Foundations Draft Week 4: Meta Shifts and Win Rate Analysis

The fourth week of Foundations premier drafts is over and with it comes some interesting data. Many archetypes that were considered weak in the first weeks of the format drastically improved their win rate in the last week. Let’s look at some of the meta data from 17Lands in more detail and figure out the best strategy for the upcoming week.

Player Interest Over Time

Looking at the chart below, we see that the interest in Foundations dropped heavily after the first week, but has only been slightly decreasing since then. Especially top players seem to stop playing the format early with games decreasing by nearly 50% after the first week. This is probably explained by the rather straightforward nature of the format, which makes it less interesting for the more experienced players.

For comparison, we can look at the same graph for Duskmourn, a format highly praised by experienced players for its deepness. Here we see a much more linear decline in games, however a similar number of games - around 150,000 - for week 4 just like in Foundations. My guess is that those are the limited enthusiasts that play every format, no matter how good or bad it is.

Shifts in Color Preferences and Win Rates

Nothing drastic changed which colors are played. Green continues its slow increase in popularity and blue also gained a little bit, while the others decreased slightly.

The real surprise is the change in win rates for the colors. Currently red is the top performing color with a win rate of 56.1%, followed by green with 56%.

Important to note is that each one of the colors increased their win rate compared to the previous week.

I found it odd, so I reviewed the weekly changes of general win rate of 17Lands users and as you can see below it did indeed increase in the whole population.

Archetype performance

Digging into the different color-pairs, we see another surprise. All the archetypes that were lagging behind in the first three weeks of the format have caught up with the rest of the field.

Blue/Red, Black/Green and Blue/Green all increased their win rates between 1% and 2% and are sitting at the same rate as White/Black. Keep in mind that all of them are drafted at the lowest rate of the format so far, which means people are careful when to move into them but at the same time being rewarded when it is the correct thing to do.

Red/Green keeps being the top performing archetype this week and even increased its win rate by another 1% (a detailed guide how to draft Gruul in Foundations can be found here). But besides that, the format has actually balanced itself out with 8 out of 10 archetypes being within 1% of each other.

Conclusion

With this week’s release of the Pioneer Masters set, the interest in Foundations will likely decrease even more as many players will move on to the new thing. I personally really enjoyed Foundations and seeing how the format found this balance in the end gives me a satisfying feeling.

Hopefully these stats were of interest of you and remind you to watch for the open color pair in your last Foundations drafts, since we’ve seen that everything is playable. Have fun and happy drafting :)