All right, we're up from Golgari's one, but we're still down from the targeted three. Green is having a hard time of it in this series. Before we get into the sets where Gruul was best, however, I want to reassure people that there were plenty of sets where Gruul was second or third best. It's not a total disaster for fans of attacking for four. Indeed, in the current set, Edge of Eternities, Gruul is doing just fine - a little behind Simic but not much.

Foundations

Okay, this makes sense, doesn't it? Foundations was all about getting back to basics. What could be more basic than making chunky monsters and attacking your opponent to death with them?

Staring with rares, this is another case where the best in the set was on the bonus sheet. Embercleave certainly helped players lucky enough to open it. Green decks got to make best use of Sire of Seven Deaths, thanks to their ability to ramp. Spinner of Souls was arguably one of the best cards for generating value in the whole set, and if you could get Sylvan Scavenging going it quickly put the game out of reach.

Gruul got a handful of top uncommons, too. Felling Blow fell just outside the top five non-rare cards in the set, but it was followed closely by Fiery Annihilation. You know you're in a back-to-basics core set when three-mana removal spells are among the best cards.

Then we start to get to the meat and potatoes of what made Gruul so strong. Battlesong Berserker pushes damage very nicely. Elvish Regrower kept the pressure up by bringing back a dead creature. Somehow Mild-Mannered Librarian was also very good. I remember it being fine but according to the stats it's slightly better than Dragon Trainer and only slightly worse than Abrade. Crazy.

There's more of the same at common, with Burst Lightning being an incredible removal spell and late-game reach. Llanowar Elves is up there, too, and a bunch of things that attack and trigger Ferocious (even if the ability was never actually named in the set). What is weird is that a lot of the best cards in the set are not in Gruul colours at all. Especially at lower rarity, the 17lands table is dominated by the other three colours. Clearly this was a set in which attacking was important, and in which Gruul had just enough synergy to matter. Other colour pairs had some, but fell a bit short on the whole. Orzhov life gain/drain sticks out as just not quite being good enough while, ironically, Golgari's elves were often better in Gruul. Essentially, while Gruul's plan was simple and effective, it was also one of the few synergistic strategies that was fully realised in a set full of nearlies.

Phyrexia All Will be One

Straight away, we see that both of the top rares in this format were in Gruul colours. While other colour pairs could play Nissa, Ascended Animist, Migloz was at its best in straight Red-Green. Turns out its best was a 66.6% win rate, so we're already seeing a similar situation to Foundations. There were two more Gruul cards in the top ten, including another planeswalker in Lukka, Bound to Ruin and the obnoxiously hard to deal with Thrun, Breaker of Silence.

More importantly, though, Gruul - Red in particular - had a slew of excellent commons. Chimney Rabble was a B+ on 17lands, which is unusual for a common. Even more unusual is the fact that it was joined there by Contagious Vorrac. The hits kept on coming, too, because Hexgold Slash and Barbed Batterfist were only barely outside of getting the same grade; both had over 58% win rate when drawn. This was before the advent of Play Boosters, but even so, for this many commons to be this good says a lot about the power of Gruul in the format.

Just like Foundations, this was a format where attacking was good and killing stuff that might stop you from attacking was just as good. Unlike Foundations, this was not a deliberately straightforward set, though. ONE had as much going on as any normal Limited set, it just so happened that Gruul benefited from having a bunch of powerful cards. The Red-Green mechanic was, in theory, Oil counters. In practice, the best cards with that mechanic were powerful on their own and didn't really work together in any meaningful way beyond the fact that they were good at smashing face.