About and methodology

Land Drop is an independent fan project about Magic: The Gathering constructed formats: Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage and Pauper. It is not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast.

Data sources

• Tournament results: the official decklists published by Magic: The Gathering Online (leagues and challenges), imported every morning.
• Card data and images: Scryfall. Images are shown from the Scryfall servers, never copied. The official Oracle text is linked on Gatherer (Wizards of the Coast).
• MTGO publishes only part of each event: the top 32 decks of a challenge and only the 5-0 decks of a league. All statistics describe these published decks, not every deck played.

Archetypes

Each archetype is defined by a few signature cards. A deck belongs to an archetype when its main deck contains all of them; decks that match no archetype are grouped by colors as unclassified. The rules are reviewed as the metagame changes.

Player rankings

Points come from finishes: in a challenge 10 for first place, 8 for second, 6 for third and fourth, 4 for the top 8, 2 for the top 16 and 1 for the top 32. Showcases and qualifiers are worth double, and each 5-0 league is worth 1 point. Ties are broken by top 8 finishes and then by number of events.

Card statistics

• Share of decks: the percentage of the format's decks that play the card, in the main deck or in the sideboard.
• Trend: the change in share, in percentage points, compared with the previous period of the same length.
• Win rate: the average match win rate of the challenge decks with at least 5 matches that play the card. Leagues are excluded because only 5-0 decks are published.
• Played together and lift: how often two cards appear in the same main deck. A lift of 1 means no relation; above 1 they are played together more often than chance.

Staples

The staples of a format are the cards played in at least 2% of its decks in the last 120 days of MTGO results (leagues and tournaments), counted separately for the main deck and the sideboard. Share of decks and average copies refer to that part of the deck; basic lands are left out. Colors and types come from the card; themes such as removal, counterspells or card draw come from the functional tags of Scryfall Tagger, updated every week.

Matchups

MTGO does not publish the pairings of the Swiss rounds, only the top 8 bracket of each tournament: who played against whom, the winner and the games. The matchup matrix and the comparison pages count these top 8 matches of challenges, showcases and qualifiers in the last 90 days.

• They are matches between strong decks and pilots, not a sample of the whole field.
• The samples are small: a percentage appears only with at least 10 matches, and the comparison pages give a 95% confidence interval (Wilson). Below 10 matches only the record is shown, in grey.
• Mirror matches and unclassified decks are not counted in the matrix.
• The win rate of an archetype comes instead from the records of its tournament decks (Swiss and top 8, leagues excluded), mirror matches included. Since MTGO publishes only the top 32 decks, the average of all published decks is above 50%: compare an archetype with that average, not with 50%.

Updates

New results are imported every morning and the statistics are recalculated right after. The card catalog is updated from Scryfall every week.