Magic the Gathering's standard format analysis

Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game released in 1993 that to this day remains the most famous of the genre. Playing Magic became much more accessible after the release of its free-to-play digital adaptation Magic: The Gathering Arena, resulting in an abrupt increase in the number of games played since its launch in 2018.

Players interested in seeing their progress in the game choose to opt for third-party deck trackers. The most used deck tracker is provided by Untapped. Having collected information from millions of games, this service provides a player with valuable information:

• Winrate statistics for decks,
• Track personal card collection,
• Competitive progress in MTGA's ladder system,
• In-game played card tracker.

Summary

Data from the Untapped website was scrapped daily, normalized and persisted on a MySQL database. The data is then used to build a Metabase dashboard intended to address questions listed in the following section. The scrapper scripts, dashboard and database are running on the AWS cloud, using a combination of the EC2 and RDS services.

Dashboard


You can find the dashboard at mtga.brunorateiro.com

Questions Answered

The questions regarding card competitiveness and popularity are listed below. Clicking on each question will direct you to the corresponding modified SQL query.

• Which cards are most popular and have the highest win rates in the current meta?
• How are popularity and win rate associated across multiple color combinations
• Which color combination has the highest overall win rate?
• Which color combination is the most popular?
• Do certain types of cards (e.g., creatures, spells, enchantments) tend to have higher win rates?
• Do legendary cards tend to have higher win rates?
• Which mana costs (converted mana costs) tend to correlate with higher win rates?
• Do cards with higher rarity (e.g., rare, mythic rare) generally have higher win rates compared to cards with lower rarity (e.g., common, uncommon)?
• How does the win rate and popularity of a card change over time?

Entity relationship diagram

The following diagram was created using Lucidchart.


Technologies and tools

Progress

The project is deemed as completed. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please don't hesitate to contact me at bruno.rateiro@gmail.com.

Acknowledgment

Special thanks to my mentor and friend Elias Soares. Check out his work.