So M14's out and the new decklists from this weekend's SCG events are out.
It seems like Jund is a very, very large portion of the metagame at those events, more than ever. Except, there isn't really too much from the new sets in it save for Scavenging Ooze. Now don't get me wrong, the Ooze is awesome and nukes the Rites decks, but otherwise, the deck already had Thrag and Huntmaster to stabilize and gain life.
So I was talking to some people at the LGS and I pointed a few things out - a few months ago, the metagame there was over 2/3 R/x aggro decks, and these days it is much more varied. Talking to some with those decks, the main reason many were playing it was not necessarily because of metagame choices or them liking the deck itself or those particular colors, but simply because it was the cheapest deck to build, by far.
So I'm wondering if this new resurgence of Jund is not really a metagame factor, but simply a price factor. I wanted to build Jund back in January but decided not to, after all, 20+ nonbasic lands, playsets of $20 Thrags and $25 Bonfires and $27 Huntmasters gets really pricey, really fast. MTG is a fun game, but when a Standard deck costs nearly six hundred bucks, many people wonder, for good reason, if it's really worth spending that much to play FNM.
But now that most of these cards are down as low as $6,7,8 a piece Jund is a lot more realistic to build. So, I'd like some input from the community:
What is your local metagame like? How much of a determining factor is price to people at your shop and the decks they build?
The price point is supply and demand. After so many months of people cracking packs of M14 etc prices just go down because there are more copies making their way onto the market each undercutting the next until a stable price point is met.
Price is no object for our group. While I stray from my LGS for the most part, the serious players disregard price. We generally pay for them play them then resell them to recover what we can. Sometimes it works out terrible, other times it works out great, like Jace TMS did for us at a $25 pre-order.
Gotta learn to front and swagger when it comes to card prices if you want to take the game seriously. I believe I paid $110 for my Liliana's (foil) and others in my group picked them up at about $70 and that was right after they were released. She dropped and went back up. If she had never gone back up, I know my group, myself included would not feel too terrible about paying more than we could sell them for as she pulled her weight in value after the events are all said and done and the prize pool is cashed out.
Magic really boils down to equity. Cards have value and while it may seem dumb, if you learn to manage your equity, the hobby becomes fairly self supportive after an initial investment and proper management.
EDIT
A good example is the $1600 I spent on foiling out Alara-Zen UWR Planeswalker Control. After selling my legacy goods and being out of cards outside of this deck, managing it ensured that I still maintain that $1600 in cards no matter how you spin it. It has found it's way into EDH decks, cube, standard sets and binder sets for sell and trade. Even more when you take into account some of the prizes I keep instead of selling.
I played a jund guy the other night at my fnm who was still playing ground seal over ooze. He wanted to wait until they go down in price. Then again, he didn't think scooze was better than ground seal, citing "I don't want to have to interact with my opponents". I beat him with a RtR block mono-red deck.
I don't think people are buying cards to build Jund because it's cheap to build, because the reason it's cheap (now) is because most of it's expensive cards are rotating and are at a discount. Which leads me to exhibit A: rotating cards. No reason to spend money to build a deck and then end up with a bunch of useless cards in a month. Really the cheaper thing to do is stick with whatever deck you've been playing with. If you've had a UWR deck this whole standard season, no reason to ditch it and build Jund even if Jund is putting up better results.
But that brings me to me main point. I don't think price factors in to what decks are considered good on a national level. And here's my logic: the people that tend to win tournaments, regardless of archetype are the ones that spend the most time testing and practicing for tournaments. The more you test out a deck against the field, the more you figure out how to use it and know what the right choice to make in most situations is, and furthermore you know the inner workings of each matchup, cards you need to watch out for, etc. The people that test a lot usually have a playgroup, by far the best way to practice for a professional IRL tournament IMO. And when you have a playgroup, all you need are 4-8 copies of all the standard staples and you can pretty much build whatever deck you want to build, usually being able to cover 3-4 people assuming you aren't all playing the same decks.
So knowing all of that, it's pretty obvious deck choice, and therefore the metagame isn't being driven by price of cards. Perhaps this is true at the FNM level. At my FNM no one plays Voice of Resurgence. But that's not going to be true at a PTQ. The people that consistently end up in the top half of those events are the ones that shell out the money, test a lot and have playgroups.
So knowing all of that, it's pretty obvious deck choice, and therefore the metagame isn't being driven by price of cards. Perhaps this is true at the FNM level. At my FNM no one plays Voice of Resurgence. But that's not going to be true at a PTQ. The people that consistently end up in the top half of those events are the ones that shell out the money, test a lot and have playgroups.
That is a perfect example. For many months now, I have noticed the FNM metagame is very different than the pro-level metagame, and the main reason simply has been price. It is definitely hard to justify paying $200 for a set of VoR's just to go to FNM and win like 6 packs once in a while.
i dont think its really price that drives the meta game its the quality of the card. alot of people will be willing to dish out more money if they can see the card being used beyond standard. i was willing to dish out $60 a pop for jtms when he was is standard because i knew he was going to be good beyond just standard and would retain most of his value. i knew fetches would be a good investment so i have a play set of each. When i saw huntmaster i was quoted as saying "that card is garbage beyond standard" and i stay behind that thought. if a card is truly worth the money people will pay for it, but most of the cards in popular decks just arnt worth the price.
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That is a perfect example. For many months now, I have noticed the FNM metagame is very different than the pro-level metagame, and the main reason simply has been price. It is definitely hard to justify paying $200 for a set of VoR's just to go to FNM and win like 6 packs once in a while.
Ok, so you are talking about the FNM metagame, and in which case the answer is 'of course price effects what people play'. Most tournaments are maybe 5 bucks a piece to enter and you either get store credit or packs as prizes. There really isn't a reason to spend 200 a month playing whatever the best deck is at the moment when the prize for making it to the top 4 is like maybe 20 bucks on average.
But the pro metagame is a completely different animal, and that's the one most people are talking about when they point to the results Jund has gotten the past couple of months and talk about it's level of success. I don't think the deck is popular because it's cheap to build (which it isn't, mono red is probably still much cheaper).
As it turns out, this was the topic of my undergraduate thesis.
In short, the answer is: It's a big factor in small tournaments, and its relevance decreases as the stakes increase.
For those who do not have a working grasp of game theory, the rest of what I'm going to say may come off as more than a little dense.
The longer answer requires the concept of Nash Equilibrium. I'll start with a simple, but illustrative example.
There are three different decks you can play in a format. There's an aggro deck, a combo deck, and a control deck. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume that the aggro deck always beats the control deck, the control deck beats the combo deck, and the combo deck beats the aggro deck.
In a Nash equilibrium, no player can unilaterally improve his position by changing his strategy. This means, in practice, each deck archetype must be represented in such a proportion(*) such that on the margin, I do just as well with strategy A as with any other strategy.
We'll assume, again, for simplicity's sake, that a win counts as +1, and a loss as -1. A draw counts as 0 [no mirror breaking allowed in this simple example, so this is equivalent to winning half the time - we are assuming that payoffs are von-Neumann Morgenstern utilities (**)]
So, calling the metagame proportion of aggro x, combo y, and control (1 - x - y) (***)
Then, by choosing aggro, my payoff is:
0*x + (1-x-y) - y = 1 - x - 2y
Combo gets:
x - (1-x-y) = 2x + y - 1
Control gets:
y - x.
These expressions have to equal each other. The solution is x = y = 1/3
In this simplified metagame, control, aggro, and combo are all represented in equal proportions.
Now, we extend this model by incorporating a price component. Control, since it requires all those expensive Jaces and Sphinx's Revelations, costs more money to play. We will penalize the players of Control by penalizing them by 0.1 ex ante.
Now, aggro still gets:
1 - x - 2y
Combo still gets:
2x + y - 1
But control now gets:
y - x - 0.1
And when we equilibriate, we find that
x = 0.3
y = 0.367
(1 - x - y) = 0.333
This results in combo being played more and aggro being played less, while control, despite being more expensive, still gets played exactly the same amount as before. However, because the metagame has shifted to accommodate this, it's a metagame that is in fact more favorable to the control player. The end result is that control will win more (since it faces more favorable combo matchups and fewer unfavorable control ones) than it used to.
In bigger tournaments, the stakes are higher, so the relative penalty (that 0.1 figure I used) will be a lot smaller [relative to the utility derived from winning], and you'll be a lot closer to the original figure where control, combo, and aggro decks all win with equal percentages. At FNM, that penalty might be larger, such as 0.3 or 0.4, and the more expensive decks win a lot more.
The question that this economic argument can't answer is: Do the better decks become more expensive because people want to play with them because they win more, or do decks win more because they become more expensive and therefore carve out a better metagame position. That I do not have an answer for.
----
Footnotes (for added explanation)
* - Technically, it would involve each player mixing his strategies in certain proportions [where my opponent randomizes to make me indifferent, and I do the same to him], but there's no difference between the mixing being done on the spot before each match and each deck being represented in certain proportions in a metagame with random assignment of matches.
** - A von-Neumann Morgenstern utility function is used for making modeling uncertainties more tractable. There are specific axioms on them, but the key takeaway is that I am completely indifferent between a 100% chance of getting x and a y% chance of getting 100*x/y, for any values of x and y.
*** - We could call it z, but we'd have the boundary condition that x+y+z = 1, and it's simpler to just incorporate it as such.
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Supply and Demand are the determinative factors of card prices.
The metagame determines the extent of that supply and demand. If an archetype is doing well, demand for the cards of that archetype generally increases. It it does poorly, demand will decrease.
As card prices decrease, the barrier to entry lowers for the unpopular cards and archetypes. As the price of these archetypes decreases, more experimentation results to make these archetypes viable again because a greater population of players now has financial access to these cards.
Sometimes the experimetation is successful and an archetypes is revived. Sometimes its not successful.
If something becomes viable again, the process repeats.
Meta game (demand) and the cycle (how far away from release and how close to rotation) determines the price of standard cards.
If price is purely based on the power level of a card, Jace, Architect of Thought would already be at least $25 now.
^I mean, Jace himself isn't much cheaper than Chains...
I think price stops being a barrier the larger the metagame becomes. At a single store, you can have tons of kids who just want to play RDW cause it's cheap and they suck, but they're not likely to go to anything larger than an SCG or PTQ, and they're significantly less likely to win those events. If price was a factor on actual large metagames, Jace wouldn't have been banned two years ago. End of story.
Oh, I thought he was talking about playing a spell that is countering a spell with counters on it as it comes into play, but I see you guys were just discussing whether he was flashing a creature with flash in order to flash a flashback or just flashing a creature with flash but not needing flash in order to flashback a spell without flash.
I don't know how long it's been since a cheap deck was Tier1; but every time it happens the metagame becomes 90% that deck. U/G Madness was the last time I recall (Only 4 rares in the entire deck; 4 Circular Logic; and some builds didn't need all 4).
I sort of agree this is a much larger influence the less competitive tournaments are. It's sort of like burn in Modern PTQs -- if it's a bad matchup you better hope your round 1 and 2 pairings are good because odds are most of the people who can't afford a Tier 1 deck are playing it; which is up to 20% of the field in some venues.
I don't know how long it's been since a cheap deck was Tier1; but every time it happens the metagame becomes 90% that deck. U/G Madness was the last time I recall (Only 4 rares in the entire deck; 4 Circular Logic; and some builds didn't need all 4).
I sort of agree this is a much larger influence the less competitive tournaments are. It's sort of like burn in Modern PTQs -- if it's a bad matchup you better hope your round 1 and 2 pairings are good because odds are most of the people who can't afford a Tier 1 deck are playing it; which is up to 20% of the field in some venues.
Umm Circular Logic isn't a rare that card is uncommon. The only rares that deck played were I believe pain lands and/or city of brass and in some builds random sideboard cards like (Glory or Genesis) in rare circumstances. I also have noticed that around my area at least I see far more expensive competitive decks at FNM. Obviously to some players they won't ever spend enough to buy 4x Voice or something if a deck requires it but I am surprised how many people have those cards and just play either casually or at most at FNM level.
TlDr? At a micro/ local level price influences metagame, but at a larger sample with larger stakes the influence decreases. In a large sample with actual prizes at state the people who don't need to worry about budget constraints tend to squeeze out the competition that do. This is because they can make optimum decks and make sure these are the decks optimal to the metagame.
The reason jund is picking up so much steam is the deck really didn't have very many bad matchups and Frites was a big one for them. Suddenly they have a very strong 2-drop threat that doubles as a very effective hatebear against one of their worse matchups. Sometimes it only takes 1 card to bring up a deck type's power-level significantly and scavenging ooze is certainly a card of that caliber.
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It seems like Jund is a very, very large portion of the metagame at those events, more than ever. Except, there isn't really too much from the new sets in it save for Scavenging Ooze. Now don't get me wrong, the Ooze is awesome and nukes the Rites decks, but otherwise, the deck already had Thrag and Huntmaster to stabilize and gain life.
So I was talking to some people at the LGS and I pointed a few things out - a few months ago, the metagame there was over 2/3 R/x aggro decks, and these days it is much more varied. Talking to some with those decks, the main reason many were playing it was not necessarily because of metagame choices or them liking the deck itself or those particular colors, but simply because it was the cheapest deck to build, by far.
So I'm wondering if this new resurgence of Jund is not really a metagame factor, but simply a price factor. I wanted to build Jund back in January but decided not to, after all, 20+ nonbasic lands, playsets of $20 Thrags and $25 Bonfires and $27 Huntmasters gets really pricey, really fast. MTG is a fun game, but when a Standard deck costs nearly six hundred bucks, many people wonder, for good reason, if it's really worth spending that much to play FNM.
But now that most of these cards are down as low as $6,7,8 a piece Jund is a lot more realistic to build. So, I'd like some input from the community:
What is your local metagame like? How much of a determining factor is price to people at your shop and the decks they build?
Price is no object for our group. While I stray from my LGS for the most part, the serious players disregard price. We generally pay for them play them then resell them to recover what we can. Sometimes it works out terrible, other times it works out great, like Jace TMS did for us at a $25 pre-order.
Gotta learn to front and swagger when it comes to card prices if you want to take the game seriously. I believe I paid $110 for my Liliana's (foil) and others in my group picked them up at about $70 and that was right after they were released. She dropped and went back up. If she had never gone back up, I know my group, myself included would not feel too terrible about paying more than we could sell them for as she pulled her weight in value after the events are all said and done and the prize pool is cashed out.
Magic really boils down to equity. Cards have value and while it may seem dumb, if you learn to manage your equity, the hobby becomes fairly self supportive after an initial investment and proper management.
EDIT
A good example is the $1600 I spent on foiling out Alara-Zen UWR Planeswalker Control. After selling my legacy goods and being out of cards outside of this deck, managing it ensured that I still maintain that $1600 in cards no matter how you spin it. It has found it's way into EDH decks, cube, standard sets and binder sets for sell and trade. Even more when you take into account some of the prizes I keep instead of selling.
MtG Sales List
But that brings me to me main point. I don't think price factors in to what decks are considered good on a national level. And here's my logic: the people that tend to win tournaments, regardless of archetype are the ones that spend the most time testing and practicing for tournaments. The more you test out a deck against the field, the more you figure out how to use it and know what the right choice to make in most situations is, and furthermore you know the inner workings of each matchup, cards you need to watch out for, etc. The people that test a lot usually have a playgroup, by far the best way to practice for a professional IRL tournament IMO. And when you have a playgroup, all you need are 4-8 copies of all the standard staples and you can pretty much build whatever deck you want to build, usually being able to cover 3-4 people assuming you aren't all playing the same decks.
So knowing all of that, it's pretty obvious deck choice, and therefore the metagame isn't being driven by price of cards. Perhaps this is true at the FNM level. At my FNM no one plays Voice of Resurgence. But that's not going to be true at a PTQ. The people that consistently end up in the top half of those events are the ones that shell out the money, test a lot and have playgroups.
That is a perfect example. For many months now, I have noticed the FNM metagame is very different than the pro-level metagame, and the main reason simply has been price. It is definitely hard to justify paying $200 for a set of VoR's just to go to FNM and win like 6 packs once in a while.
Tooth & Nail........Grishoalbrand....Living Dominance....Tezzerator.........Vannifar Pod
My Decks that have been BANNED
DRS Jund | Kiki-Pod | Bloom Titan | Splinter Twin | KCI
Ok, so you are talking about the FNM metagame, and in which case the answer is 'of course price effects what people play'. Most tournaments are maybe 5 bucks a piece to enter and you either get store credit or packs as prizes. There really isn't a reason to spend 200 a month playing whatever the best deck is at the moment when the prize for making it to the top 4 is like maybe 20 bucks on average.
But the pro metagame is a completely different animal, and that's the one most people are talking about when they point to the results Jund has gotten the past couple of months and talk about it's level of success. I don't think the deck is popular because it's cheap to build (which it isn't, mono red is probably still much cheaper).
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In short, the answer is: It's a big factor in small tournaments, and its relevance decreases as the stakes increase.
For those who do not have a working grasp of game theory, the rest of what I'm going to say may come off as more than a little dense.
The longer answer requires the concept of Nash Equilibrium. I'll start with a simple, but illustrative example.
There are three different decks you can play in a format. There's an aggro deck, a combo deck, and a control deck. For simplicity's sake, we'll assume that the aggro deck always beats the control deck, the control deck beats the combo deck, and the combo deck beats the aggro deck.
In a Nash equilibrium, no player can unilaterally improve his position by changing his strategy. This means, in practice, each deck archetype must be represented in such a proportion(*) such that on the margin, I do just as well with strategy A as with any other strategy.
We'll assume, again, for simplicity's sake, that a win counts as +1, and a loss as -1. A draw counts as 0 [no mirror breaking allowed in this simple example, so this is equivalent to winning half the time - we are assuming that payoffs are von-Neumann Morgenstern utilities (**)]
So, calling the metagame proportion of aggro x, combo y, and control (1 - x - y) (***)
Then, by choosing aggro, my payoff is:
0*x + (1-x-y) - y = 1 - x - 2y
Combo gets:
x - (1-x-y) = 2x + y - 1
Control gets:
y - x.
These expressions have to equal each other. The solution is x = y = 1/3
In this simplified metagame, control, aggro, and combo are all represented in equal proportions.
Now, we extend this model by incorporating a price component. Control, since it requires all those expensive Jaces and Sphinx's Revelations, costs more money to play. We will penalize the players of Control by penalizing them by 0.1 ex ante.
Now, aggro still gets:
1 - x - 2y
Combo still gets:
2x + y - 1
But control now gets:
y - x - 0.1
And when we equilibriate, we find that
x = 0.3
y = 0.367
(1 - x - y) = 0.333
This results in combo being played more and aggro being played less, while control, despite being more expensive, still gets played exactly the same amount as before. However, because the metagame has shifted to accommodate this, it's a metagame that is in fact more favorable to the control player. The end result is that control will win more (since it faces more favorable combo matchups and fewer unfavorable control ones) than it used to.
In bigger tournaments, the stakes are higher, so the relative penalty (that 0.1 figure I used) will be a lot smaller [relative to the utility derived from winning], and you'll be a lot closer to the original figure where control, combo, and aggro decks all win with equal percentages. At FNM, that penalty might be larger, such as 0.3 or 0.4, and the more expensive decks win a lot more.
The question that this economic argument can't answer is: Do the better decks become more expensive because people want to play with them because they win more, or do decks win more because they become more expensive and therefore carve out a better metagame position. That I do not have an answer for.
----
Footnotes (for added explanation)
* - Technically, it would involve each player mixing his strategies in certain proportions [where my opponent randomizes to make me indifferent, and I do the same to him], but there's no difference between the mixing being done on the spot before each match and each deck being represented in certain proportions in a metagame with random assignment of matches.
** - A von-Neumann Morgenstern utility function is used for making modeling uncertainties more tractable. There are specific axioms on them, but the key takeaway is that I am completely indifferent between a 100% chance of getting x and a y% chance of getting 100*x/y, for any values of x and y.
*** - We could call it z, but we'd have the boundary condition that x+y+z = 1, and it's simpler to just incorporate it as such.
Went to a new shop from a friend's recommendation, DQ'ed for willful violation of CR 100.6b.
Have played duals? I have PucaPoints for them!
(Credit to DarkNightCavalier)
$tandard: Too poor.
Modern:
- GW Birthing Pod(?)
Legacy:
- UWR Delver
The metagame determines the extent of that supply and demand. If an archetype is doing well, demand for the cards of that archetype generally increases. It it does poorly, demand will decrease.
As card prices decrease, the barrier to entry lowers for the unpopular cards and archetypes. As the price of these archetypes decreases, more experimentation results to make these archetypes viable again because a greater population of players now has financial access to these cards.
Sometimes the experimetation is successful and an archetypes is revived. Sometimes its not successful.
If something becomes viable again, the process repeats.
If price is purely based on the power level of a card, Jace, Architect of Thought would already be at least $25 now.
And the situation occurs with many other cards.
I think price stops being a barrier the larger the metagame becomes. At a single store, you can have tons of kids who just want to play RDW cause it's cheap and they suck, but they're not likely to go to anything larger than an SCG or PTQ, and they're significantly less likely to win those events. If price was a factor on actual large metagames, Jace wouldn't have been banned two years ago. End of story.
-regarding Snapcaster Mage.
I sort of agree this is a much larger influence the less competitive tournaments are. It's sort of like burn in Modern PTQs -- if it's a bad matchup you better hope your round 1 and 2 pairings are good because odds are most of the people who can't afford a Tier 1 deck are playing it; which is up to 20% of the field in some venues.
Umm Circular Logic isn't a rare that card is uncommon. The only rares that deck played were I believe pain lands and/or city of brass and in some builds random sideboard cards like (Glory or Genesis) in rare circumstances. I also have noticed that around my area at least I see far more expensive competitive decks at FNM. Obviously to some players they won't ever spend enough to buy 4x Voice or something if a deck requires it but I am surprised how many people have those cards and just play either casually or at most at FNM level.
Feel free to bid on my cards here!
Read drifting skies's quote, this is your answer.
TlDr? At a micro/ local level price influences metagame, but at a larger sample with larger stakes the influence decreases. In a large sample with actual prizes at state the people who don't need to worry about budget constraints tend to squeeze out the competition that do. This is because they can make optimum decks and make sure these are the decks optimal to the metagame.
The reason jund is picking up so much steam is the deck really didn't have very many bad matchups and Frites was a big one for them. Suddenly they have a very strong 2-drop threat that doubles as a very effective hatebear against one of their worse matchups. Sometimes it only takes 1 card to bring up a deck type's power-level significantly and scavenging ooze is certainly a card of that caliber.