I think there’s more to this than just the issue of a sliding scale for speed. Defining what constitutes a “win” is critical, since decks like lantern and Tron are much, much faster than jund, but you consistently refer to lantern as a slow deck (a 5? Seriously?). That seems irreconcilable with the free win nature of turn 3 Bridge – similarly a turn 3 Karn is a much faster win than pretty much any humans draw, on par with the fastest affinity or storm kill. It may not affect your current analysis, but likely should be addressed at some point. Is the length of time a game lasts indicative of the deck’s speed? Or of the opponent’s stubbornness? You just have to look at game 1 of the most recent PT finals to see how silly that would be as a benchmark.

Interesting. I saw the Whir version and I guess I just thought everyone would be on it. I guess I thought wrong.

I can agree with the criticism on the speed axis; I probably should have given that scale a bit more granularity, as it is kind of odd to have Humans lumped in with Jund and Eldrazi Tron (it is clearly faster than they are). I also toyed with the option of weighting the entries, but I’d be pulling the weights out of thin air; none of the online metagame data is really trustworthy for this purpose. I know that weighing them equally isn’t ideal, but it seemed like less of a problem that slanting things one way or the other and making it more subjective.

I will push back on these problems invalidating the conclusions, though. I decided to go back and assign numbers from 1-5 on the speed axis (with the likes of Affinity earning a 1 and Lantern being a 5), and re-evaluated the lists. Here’s what I came up with:

Current metagame:
4x 1s (Affinity, Bogles, Gifts Storm, Hollow One)
5x 2s (Ad Nauseam, Burn, Dredge, Grixis Shadow, Humans)
4x 3s (Eldrazi Tron, Gx Tron, Jund, Ponza)
2x 4s (Jeskai Control, UW Control)
Average rating: 34/15 = 2.27

Previous metagame:
3x 1s (Affinity, Counters Company, Gifts Storm)
4x 2s (Burn, Dredge, Grixis Shadow, Humans)
5x 3s (Abzan, Eldrazi Tron, Gx Tron, Madcap Moon, Titanshift)
3x 4s (Jeskai Control, Mardu Pyromancer, UW Control)
Average rating: 38/15 = 2.53

Not a massive shift, but one that is at least somewhat noticeable. I think my conclusion holds.

Just FYI none of the versions of kci which have placed well in tournaments recently have been running whir of invention. Other than that, sure. =)

Also if im not mistaken you weight the fifteen decks equally? We could have seven fast decks representing just twenyy percent of the top fifteen archetypes – you cant just say the format is faster because now nine of fifteen are fast when it used to be seven – the percentage share is extremely important. I get that its a crude sample or limited data – but this sort of conclusion is borderline meaningless,

It’s definitely possible that this happens at the local level; in fact, I’d expect it to be the case in some locales. If folks were on interactive decks before the unban, they now have stronger options, which will prompt them to double down and push opponents to play decks that aren’t as soft to them. If we had looked at this chart a couple of weeks ago, I suspect we’d have come up with a different answer than we did today; this is in part because the inclusion of MTGO data slants us toward aggro as compared to a purely paper-centric look, and also because MTGO tends to iterate very quickly, and you can expect a reasonable amount of settling in the metagame by the 2-month mark (which we are approaching).

I see what you’re saying regarding the Abzan vs. Jund comparison, but the Death’s Shadow vs. Jund comparison doesn’t work as cleanly because Shadow is still around and doing well (though not quite as well as it did before the unban). That strategy is clearly viable, and not going anywhere. Abzan, on the other hand, has basically dropped off the face of the earth. I also attribute KCI’s resurgence to the card pool for the deck improving; a deck that didn’t function unless it drew certain cards got 4 more effective copies of them in Whir of Invention. I suspect didn’t see as much of it before now because graveyard hate was in high fashion until recently thanks to midrange and control becoming increasingly graveyard-dependent, and because Lantern was a powerful option with very similar cards and not much of the combo-oriented fragility.

Anecdotally I’ve found things to be about half a turn slower on average since the unban. I’d put this down to a general uptick in midrange strategies overall, as death’s shadow has generally been supplanted by jund.
Remember, abzan wasn’t anything but a fringe player in the death’s shadow world, so by making the comparison above (abzan to jund) you may have been comparing the wrong decks.

I’ve also locally seen quite a few people move away from their infect, burn and bogles decks towards stuff like Affinity, jund and *insert jace deck here*. This switcharoo has definitely meant a local slowdown in the modern meta.

Also decks like KCI which are having a bit of a Renaissance are only really able to crop up when the format sees a temporary slowdown (which does happen occasionally as a natural part of the meta swinging back and forth like a pendulum or a wave)