I would like to begin by exploring the limitations and biases of the data so we can get a better understanding of how to apply it. As explained in the site’s introduction, these statistics are only applied to the games that a card is seen (revealed, summoned, activated, sent to grave, or banished), not all games in which they are present in a deck. This means that you will only see a majority of these cards’ stats change when a deck is actually playing, and bricks will not usually count detrimentally towards a card/deck’s win rate. This can both help and hurt, as we may get a more accurate look at the power of a deck, but also may not get an accurate picture of a deck’s consistency. This will be made clearer when we look at this week’s highest win rate cards. The other limitation is where the data is collected; it is important to note that Duelingbook will not have the exact same meta as a real tournament, and all levels of play will see a different meta game. Your local meta game will not be 100% the same as your regional meta game, which will not be 100% identical as the meta game of a YCS, and so on. This is not going to be completely indicative of your precise tournament experience, but the data can still be useful if viewed through the correct lens.

For future articles I will mostly be going over notable changes from previous weeks, but with this being the first week, I will go over how and why cards garner the popularity and win rates they do.

Popularity

Pot of Desires, Ash Blossom & Joyous Spring, and Terraforming unsurprisingly round out the top 3, as they are very generic cards that can be slotted into almost any deck. The most popular archetypal card is Dragonic Diagram, followed closely by True Draco Heritage. Other than Ignis and True King’s Return, which are limited to 1 and therefore seen far less often, the least played True Draco card falls at 16th, before any other archetypal cards appear on the list. True Draco is far and away the most popular deck on Duelingbook right now, and the most recent events have been catching on to these trends. True Draco saw the second most entrants and second highest representation in top cut at YCS San Jose, Costa Rica last weekend, closely following Pendulum variants. This uptick in popularity is likely due to the introduction of Amano-Iwato (which clocks in at 38th in popularity), which gives True Draco a means to protect their powerful draw spells like Heritage and Card of Demise from hand traps when going first, as well as completely shutting off the monster-based negation boards created by Pendulum Magician.

Win Rate

Win rate can be deceptive, as it only counts when cards come into play. If you were to create a deck based exclusively on win rate, it would look something like this:

True Draco seemed to be the clear winner on Duelingbook this week, but only time will tell if it will usurp Pendulum Magician as the deck to beat for the remainder of the format.