Essentially, the 3-1 numbers become the “baseline” and everything else is compared to that.

Valakut’s numbers suggest that unless the meta shifts in favorable ways (slagstorm, infect?) it is not performing well against the top contenders, with very few 4-0 records compared to the sheer quantity at the 3-1 level.

I would in fact suggest that trying to tally up all the 2-2 and worse decks would have diminishing returns; though if we were seeing a lot of RUG failures on MTGO that would indicate things have turned strongly against that archetype.

This method of deck selection works better during a PTQ season, and a less-refined version of it worked for me leading into GP ATL- see that tournament report for info. I had tried to set daily 3-1 and 4-0 as “equal” to a top 8 position and a winning position but that was clearly flawed. This system actually measures *something* concrete, though scaling remains a problem.

I may revisit this in the future if there’s ever a set of events from which I can readily access ALL the decklists, as there’s actually a very straightforward system: compare points gotten to possible points across the archetypes.

This is an imperfect system designed to work on imperfect data.