Pro Tour Honolulu: The Complete Breakdown And Analysis

<TedKnutson>: hey pete
<TedKnutson>: I need you to get a message to ferrett
<TedKnutson>: this is the first Standard PT in 5 years
<TedKnutson>: we will have ALL the decklists for it
<TedKnutson>: he needs to run the archetype record breakdown program we developed way back in P9 Chicago
<StarCityCCG>: will do
<StarCityCCG>: I’ll e-mail him now

That’s how it started: Ted categorized the decks for me, and I ran several big queries to mine the most data out of Pro Tour: Honolulu.

What we have here is the most complete snapshot of the new Standard scene that you’re likely to see. What we did here was in several steps:

1) Figured out which players were piloting which deck at the Pro Tour;
2) Once we had assigned players to decks, we entered each round’s results into our database, so we not only knew who beat who, but what deck had beaten what deck;
3) Once we had all sixteen rounds entered into our system, we ran a large query that looked up every deck at the Pro Tour and figured out its win/loss percentage against every other deck that it had faced.

So what you have here is a matrix of every matchup that took place at Pro Tour: Honolulu. Want to know how many times Orhov Descent faced Zoo, and whether it won on average? Now you know.

A few notes, however: First, this does not include the Top 8 matchups. If you’re really bent out of shape about that, it shouldn’t be too hard to add the seven matches to the totals.

Secondly, this Pro Tour is difficult to analyze because of the diversity of decks out there; unlike Block Constructed, where you usually have a few major decks, this new Standard format is all over the map. Thus, you have a lot of different decks in a lot of different matchups, making it slightly harder to get a bead on a format that is, say, “Affinity” and “not Affinity.”

That said, as a summary, here are the breakdowns for decks where more than ten people played it, ordered by their overall win percentage:

Owling Mine: 58.43%
U/R Wildfire: 55.81%
GhaziGlare: 53.39%
Izzetron: 52.63%
Heartbeat Combo: 50.88%
Orzhov Aggro: 50.7%
Orzhov Descent: 50.33%
Greater Gifts: 50.18%
For Whom The Knell Tolls: 48.13%
Bad Religion: 46.74%
Roxodon Hierarch: 46.46%
Zoo: 46.44%
Gruul Beats: 41.5%