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Data Tales of Middle-earth

Analyzing Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth

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Magic: The Gathering is one of my favorite things. I started playing when I was 15 and since then have spent an unreasonable amount of hours and dollars playing Magic with friends and at tournaments. And while I love casting spells in any context, playing Magic: The Gathering Booster Draft (where you build a deck of cards on the spot) is definitely my favorite format.

As part of my first week at Omni, I took some time to acclimate myself to the Omni analytics product by connecting a small dataset of Magic: The Gathering draft analytics that I had sitting in a local Postgres database. In this article, I’ll explore some interesting findings regarding Magic’s latest set: Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. On a personal note, this is a set that I’ve spent at least 50 hours drafting and playing, so I’m excited to pose some questions I’ve had against the data.

This data is sourced from 17Lands, which I highly recommend checking out if you want to explore a wide range of Magic: The Gathering statistics and up your Draft game. Note that I’ll be using card win rate interchangeably with games in hand win rate, which is ā€œthe win rate of games where an instance of this card was drawn into hand, either in the opening hand or laterā€ as per 17Lands.

Analyzing Tales of Middle-earth #

Green cards really are the worst color #

Is green the worst color in the Lord of the Rings Draft?? The short answer is yes. A thousand times yes.

It’s common knowledge amongst the Draft community that green is severely underpowered compared to the other 4 card colors in this set, and the data fully supports this claim. Looking at just mono-colored cards, green cards have the lowest average win rate by far at 52.3%. By contrast, black cards have the greatest average success with a win rate of around 58.2%.

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Diving deeper, the best black card according to win rate in Lord of the Rings Draft is Orcish Bowmasters at 71%. Looking at green, the best green card is Radagast the Brown, which sits at a win rate of 61%. Not a bad win rate, but the fact that there are at least 13 other cards that perform better than a marquee Mythic rare creature in Radagast shows how much of a disadvantage you’re at when drafting a green deck.

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To further illustrate the point, check out the distribution of card colors among the top 50 best-performing mono-colored cards. Of these top 50 best performers, only 2 cards (Radagast the Brown and Delighted Halfling) are green.

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Needless to say, if you’re trying to win your draft table, avoid drafting green at all costs.

White cards are better than I thought #

Going into this, I hypothesized that black, red, and blue cards would be by far the best-performing colors in the Lord of the Rings Draft. But as you can see, white is actually the third best-performing color with an average win rate of 55.1% - just a smidge above blue’s win percentage. And considering that only 4 of the best 50 mono-colored cards are white based on the donut chart above, this didn’t make any sense.

However, when looking at multi-colored cards, the data points start to piece together. Of the top 10 best-performing multi-colored cards, 5 of them include white mana in their casting cost. The best of these cards is Arwen, Mortal Queen which sits at a whopping 67% win rate.

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So while your average white common like Westfold Rider won’t win you a ton of games, the data shows that drafting a powerhouse rare like Faramir, Prince of Ithilien is worth playing white for.

Common rarity cards you shouldn't overlook #

Looking at just common rarity cards, we can see a few cards that overperform when compared to their average draft position. Dreadful as a Storm is a flexible creature buff spell at instant speed that can help your smaller creatures block bigger threats, or even help you turn your unassuming creatures into potential game finishers. It has a respectable 58% win rate, but the card’s average drafted at position is 10.34.

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A card like Troll of Kazad-dun also has a 58% win rate, but its average drafted at position is 5.64, nearly 5 positions ahead of Dreadful as Storm. I’ve definitely undervalued it in the past, but after seeing the win rate data, I’m very tempted to try and pick up a few copies with my later draft picks.

One card that seems particularly overvalued is Wose Pathfinder, sitting at a 56% win rate despite being one of the most sought-after commons. This matches up with my anecdotal evidence; while Wose Pathfinder can help accelerate you toward your deck’s expensive finishers, a 1/1 creature that dies to basically every form of removal in the format just isn’t great value.

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Conclusion #

All in all, there’s a lot to uncover in these draft datasets. Ultimately, while a lot of my anecdotal observations were confirmed, I’m definitely surprised by which cards and strategies were actually producing wins on average.

PS - If you didn’t just read this because you’re obsessed with Magic: The Gathering too (it’s okay if that’s the case!), we’d be happy to help you explore Omni 😊