I was locked out of my work account yesterday so I thought I'd make a graph I'd been thinking about for a while.
One way to think about power creep is that, if you want to win and have access to the entire history of cards, you're going to be more likely to play recent cards, since they are power crept. Formats like Legacy and Pauper, where the outsized mistakes of early cards like the power 9 are not legal, should tilt recent. I don't have a general impression that this is true, though, so I wanted to see. I took mtgtop8 data from top 8 decks at competitive events (including sideboards, including MTGO) in April-September 2026 and graphed what I saw by the *original printing year* of the cards included.
We *do* see that there are way more copies of cards from recent years in the included decks. The top-left graph, which shows the total number of copies of cards from a given year played per deck has gone up since 2020, with 2024 (Modern Horizons 3) as a high watermark.
However, part of this is that they print way more cards per year than they used to. If we take things relative to the number of printed cards, it gets way more flat! 2024 is still a bit of a peak, but now the early years are the years with the top playrates, and the recent bump looks pretty similar to 2002-2003 (Mirrodin era) and 2010-2012 (Worldwake-Return to Ravnica). (note, banned cards are excluded from the denominator but if you track the share of cards that are banned by printing year it's fairly flat outside of 93/94 so this doesn't explain much).
Shifting to what share of cards saw *any* play (which reduces the impact of a single super-powerful card from an otherwise unimpressive year) or saw 10+ copies across all the submitted decks (which is similar but avoids random things like how yes someone did register a single Glasses of Urza in a top 8 pauper deck in 2026) also looks mostly flat, with perhaps a slight bump post-2020. All the graphs do show a big fallow period from roughly 2013-2019 where those cards don't get played much. Comparing pre-fallow period to post-fallow period, in Pauper 7.1% of all valid (ie common, non-Un) cards pre-2013 saw 10+ copies, while it's 9.3% in 2020+. In Legacy that's 2.1% pre-2013 and 1.9% (lower!) in 2020+.
Interesting takeaways:
- It's obvious to anyone comparing standard or limited formats across time that cards are way more powerful now than before. The floor is higher. But this analysis is about the ceiling - cards good enough to compete against *all* other cards in an eternal format. The ceiling is surprisingly *not* that much higher, with early (pre-2013) and recent Magic sending a fairly similar share of cards to the competitive level in eternal formats.
- 2013-2019 appears to be butts for eternal formats. I'm surprised how low 2025 is too (2026 is also low but keep in mind the data starts in April 2026 so not all the 2026 cards were legal as of this graph).
- It's really shocking what a high share of pauper-legal cards see play in pauper. In most years between 5-10% of all newly printed commons show up in modern Pauper decks in at least 10 copies. Granted there are like 4k Pauper decks and so 300,000 slots available to put those 10 copies in, but to me that's still a very high number. Brewer's paradise indeed!
- While I focused on the share of cards to try to get at power level, the top-left graph which doesn't adjust for number of cards printed is worth something too, as it tracks a bit more closely to "what share of the cards that you see are recent" which it looks like is going to be quite high simply due to more cards being printed, even if the per-card hit rate isn't that much higher.
In terms of a data viz, I think a line chart is working against the point you’re trying to illustrate. Line charts imply continuity between each item on the X-axis, such as a time series. This is especially true when the x-axis is, in fact, years. It frames the interpretation as “in 2010 on average there were 4 cards played in pauper decks, which decreased to 3 in 2011.”
A bar or column chart would probably be a more accurate way to depict your dataset. That format reads much better as “in this snapshot dataset, there are, on average, 4 copies of cards printed in 2010 played in pauper. Usually there are 3 copies of cards printed in 2011.”
I wanted to imply continuity. The question I started with was whether there was a general upward trend over time in power level as measured by eternal format playability.
I'm kind of picking up what you're putting down for intent I think. The line chart basically illustrates the top of the bars, and emphasizes the flatness or spikes more than a bar chart might (not that a bar chart wouldn't but it doesn't not do the job)
If you’re going after continuity, a better approach than a snapshot in time would be taking deck lists from major events in each format by year, then tracking the first printing of each card’s density over time. That way you can actually do the analysis of how deck composition over time changes.
Here’s some completely made up data that could be collected and presented as a continuity. Fact 1: In 2012, the deck lists present in major pauper events contained an average of 14 cards first printed in 2011. Fact 2: In 2013, the deck lists present in major pauper events contained an average of 10 cards first printed in 2011, and 4 cards first printed in 2013. Fact 3: All other card counts by the first year in 2012 and 2013 decklists remain unchanged.
Interpretation: the cards first printed in 2013 replaced a playset of cards from 2011. This is representative of power creep through the time period.
That said, power creep is extraordinarily hard to measure without context to the archetypes and roles of cards being played and seemingly replaced. Goblins is a classic pauper deck. The introduction of First Day of Class from STX opened up a whole new avenue of combo goblins. Is it correct to compare aggro goblins pre-2021 with combo goblins post-2021? That’s a whole other can of worm when talking about power creep. A new archetype existing doesn’t mean the old one is worse; it’s a new threat to the meta that some may not know how to handle.
Thank you for that last paragraph. A lot of folks see more text as power creep, or things breaking into modern or legacy, when it's real tough to tell objectively if a card is that much better than another in the majority of cases (as in, a 1 mana spell that mills three and a 1 mana spell that gains three life work on entirely different axis you can't directly compare them, as opposed to a 3 mana 3/3 that used to have a downside and now is a 3 mana 4/5 with trample).
How cards work together is what makes a deck, and new cards often make new decks, but ultimately people will play whatever the best thing to be doing is, and as you said it doesn't mean a deck is outright bad, it's just a bad matchup against the new deck in the scene so phases out.
This was done for modern a bit ago too. If you took out fetch lands and shock lands the data skews towards more recent sets. Would be interesting seeing legacy data minus fetch lands.
As I mentioned in the post, the share of cards that are banned is pretty flat over time outside of the very early years, and if anything goes slightly down over time, so it doesn't really affect the results by much (except to say that 93 is definitely more powerful in Legacy than the graphs represent)
Correct. The top-left graph shows that too, that the absolute number of new cards entering both formats goes up even as the hit rate stays roughly the same.
Very useful data! Legacy is a high bar to clear for new cards, but given how people talk about power creep like every set is outmoding half the cards in existence, it is a good showing that the format that runs the most busted stuff in the game is relatively warm on the new stuff. And also that even if you read it as "cards from new sets are so good they're being played in Legacy!" this shows that cards from (mostly) everywhere get played in Legacy, to some extent at least. It's not special from recent years.
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u/ViolentBananas Duck Season 12h ago
In terms of a data viz, I think a line chart is working against the point you’re trying to illustrate. Line charts imply continuity between each item on the X-axis, such as a time series. This is especially true when the x-axis is, in fact, years. It frames the interpretation as “in 2010 on average there were 4 cards played in pauper decks, which decreased to 3 in 2011.”
A bar or column chart would probably be a more accurate way to depict your dataset. That format reads much better as “in this snapshot dataset, there are, on average, 4 copies of cards printed in 2010 played in pauper. Usually there are 3 copies of cards printed in 2011.”