On the 8th of November 2024, 122 players fought through seven rounds to try and win a Library of Alexandria! Thank you to the staff and judges, and congratulations to Henry Fair who took it all down with an 8 Point deck!
As always, there will be an accompanying video to this article which you can find here.
You can view the spreadsheets and raw data used here.
Here you can find the decklists.
You can find a summary at the bottom of this article..
The Stats
Pointed Cards
Below are all the pointed cards with at least 12 copies, or about 10% of the room.
Here are the 15 cards that cost players the most points.
Six cards in this category cost more than one point (WPA, Lutri, Sol Ring, Time Walk, Ragavan and Thassa’s Oracle)
Below are the pointed cards that appeared in the Top 8 decklists. Only 6 cards of the 31 cards cost more than one point, and only one card put four copies into Top 8.
Let’s go a bit further. This graph shows every pointed card with at least one copy in Top 8, ranked by Conversion Factor. Seasoned Dungeoneer, Broadside Bombardiers, WPA, Karakas, Orcish Bowmasters and Forth Eorlingas all had a poor showing. All pointed cards not present here put zero copies in top 8, and therefore have a conversion factor of 0.00.
Below are the Conversion Factors of the pointed cards that appeared in Winning Decks.
Notable achievers are Balance, Timetwister, Flash, Underworld Breach and Intuition.
Lastly, here are the Match Point Averages of the pointed cards, with a cut off of 10.5 (half of the total possible 21 in a 7 round event). Blue is the played count, with the MPA in red.
All Cards
Here are the most played Mainboard cards, with at least 37 copies or a hair above 30%.
And here are the most played sideboard cards, with at least 19 copies each.
Summary
I want to reiterate that these stats DO NOT tell the whole story about the event, as every piece of data has flaws and gleaning information from such a large set of data points requires some amount of bias. Whether you believe a card that was played by one person who reached Top 8 is an exceptional performer or a symptom of a small sample size is up to you. The full data is available here and you can use it to create your own story.
Combo appears to be winning more, with multiple pointed cards in the “combo” category having good showings. Lutri Grixis and RWx Midrange/Initiative were very popular on the day.
The most played pointed cards were: Force of Will, Forth Eorlingas!, Orcish Bowmasters, Karakas, WPA, Reanimate, Broadside Bombardiers, Deathrite Shaman, Ancient Tomb and Seasoned Dungeoneer.
Every card here but WPA appeared in the most played pointed cards from Canbrawl4.
This is the exact same top 10 as the Plenty of Games Win-a-Dual at the end of Oct.
The most played mainboard cards (excluding lands) were: Mental Misstep, Lightning Bolt, Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Brainstorm, Swords to Plowshares, Ponder, Thoughtseize, Inquisition of Kozilek, Fatal Push and Fury.
Fatal Push and Inquisition of Kozilek replaced Gitaxian Probe and Preordain from Canbrawl4.
Fury returned over Mishra’s Bauble from the PoGWAD event.
The most played sideboard cards were: Pyroblast, Red Elemental Blast, Hydroblast, Blue Elemental Blast, Unlicensed Hearse, Brotherhood’s End, Duress, Submerge, Ghost Vacuum and Ashiok, Dream Render.
Ghost Vacuum replaced Energy Flux from the Canbrawl4 list.
Ashiok, Dream Render returned for the PoGWAD list, replacing Carpet of Flowers.
Across these three events, a total of 90 unique possible cards were available across these categories. 30 unique cards would require every event to have the same top 10 for each of these events.
There were 36.
