticals, I, I want to say Corticals, noticing that the ALSA of black-green cards on 17 lands is very low, which means that people pick black-green multicolor cards quite early in the draft, which means that Witherbloom, Golgari, whatever, black-green, is not particularly open on Arena.
And of course, that will have impact on the win rate of those cards because the earlier you have to pick the basic cards for the deck, the more you have to prioritize them.
The more you have to prioritize them, the less you can pick other powerful cards that maybe are, you know, just generically powerful.
Or if you pick generically powerful cards, you miss out on the synergy cards, and you end up with a deck that is not relying on synergy, and in some colors, synergy is quite important as a supplement because the power is not there, so we need also the synergy to, uh, to supplement it.
But of course, I could have sort of said that probably this is not going to be the case in the Pro Tour, that in the drafts in the Pro Tour, people will look at the win rates of the Witherbloom cards and potentially think that, oh, Witherbloom is not great, therefore, why should I be prioritizing those cards high? The Arena metagame will be comprising people who are good players that want to draft and win, but also more casual players that want to just draft and have fun, and it seems like Witherbloom, for example, was one of those archetypes that people consider fun because life gain synergies are fun.
I'm just not particularly focused on fun or maybe I have a different definition of fun.
My definition of fun is misery of others, for example, and not gaining some life and having fun with my own game.
Um, but because of that, this archetype will be naturally over-drafted compared to the Pro Tour, which means that if you think that Witherbloom is actually slightly stronger in vacuum than the numbers suggest from 17 lands where it's over-drafted, you can, I'm not gonna say force, but at least you can have a good plan of drafting Witherbloom, and a large part of my talk was talking about what would make good Witherbloom deck and why should you be paying attention to it.
And if you noticed the two featured drafts from Team Cosmos members, uh, both Chris Larson and, um, uh, Nathan Steuer, both of them drafted sort of Witherbloom adjacent deck, 'cause, um, uh, Chris drafted a five-color deck with the Witherbloom as the core, and Nathan just drafted a Witherbloom deck.
I think the team had total 10 trophies on the Pro Tour, which is, which is quite a good result, I have to say.
Um, and this all came from the analysis of the metagame and identifying that the metagame at Arena, metagame at Magic Online is not necessarily the same metagame that you expect on the Pro Tour, and because of that, an opportunity appears for you to use the knowledge to gain a slight edge over the opposition by identifying that Witherbloom is probably going to be actually way better than it, than the data suggests.
You know, when you think about metagame, you think about constructed, but metagame in limited is real, and as I mentioned to the chat before I started the recording, this presentation is largely based on the talk I was doing to the Team Cosmos before the Pro Tour, which by the way, they aced it.
So, uh, hopefully, at least in part, this talk helped them, uh, um, helped them crystallize their ideas about limited.
And part of the talk w- that was important I, like, I thought was looking at the metagame of Arena and then trying to figure out what the metagame could look like in the actual Pro Tour.
Because metagame in limited is a real thing, and one thing that put me on the right track was maybe Corticals, I, I want to say Corticals, noticing that the ALSA of black-green cards on 17 lands is very low, which means that people pick black-green multicolor cards quite early in the draft, which means that Witherbloom, Golgari, whatever, black-green, is not particularly open on Arena.
And of course, that will have impact on the win rate of those cards because the earlier you have to pick the basic cards for the deck, the more you have to prioritize them.
The more you have to prioritize them, the less you can pick other powerful cards that maybe are, you know, just generically powerful.
Or if you pick generically powerful cards, you miss out on the synergy cards, and you end up with a deck that is not relying on synergy, and in some colors, synergy is quite important as a supplement because the power is not there, so we need also the synergy to, uh, to supplement it.
But of course, I could have sort of said that probably this is not going to be the case in the Pro Tour, that in the drafts in the Pro Tour, people will look at the win rates of the Witherbloom cards and potentially think that, oh, Witherbloom is not great, therefore, why should I be prioritizing those cards high? The Arena metagame will be comprising people who are good players that want to draft and win, but also more casual players that want to just draft and have fun, and it seems like Witherbloom, for example, was one of those archetypes that people consider fun because life gain synergies are fun.
I'm just not particularly focused on fun or maybe I have a different definition of fun.
My definition of fun is misery of others, for example, and not gaining some life and having fun with my own game.
Um, but because of that, this archetype will be naturally over-drafted compared to the Pro Tour, which means that if you think that Witherbloom is actually slightly stronger in vacuum than the numbers suggest from 17 lands where it's over-drafted, you can, I'm not gonna say force, but at least you can have a good plan of drafting Witherbloom, and a large part of my talk was talking about what would make good Witherbloom deck and why should you be paying attention to it.
And if you noticed the two featured drafts from Team Cosmos members, uh, both Chris Larson and, um, uh, Nathan Steuer, both of them drafted sort of Witherbloom adjacent deck, 'cause, um, uh, Chris drafted a five-color deck with the Witherbloom as the core, and Nathan just drafted a Witherbloom deck.
I think the team had total 10 trophies on the Pro Tour, which is, which is quite a good result, I have to say.
Um, and this all came from the analysis of the metagame and identifying that the metagame at Arena, metagame at Magic Online is not necessarily the same metagame that you expect on the Pro Tour, and because of that, an opportunity appears for you to use the knowledge to gain a slight edge over the opposition by identifying that Witherbloom is probably going to be actually way better than it, than the data suggests.
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