Pioneer Masters Draft Week 2: Trends, Highlights, and Card Insights

The second week of Pioneer Masters marks the end of the first phase of rotating bonus sheets. Starting tomorrow, December 25th, the “Planeswalker” will be replaced by the “Spells” bonus sheet. Before discussing meta shifts resulting from the changing card pool next time, let’s review what happened during the last week of the format.

Player Interest Over Time

As we’ve seen last week, the interest in Pioneer Masters has been significantly lower than in your usual set. Probably a combination of the holiday season, Foundations drafts running at the same time and that the set is an Arena-only reprint set led to this lower engagement.

Week 2 of the format didn’t change this and the number of games played on 17Lands decreased further to 67,127. This is a decrease of 36% compared to the first week.

In the same timeframe, Foundations saw 49,294 games played, which in total sums up to 116,421 games played in Premier Drafts on Arena last week.

Shifts in Color Preferences and Win Rates

Last week we conjectured that the format was a multicolored one with well performing 4 or even 5 color decks. Looking at the meta shifts from last week, we see that the decks with more than 3 colors increased in popularity, but at the same time declined in their win rate.

Especially the 4/5 color decks saw a significant drop in win rate of up to 2.5%. While last week it looked like they could compete with straight-up two-color decks, it seems now that they are on average a tier lower.

The gates deck was hyped up by some content creators and streamers to be the best thing to do in this format and this is the reflection in the data. So if you haven’t had the chance yet to draft the nuts gates deck, you might want to try it out soon before even more people catch on.

At the same time the two-color decks see an increase in win rate as people figure out which archetypes are good and which better to avoid. Before taking a closer look at the two-color archetypes, let’s see how the colors themselves performed.

Red overtook White as the most popular color and managed to increase its win rate quite substantially. This is mostly due to the rise of Rakdos decks, as you can see below, both in popularity and performance. But also mono-red decks are a thing due to the colors’ depth. Sierkovitz wrote a post about this, which I can recommend to check out.

Other than that, Blue and Green both declined in their performance, creating a gap of 4.36% between the best and worst performing color.

Archetype Performance

Boros was already drafted a lot last week, but it increased even more. It doesn’t really seem to be overdrafted yet though as its win rate saw the biggest increase of all archetypes.

The word about Rakdos seems to be out as well, as it saw a significant increase in popularity and win rate. To see what cards are driving this archetype, check out the overview article.

Izzet is also on the rise in terms of win rate and placed itself as the third-best two-color archetype. It’s still not played that much and given that red is a very contested color, it seems like there might be something to explore there.

Gruul is the only red archetype that performed worse than last week.

Cards of the Week

Let’s get into the weeds and look at some cards that stood out this week to give you something practical to work with during your next draft.

ALSA Movers

The biggest gainers in pick order from last week are both essential cards in the red decks, Witch's Mark and Goblin Heelcutter. Both have a lower ALSA of 0.89 compared to last week, so on average get picked close to one pick earlier.

Chromanticore sees a similar drop in ALSA, as people were seeing it at the top of the game-in-hand win rate for most of last week and realized that it's a good payoff for a multicolored deck and not just a meme.

Less popular are the hexproof creatures Green offers, Bassara Tower Archer and Gladecover Scout. The problem with a full-on boggles deck (throwing a bunch of auras on a hexproof creature) is that it requires you to draw your cards in a very specific order to be effective.

Win Rate Movers

While looking at changes in ALSA gives us an idea what the general population of drafters values more over time, comparing win rates over time doesn’t yield that clear of an explanation. Nevertheless, it can be interesting to look at the most extreme examples.

The biggest change can be seen for Painful Truths, which saw an increase of 6.8% in win rate. Hard to say what the reason for this change is, but if you wrote the card off based on early data, you might want to reconsider as now it looks like it is definitely playable.

Leading the table of cards that performed worse than last week is Shambling Vent. But also another Orzhov card, Cartel Aristocrat, which looked like a very undervalued and strong card in the archetype last week, saw a massive decrease in win rate.

Gem and Junk of the Week

For this category we look at cards whose ranking in terms of win rate has the biggest difference to its ranking in terms of ALSA. This comparison reveals undervalued as well as overvalued cards.

As Gem of the Week we have Witch's Mark, which besides having gained in ALSA, is still the most undervalued card in the format. A win rate of 62.57% for a Tormenting Voice variant is insane, but makes sense given how well the aggressive heroic decks are doing.

For anyone interested here are the other contenders for this category:

Now looking on the other side of the coin, we have our Junk of the Week, Medomai the Ageless. Highly picked with an ALSA of 2.67 it is really not the bomb win con in Azorius many players might think. A win rate of 50.75% is horrendous, and you should definitely avoid drafting this card.

As you might notice, all the junk cards are rare. Since rares are often picked higher for reasons other than the draft itself (collection completion or gems), this list might not be super accurate. It is still useful to look at the cards and keep in mind that they are not as good as they might seem on first glance.

I hope you enjoyed this little overview and stats about the second week of the Pioneer Masters. Let me know on Bluesky or in the comments which stats or trends you’d like to see in the next update. I’d also love to hear your personal draft experiences!

Until then, happy holidays and drafting!