The present study examined the effect of language background and topic on productive formulaic competence. Guided by usage-based theory of language learning, this study used a distribution-based approach to the examination of the native-likeness of formulaic usage in English timed argumentative writing. Six indices informed by a large-scale native corpus were chosen to gauge the frequency and association strength of bigrams and trigrams in a total of 778 English timed independent argumentative essays on two topics by 100 native speaker writers, 210 English as a foreign language (EFL) writers and 79 English as a second language (ESL) writers in Asia. Results of a series of linear mixed-effects regression analyses showed that, while EFL writers scored lower on most of the indices than both NS writers and ESL writers, ESL writers did not differ much from NS writers in their use of n-grams across topics. Meanwhile, the topic that was deemed more cognitively demanding and of a stronger technical nature elicited more native-like performance in bigram and trigram use across all three language groups. Findings of the study highlight the important effect of input on the development of formulaic competence in a second language, offer empirical support to the use of cognitively complex topics in second language writing practice, and carry important implications for L2 writing pedagogy.