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Click here for Statistically Speaking: White!
Click here for Statistically Speaking: Blue!
Click here for Statistically Speaking: Black!

Before we get to red’s results, I wanted to spotlight an anonymous reader’s response to the black article. Surrakar Marauder performed way worse than one would have suspected—a pedestrian 52%—and I was unsure why. The reader responded that black is a very popular color in sealed (true—Swamps were the second most frequently played card, just narrowly edged by Mountains), and thus nearly everyone has creatures to block the Marauder. Hence, for two mana, you get a 2/1 creature a lot of the time. We shouldn’t expect such a card to do very well, and sure enough that is what we saw.

Note, however, that Bladetusk Boar didn’t suffer from the same effect. This could possibly be attributed to its larger size. Keep that in mind as we go through the cards.

As always, you can check the methodology of the study by viewing the appendix at the end of the article. Regardless, here are the results:

Tuktuk Grunts: 65%**
Torch Slinger: 62%**
Bladetusk Boar: 60%*
Plated Geopede: 60%**
Burst Lightning: 57%
Goblin War Paint: 53%
Slaughter Cry: 52%
Magma Rift: 52%
Spire Barrage: 52%
Goblin Shortcutter: 48%
Highland Berserker: 47%
Ruinous Minotaur: 45%
Shatterskull Giant: 44%
Molten Ravager: 42%
Zektar Shrine Expedition: 34%***
Demolish: Not Eligible
Seismic Shudder: Not Eligible

*Statistic is significant at 90%.
**Statistic is significant at 95%.
***Statistic is significant at 99%.
A card is ineligible when there are fewer than 20 observations.

Despite being a highly played color, red drops off quite a bit after its top five commons. Let’s find out why:

Tuktuk Grunts: 65%**

I am a surprised to see Tuktuk Grunts on top as well. Unlike Crypt Ripper, the Grunts do not single handedly win the game; perhaps that is why the Ripper finished three percentage points higher and at the 99% significance level. However, they do contribute their fair share to the game, surprising opponents unprepared for a hasty creature while beefing up the rest of the allies you have in play. That is enough to get you by in most limited formats, Zendikar sealed not being an exception.

I certainly would not play Tuktuk Grunts over Torch Slinger, Bladetusk Boar, Plated Geopede, or Burst Lightning. But Tuktuk Grunts is comparable to Shatterskull Giant. Tuktuk finished 21% higher than Shatterskull, and a difference in means test revealed that Tuktuk is more than 99% likely to have a better finish in this study that Shatterskull. So unless you have no other allies in your pool, you really ought to be running Tuktuk Grunts instead.

Torch Slinger: 62%**

Obviously Torch Slinger received a 62% because it destroys creatures and leaves a body on the battlefield to contribute to your offense. That being said, I frequently fall into the trap of avoiding casting Torch Slinger without the kicker. Do not do this. You will often be better served by simple having an additional attacker, especially if you are waiting to draw a second Mountain off the top of your deck. Walk the fine line, and Torch Slinger should do better for you than this statistic shows.

Bladetusk Boar: 60%*

It is getting tiring to keep discussing how good evasion is in Zendikar, but Bladetusk Boar forces me to readdress this issue. Red creatures are pretty dorky for the most part, so if anything ever does block the Boar, you’ll almost always trade straight up. Failing to find any blockers, your opponent will simply eat three damage repeatedly. At that rate, he will not be able to survive very long, especially if you got off to a fast start with the next card…

Plated Geopede: 60%**

Once again, landfall is good. Plated Geopede will normally go uncontested for three or four more turns provided that you keep maintaining your land drops. Like Bladetusk Boar, that puts quite a clock on your opponent, especially when you can back it up with burn to selected blockers or just straight to your opponent’s dome. The Geopede can also screw with your opponent’s blocking plans with instant speed land search in the form of Harrow.

Finally, this guy demonstrates the importance of holding back land in hand when playing Zendikar. Although normally you do this to bluff combat tricks, failure to do so makes landfall creatures weaker in the late game. Imagine if you just kept playing topdecked lands into the late game. Then you draw Plated Geopede. Congratulations, you now have a 1/1 creature with first strike. Unfortunately, that is a virtual dead card in the late game. Contrast that with what would happen if you had held onto to those lands. Now you will get at least a couple swings in with a 3/3 first striker if not more.

Burst Lightning: 57%

Yes, Burst Lightning does better than average, but again a removal spell falls short of statistical significance. Theorists in the article feedback have suggested that this is because everyone plays removal spells, so Burst Lightning has a disadvantage when compared to cards that only good players know to use.

I understand the logic of the theory, but it is time to start questioning the concept. Even if everyone plays a certain card, if that card is truly spectacular, then it should be boosting its caster’s win percentage regardless. And it seems like everyone is playing other cards as well. I observed 116 instances of Burst Lightning. I also saw 118 instances of Goblin Shortcutter, but logically that fell below average. But most damning is the fact that I recorded 147 instances of Plated Geopede. Truly everyone must be playing that creature as well, except Plated Geopede came out as statistically significant. Burst Lightning did not.

I’m not prepared to say that removal is overrated yet. However, the conventional wisdom has always been that removal is the top dog, and you should be splashing to get access to it. Some of this data at least suggests a contradiction to this theory, so I’m going to keep this in mind as I gather data on Magic 2010.

Goblin War Paint: 53%

Creature enchantments run the danger of being a two-for-one target, but careful application of them (that is, not casting them with your opponent having mana open) reduces that risk. Moreover, a card like Goblin War Paint that boosts toughness makes the creature harder to remove later, thus reducing the risk that a random Burst Lightning or Magma Rift will successfully come along later. And that led to Goblin War Paint as coming out average.

Slaughter Cry: 52%

Combat boosters work when they can simultaneously deal more damage and increase the likelihood that your creature will survive after the fray. Slaughter Cry fulfills the first parts of this by pumping up the creature’s power by three; giving it first strike takes care of the second. What keeps Slaughter Cry lower than comparable card such as Vines of Vastwood is its mana cost—at three mana, Slaughter Cry takes up the better part of your turn’s allotment. While not the end of the world, this drawback limits its power.

Magma Rift: 52%

Magma Rift appears to be about as “fair” of a removal spell as you are going to find. Red decks have a difficult time removing big creatures without the support of other colors’ removal spells. Rift’s five damage nails most creatures in the format. However, it is a complete tempo drag—casting it any time before turn six always feels like an awful play. You also can’t play Magma Rift at instant speed, so you lose much of your ability to go two-for-one with opposing spells.  

Spire Barrage: 52%

You need a lot of Mountains to make Spire Barrage a real threat, and it is difficult to have that kind of concentration in a single color in a sealed format. As such, Spire Barrage joins Magma Rift as being a “fair” removal spell. At five mana, good luck casting something else with it on the same turn.

Goblin Shortcutter: 48%

I think Goblin Shortcutter gets a lot more credit than it deserves. A 2/1 creature doesn’t go very far in the late game, and the Falter ability makes only a meager impact on the board. Sealed tends to be slower than draft, so you would need a remarkably aggressive deck to make full use out of Goblin Shortcutter. If you get that kind of pool, run with it; if not, try to find another card.

Highland Berserker: 47%

Now we get to some less than stellar allies. Why do people value Highland Berserker as highly as they do? Even with other allies, the Berserker isn’t very good. If you curve right, he comes down on turn two. From then, your allies only get first strike every time another one falls into play. However, blocking isn’t a popular thing in Zendikar anyway. And if you draw it later, you get a bad creature and whatever bonuses come out of the other allies you have in play. If he’s your own ally, then you have a really terrible deal. Highland Berserker is permissible in a deck without a lot of allies, but don’t include it anywhere else.

Ruinous Minotaur: 45%

Five power creatures are tempting at only three mana, but blowing up land usually comes at too high of a cost. If you do play it, consider it a wall up until the late game. As blocker, it will trade with just about whatever your opponent attacks with, which does not happen frequently in this format. Swing, however, and crafty opponents will let it through to disrupt your tempo in the early game. And as nice as five damage is, it usually isn’t worth the price, especially when you need to blow up a land on Magma Rift.

Shatterskull Giant: 44%

Shatterskull Giant gets more respect than it ought to considering he merely a 4/3 vanilla creature for four mana. I think you could do worse (see below), but I would still want to put something else in my deck. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be completely embarrassed to play it either, so maybe I am being too hard on it.

Molten Ravager: 42%

If you want to drain a lot of mana into a card, look no further than Molten Ravager. Unlike Crypt Ripper, you need to continuously tap Mountains to make the Ravager do anything other than stand there as a wall. This detracts from your board production, which ultimately comes back to bite you. Thing get a little bit better in the late, late, late game—once you run out of spells to play, you can start pumping with reckless abandon. However, it is getting there that is the difficult thing. If you are looking to race, Molten Ravager and its 42% just isn’t your card. And if you are looking for a really good card in the late, late, late game, you are caring far too much over a single contingency.

Zektar Shrine Expedition: 34%***

Dare I label Zektar Shrine Expedition the single worst common in Zendikar? Why, in fact, I will! (I never bring controversy upon myself.) Well, I should at least clarify. Some cards are obviously worse than Zektar Shrine Expedition—Caller of Gales, Lethargy Trap, and Mire Blight come to mind—but at least those cards don’t sucker you into playing them. Meanwhile, a full 67 brilliant young minds spent their two mana in hopes of getting a Ball Lightning. 44 of them came back sad. That’s such a large degree of failure that it comes out as significant to 99%, the only bad card to come out of the study.

Honestly, if you end up playing one of these (and you shouldn’t), consider my advice for Ruinous Minotaur—Zektar Shrine tokens are really big blockers. Yes, there will be times that you can swing for a ton of damage and finish the game. However, your opponent will just let it through some of the time, preferring to pay seven life to set you down a card. Other times, they will spoil a removal spell to preserve their life total. Sometimes it will get chump blocked. Finally, it just sits there when you draw it in the late game and never roll through enough lands to activate it.

But, then again, all that discussion on Zektar Shrine Expedition’s strategy is for nothing—you aren’t going to play it any more, now are you?

Demolish: Not Eligible (3-2)

Example of good land destruction in limited: Mold Shambler. Example of bad land destruction in limited: Demolish. My opponent would have to have a bunch of ridiculous artifacts in his or her deck before I would even begin to think about sideboarding in Demolish, so I doubt I will be casting one bfore Zendikar rotates out.

Seismic Shudder: Not Eligible (3-5)

Unlike with Demolish, I can see the occasional use for Seismic Shudder from out of the sideboard. But such a scenario is rare, and even then I probably wouldn’t be too enthusiastic about putting it in the deck.

Of a little more than 1,000 players, 585 played Mountains, the largest total for any of the basic lands. And with four cards coming back as statistically significant (and another being Burst Lightning), it should not come as much of a surprise. However, red drops precipitously afterward, so keep that in mind before you blindly center your deck around it just because everyone else is playing it.

William Spaniel
williamspaniel@gmail.com

Appendix: Methodology

I assume that skill, luck, and the quality of a player's deck determine who wins any particular confrontation. While undoubtedly skill matters, this study is focused on the luck and card quality factors. Players actually have a great deal of control over both of these, as a poorly-constructed deck will win less often than a well-constructed one. From this, we can conclude that some cards contribute to wins more frequently than others. If an average card ever reached play in a game, we would expect its controller to have only won that game around 50% of the time. But if a truly exceptional card reached play, we would expect its controller to have won upwards of 70% of the time.

Watching replays of Pro Tour San Diego qualifiers on Magic Online (and carefully avoiding the qualifier in which the system malfunctioned and everyone played a 140 card deck—yes, this actually happened), I recorded the results of more than a thousand players. Every time a card hit play, I would record it as either a win or a loss, depending on what ultimately happened in that game. If the card reached play multiple times (perhaps because of a (Grim Discovery)), it only counted once. But if a player cast multiples of a single card, I counted that card multiple times.

Such a large number of observations were necessary to remove the play skill bias that would have shown up in a smaller-n study. It also shrinks the margins of error, allowing for better hypothesis testing, which I ran at 90%, 95%, and 99% confidence.

For those of you unfamiliar with hypothesis testing, here is a brief explanation for what each of those means:

90% Confidence: When I say we can be 90% confident that a card positively contributes to victories, it means that there was only a 10% chance that the card has no impact and the data came back so eschewed based on pure luck. While the odds of being wrong here are only 1/10, we should be very skeptical of these results as statisticians. Generally, it is only a good idea to accept these results if we have a good theory behind them. For example, I would accept (Burst Lightning)—a quality removal spell as being true—but I would cast doubt on whether (Blood Seeker) was actually affecting things.

95% Confidence: This is the gold standard of statistics. When a card meets 95% confidence, the likelihood the card is merely average but we got this extreme of data back is only 1/20. At this point, it is a good idea to start thinking of theories to justify the results if you do not have one already.

99% Confidence: While rare (there were only four in this study), a 99% confidence virtually guarantees that a given card has an impact on the match—there is only a 1/100 chance that this result is wrong. You should pay careful attention to these.

Just because a card does not show up a significant does not mean you should not care about the results. But you should not treat them as gospel, either. The best analogy I can draw is to that of a baseball team. It is possible that your star hitter goes through a minor slump at the beginning of the season and an average player goes on a torrid streak at the same time. That does not mean the average player is better than the star; it just means he was better during that period of observation. So don’t be surprised if the study ranks an average card lower than one you perceive as a top-pick. My card-by-card commentary will help qualitatively decide whether this was just statistical coincidence or if it might be part of a larger trend.

Additionally, just because a card is sub-50% does not mean you should automatically stop playing it in all of your decks. Going back to the baseball analogy, a team cannot field nine players with batting averages all over .300. But it can maximize its performance by putting its best players in the lineup. So if you need to play Vampire’s Bite to have enough black cards to justify running (Sorin Markov), go right ahead; but if (Vampire Lacerator) is floating around in your sideboard, the data indicate you should swap out the Vampire’s Bite.