Pauper enthusiasts have lamented the recent change to the daily event structure that reduced the number of rounds from 4 to 3. This change dropped the number of Featured Decklists provided by Wizards - while previously they would showcase 3-1 and 4-0 decks, now only 3-0 decks are provided to the public. Those who use the lists to gauge the current meta are left with only a handful of decks provided each day.

This change led me to think about alternatives to getting more data on these events. The replays are all made available after the event concludes - what if I captured the game logs, parsed the text, and structured the data to do some analysis? We wouldn't have full decklists as we can only see what is present in the logs, but maybe we could gain other interesting insights.

The data for this article comes from the 2015-08-31 Pauper Daily event . In total 118 games are included (3 games were thrown out as they were incomplete due to bugs in MTGO's replay system).

Let's dive in and see what we can find. My first thought was to look at what were the most cast spells, and how often those spells were cast in a game that the spellcaster eventually won. Here are the stats on the top 20 casted spells:

As we can see, cards like Ghostly Flicker, Cloud of Faeries, Mulldrifter and Snap featured in the Familiar Combo were among the most played spells. Given the nature of the combo this isn't surprising. Featured in the top 20 are four out of five colors - White almost made the cut, as another Familiar Combo piece, Sunscape Familiar, holds the 21st slot.

Percentage of Casts that were in Winning Games is a bit more revealing. Familiar didn't just dominate in terms of casting the most spells, they also dominated the win column, with key pieces of the deck near or above 90%. On the other end of the spectrum, the most played cards for MBC did not fare as well. Out of the total casts of Chainer's Edict and Sign in Blood , only 27% and 15% respectively were in games won by the spellcaster.

Let's take a look at some turn specific data, in particular the first two turns of the game. Here are the top 10 cards cast on Turn 1:

As we saw Familiar dominate the most played spells, an expected result appears at the top of the Turn 1 most played spells as well in Delver of Secrets . One would imagine that players casting Ponder on Turn 1 wished they had a Delver of Secrets in hand instead.

Let's take a look at the Top 10 spells cast in Turn 2 (bottom 4 are tied for 10th):

Even on Turn 2, Delver of Secrets still leads the pack of most played spells, tied with a suspended Rift Bolt for first place.

Another piece of data we can look at is the number of turns it took for the game to conclude. Here's the breakdown for this event:

Turn Number Number of Games ending on that Turn 6 22 5 19 7 13 9 13 8 10 4 9 11 8 10 6 0 4 12 4 20 3 3 2 13 1 14 1 16 1 19 1 22 1

Note that Turn "0" means that the game was over before the first turn (for example someone disconnecting).

Turns 4 through 9 are at the top of the chart, comprising of 75.4% of games in which at least one turn was played, with the average number of turns at 7. Decks that want to grind out the opponent would need to have a plan to survive past these turns to have a chance at success.

So that is what I've gathered from my first shot at analyzing MTGO game logs. I'd love to hear more feedback on what types of data you'd like to see from these events, and what further conclusions could be drawn, as I can try to do similar data gathering for future events. Please let me know in the comments!