03 June 2020
By: Mackenzie (she/her) (“Who Smiles at Death” in the Discord)
With May coming to a close and not much else to do I thought it would be interesting to see how the competitive meta of Gladiator was shaping up. Specifically, what was being played most at the upper echelons of tournaments. So, I grabbed every deck list that made top 8 in a May tournament (a total of 64) and did some crunching. Looking at the 64 deck lists these are the findings that I thought people would find most interesting.
All Cards Played in at Least 50% of Decks
| Card | Number of decks | Percentage of all decks |
| Forest | 48 | 75% |
| Fabled passage | 45 | 70% |
| Ketria Triome | 40 | 63% |
| Island | 39 | 61% |
| Gilded Goose | 36 | 56% |
| Paradise Druid | 35 | 55% |
| Castle Vantress | 34 | 53% |
Non-Land Cards That See the Most Play
| Card Name | Number of decks | Percentage of all decks containing this card |
| Gilded Goose | 36 | 56% |
| Paradise Druid | 35 | 55% |
| Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath | 30 | 47% |
| Vivien, Monsters’ Advocate | 30 | 47% |
| Llanowar Elves | 30 | 47% |
| Incubation Druid | 29 | 45% |
| Questing Beast | 29 | 45% |
| Jadelight Ranger | 28 | 44% |
| Voracious Hydra | 26 | 41% |
| Once Upon a Time | 25 | 39% |
| Brazzen Borrower | 25 | 39% |
Prevalence of Each Basic Land Type
| Land | Number of decks it is in | Percentage of all decks containing this card |
| Forest | 48 | 75% |
| Island | 39 | 61% |
| Plains | 31 | 48% |
| Mountain | 26 | 41% |
| Swamp | 23 | 36% |
Most played colour combinations
| Combination | Number of decks | Percentage of the field (64) |
| Bant (G/U/W) | 14 | 22% |
| Gruul (G/R) | 12 | 19% |
| Sulti (B/G/U) | 9 | 14% |
| Jeskai (R/U/W) | 4 | 6% |
| Esper (B/U/W) | 4 | 6% |
In addition to looking at the most played cards I was also interested in the average converted mana cost of the top preforming decks.
| Average converted mana cost of all decks | 3.326258 |
| Variance | 0.205841 |
| Standard Deviation | 0.453679 |
The average cmc of all 64 decks was 3.326, which makes sense when you look at the graph, a large majority of decks have an average cmc of between 3.29 and 3.69 so an overall average of 3.326 is unsurprising. I will leave it to others to comment on if this number is too high or too low, I just thought it was something people would be interested in seeing.
Looking at the most played cards it is clear green in the most represented colour in tournament play, with almost all of the most played land and non-land cards being green. Similarly, the three most prevalent colour pairings also feature green. This open the door to a discussion about possible counter plays or card choices that could be made to exploit this trend, but I will leave the analysis of these findings to those who are more qualified to discuss them. Please feel free to use/cite these statistics (just please credit me (she/her)) and shoot me a message on discord (TrueMarduSoul#1357) if you have any suggestions about other measures and statistics that you think would be relevant.
Methods of data collection
All data presented here was pulled from articles and tournament reports posted on the Gladiator: Arena Singleton blog (https://gladiator.blog/). I looked at all the results of tournaments held in the month of May and pulled the top eight ranked deck lists from tournaments with at least 32 participants.
