About this project

This project started on a day when I was deciding which Pauper deck to buy next. While looking online for lists and inspiration, I was surprised to see how some archetypes had decks that were 90% identical, while others left a lot of room for player choice with very different decklists. Why was that the case? After thinking about it for a while, I realized that some decks were still adapting to meta shifts after a recent ban from our friends at Wizards of the Coast, and I thought that these changes in the meta could definitely be analyzed.

The first attempt was a very basic piece of software that looked at decklists and gave me simple percentages of which cards were most played. Four months later, I had the chance to run part of my software on the Paupergeddon decklists (you can see them on the beautiful Paupergeddon.com website), and people apparently liked the results, so I decided that all the work I had done was meant to be public for everyone to enjoy. I am now working on making the data nicer to look at and integrating it into this site, but for now, if you want to check it out, visit my Patreon page, where you can also help me improve the data.

About the data

For these stats, I analyze hundreds of lists every week for every format. These lists come mostly from online events, but I also use many decklists from tournaments all around the world when they are published. Since the goal is to understand the competitive metagame, I only gather lists that won or had a strong finish, relative to the size of the tournament, and ignore those that did not perform well. This allows me to track the metagame share of each archetype, both online and offline, and once an archetype has a minimum sample of decklists, I can derive statistical data to see, week after week, which cards start to see play and how the archetype evolves.

I also use various formulas on historical data to identify trends and shifts. The tables you will see are quite complex, but I wrote a guide on how to interpret them, even if you do not have a background in statistics. You can read it here.

Collaboration

If you are a tournament organizer and want to publish your event data, contact me and we can work together to make your players happy with tournament insights, while if you are a professional player with proven results and you or your team would like to discuss my data or need specific analyses, I can probably help with that as well.
If you are just a stats lover like me and want to have a chat you can find me on Instagram, i'm always ready to talk about data!