MTG Spider Man Draft has been… controversial, to say the least. The set certainly didn’t start out on a strong foot, having been expanded to a Draftable set at the last minute. Wizards of the Coast went out of their way to make Spider Man Draft work, introducing a new Draft format for the set. Unfortunately, all of this effort seems to have been for naught.
There have been endless complaints about the quality of Spider Man Draft, and results from the first few weeks support those claims. Even with only five archetypes being supported, the colors in this set are seriously unbalanced.
An Unplayable Option
Looking at the stats on 17Lands.com makes it quite clear that every Red archetype is incredibly weak compared to the rest of the field. Every other color has multiple cards above a 60% win rate, while the highest win rate for any card in Red is 58.5%. Making things worse, only two cards in the entire color have above a 55% win rate. In comparison, green has 20 cards in this category. Even in multicolor, there are only two red cards that have over a 60% win rate. One is Cosmic Spider-Man, which is a five-colored card. The other is Cheering Crowd, which uses hybrid mana, allowing it to be played outside of red.
This suggests that, unless red is wide open, you should generally avoid drafting in this color. This means that two of the set’s five archetypes, Rakdos Mayhem and Gruul Mana Value 4 matters, aren’t draftable, especially in an environment like MTG Arena, where you play against players outside of your pod.
Comparatively, there also appears to be one archetype ahead of the rest. Selesnya Web-Slinging appears to be the best archetype by the numbers, with all the signpost cards from the strategy having extremely high win rates. Uncommons like Spider-Girl, Legacy Hero, and Spider-Man India have higher win rates than many of the set’s rares, coming in at 60.3% and 60.2%, respectively.
All of these things just distance the discrepancy between colors in MTG Spider Man, but there are more issues to talk about. Many of the best cards in Spider Man Draft are completely outside of the supported archetypes. This gives an unusual amount of power to colors that have strong mana fixing.
Many of the Best Cards are Off-Color
In terms of win rates for multicolor cards, six cards stand out above the rest. Three of these don’t fit into any of the five supported archetypes, making mana fixing an even higher priority than usual.
The three high win rate multicolored cards that don’t fit into any of the supported archetypes are Spot, the Living Portal, Cosmic Spider-Man, and Mister Negative, clocking in at 64.4%, 63.8%, and 62.5%, respectively. While The Spot and Mister Negative could be reasonably splashed in any of the non-red archetypes in the set, Cosmic Spider-Man’s massive win rate tells a different story.
A five-colored creature having this high of a win rate means that players can cast it pretty consistently. Doing that outside of green, however, seems very difficult. It is possible with the small arsenal of colorless fixing tools, but Green’s exclusive fixing at common, like Guy in the Chair, and Spider-Man Brooklyn Visionary are leagues ahead of what other colors can do for fixing.
While each of the five archetypes has access to their own chase cards, Green has access to every chase card in MTG Spider Man Draft. That archetype, having two of the best mono-colored cards in the format, as well as having high win rates across the color, supports this.
So, in actuality, three of the five supported archetypes in MTG Spider Man are playable. On top of that, a sixth Five-Color Ramp archetype that uses the set’s good colors as a base is better than everything else.
Honestly, the writing was on the wall for this Draft experience before it even hit store shelves. Avoiding a Draft format for a new MTG set at the Pro Tour was the biggest red flag anyone could have planted. If this set isn’t a proper Draft experience for professional MTG players, players won’t enjoy it, either.
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