How we collect data, calculate the meta, select decklists, and keep guides accurate.
All tournament data comes from publicly available results published by MTGGoldfish and MTGTop8, refreshed daily. Tournaments with at least 8 players are included; smaller events are excluded as they provide insufficient data. Card metadata (names, types, rules text, images) is sourced from the Scryfall API, and win rate data from mtgdecks.net.
Meta percentages are not simple deck counts. We use a weighted system to give more influence to larger, more competitive events:
Tournament weight = 2.0 if player count ≥ 64
Tournament weight = 1.0 if player count is 32–63
Tournament weight = 0.5 if player count is 8–31
Archetype meta % = (sum of archetype’s weights) / (total weight of all decks) × 100
This means a deck placing in a 200-player Regional Championship carries twice the weight of a Challenge 32, and four times the weight of a small 8-player local event. Including smaller events provides more recent decklist data while keeping large competitive events dominant in the meta calculation. The default view uses 14 days of data, but you can adjust this from 7 to 60 days on the homepage.
After a major banning or rotation shakes up a format, the calculation window is clamped so results from before the change don’t distort the current picture. The same formula and window are used everywhere on the site — homepage, archetype pages, and sideboard guide ordering all agree.
Each archetype page displays a trend chart showing that deck’s meta share week-by-week over the past 8 weeks. The same weighted calculation applies — each week’s percentage is the archetype’s weighted deck count divided by the total weighted deck count for all archetypes in that week.
The chart gives a quick visual of whether a deck is rising, falling, or holding steady in the meta, which meta percentages alone don’t convey.
Win rates are sourced from mtgdecks.net, which tracks head-to-head match results from competitive tournaments. This data supplements our meta percentages by showing not just what’s popular, but what’s actually winning.
For each archetype, we display:
Win rates reflect tournament match results only — not ladder, league, or casual play data. Confidence intervals (shown as a range like 46%–53%) indicate statistical uncertainty; wider ranges mean fewer matches and less certainty.
Color coding: green (≥52%) indicates a favorable matchup, red (≤48%) indicates unfavorable, and neutral colors indicate an even matchup.
Archetype names come from how the source sites categorize each deck. Different sites sometimes use different names for the same deck, so an automated deduplication pass compares actual decklist contents and merges archetypes that are functionally the same deck. Merged names are kept as aliases, so existing links and searches still work.
Deduplication runs with every scrape, but no automated merge is perfect — if you spot a duplicate or misclassified archetype, let us know on Discord.
Every decklist shown on an archetype page is a real deck played in a real tournament — never an average or synthetic composite. We identify the archetype’s dominant current build from recent tournament results and display the best-placed real deck running that configuration, complete with its actual mana base and sideboard.
When this is computed from very recent events, a Live build badge appears in the page header. If recent data is too thin (a newly-tracked archetype, or a quiet format), the page falls back to a stored representative list updated by the daily scrape.
Sideboard guides are AI-generated using your deck’s mainboard and sideboard as input, matched against each of the top meta archetypes. Each matchup incorporates the opponent’s typical decklist and available head-to-head win rate data to produce a concrete boarding plan: what to bring in, what to cut, and the strategic reasoning. Meta archetype guides are refreshed automatically each week, and guides for user-imported decks are generated in the background shortly after import.
AI-written guides are only as good as their fact-checking, so every guide goes through an automated accuracy pipeline:
You’re part of that loop too: every guide has a Report an issue button — no account needed. Reports are reviewed against the actual decklists and card rules, and most fixes ship within a day. Leave an email with your report if you’d like a one-time notification when it’s addressed (the address is deleted after that and never shown publicly).
Guides are ordered by live meta percentage so the most relevant matchups appear first. Each guide card shows how long ago it was last updated, and stale guides display an amber ⚠ warning to signal that the advice may not reflect recent meta shifts.
Registered users can submit suggestions for guide edits — proposing different cards in or out with optional reasoning. Other users can upvote or downvote suggestions. Approved suggestions are shown inline below the relevant guide. Community feedback with strong consensus will be incorporated into future guide regenerations.
Each archetype page also includes a What They Bring tab, which inverts the perspective: instead of showing how your deck boards against the field, it shows what each meta deck boards in and out when they face you — drawn from those archetypes’ own sideboard guides.
The Spicy Decks page highlights off-meta lists that earned a strong finish — a win or Top 8 at a sizable event within the last week — despite holding only a small share of the meta. Variant names of established meta decks are filtered out so the page surfaces genuinely rogue lists, and every entry links its full, real decklist.
The Matchup Lookup tool lets you query a specific head-to-head directly: select the deck you’re playing and the deck you’re facing, and you get the sideboard plan and win rate for that exact matchup without navigating the full archetype page. A “Flip” link shows the reverse perspective.
Tournament data is refreshed daily, picking up any new events published since the last run. Meta percentages are recalculated continuously from the latest data (pages are briefly cached), so the numbers you see are always current, and representative decklists always reflect the most common recent build at the time you visit.
Win rate data is refreshed on the same cycle. Since mtgdecks.net aggregates match data over a longer period, win rates tend to be more stable than meta percentages.