Looking back at Khans card ratings

Hello all.

There's a new set coming out soon with the Pre-Releases this coming weekend. With new cards, the subject of evaluation pops up. I posted previously about my approach to card evaluation methods, you can scroll down to see it. I applied it to Khans of Tarkir when it was released last year. I applied a 0-10 rating scale with the following descriptions of cards that fall within numerical bands.

0.0 to 2.5 - Nothing here. Essentially unplayable
3.0 to 4.0 - Filler cards for very specific decks, or typically cards used in sideboards
4.5 to 6.0 - Cards that will see play over and over in many strategies; the meat and drink of your deck
6.5 to 8.0 - The power cards in an archetype, the incentives for playing the strategy you are
8.5 - 10.0 - (Multi) format all stars, among the most powerful cards available to a deck builder

So how did I do? Well, you can see the ratings in the previous post. Overall, I think the method I applied was sound. There are some big misses and some clearly wrong evaluations but for the most part, I was not too far off. We have the benefit of a developed Standard format to use in being able to show which cards were hits and which were not. Here are the cards from Khans that were impacting on Standard.

...as well as the remaining lands in these cycles. So from Khans, we got about 40 good playables (not counting the remainder of the land cycles which would add another 22 cards). The above cards have proven themselves are constructed playables in tournament winning decks. From these, I had not considered some cards as worthy of a high enough rating to have an impact on constructed. I overlooked these:

I'm pretty happy with that. I don't think it's likely for anyone to predict ALL of the cards which will end up playable from a set to getting 90% of the ones that did from my evaluation method is more than acceptable. I am disappointed that I did not see Swiftspear or Jeskai Ascendancy as tournament-worthy cards but the other are much of a muchness.

There we also cards I thought would be playable but ended up not seeing the light of day, 13 out of the 55 I had expected to see play, or a miss rate of 24%. I think a "hit" rate is of much greater importance than a "miss" rate. This miss percentage though is higher than I'd like but I think it's a lot easier to hit than miss with card predictions. Often, new cards will not have format context to be considered or may do something very new meaning they're hard to properly evaluate. Also, its easy to get excited by new cards so I suppose it's not too bad. These are the following:

I think some of these may still see play some play in top level decks over time, or would have been very playable in former formats. But some of the cards were stinkers, specifically the various abzan soldiers; re-useable effect of 3 mana for a 2 power from a 1-drop does appear powerful and it did certainly pass a test of cost vs' return but the significant aspect is the format's decks battling over which of their 3-drops to cast first. The Herald was never going to be a better proposal than a Goblin Rabblemaster, Mantis Rider, Courser...The same holds true for High Sentinels. It's a powerful card as many of you will know from limited, well worth the 4 mana and a card, but it won't get a look in when we have cards like Siege Rhino or Butcher of the Horde.

The ratings I applied with my evaluation method was also, for the most part, accurate. The inaccuracies were present in Treasure Cruise and Dig through Time, perhaps from a misinterpretation of how playable delve cards would be. Sorin and Sarkhan was also overly rated by 0.5 to 1.0 points. The same was true for Utter End, now I would rate it as a 4.0. I would like to hear any feedback from you as to which other cards in my Khans rating you think may be off.

The Fate Reforged cards will be put through the same process and I will post a review in the next update, along with some commentary about certain cards that I find interesting.

Thanks for reading,
AJ