Thread by @JasonILTG

The latest Lords of Limited episode was absolute 🔥; fantastic discussion by the lords and twoduckcubed about how to best use 17lands data. However, one thing that I couldn't help but notice was missing was my most-used 17lands stat: Average Last Seen At. So here's a thread! 1/x

https://twitter.com/LordsofLimited/status/1430596338941579270

A definition: Average Last Seen At, or ALSA, is: "The average pick number where this card was last seen in packs. When a card comes back around on the wheel, only the second time around counts toward the average." So basically, the higher the number, the later the card goes. 2/x

One of the benefits of ALSA is that it is inherently less complex than most stats. GIH WR will be aggregated across a large swath of decks, gameplay situations, and play skills, while the only thing ALSA's aggregation hides is information you might get from signals. 3/x

And since it's already extremely hard to get much more than fuzzy information from reading signals, ALSA serves a very good baseline for judging how late you expect certain cards to go. 4/x

Pods will still vary, but unlike with variance in decks, you couldn't take that into account anyways. You can say "This is a grindy BW venture deck, so I'm taking Fate's Reversal higher than data suggests," but it's much harder to say the same about how your pod affects ALSA. 5/x

So how can you use ALSA? Well, one use is to help read signals. For example, Minimus Containment is a card I'm not very high on, but it is the second highest white common by ALSA in Bo3 AFR. So if it wheels, that's a signal, even though I personally would pass it that late. 6/x

Caveat: using ALSA to read signals doesn't make the signals stronger. Signals are still extremely fuzzy; ALSA just points you in the right direction of what kinds of signals Arena drafters send on average. Sierkovitz has an excellent seminar on this: twitch.tv/videos/1087818… 7/x

Another use of ALSA can be as a tiebreaker for making close picks. For example, if I'm picking between Spoils of the Hunt and Bull's Strength P3P1, even if I think Strength is a better card for my deck, I'll usually take Spoils, because I know that Strength usually wheels. 8/x

HOWEVER, keep in mind that a card with a very high ALSA can still fail to wheel. ALSA describes the average situation, and you can't completely predict the actions of your pod. There is a failure rate for trying to wheel things, so sometimes you should just take the card. 9/x

But this leads into what I find is the most useful case for ALSA: determining underrated cards. If you follow me, you may know that I post threads occasionally on underrated cards (not much recently (sorry) because I haven't been playing AFR and have been busy with work). 10/x

I've found that there are often cards or archetypes in a format that are just super underrated. And if you can identify those cards, especially if they're commons, you can draft with them in mind, and in some cases even count on getting multiple basically for free. 11/x

Bull's Strength, for example, is somewhere in the top 5 green commons for me, but I find it pretty easy to pick up 1-2 copies on the wheel; the same applies for Elturgard Ranger. So that biases me more towards green, as I'm more likely to have a good base of cards. 12/x

First Day of Class was another example in STX. Seeing a couple early would push me towards red even though I always passed them, since I knew that they were extremely likely to wheel, and they played a key role in my red decks as cheap learn spells. 13/x

ALSA helps a lot with the process of finding these underrated cards. You might get a feeling of what cards wheel often from just drafting, but it's much easier and cleaner to just go to 17lands and reverse sort by ALSA. 14/x

If you do go looking for underrated cards, I strongly recommend thinking about exactly how you can use each one. Is there a specific deck it fits into? Do you want one of it, or multiple? Should you ever take it highly, or always try to wheel it and be fine with missing it? 15/x

This is why I write very long threads on all of these cards; it's not as useful to just say "this card is underrated", and *much* more useful to say "this is how you can develop a draft strategy that takes into account this card being underrated". 16/x

And finally, the extreme end of using ALSA to look at underrated cards is, of course, bot drafts. It's basically the same process, but you can be more confident in your conclusions, since bots are more predictable than humans. Giant Ox is basically always >90% to wheel. 17/x

Conclusion: ALSA is different from most other 17lands stats, in that it doesn't help with evaluating how good a card is. But once you have an idea of card evaluations, it is a very powerful tool for augmenting your draft strategy to take into account underrated cards. 18/18

P.S. forgot to mention this while writing, but the 17lands Card Evaluation Metagame page is also a good tool for viewing how ALSA shifts over time, to get a sense of metagame shifts! 17lands.com/card_evaluatio…

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