Aetherdrift Draft Week 5: Meta Update and Traditional Draft Insights
Another week has passed, and not much has changed in the Aetherdrift metagame. Nevertheless, here’s a brief overview of the current state of the format.
Player Interest Over Time
The number of Premier Draft games tracked by 17Lands has declined in the last week by 10.35% and has now ended up underneath the 100k mark. The curve is leveling off as only the committed grinders remain in the queues. Based on previous sets, the decline over the next few weeks until the release of Tarkir: Dragonstorm is expected to be more gradual.
However, Traditional Draft has seen a 22.75% increase in games played this week. The numbers are still low compared to Premier Draft, with only 17k games tracked last week.
With roughly 130k total Traditional Draft games, we now have enough data to examine the differences between the two game modes. This will be the focus of today’s post.
Shifts in Color Preferences and Win Rates
In terms of deck color composition in Premier Draft we see nothing new this week. The number of 3+ color decks is still rising slightly.
It’s the time of the format where playing multicolored decks is sometimes necessary to get enough high-impact cards. As a result, the importance of good fixing is also increasing.
White can no longer be considered the worst color in the format. Thanks to the self-correcting nature of draft, the colors now appear to be well balanced. If one color had to be singled out as the worst, Red would likely be the candidate.
Traditional Draft
Looking at the same graphs for Traditional Draft, we see a similar picture. Keep in mind that there isn’t enough data available to track these values over time. What you see here is all data, except for the first week of the format.
Interestingly, Blue appears to have the lowest win rate in Traditional Draft. At the same time White doesn’t look too bad. However, the confidence intervals are quite large, so take these values with a grain of salt.
Archetype Performance
Non-Boros White decks continue to gain momentum in Premier Draft, with Selesnya and Orzhov still leading in win rate. With player interest declining, this is likely the final form of the metagame.
Traditional Draft
In Best-of-3 drafts the meta looks similar and White/Green seems to be the number 1 archetype. Gruul sticks out as performing better here than in Premier Draft.
Overall the win rates are very close together, which is nice to see. Only Boros is lagging behind, but after many aggressive formats in the recent past, this is a welcome change.
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Cards of the Week
As this week’s focus is to shed some light on Traditional Draft, we are going to take a look at win rate differences between the two game modes. Since Premier Draft is more popular, its larger dataset makes win rates more reliable and frequently cited. However, some cards perform differently due to fundamental gameplay differences, such as hand smoothing in Best-of-1.
Win rate comparisons can be misleading since the average win rate differs between Premier and Traditional Draft. The dataset used here is the overall game in hand win rate, minus the first week of the format. The difference in win rate for this period of time is
58.17% (Traditional Draft) - 54.57% (Premier Draft) = 3.6%The following tables show both win rates and the adjusted difference. The adjusted difference is calculated by subtracting the 3.6% of the traditional win rate before comparing the two values. This way the comparison is fair and differences in formats are better investigated.
Better in Traditional Draft
The biggest difference in win rate is seen with Muraganda Raceway. Looking at the win rate alone, this land looks like a bomb in Traditional Draft, while being an F in Premier Draft. Since there is no apparent reason why it should perform so much better in a Best-of-3 format, it is worth digging a little deeper.
An explanation for this difference could be that the card is skill-testing and only good player can make full use of it. Currently, there is not enough data from top players to get a game-in-hand win rate for this card. However, we see a game-played win rate of 61.9% even in Premier Draft, making it the 10th best performing card under this metric.
The key seems to be to only put it into a certain type of deck and top players seem to know when that is the case. Top players put this card only in 17.2% of the decks when they have it in their pool. That’s nearly half the time the average 17Lands user plays it (33.1%).
Fuel the Flames is another card that performs better in Traditional Draft. This is a classic sideboard card, so here the difference in performance is not surprising.
The same is true for Gastal Blockbuster. For the rest of the card in the list, I don't see an obvious reason why they should be better in Traditional Draft. It is possible that there are again other factors at play, just like we've seen with the Raceway.
| Name | Win Rate (Premier) | Win Rate (Traditional) | Diff (Adj) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Muraganda Raceway | 51.33% | 62.13% | 7.21% |
| Tune Up | 52.46% | 59.17% | 3.11% |
| Fuel the Flames | 53.12% | 59.46% | 2.74% |
| Gas Guzzler | 56.42% | 62.73% | 2.72% |
| Valor's Flagship | 56.16% | 62.47% | 2.71% |
| Gastal Blockbuster | 51.13% | 57.38% | 2.66% |
| Air Response Unit | 51.04% | 57.13% | 2.49% |
| Coalstoke Gearhulk | 55.48% | 61.40% | 2.33% |
| Swiftwater Cliffs | 54.77% | 60.66% | 2.29% |
| Trade the Helm | 51.49% | 57.31% | 2.23% |
Better in Premier Draft
On the other side of the spectrum, the following table shows cards that perform better in Premier Draft.
Leading the list is Bloodghast, but the win rate is horrendous in both formats. Performing relatively better in Best-of-1 makes sense for an aggro card like this, but it's still not a card you should be excited about.
Scanning the rest of the list, a lot of Simic cards are present. It seems like the absolute win rates of these cards are the same across both game modes.
Earlier we saw a hint that Best-of-3 players might be better players on average. If that’s the case then it could be that Simic is easy to navigate and therefore gameplay skill plays less of a role. The win rate would then seem relatively higher in Premier Draft.
Since the win rates are very high for these cards, this is an explanation that makes sense, but this is a topic that could be explored further.
One card that could actually be better in Best-of-1 is Silken Strength. In Traditional Draft the element of surprise is gone once it shows up in game 1. If an opponent plays around it, the card loses much of its value.
| Name | Win Rate (Premier) | Win Rate (Traditional) | Diff (Adj) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bloodghast | 49.08% | 50.23% | -2.44% |
| Sita Varma, Masked Racer | 60.41% | 61.66% | -2.35% |
| Silken Strength | 54.61% | 56.13% | -2.08% |
| Mimeoplasm, Revered One | 50.89% | 52.44% | -2.05% |
| Wastewood Verge | 55.63% | 57.20% | -2.03% |
| Rangers' Aetherhive | 55.05% | 56.65% | -2.00% |
| Mu Yanling, Wind Rider | 65.42% | 67.05% | -1.96% |
| Lumbering Worldwagon | 65.45% | 67.17% | -1.88% |
| March of the World Ooze | 62.77% | 64.55% | -1.82% |
| Chitin Gravestalker | 53.69% | 55.51% | -1.77% |
ALSA Movers
Finally, let’s look at weekly changes in ALSA values. All changes are minimal, and with the declining number of games, ALSA values for these timeframes are becoming less reliable. This is yet another sign that the metagame is becoming stale.
Nevertheless, it is still interesting to see that two fixing cards are the top popularity gainers this week, matching with our previous observation that multicolored decks are rising in popularity. If you listened to the recent episode of Limited Level-Ups with Andrea Mengucci, you heared his praises of Starting Column. Don't sleep on this card!
| Name | Alsa Week 4 | Alsa Week 5 | Alsa Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marshals' Pathcruiser | 4.25 | 4.06 | -0.19 |
| Starting Column | 6.15 | 5.96 | -0.19 |
| Winter, Cursed Rider | 3.69 | 3.5 | -0.19 |
| Embalmed Ascendant | 4.68 | 4.5 | -0.18 |
| Broadcast Rambler | 5.74 | 5.56 | -0.18 |
The other end of the ALSA change table looks like follows, just like the cards gaining more popularity, the ones losing it are also doing so by very little amounts.
| Name | Alsa Week 4 | Alsa Week 5 | Alsa Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Skyseer's Chariot | 3.55 | 3.77 | 0.22 |
| Caelorna, Coral Tyrant | 6.74 | 6.93 | 0.2 |
| Pacesetter Paragon | 5.07 | 5.25 | 0.19 |
| Wickerfolk Indomitable | 6.26 | 6.4 | 0.14 |
| Cryptcaller Chariot | 2.81 | 2.94 | 0.14 |
The Limited community seems to be wrapping up Aetherdrift and looking ahead to the next set, Tarkir: Dragonstorm. The data reflects that and the meta is not moving much week to week.
I hope the little detour into Traditional Draft was interesting and I’m working on some other aspects to discover in the next couple of weeks until the data of the new set is available to explore. Let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see analyzed using 17Lands data.
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