MTGO vs. Paper: Where the Two Premodern Metagames Differ
Stiflenought and Enchantress take about twice the share on Magic Online that they have in paper. We went through every recorded decklist since the Parallax Tide ban to see how far that holds and what else is different.
- 26.4% of MTGO decklists are Stiflenought or Enchantress, against 12.6% in paper
- 2.2x how much more often Stiflenought appears in Challenges than in League 5-0s
- 34% of Challenge decklists come from 19 players
- 0.6% of paper decklists play a card that doesn't exist on Magic Online
Magic Online added Premodern in December 2025 as part of its Contraption rotation and made it permanent on 25 February 2026. Players have argued ever since about how much the online results say about the format at the table; one thread on Stiflenought's Challenge wins ran to 140 comments in September. For this report we compared every Premodern decklist MTGTop8 has recorded since the last banlist change on 18 January 2026: 3,737 from Magic Online and 7,813 from paper events.
MTGO and paper at a glance
- Stiflenought, Enchantress, Goblins, Sligh and Landstill are the five most played decks on both sides. On MTGO they make up almost half of all lists, in paper about a third.
- Stiflenought and Enchantress are the only two decks clearly more common online. How far Stiflenought is ahead depends on the type of event, while Enchantress is ahead in every kind of MTGO event.
- MTGO has fewer black and red lists mainly because those two decks take up so much room. Among all other lists red is level and black is close.
- Tinker and Devourer builds, Aluren, Clerics and Deadguy Ale are several times more common in paper.
- We can't tell how much paper prices explain, and cards missing from MTGO matter for almost nobody. Online, a small group of regulars accounts for more of the results than in paper.
- We found no sign that a deck rising online also rises in paper, though monthly numbers are noisy. Of the four cards that went from rare to common in a deck on both sides this year, three got there on MTGO first.
The same five decks in different proportions
The chart shows each deck's share of all recorded lists on each side. Deck names follow MTGTop8, grouped into the archetypes of our tier list.
- Stiflenought15.4% / 7.0%
- Enchantress11.1% / 5.5%
- Full English Breakfast3.6% / 2.5%
- Psychatog3.0% / 1.9%
- Landstill6.4% / 5.6%
- Goblins7.6% / 7.0%
- Replenish5.6% / 5.1%
- RG Zoo2.1% / 1.7%
- Elves2.3% / 2.1%
- Sligh7.5% / 7.3%
- Oath of Druids4.1% / 4.5%
- Mono Black4.4% / 4.9%
- Terrageddon4.1% / 4.7%
- Aluren0.3% / 0.9%
- Devourer combo (Tinker Fling)0.6% / 1.3%
- Stasis1.9% / 2.8%
- MUD0.1% / 1.0%
- UG Madness0.6% / 1.5%
- The Rock2.0% / 2.9%
| Deck | MTGO | Paper |
|---|---|---|
| Stiflenought | 15.4% | 7.0% |
| Enchantress | 11.1% | 5.5% |
| Full English Breakfast | 3.6% | 2.5% |
| Psychatog | 3.0% | 1.9% |
| Landstill | 6.4% | 5.6% |
| Goblins | 7.6% | 7.0% |
| Replenish | 5.6% | 5.1% |
| RG Zoo | 2.1% | 1.7% |
| Elves | 2.3% | 2.1% |
| Sligh | 7.5% | 7.3% |
| Oath of Druids | 4.1% | 4.5% |
| Mono Black | 4.4% | 4.9% |
| Terrageddon | 4.1% | 4.7% |
| Aluren | 0.3% | 0.9% |
| Devourer combo (Tinker Fling) | 0.6% | 1.3% |
| Stasis | 1.9% | 2.8% |
| MUD | 0.1% | 1.0% |
| UG Madness | 0.6% | 1.5% |
| The Rock | 2.0% | 2.9% |
Share of decklists on MTGTop8, 18 January to 7 November 2026. MTGO: 3,737 decklists, paper: 7,813. Sorted from the biggest lead on MTGO to the biggest lead in paper. Green and red mark a gap of at least two standard errors, counting all of a player's lists together.
Full English Breakfast and Psychatog sit higher on MTGO in the chart, but both gaps lean on one player and on the Leagues. vcT posted 23 of the 134 Full English Breakfast lists on MTGO and Beicodegeia 32 of the 111 Psychatog lists. Without those two players, Full English Breakfast is at 3.0% on MTGO against 2.5% in paper and Psychatog at 2.1% against 1.9%. In the Leagues the two decks are still ahead (4.6% and 2.8%), and in the Challenges they are below their paper share (1.8% and 1.7%). Ill-Gotten Gains is the extreme case, with 35 of its 57 MTGO lists from desolutionist.
Half of all MTGO lists come from six decks, and in paper it takes nine. That count overstates the difference, because paper players use far more names than MTGTop8 uses for MTGO (774 against 163 before we group them), so we also counted cards. In samples of the same size, paper lists use about 1,340 different cards and MTGO lists 964. Most of the extra paper cards are rarely played: 347 cards appear in at least 1% of paper lists and 310 in at least 1% of MTGO lists, and two randomly drawn lists share only slightly more non-basic main-deck cards on MTGO (5.7) than in paper (5.0).
Stiflenought and Enchantress by type of event
MTGTop8 has the top 16 of most Challenges, which averaged about 40 players, and only the 5-0 lists from Leagues. Most paper lists are Top 8s from small events: half of all paper events had 17 players or fewer.
| Where (lists) | Stiflenought | Enchantress |
|---|---|---|
| MTGO Challenges, published lists (2,111) | 20.0% | 11.7% |
| MTGO Challenges, Top 8 (1,186) | 22.0% | 12.1% |
| MTGO League 5-0s (1,594) | 9.0% | 10.3% |
| Paper, 65 or more players, Top 8 (294) | 9.5% | 6.5% |
| Paper, 32 to 64 players (1,553) | 7.8% | 6.4% |
| Paper, under 32 players (5,493) | 6.5% | 5.1% |
Share of decklists on MTGTop8, 18 January to 7 November 2026. Player numbers as recorded by MTGTop8.
Stiflenought, often just called shrimp, takes a fifth of the Challenge lists. Among League 5-0s it is under a tenth, about where it stands at paper events with 65 or more players, and in paper it gets more common as events grow. Enchantress is at roughly one list in nine in every kind of MTGO event and stays well below that in paper at any event size.
Two players account for a lot of Stiflenought's Challenge share. LuffyDoChapeuDePalha and SpockVidaLoka posted 139 of its 423 Challenge lists, and without the deck's five most frequent pilots it drops to 12.1% there. League numbers have a filter of their own: a list only appears after five straight wins, so a deck with a modest match win rate shows up less often than it is played. If every player counts the same, however many lists they have, Stiflenought is at 13.2% on MTGO against 6.9% in paper, so its lead survives. Enchantress falls to 7.3% against 4.9%, still ahead but by much less. Regulars such as walrusmadness (32 lists) and Negator87 and PNascimento (23 each) account for part of its MTGO share.
Stiflenought is listed as the winner of 53 of the 149 Challenges. We don't use that figure, because OverSizedPillow pointed out on Reddit that 12 of its 14 titles between July and September came from split finals, where the two finalists agree to share the prize and one of them takes the trophy. In paper its big results go both ways: Simone Fierro won the European Championship with it, while at Lobstercon, the largest paper event of the year, its best finish was in the 17th to 32nd bracket. The Eternal Durdles podcast discussed how the whole room arrived prepared for Dreadnought.
What is left without those two decks
Fewer MTGO lists play black or red cards than paper lists do. Stiflenought is a blue deck and Enchantress is green and white, so the room they take comes partly out of the other colors. With both decks removed from each side, red is level and black is about three points apart.
| Color | MTGO | Paper | MTGO rest | Paper rest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| White | 46.5% | 45.5% | 47.6% | 45.3% |
| Blue | 45.9% | 43.9% | 41.7% | 42.1% |
| Black | 24.0% | 31.2% | 32.3% | 35.3% |
| Red | 34.5% | 40.9% | 46.7% | 46.3% |
| Green | 45.9% | 48.9% | 47.4% | 49.4% |
Share of decklists with at least one nonland main-deck card of the color. Rest: all lists except Stiflenought and Enchantress.
With two decks taking that much more of the field online, every other deck's share drops about 16%, so a deck can look rarer on MTGO without anyone having stopped playing it. Measured only against the rest of the field, Sligh, Goblins, Landstill and Replenish are each about two points higher on MTGO than in paper, and The Rock and Stasis about half a point lower. With the same regulars behind many MTGO lists, none of those six gaps is clear.
Decks you rarely meet online
A group of smaller decks stays several times more common in paper after that correction. We counted these by their key cards, because their names are unreliable.
| Deck or card | MTGO lists | Paper lists |
|---|---|---|
| Tinker with Phyrexian Devourer | 22 (0.6%) | 172 (2.2%) |
| Aluren | 12 (0.3%) | 75 (1.0%) |
| Clerics | 4 (0.1%) | 61 (0.8%) |
| Deadguy Ale | 5 (0.1%) | 50 (0.6%) |
| Winter Orb in the main deck | 31 (0.8%) | 246 (3.1%) |
| Tangle Wire in the main deck | 34 (0.9%) | 283 (3.6%) |
Decklists on MTGTop8, 18 January to 7 November 2026, by main-deck copies: at least three Tinker and one Phyrexian Devourer, three Aluren, three Rotlung Reanimator, three Hypnotic Specter and two Vindicate. MTGTop8 files 48 of the 172 paper lists in the Tinker row as MUD.
More than half of the paper lists with Winter Orb or Tangle Wire in the main deck are MUD, Tinker and Survival builds, so those two artifacts are rare online because the decks that play them are.
By name, UG Madness is more than twice as common in paper, and counting cards gives the same result: lists with three or more Wild Mongrel and Arrogant Wurm that also play blue are 0.4% of MTGO and 1.3% of paper. The shell as a whole is close to even (2.4% against 3.0%), because on MTGO most of those lists are the green-white build (1.5% against 1.2%).
Same deck, different cards
The table shows the share of each deck's lists that play a card, picked from the largest gaps we found in the most played decks.
| Deck | Card | MTGO | Paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stiflenought | Peek | 76.0% | 44.8% |
| Stiflenought | Misdirection | 74.4% | 43.0% |
| Stiflenought | Thwart | 84.3% | 60.8% |
| Stiflenought | Accumulated Knowledge | 17.1% | 37.3% |
| Stiflenought | Powder Keg (side) | 20.9% | 42.1% |
| Enchantress | Exploration | 77.3% | 95.1% |
| Enchantress | Karmic Justice (side) | 40.8% | 62.7% |
| Sligh | Mogg Salvage (side) | 63.5% | 34.7% |
| Sligh | Anarchy (side) | 24.1% | 56.5% |
| Sligh | Tormod's Crypt (side) | 19.1% | 46.2% |
| Landstill | Humility | 34.0% | 67.4% |
| Landstill | Exalted Angel | 59.7% | 37.7% |
| Mono Black | Plaguebearer | 52.7% | 23.6% |
| Mono Black | Perish (side) | 6.1% | 27.2% |
| Mono Black | Phyrexian Arena | 15.8% | 35.6% |
| Terrageddon | Werebear | 54.9% | 35.5% |
Share of the deck's decklists on MTGTop8, 18 January to 7 November 2026. Every gap is at least three standard errors with a player's lists counted together. (side) means sideboard, all others are main deck. Sligh counts the lists MTGTop8 files as Burn, as our tier list does.
Sligh and Goblins sideboards on MTGO carry more answers to Dreadnought. Mogg Salvage is free when your opponent controls an Island and you control a Mountain, and it destroys an artifact, which Phyrexian Dreadnought is. It sits in nearly two thirds of Sligh sideboards on MTGO and about a third in paper. Overload kills a Dreadnought for one red mana and is in 42% of Goblins sideboards online against 13% in paper, a gap that leans more on a few regulars. Not every sideboard follows the field: Anarchy destroys white permanents, so it is a strong card against Enchantress, yet it is in 24% of Sligh sideboards on MTGO and 57% in paper, where Enchantress is half as common.
Why the two fields differ
In the ban announcement in January, Martin Berlin wrote that Magic Online has "its very own logic" and pointed to the player population, card availability and, at times, an incentive to play faster and simpler decks. Players on Reddit add the price of paper cards.
Price
Magic Online flattens the price differences between decks. Among the 20 most played archetypes on MTGGoldfish, the priciest paper list costs about 58 times the cheapest, and on MTGO about three times. The table has the 16 MTGGoldfish archetypes we could match to our own deck groups, next to how much more common each deck is on MTGO:
| Deck | Paper | Tix | MTGO vs. paper |
|---|---|---|---|
| Elves | $7,926 | 159 | 1.1x |
| Terrageddon (Naya) | $5,795 | 348 | 0.9x |
| Replenish | $3,430 | 381 | 1.1x |
| Enchantress | $3,397 | 259 | 2.0x |
| Survival | $3,305 | 157 | 1.5x |
| Gro-a-Tog | $2,264 | 217 | 0.8x |
| Full English Breakfast | $2,193 | 204 | 1.5x |
| Stiflenought (mono blue) | $1,549 | 300 | 2.2x |
| White Weenie | $1,220 | 215 | 0.7x |
| Mono Black | $590 | 387 | 0.9x |
| Reanimator | $543 | 252 | 0.9x |
| The Rock | $393 | 212 | 0.7x |
| Goblins | $385 | 234 | 1.1x |
| Sligh | $378 | 138 | 1.0x |
| Psychatog | $364 | 172 | 1.5x |
| BW Control | $137 | 135 | 0.8x |
Prices from MTGGoldfish on 8 November 2026, tix are MTGO event tickets. Last column: the deck's MTGO share divided by its paper share, from MTGTop8.
If price decided what people register, the decks that cost the most in paper would gain the most online. Survival and Full English Breakfast do lean online, but Elves and Terrageddon, the two most expensive, don't. Enchantress and Replenish cost almost the same in paper, and only one of them is twice as common on MTGO. Across the 16 decks the correlation between paper price and online share is a weak 0.32. MTGTop8 doesn't record which paper events allow proxies, which take much of the cost away where they are permitted, so that part can't be tested.
Cards missing online
According to Scryfall, 374 of the 5,375 cards legal in Premodern have no Magic Online version, most of them from Ice Age, the older core sets, Homelands and Alliances. Only Transmutation sees real play: it is in 25 of the 41 paper lists of En-Kor Life. The other 16 lists do without it, one of them won an event, and MTGO has a single Life list, also without it. PieGonti wrote at Ultimate Guard that Life and Aluren are hard or impossible to play on MTGO. Every main-deck card of the paper Aluren lists does exist online, and the deck is rare there anyway.
Who plays
The most active 1% of players, 9 on MTGO and 41 in paper, account for 13.3% of all MTGO lists and 7.6% of paper lists, and the average MTGO player has 3.9 recorded lists to 1.9 in paper. In the Challenges 19 players hold a third of all lists. Those events have also gotten smaller: Challenge 32s averaged between 41 and 46 players in every month through September, and in October 13 of the 14 Challenges were Challenge 16s with about 26 players. The Championship Week Finals on 30 May drew 138, the largest Premodern event on the client so far.
What the client does to a deck
Decklists can't show what clicking through a long turn on a chess clock costs a deck. vcT, whose run of 28 straight match wins with Full English Breakfast (hFEB on Reddit) led to an AMA in October, said there that misclicks have cost many matches and League trophies. That kind of cost would fit the rarity of combo decks that need many actions in one turn, such as Aluren.
Does MTGO move the paper meta?
Berlin also doubted that the online results so far would spill over to paper to any significant extent. These are the quarterly shares of three decks that moved this year.
| Deck | Q1 | Q2 | Q3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stiflenought | 14.6 / 6.9 | 17.9 / 6.5 | 13.2 / 7.6 |
| Enchantress | 7.7 / 5.8 | 11.3 / 5.5 | 14.1 / 5.5 |
| Terrageddon | 2.6 / 3.6 | 2.6 / 5.0 | 7.1 / 5.5 |
MTGO / paper, percent of decklists on MTGTop8. Q1: 18 January to 17 April, Q2: 18 April to 17 July, Q3: 18 July to 17 October 2026.
Enchantress nearly doubled on MTGO over those three quarters and passed Stiflenought there, while its paper share stayed where it was. Most of the rise came in the Challenges, from 7.3% to 16.8%, against 8.4% to 11.0% in the Leagues. Terrageddon went the other way: it grew in paper first, after national titles in Portugal and the UK in spring, which we covered in our Parallax Tide report, and picked up on MTGO only a quarter later. Monthly shares are too noisy to show a link either way. Across the 13 most played decks, a month's change in MTGO share says nothing about the change in paper share that month or in the three months after it, but 87% of the month-to-month movement in paper and 55% on MTGO is the size that small monthly samples produce on their own.
For single cards we looked at those that were rare in a deck in February and March and later reached 30% of its lists. Twelve did. Four of them got there on both sides, three on MTGO first and one in the same month: Shallow Grave in Full English Breakfast passed the mark online in July and in paper in September, and Glowrider in Oath of Druids and Goblin Vandal in Sligh did so online in June and in paper in August. The other eight reached it on one side only, four online and four in paper, among them Earthquake in Terrageddon and Kor Haven in Landstill in paper. Three of four is too few cards to lean on, though it would fit a suggestion on Reddit that paper players are slower to buy a card they may end up not playing.
Reading MTGO results for a paper event
In the Top 8s of paper events under 32 players, Stiflenought and Enchantress are less than half as common as the MTGO totals suggest. For an event of 65 or more players, the League figure for Stiflenought is a better guide than the Challenge figure, and Enchantress stays lower than either. The artifact and Tinker decks in the table above barely appear online, so testing on MTGO gives little practice against them, and sideboards copied from MTGO lists carry more answers to Dreadnought than most paper rooms call for.
How this report is made
The decklists are every Premodern deck on MTGTop8 from 18 January to 7 November 2026 (11,550 lists on the two sides). MTGO means events with MTGO in the name: 1,594 League 5-0 lists, 2,111 Challenge lists and the 32 lists from the Championship Week Finals. Paper means events MTGTop8 marks as paper. Webcam events and other online leagues (279 lists) count on neither side. The ban took effect on MTGO on 20 January, and MTGTop8 has no MTGO lists from the two days before. MTGTop8 lists a few decks twice (same event, place and list); we count each list once. Deck names follow MTGTop8, grouped into the archetypes of our tier list. Names we could not place clearly stay separate. Colored marks in the chart show a gap of at least two standard errors, with all of a player's lists counted together so that one regular can't produce a gap alone. For the correlations we used monthly shares from January to October 2026.
MTGTop8 carries at most eight League 5-0s a day and never two from one player, while mtgo.com publishes more. On the 189 days we could compare, mtgo.com has 2,295 lists and MTGTop8 1,487. Counted by key cards, Stiflenought is at 9.3% in both and Enchantress at 10.9% against 10.4%, so we stayed with MTGTop8.
All numbers are shares of recorded results. They are not win rates and they are not attendance: Challenges show the top finishers, Leagues the 5-0s and paper events mostly the Top 8, which at a small local is about half the field. Paper results also lean on Italy, Spain, Brazil and Argentina, which have the most recorded lists. MTGTop8 doesn't record every event and adds some of them late. Player names are matched as written, so one person with two spellings counts twice. A difference between the two sides doesn't show why it exists, and a card reaching one side first doesn't prove it came from there. Card availability is from Scryfall, prices from MTGGoldfish, both on 8 November 2026. Play Premodern publishes a monthly breakdown of the Challenges, sorted by signature cards rather than MTGTop8's names. Our monthly reports use MTGDecks, which counts differently.
Questions
Is Premodern on Magic Online?
Yes. It started as a Contraption format in December 2025 and has been a permanent MTGO format since 25 February 2026, with Leagues and regular Challenges. The banlist is the same as in paper.
What is the most played Premodern deck on MTGO?
Stiflenought has the most recorded lists since January 2026, followed by Enchantress. In the quarter up to 17 October Enchantress was slightly ahead.
Can you play every Premodern card on Magic Online?
Almost. According to Scryfall, about 7% of the legal cards have no MTGO version, most of them from Ice Age, older core sets, Homelands and Alliances. Very few of them see play. The notable one is Transmutation, used in many En-Kor Life lists.
Is the MTGO Premodern metagame different from paper?
Yes, though both sides have the same five most played decks. Stiflenought and Enchantress take a larger share on MTGO, and decks such as Aluren, Clerics and the Tinker and Devourer builds are several times more common in paper.
How much does a Premodern deck cost on MTGO?
On 8 November 2026 MTGGoldfish listed its 20 most played Premodern archetypes at 128 to 391 event tickets each. The same lists cost from $137 to $7,926 in paper.
