With Round 6 all done and the Top 256 officially identified, here’s a quick look over some of the highlights of this last round.

With just sixteen batches of sixteen matchups, it was a quick one (and it’s only getting quicker from here). But there was still a lot of time for action.

Lightning Bolt was the biggest winner of this round, scorching Dragonlord Atarka with 93.79%. It’s very noticeable that the matchups are getting tighter as time goes on though - this round only Bolt, Counterspell, and Force of Will managed to get across the 90% line.

The tightest score of the round came for Engineered Explosives, which eked out Leovold, Emissary of Trest with just 50.07%.

We had some big losses this round - the first basic lost (Plains, to Bitterblossom), and several of the “Eldrazi Titans” lost as well, meaning that now no set or cycle of cards is complete - they all have at least one loss.

There were also some moments of irony - for example, the Duel Deck-rematch of Venser vs Koth (Venser edged it). Purphoros, fresh off of dispatching meme supreme Storm Crow, got paired against (and lost to) Black Lotus. In an alternate universe, Storm Crow vs Black Lotus is the most controversial pairing of the round. In the real world, the biggest power matchup this round was Sol Ring vs Sensei’s Divining Top; in the end the voters showed that they’d rather have their games unfairly expedited than unfairly slowed down, and Sol Ring was the winner.

We also had a raft of extinctions this round, as the pace of sets falling out of the contest really accelerated. Six sets had gone down prior to Round 6 - and twice that many went down in Round 6, including Battle for Zendikar, M15, both of Theros’s expansions, and the last silver-bordered card in the contest, Richard Garfield, Ph.D. from Unhinged (to his own creation, Birds of Paradise). We also lost every remaining 3- and 4-colour combination except Abzan and Grixis. There’s a full list in the back of this spreadsheet.

Finally, on a personal note, I was extremely happy to see engagement with the project really take off. The average voter count rose from just over 1,000 in Rounds 1-5, to nearly 1,700 in Round 6. That’s great to see and makes me really excited to see where we go from here.

Round 7 (the final unseeded round) starts on Monday 18th. I’ve created the (random) pairings already, and let me tell you that they are BRUTAL. We are losing some big cards before the Top 128 no matter what happens.

See you then!