Standard, as supported by recent Tweets by Brad Nelson and April King, still appears to be the most popular format on MTG Arena. Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty changed the format quite a bit, and to understand that better, I analyzed all Neon Dynasty Standard deck lists that were played in Best-of-Three events on MTG Melee from Sunday, February 13 up to and including Saturday, March 5. This essentially encompasses the first three weeks of online play with the new set.
In total, my data set contained 1751 decks and 3615 matches. For comparison, in the same date range, there were fewer than 500 Alchemy matches and fewer than 700 Historic matches on MTG Melee, which means that Standard is more than three times as popular as Alchemy and Historic combined, at least among tournament players. Given that that, it feels a bit weird that this weekend’s Neon Dynasty Championship features the Alchemy and Historic formats instead.
In any case, this article will break down the new Standard metagame, most-played cards, and win rates. I’ll also offer aggregate deck lists all major archetypes.
As a suggestion: Instead of just reporting a single win percentage for each archetype, maybe give some sort of confidence interval? It’s not clear how much of the differences here may be just an artifact of small samples.
Doh! Missed that they were on one of the charts already!