MKM Limited Meta Report: Learning From the Best Players Using Draft Data

Limited is hard. No real way around it. Formats change completely every few months, you need to understand the basics of drafting, deckbuilding, and gameplay just to be able to start, then you get more fancy strategies connected to building around, reading signals, preferences in draft, etc, etc. All this can be overwhelming and, my gut feeling, stops some people to engage with draft.

However, Limited has something that no other format does – access to incredible data that can help any player bridging the knowledge gap between a novice and a seasoned grinder. I strongly believe that it is the less experienced players that can reap the largest benefits from insights found in the 17Lands data. Hopefully, this article will set you on the right path to improvement.

Murders at Karlov Manor (MKM) Limited Guides

• 📈 Tier List 🆕
• 🧪 Alchemy: Karlov Manor 🆕
• ☀ White Review
• 💧 Blue Review
• 💀 Black Review
• 🔥 Red Review
• 🌳 Green Review
• ⭐ Multicolored | Part 2
• 🏔 Artifacts and Lands Review
• 👥 Special Guests
• 📃 The List | Part 2

• MKM Limited Meta Report: Learning From the Best Players Using Draft Data 🆕
• Draft Guide
• Best Commons and Uncommons, Hidden Gems, and Trap Cards
• Over and Underperformers
• Archetypes and Example Decks
• Theorycrafting
• Combos and Synergies
• Removal Guide
• Sealed and Prerelease
• Mechanics

Introduction to Data

One of the problems with improving in Magic is that advice you hear from content creators, friends, or that one guy in the LGS who seems to know stuff is not necessarily tailored for your needs. Any educations programme is structured to make progression easy. In biology, you first learn what are animals and plants, how do they work and only after you mastered those parts you can learn genetic engineering. If you learn to play piano, you spend years doing seemingly pointless finger exercises before you even start dreaming of playing a full coherent song. The efficiency of such approach is probably best shown by a known martial arts pedagogue, Nariyoshi Keisuke Miyagi and his teaching methods utilising DIY chores as foundational exercises in karate, giving a pupil skills in martial arts without knowing they were learning them.

But Magic education does not have the tested structure of music education nor the stealthy strategy but potent approach of Mr. Miyagi. Most advice you will get is good at some stage of your Magic learning, but the problem is – are you sure you at this stage yet? Or are you simply not ready to learn particular mechanisms? How to know it? This article is aiming to help you figuring out just that, and comes with some cards that you should pay particular attention to in your learning process as those are good indicators of high or low skill levels.

To do so, we dive into the 17Lands dataset. You may not know it but you can look at almost all data on 17Lands through 3 player tiers based on their performance in the recent sets. We have the top tier, players with average win rate of ~60%, middle tier with players who win ~55% of their games and bottom tier with players whose win rate is around 50%. This division into those three tiers gives me opportunity to compare behaviour in those three groups. I can look at the general trends or single cards that all the categories approach differently. If you know your win rate – you can sort of assign yourself into one of the tiers or position yourself somewhere in between. But those categories will be very fluent and it always is a spectrum of ability. Don’t get too stuck in the mindset of what win rate player you are, but rather than this, if you see a card top tier players are high on, but you are not, ask yourself – why don’t I think this card is great? Or if I understand it is great, why don’t I pick it more often?

To look at the differences between the player tiers in terms of how frequently they pick particular cards when they see them and how well do they do while playing with particular cards, looking at their win rates. And here comes your homework – think about which of the cards you see on the list are valued lower by you than by the top 17Lands users and think why you value them lower. Also, look at the cards that are doing much better in the hands of top players – if you think you still need to learn a lot to qualify to that group, take into account that maybe you are not just ready yet to gain full advantage of playing them. But by all means – start thinking about why it might be so.

Pick Preference

Your path towards winning more in Limited starts with making the right picks during the draft. Some cards are more powerful than they look. The top players see that potential more frequently. Or they learn faster about cards that are more powerful than they look on first glance. Independently of the mechanism, any difference in pick preference will be interesting to look at. Pick preference here is what % of the time does each group of players pick a given card when they see it. It will combine several tendencies. Firstly – the preference of the card itself. But secondly – the preference of the color or color pair that card is played on – if higher win rate players play Green more frequently, they will end up picking Green cards more frequently.

Since your skill progression in Limited is gradual, I thought that looking at the differences between neighbouring ability groups data is most useful as a learning tool. So if you are in the 50% win rate bracket, you want to be looking at what do people in the 55% win rate bracket are doing differently. This way you can start analysing what can you change to become more like them. It might be a too big jump to go straight into emulating the play style of the 60% win rate group as you might not be ready just yet to make that jump and skip the middle stage – you want to move up from playing finger exercises to simple melodies in your piano lessons, not necessarily skip straight to playing Chopin Concerto No. 2 in F minor. So let’s look at the key differences between neighbouring groups.

Lets start by looking at the difference between the middle and bottom tiers on 17Lands and cards that the 55% win rate middle tier players pick more frequently. The card where we see the biggest difference is the Neighborhood Guardian. I got the feeling that this might be under-appreciated already at the prerelease, tweeting that no matter how high you think it is as a pick, pick it higher. This is of course a classic Magic hyperbole, but data shows that there is more than a grain of truth in it. Guardian is an oppressive two drop, giving you the possibility of pushing damage early and making combat math a nightmare for the opponents. At its floor level it is already a very desirable statline of a 2/2 for 2 mana in a set full of Disguise creatures, 2/2s for 3 mana, making it exchange favourably. But it is so easy to go higher than the floor and the ceiling of flipping up the Dog Walker mid combat to give your creatures some combination of +2/+2 is not that hard to achieve.

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If you look through the list, you see many more creatures that play well in Boros decks, suggesting that it is not only the Guardian that middle win rate players value in that archetype, but the archetype itself if preferentially drafted. Inside Source, Novice Inspector, Reckless Detective, Torch the Witness, Cases of the Gateway Express and Case of the Burning Masks, Dog Walker and Fuss // Bother are all superlative cards in RW decks and all are picked higher by the middle tier players, suggesting systematic bias towards RW. Boros since day 1 and still now is the highest win rate archetype so those results suggest that middle win rate players draft with a bit more preference towards powerful color combinations. If you think you are more of the 50% win rate player – maybe start positioning yourself better to be in one of the powerful color pairs than you are currently doing.

But apart from the RW contingent, there are some individual cards that middle win rate players see as reasons to draft something while lower win rate players stay away from more frequently. There are couple bombs on this list – Cryptic Coat, Lamplight Phoenix, Tolsimir, Midnight's Light are all reasons to shift your draft in a way that lets you play them. It seems that lower win rate players are less likely to pick them and try to switch their draft strategy than the middle win rate players.

But not only rares are in this category. Three powerful uncommons are notoriously undervalued by lower win rate players. A Killer Among Us looks benign, but it is basically a 6/6 of stats on 3 bodies for 5 mana, which is a great statline. This card is the top uncommon of the format but is still picked later than the win rate would suggest so if you are not convinced, maybe it is time to think about it. Flourishing Bloom-Kin is another under-appreciated card. It reads like a mono-Green creature, but it is perfectly fine in a green heavy multicolor deck. The flip not only ramps you, but if you managed to pick a Green surveil land – can also fix your mana to some extent and it makes sure you are more likely to draw spells later in the game, and even in a less green-centric deck, will be frequently a 4/4 or more after the flip.

Lastly, Coerced to Kill is a very powerful card. Like rare level of power. But it is in the weakest color pair. Middle win rate players seem to care less about it – and for good reason. it is a 5 mana spell, which makes it very easy to splash if you are already playing a Ux or Bx deck. Especially in combination with Green, if you have a Nervous Gardener or Escape Tunnel, you will be able to play Coerced to Kill off one basic land of the splashed color easily.

And some cards seem to be more appealing to lower win rate players. I see them in few categories: cards that may look appealing but play worse than they look, cards that have reputation of being good, more expensive creatures, and cards that sell dreams well, but rarely deliver on those.

From the cards that look appealing, Case of the Pilfered Proof sticks out. It looks like a powerful addition to the WU detective deck, but actually has a pretty bad win rate in those decks. The problem with is is a classic one – no good place on the mana curve to play it optimally. You can cast it early, but at the cost of board presence, or late and lose value. And, as far as the +1/+1 bonus to your detectives is neat, the payoff for solving it is not amazing. Also – solving will be tricky in many games where you will have to trade off some of your creatures if you skipped your turn 2 to cast it.

Another card that does look appealing is the Nightdrinker Moroii, promising a powerful flying creature and the good feeling of playing around its drawback, but in the end, the 4/2 body is not reliable enough to make it do enough damage. Getting your Moroii Shocked after you invested 5 mana to cast it is not only a feel bad but a good way of losing a game. Another classic appealing card is the Forum Familiar. Promises value but that value is requires 5 mana investment to bounce one of your own permanents back to your hand – that is a lot of mana for the effect, and the 2/2 body that comes with it is not enough to excuse such cost.

When it comes to overblown reputation, look no further than Murder. A classic card, but didn’t age well given the shift in card design. It is still a good card, but it is not great and perhaps the lower win rate players see it as great still. Modern creatures have too many enter the battlefield (ETB) triggers – so frequently the creatures you are trying to kill already accrued some value, making killing them at an expense of a whole card less appealing. And Ward on Disguise creatures means you will need to spend 5 mana to deal with those if you want to stop a Disguised creature from flipping. But all this, in my opinion, wouldn’t matter if Black was a stronger, and perhaps more importantly, a proactive and not a reactive color. A 3 mana removal like Makeshift Binding in a proactive color is one of the top cards in the format and if tables were turned and Black was powerful and White was struggling, I can easily see win rates of the two swap. As is – Murder is a mediocre card in the format. And middle win rate players seem to understand it better than the low win rate players.

Another card that is picked by the lower win rate players based on its reputation is No More Lies. The card will most likely become a constructed staple but that doesn’t mean it’s great in draft. This inability in evaluating cards differently between formats is one of the traits I observed in newer players and leads them to pick weaker cards while being convinced they are doing the right thing. The culprit here is, again in my opinion, the idea that Limited is seen merely as a weaker format. And while it is true – decks in Limited decks have lower power level than constructed decks, this is only a part of the story. Limited is weaker but also different and looking at it as only weaker leads to extrapolating Constructed power to Limited – which is not always a good idea.

The other category is expensive cards. And to be more precise – I mainly mean the 4-drops in this category. 4-drops are in an awkward spot in Limited – expensive enough not to be guaranteed on curve but not expensive enough to be powerful when cast like a 6-drop would. This category suffered a lot with the modern card design leading to prevalence decks with a U-shaped mana curve: lots or 1-2-drops, not much in the middle and powerful top end. You will see a lot of those among trophies because they can win games quickly if needed and the expensive top end provides them with some finishing power if the early aggression is not enough.

But this means cards like Wispdrinker Vampire, Harried Dronesmith or Nightdrinker Moroii are not as powerful as they read. That doesn’t mean they are weak – just not a reason to draft a color pair, but only a reward for picking that particular lane (ok, not Moroii, that card is pretty weak). But the other two are perfectly serviceable if you are already in WB or UR – just not powerful enough to switch to those colors if you see them.

Lastly, we have cards that offer a dream and Mistway Spy is one of them. Newer players in my experience will focus too much on the upside and a dream scenario of getting 4 clues, while ignoring the cost of achieving this dream – and that is paying 5 mana for a 1/1 flying creature. This card is symptomatic of that dream scenario, but actually, two cards mentioned earlier, Case of the Pilfered Proof and Forum Familiar would also fit this brief, if you squint a little.

OK. But what if you already are this 55% win rate player? What do the absolute top players do differently form you?

Well, they do a lot of the same things like the middle players do in comparison to bottom tier, but even more. Here the pattern is, that the top players do draft a bit more of Boros, but definitely much more Selesnya on top of it to try to stay in White. We see just how much more do the top players value A Killer Among Us– it was already one of the most profound differences between the bottom and mid tier players and that difference is even bigger here, with 12.4 percentage point difference in pick rate.

You also see another feature of top players inflated – their willingness to prioritise fixing. Nervous Gardener and Escape Tunnel are key in utilising cards like Coerced to Kill as a splash. Buried in the Garden is technically also fixing, although I think it made the list mainly due to drafting more Selesnya, rather than for the color fixing itself.

There are two interesting cards on this list. Glint Weaver is valued highly by top players, showing their willingness to play slower decks. Slower decks require tighter play, better planning, so if you are new to Limited, I would advise to dip your toes into them but maybe don’t try to force them every time, sticking to easier builds that will help you getting confidence in the format. Glint Weaver is a great card to stabilise you and let you turn the corner after first turns in a full survival mode. On the other hand, Get a Leg Up looks innocuous, but it can give you a lot of stats for one mana. Think about it like that: if pushing damage is what you care about, it can probably push more damage than On the Job but for a quarter of the mana investment. Yes, I do understand that OTJ does a lot more than that, but still, don’t underestimate the power of 1 man trick that can win games out of nowhere. And the defensive surprise Reach can come handy – I managed to eat Niv Mizzet with the card, that would otherwise take over the game.

As for cards that the top players are lower on – there is plenty of rares on the list. Those are mainly there because middle tier players are very high on those rares, while top players will see them as powerful cards but not powerful enough to change the draft strategy to switch to those. Krenko's Buzzcrusher is a solid card but it is not broken, it has its flaws, mainly being susceptible to some removal because it is an Artifact. You also see a light tendency of top players to be less bullish on Red in general, with some really powerful red cards making the list, like Krenko or Pyrotechnic Performer.

If Murder drafting Murder highly is what distinguishes bottom tier players from the top ones, Soul Enervation is what makes the difference between the middle and to tier. Card looked decent in the previews but didn’t pan out to be great – but that uncommon symbol still appeals to middle tier player slightly more than it probably should. Another card in that gist is Not On My Watch – a card that will be not on plan for most of White decks, thus low priority for top players.

Win Rate

But picking a card doesn’t make you win more all by itself. You still need to win with it. And some cards are easier to win with than the others. I always found it intuitively wrong to tell beginner players to play some cards more frequently because they win more. They might win more in the hands of a 60% win rate player, but that doesn’t always convert into wins in the hands of someone who played only a few drafts.

A good rule of the thumb is – cards that have multiple functionalities and offer more choice of what to do with, have usually a better win rate in the hands of more experienced players, simply because they will more frequently chose the right mode.

First card I saw having a disproportionately high win rate in the hands of the top players was Impulse in Dominaria United. For an experienced player, having a choice of one of the 4 cards is a great tool, but for a beginner it might turn into a decision nightmare. Not to mention that Impulse is also a card that shouldn’t be played in just any deck, and my bet is top players knew where to play it more frequently than the beginners.

But what cards behave similar to Impulse in MKM?

The average win rate difference between the middle tier players and the bottom tier players is 7%p. So a difference of 12%p between those two groups is much larger than you would expect. Ignoring a small sample size Benthic Criminologists, Flourishing Bloom-Kin is the first card on the list. And this card offers many modes. Do you play it for mana and ignore the value? Do you trade it off or keep for later to flip? When do you flip it? All those pose non-obvious choices and low win rate players seem to make the bad ones more frequently. So if your win rate is around 50% – start thinking more about what should you do with a card like this. Show someone your game logs and ask for assessment of how you played with it, especially when you lost a close game. Those logs are generally important to revisit to find small errors that might have cost you the game. Replay game logs is both one of the most useful and underused functionalities of 17Lands. If you understand where you used the Bloom-Kin sub-optimally, you have a good chance to not only correct how you play this specific card, but also level up on a general level.

Gleaming Geardrake is another card with large win rate difference between Mid and Bottom players. Here my guess is that at least a part of the difference is related to building of a UR deck. Those builds are not trivial. Izzet is one of the archetypes that performs relatively better in the hands of high win rate players – be it by drafting the color pair better or by knowing better when to start drafting it. If you are the 50% win rate player – look at successful Izzet builds and see which cards you like to play in yours are not in them and which cards you avoid are included. If all you see is – the trophy decks had many rares, this is a piece of information too. Maybe to be successful in this color pair, it needs to be decently open and you need to get more high rarity cards to win, when you try to play this color combination based only on decent commons and uncommons when it is not enough.

Reckless Detective is an aggro-oriented version of the Bloom-Kin. So many choices. Do I block with it and risk a combat trick? Do I attack or not? Do I rummage or sacrifice a Thopter token? All of those can have different answers depending on the situation and that increases a possibility of making a sub-optimal decision. In aggro decks suboptimal decisions matter. You only have a small window in the game when you can win reliably so any wobble might have knock-on consequences. For example that land you rummaged away on turn 3 may mean you won’t double-spell on turn 5 and lose momentum. Again – look at your game replays with a high win rate player or someone you trust to get a second opinion on your decisions in close games you lost.

Unyielding Gatekeeper is a great example of a card that can be a lesson in flexibility. In most games you do want to turn it face up and kill something big or annoying in exchange for a Detective, or blink your powerful threat to dodge removal or get an ETB trigger. But chasing value for value’s sake can be a trap. Don’t forget that one of the modes is just playing it out as a 3/2 for 2 mana and value you will be getting is measured in quickly diminishing life total of your opponent. Cards have a wide range of utilities and in my experience, the top players use the full range better. The same can be said about Krenko. As a vanilla 3/3 haste it is still a decent creature, but can become so much more in a dedicated synergy deck. And higher win rate players seem to be capitalising on it. Some artifact sacrifice synergies can go a long way to make it from very good to amazing.

Coerced to Kill is possibly a different case – a case of understanding splashing better. Dimir is the lowest win rate deck in the format so far, and lower win rate players play Dimir more frequently. Higher win rate players will play Coerced to Kill more frequently as a splash card in their Ux or Bx deck, and it performs markedly better there. This shows how important it is to not only understand the power of individual cards, but also of the format’s metagame.

The last card I wanted to talk about is the Person of Interest. Here my suspicion (see what I did) is that the lower win rate players include it more often in decks it is not suitable for. Person of Interest is a strictly aggressive card. If you are playing defence, you don’t want to spend 4 mana to get a 2/2 blocker, and the 2/2 menace attacker is of little use for you. Picking a card based on your plan and not on a simplified idea of what a good and bad card is, is one of the level-ups you need to forego to improve your win rate.

But what do really top players win more with?

The difference between the top and middle tier on 17Lands is roughly 5%p. So we can there are not that many cards that are outliers. But the ones we see have something in common. Lots of them are linked to an extensive mana plan in the game. We have fixing in the form of Topiary Panther, Public Thoroughfare, Scene of the Crime and a self-mill ramp build-around in Aftermath Analyst. Seems to me that players with win rate around the 55% mark are still learning the ins and outs of those specialised multicolor decks and this reflects on their win rate. If you are in that category – 5C decks are a good tool to have in your range, but it also requires drafting slightly differently. Explore 17Lands database and look for 5C decks – what do they have in common. How does their mana look like compared to yours. If you notice differences – make sure to try to act on this information.

We also see cards that have specific requirements. Proft's Eidetic Memory, Wispdrinker Vampire, Krenko are all very original build-arounds and this may mean that 55% win rate players don’t have a sufficient experience yet to extrapolate towards such unique cards. Mastery comes from repetition, talent can speed up the process but won’t eliminate it. If you don’t know how to use those cards best – public datasets on 17Lands are released soon – dive into them and see which decks containing those cards do better. What are their common features and what do you think you would do differently – like this you can identify your own weak spots.

Conclusions

I hope that this article gave you some tools for self-study. But self-study can be tricky. If you want to improve in Limited – best way forward is to invest a bit and get some coaching. Many great drafters offer coaching, and you should at least consider it if you want to improve. Watching streams is a sort of less personal but cheaper version of it – do watch some drafts played by the best on a replay and pause to see where you would make a different pick, where would yo make a different play. All those tools supplemented with a data cocktail will get you to mythic if you are willing to learn.

If you want to see more data on this topic, or love the timbre of my voice (warning, I was a bit raspy due to cold) – watch the full seminar with even more graphs.