I see people make the argument all the time that restrictions keep pushing us closer to a singleton format, and that maybe we should just go ahead and restrict everything. I'm having a slow Friday at work, so I was curious: are singletons actually trending upwards?
It's not perfect, but I decided an easy way to check would be to tally up the number of singletons in North American Vintage Champs Top 8s. Here's what I found:
Some notes:
- EDIT: I should note that this is only maindecks. I excluded sideboards because I figured by nature they include a lot of 1-ofs.
- I excluded Dredge, because their lists were huge outliers (e.g. 3 singleton cards/list).
- 2019 is 8 decklists. I don't know why I left that field blank.
- For some reason, I couldn't find the 2010 decklists.
- Anecdotally, the years with more singletons tended to feature higher numbers of PO, Oath, and Storm. In years with fewer singletons, we saw decks like Delver as dominant strategies.
- My quick summary is I'm not sure what to conclude. It looks to me as though 2011 - 2018 was fairly stable. 2019 saw a big jump in singletons.
I'm not posting this to make a strong argument for/against restrictions, or anything like that. I just thought some people might find it interesting.