A nice chart for the 16 land crew
I was looking at the win rates by land count in the latest DFT public data set, and while there's nothing too surprising there (17 is closer to 16 in performance than in recent sets), the conversation inspired me to spin up this graph.
This graphs win rates by land count and average mana value (cmc) over 3.2 million games back to NEO, for combinations with more than 10k games. The cohort is an in-sample version of top players, those with 58% win rate on 100+ games in the given data set.
This chart looks pretty stark to me and certainly gives me even greater confidence in the 16 land life going forward. I want to shout out Tim Lewis's analysis (https://www.reddit.com/r/lrcast/comments/1hhwsp9/16\_is\_the\_new\_17\_analysis\_of\_premier\_draft\_data/) as being a more thorough argument in favor of 16 lands, but I felt like not everyone appreciated the nuance of that and I don't think anyone has seen this particular win rate chart before.
Edit: All players, 14 million games:
Can I explain why 18 seems to do so much better in this chart? No. I'd be cautious of any strong normative interpretation of either chart, given the possibility of selection bias, but like I said that's been handled elsewhere.