Edge of Eternities

It's been a good few months for Simic fans. Although the sample size is tiny, early data from 17lands suggests that it's the best colour pair in Spider-Man. We can more safely say that it was the best pair in EOE, too.

It's no surprise when you think about EOE's mechanics. Landers give you plenty of lands, which, which means you're quite likely to be alive long enough to cast bombs like Quantum Riddler or Glacier Godmaw. Blue-Green also gets to benefit from splashing bombs in other colours, too. Simic plus a splash is an entire percentage point ahead of the next best splash deck and the drop off to number three is bigger still.

The next best splash deck is Gruul, so Green is good in the literal battlecruiser set: big surprise. But Simic isn't only about ramping into bombs of various colours. It also gets the best signpost uncommon in Biomechan Engineer. This little bug does everything Green-Blue wants: it ramps and pays you off for ramping, and although you won't want to, it can also block if necessary.

Importantly, you also get a lot of good speed bumps in Simic. Meldstrider's Resolve is, surprisingly, the best uncommon removal spell. Now this might be a case of simic being so good that even its fight spell gets a bump, but it wins significantly more games than cards like Gravkill and Vote Out so there's clearly something going on.

In truth, I could keep listing good Simic cards for a lot longer - I haven't even gotten to mention Galactic Wayfarer yet - but I do have a word count to stick to. Suffice to say, there are a lot of them, and they also work together in a very coherent way.

Aetherdrift

Didn't have to go back too far to the last time Simic was good, huh? It's a similar story, too. Good top end, good speed bumps and a decent bit of ramp. Simic had great cards all the way up the curve and it often got to play them ahead of time. Molt Tender was a B- card at 57.4% win rate when drawn. Similarly, Skyserpent Seeker was one of the best gold uncommons, helping to get your Autarch Mammoth or Migrating Ketradon into play a turn or two early - often putting a game out of reach in one go.

Here's an interesting tidbit, though. Thornwood Falls had a 56.2% win rate when drawn, putting it alongside the likes of Hazard of the Dunes and Thunderhead Gunner. This is the tenth article in a series of ten and I don't think I've ever seen a common tapped land appear this high up the 17lands data, no matter how dominant the colour pair I'm writing about. What does that say about the format? I'm not exactly sure but it's noteworthy.

Throne of Eldraine

Oh, yeah, the set that birthed Oko, Thief of Crowns is one in which Simic dominated. Who would've guessed? Oko was one of the best Limited rares of the Arena era, but it had a lot of help. Lovestruck Beast was a 1/1 and a three-mana 5/5, Wicked Wolf was basically a Green Ravenous Chupacabra, but bigger and Stolen by the Fae was one of the best bounce spells Limited has ever seen.

Rares are all well and good, but by their nature, they can't be relied upon to make a colour pair great. Luckily for Simic, it had incredible commons and uncommons, too. Didn't Say Please, while more of a Mono-Blue or Dimir card, still played out pretty well in Simic decks. Turn into a Pumpkin could be a three-for-one if you could manage a triple-Blue mana cost, otherwise you had to settle for a two-for-one. Oh no.

What is really fascinating about ELD Limited is that, technically, Simic was not the best deck in the format. It was the best colour pair, but the de facto best deck was Mono-Red. Indeed, every mono-coloured deck except Black was better than every colour pair. This is with a pretty good sample size, too, not weird outliers. Adamant as a mechanic paid you off nicely, fixing was extremely scarce and even the common lands (Mystic Sanctuary and co.) in the set really pushed you toward playing as few colours as possible.

Simic, with its powerful rares and abundance of food tokens, was the best at combatting the aggressive mono-colour decks. It also benefited from the fact that, even in a set like Eldraine, you couldn't reliably end up with a mono-colour deck. Just look at 17lands sample size: mono-colour decks have just shy of 20,000 games played. Guild decks have over 90,000. You really wanted to be a mono-colour deck in ELD, but if you couldn't, Simic was your next best bet.