Selesnya Flavors in Foundations

Following up on last week’s article about Gruul, we’ll explore another green archetype in Foundations that is currently underdrafted while developing quite a strong win rate: Selesnya.

Weekly meta update

When we look at the following charts we see that green is actually gaining popularity in the third week of the format. More impressive however is looking at the win rate. Decks containing green see a drastic increase not only from week 1 to 2 but again to week 3, even to the point of having a higher win rate than black and blue. Of course there are a multitude of factors contributing to this, e.g. people fighting over the other colors, resulting in worse decks in the popular archetypes, but I think it’s safe to say that green earned its spot as a viable color in the format.

Looking at the weekly archetype chart we can see the same trend as well with black archetypes decreasing in win rate, while green decks - or rather Gruul and Selesnya - are on the rise. Now we are at a point in the meta game where the top three performing archetypes per win rate are Gruul, Azorius and Selesnya.

So to get you well positioned for the upcoming weeks of Foundations, let’s look how Selesnya works and what cards to look out for when it is open.

What are archetype flavors?

A big part of drafting a good deck is understanding which cards belong in each archetype. Having a good understand what each color-pair wants to do and which mono-colored cards are supporting that strategy is the first big level-up anyone can achieve in a format. 17Lands can help with that by allowing us to look at the win rate of each card in their respective archetypes.

However, as you get more familiar with an archetype, you’ll start to notice that there are different builds and some card choices perform better in one deck over another, even though it’s the same color pair. I call these different sub-archetypes “flavors” and will show you four different flavors of Selesyna that I’ve identified using data.

Doing this kind of analysis is not possible on the 17Lands website alone, since there you only have access to aggregated data grouped by the color-pairs. What I’ll show you now is based on the recently published public game data set that 17Lands provides. A detailed explanation of my approach will be published in a separate article soon.

The data

Before we dive into the finding of my analysis I want to give you some numbers about the dataset I used. It contains data of 619,386 premier draft games with a total of 132,777 different decks.

For this analysis I was only interested in the games of decks that 17Lands classified as Selesnya without any splashes. This resulted in 7,690 individual decks with a total of 36,775 games.

The flavors

The following sections will introduce the different flavors and explain in what way they differ from the average Selesnya deck. Each section has a table showing the 10 cards that differ the most in occurrence from the overall average. However, this doesn’t mean that those are the best cards in this flavor, just that this was chosen by the clustering algorithm to be the best way to split up the dataset.

Additionally, I link the 17Land deck page for the most iconic deck of the flavor so you can get a better understanding of a real deck.

Selesnya Angels

This flavors main characteristic is the high number of angel creatures, as well as Luminous Rebuke, which is an excellent removal spell to have with a bunch of flyers. It's the slowest of the four flavors with an average game length of 9.25 turns.

Link to example deck

Number of decks: 1,313 (17%)

Win rate: 55.35%

Avg. turns: 9.25

Color distribution: 57.6% white, 42.4% green

Selesnya +1/+1 Counters

This is the deck that cares about the official theme of Selesnya: +1/+1 counters. It is one of the two flavors more slanted towards green. This deck is the most consistent in performance regarding game length. Early/Mid-game is still the stronger suit of the deck, but the late game is not as bad as with some of the other flavors.

Link to example deck

Number of decks: 2,081 (27%)

Win rate: 54.95%

Avg. turns: 8.98

Color distribution: 42.4% white, 57.6% green

Selesnya Cats

Just like Angels, Selesyna Cats is a mostly white deck. However, it’s speed is quite different, as it wants to be very fast. Its peak win rate is 65% in games that last only 5 turns. After that the win rate drops linearly with each additional turn.

Link to example deck

Number of decks: 2,258 (29%)

Win rate: 55.53%

Avg. turns: 9.09

Color distribution: 56.9% white, 43.1% green

Selesnya Elves

Selesyna Elves is the most green slanted flavor of the archetype with an average of 64% of colored pips being green. It is also the most aggressive of the four flavors, with a high win rate of 65% in turns 4-6 but then a steep drop. This flavor really wants to curve out, go wide and finish the game quickly.

Link to example deck

Number of decks: 2,038 (26%)

Win rate: 54.34%

Avg. turns: 8.86

Color distribution: 36.1% white, 63.91% green

Game plan

Taking a look at the following plots shows that the game plan of all four flavors are roughly the same. That is to play a short game and win early - roughly before turn 9 - to prevent the opponent to stabilize and out-value you.

When comparing how long the games last for each flavor, we can see that the curve of Angels is clearly shifted to the right. The win rate curve also looks as if it was shifted one turn behind compared to the more aggressive flavors Cats and Elves.

A look at the average creature curve, also shows mostly the same picture. A small exception is the one drop slot for Elves which is significantly higher as it wants to play as many Llanowar Elves as possible. Selesnya decks in general play a lot of three drops (4.7 compared to the average 3.4), as many of the archetypes key cards are in that slot.

Key cards

The most interesting analysis we can do now is to look at win rates of cards in each flavor and find outliers. This can help us to identify key cards that are especially good in one flavor but not in another. With this information we can make better picks in the draft and what cards to look for once we have an idea which direction our Selesnya deck is going.

The following tables show the top 10 cards that have the biggest difference in win rate between the overall Selesnya win rate and the win rate of the flavor. Still keep in mind that just because a card is performing much better than on average does not mean that it is good. The same is true for the other way around.

Angels

In the top half of the table we see that Angel of Finality, which does not appear strong based on the overall win rate, is actually quite good in this deck. Squad Rallier is also much stronger in this environment. My guess is that its defensive body is more valuable when you are attacking in the air.

On the other hand, Cat Collector and Eager Trufflesnout are performing much worse in this flavor. Again I think non-flying creatures in this deck have to be able to hold the ground, which these two cards are not very good at.

Why Felidar Savior is performing worse in this deck is a bit of a mystery to me. Putting a +1/+1 counter on a flyer seems like a good deal and a 2/3 lifelink blocker also seems like a good defender.

+1/+1 Counters

This is the only flavor that can play Garruk's Uprising and Armasaur Guide, even though they are still not very good. Fleeting Flight and Snakeskin Veil both perform better since they both leave behind a counter.

Cat Collector on first sight doesn’t seem as if it fits the theme very well, however I think the additional life from the food and the 1/1 token go a long way in making sure not to be overrun by more aggressive decks.

In the bottom half of the table we see some angels that are not performing well in this deck.

Cats

Here we have a good example of a card that shines in one of the flavors while being mediocre in another one. That card is Overrun, which has an average Selesyna win rate of 59% and because of that might look appealing to someone looking at the stats. Breaking it down, however, reveals to us that it is actually an A-level card in Cats and a C-level card in the other flavors, like +1/+1 Counters. Of course experienced players will figure this intricacy out by themselves, but it shows that the data approach can find real insights.

Other aggressive cards like Inspiring Paladin and Savannah Lions are also performing better in this flavor.

Bushwhack is a bad choice of removal spell for this deck, since all the creatures are small.

Elves

Here the findings are actually a little disappointing. We don’t really see a big shiny card that performs much better here than the other flavors. The top three better-performing cards are still all below the flavors win rate.

Llanowar Elves and Dwynen, Gilt-Leaf Daen performing better is not surprising, but even here the difference is not that big.

One interesting thing to note is that Evolving Wilds has horrible stats in this flavor. That's easily explained as the deck is so aggressive it really doesn't want to play tapped lands. My guess is that a huge chuck of the winning games see a turn 1 Llanowar Elves and then the snowballing effect of the additional mana each turn. So a tapped land on turn 1 is a huge tempo loss that decides games.

Universal cards

After looking at what cards are good in each flavor, let’s take a look at the cards that are good (or at least consistent) in all flavors. The following 10 cards have the least range in win rate between the flavors.

Spinner of Souls for example is a card that will be good in any flavor (or any green deck) as it is just a great body with an ability that's always relevant.

Cheap interaction like Bite Down and Luminous Rebuke are also cards that are good in any deck.

Helpful Hunter, a 1/1 for 2 mana that replaces itself is also a card that every deck wants to play, regardless of other cat synergies.

On the other side of the spectrum, these are the cards with the biggest range of win rates between the flavors. Some of them were already discussed in the previous sections.

Mossborn Hydra sticks out as being a bomb in the +1/+1 Counters flavor while at the same time unplayable in Elves or Cats.

What surprised me to see is that Scavenging Ooze is actually performing the worst in the +1/+1 Counters deck. This could however just be noise, as the available data for calculating win rates for rares is rather small.

Conclusion

We’ve looked at different sub-archetype - flavors - of Selesyna in Foundations that were identified using a data-driven approach and the publicly available game data from 17Lands.

The four flavors we identified are Angels, +1/+1 Counters, Cats and Elves. While they have a relatively similar game plan - win early - they differ in what cards they are interested in.

While I wouldn’t recommend forcing Selesyna every draft, it is definitely a viable choice if the seat allows it. So in case you notice those key uncommons flowing, you might want to move in. I hope that the information provided in this article will then help you identify what kind of Selesnya deck you’re in and what to priotize.

Good luck in your next draft!