(The contest is obviously now closed, but you can review the contest rules here)
I asked everyone to choose 5 monocolored cards. After over 450 submissions, how did the community do? Pretty much a massive punt:
Underperformers
None of the most popular cards - Glorybringer, Cast Out, Censor, Manglehorn, Gideon, or Rhonas - saw enough PT play to justify their popularity on the survey. We need to go down all the way to Magma Spray to find a card that actually overperformed its survey expectations. To be fair we should point out that many survey results came in before the surprise banning of Felidar Guardian, which certainly shook up the expected metagame.
Overperformers
What did overperform? Zombies massively overperformed early expectations at the PT, as the most popular Zombie on the survey, Dread Wanderer, barely had 1/3rd the number of picks of Rhonas. Note that I excluded cards with fewer than 30 survey picks unless they showed up at the PT, so there was an extremely long tail of cards with the same level of popularity as something like Lord of the Accursed.
In fact, only TWO (!!!!!) participants predicted Liliana's Mastery would show up at the PT. As one of the core cards in Zombies decks the card did put up results in a big way. So basically winning the contest came down to whether or not you were one of the only two people who correctly identified that Liliana's Mastery is a constructed-playable card.
I should also mention that the survey closed before the SCG Open on launch weekend began. That tournament showed us that Zombies might actually be a real deck, but prior to that tournament Zombies wasn't really hyped at all.
So if someone tells you that they totally saw the Zombies deck coming... there's a good chance that's just hindsight bias. Very few people actually thought that this casual tribal deck would be pushed to tier 1 with Amonkhet cards - or at least, not enough of them to place a marker and pick up some free store credit from Cardhoarder!
Dissenter's Deliverance and Dispossess were other solid playable cards that the survey completely missed, with only ONE participant identifying that Dispossess is actually a pretty solid sideboard option. Even with SB-only appearances being worth only 25% according to contest rules, Dispossess was a ubiquitous enough SB card that it was worth a lot of points to the lone participant who picked it.
Another notable overperformer is Never//Return, considering how down people were on Aftermath cards when it was first spoiled - to the extent that MtGGoldfish published an article panning the mechanic before the complete spoiler was even out! Granted, at least some of that criticism was directed at the visual aesthetic, but aftermath is definitely the sort of design that is stronger than it looks.
What did we learn?
It's easy to feel smug from the peanut gallery, watching the community survey whiff once again on meaningfully predicting the PT metagame. While it is amusing to repeatedly observe just how poorly the community is at evaluating cards and card sets on first impressions, if you are feeling smug, or if you do detect any condescension in my own tone, I assure you that's not my point at all. After all, I can hardly claim to have identified the Zombies deck back when the survey was open either - the ballot I filled out myself for fun was itself full of over-hyped cards like Glorybringer.
Rather my point is this: we should all have more epistemic humility when it comes to initial card impressions. Instead of bashing new sets or cards as under- or over-powered before even playing with them, moderate your evaluations a little bit. Because as we've seen, evaluating cards based on pure theorycrafting, with zero empirical playtesting or tournament results, is really hard! No one is very good at this - not WoTC R&D, sure, but not their critics or the Pros either.
One of the most revealing moments of the PT broadcast for me was the brief interview with Dave Williams, who was in the testing house with eventual PT AKH winner Gerry Thompson, about how their team landed on the Zombies deck. As Dave tells it, they dismissed the deck at first. It was only over the course of their week of testing together that people were gradually "infected" with the knowledge that hey, this deck full of casual tribal rares is actually pretty good!
So if you totally missed on the Zombies deck and bought into the Glorybringer and Gideon hype instead, don't feel too bad. On first impression, the best players in the game were just as ignorant about Liliana's Mastery as you were. But the successful Pros knew not to trust their first impressions, but to subject their assumptions to rigorous testing.
Just something to keep in mind before bashing a card as OP or weak the next time you see a spoiler. Unless you're one of the two people who picked Liliana's Mastery. In that case you can trash talk as much as you want! =P
Wrap-up
Well, that's it for the PT AKH metagame prediction game. I hope everyone who participated had fun. The winners have been identified and contacted by email to collect their prizes.
If you'd like to sign up for future Pro Tour survey contests, leave your email address here!
