Hey there, welcome back to the channel.

I've got so much behind the scenes commander data to share with you today.

But before I can get into it, I have to acknowledge something.

This card named Manhole Missile. Manhole Missile.

Crazy to see my college nickname wind up on a magic card. Okay, I kid, but also not really, because my DMs have not been okay ever since this card came out, y'all. I'm getting tagged in posts left and right, recurring jokes about the ex-boyfriend island, all that jasmine. I guess, hey, you know what? I'm glad that the brand remains strong. Anyway, we got some data to get to today. So if you were to ask a commander player, which color they think is the strongest color in EDH, which one do you think they would say? Blue, green? It's usually a toss-up of one of those, right? At EDH rec, we've been surveying general sentiment and chatter that we see online, as well as anecdotal conversations at game stores or at various game nights.

And in addition, I also asked for responses from patrons from this channel's exclusive Discord,

patreon.com slash edith recast, plug plug, for their answers to the following three questions.

1. Which color do you think is the most powerful in EDH? 2. Which color do you think is the most popular in EDH? And three, which color combination do you think is the most popular in EDH? I'm going to show you some responses and then show you some actual data, but real quick, just lock in your guesses. Say them out loud maybe. That way, you know, you're really sure which ones you're going with. I collected a small sample of responses from patrons, which I'll show on

screen now, but to sum them up, for question one, usually either blue or green seemed to be perceived

as the most powerful color. Blue because of its potency in the competitive sphere, being able

to interact on the stack and things like that, and green because of its consistency and versatility in more casual and social games of Commander. For question two, which color

is the most popular? Green was easily the most common response. Reasons stated including green being

a great gateway color, or it having big, beefy creatures, lots of reliable effects like being able

to deal with many different types of problems on a board, especially at the social levels of gameplay. And for question three, often Simic or her assorted sisters like Bant or Soltai were named as the most popular guess. Again, I think these are super fair responses. I think these estimates are very well reasoned, and I also think that they are reflective of a sentiment that a lot of players out there share. While I've shown just a few screenshots from the Discord, my general impression, just being a citizen of the

Magic the Gathering Internet, is that these responses would line up with many other people's

anecdotal experiences around Game Night and at game stores and things like that. But if some of those

were your guesses, what if I told you you're probably wrong?

Allow me to show you this.

This is a graph of data we've accumulated at EDA Trek to track the most popular colors present in each deck across the past two years of deck data.

And as you may notice, out of the five possible spots, green is in fourth place.

And if you guess that the most popular color combination was Simic or Bant or Sultai,

well, spoiler warning, but Simic is the 11th most popular color combo, and Sultai and Bant are even lower.

...