What exactly is the bug? I'm having trouble understanding your description of it. Is this a "trade is unusable" bug, or a "trading is really annoying" bug?
Mystic may be slightly over-valued, but honestly the 1 cmc mana dork is always good. A turn 1 Elvish Mystic either puts you a whole turn ahead tempo wise or catches you up to the player that drew first. I can't think of anything I'd rather see in my opening hand.
According to the graphs, the best common in the set is Lightning Strike followed by Frost Lynx. Triplicate Spirits has a lot of high ratings, but also has some Cs and even a D+.
Do you think this is accurate?
With the huge caveat that as an MTGO player my ratings have to be pure theory craft right now - I can totally buy that Lightning Strike is the best common. I have trouble looking at the graphs to assess card ratings so I use this view:
1
Red Commons [Lightning Strike] B+ 10.13 1.10
2
White Commons [Triplicate Spirits] B 9.27 1.65
3
Green Commons [Elvish Mystic] B 9.02 1.47
4
Black Commons [Flesh to Dust] B 8.85 1.38
5
Blue Commons [Frost Lynx] B 8.74 1.36
6
Blue Commons [Welkin Tern] B 8.58 1.41
7
Black Commons [Accursed Spirit] B- 8.49 1.12
8
White Commons [Raise the Alarm] B- 8.13 1.50
9
Red Commons [Generator Servant] B- 8.10 1.87
10
Red Commons [Borderland Marauder] B- 8.04 1.53
And looking at the top 10, I can see arguments for these being the premium commons in the colors. I still think Generator Servant is overrated - but I don't think by much, I mean it's clearly at least a C+ as a piker, in red, with upside - but honestly I'd much rather have a 3/2 attacker for 2. Also I'm not sure I love Elvish Mystic in a format where the common green fattie has convoke.
Honestly the amount of feedback we got on this one shocked us. Definitely open to re-examining our approach here, including bringing back ratings in some form to something entirely new that tries to serve the same space.
So, they didn't realize we like ratings, but ratings are gone now, and probably at some point the ratings or some substitute will be brought back.
Ratings in real life were apparently something of a net negative for WotC - as was mentioned on the same thread "Of course, the problem from Wizards side is that it's bad business to tell half your audience that they are below-average at the game."
I can understand as something that was essentially meaningless (a high rating got you nothing), and an artifact of a system the paper game didn't use anymore, Wizards can be forgiven for thinking the deletion of Elo would go unnoticed. However, I loved having a rating - and the fact that this conversation is happening at Wizards gives me hope.
The biggest change in NWO has been changes to rares and mythics
The BIGGEST (and really only) focus of nwo is commons. At common R&D have to limit the types of complexity that make the game inaccessible for new players. This has had side effects outside of common - as mentioned in the articles uncommons have ticked up in complexity, but the focus is on keeping the commons simple and easy to understand.
This is just one part of the New World Order philosophy that has been the driving factor in set design for the last several years.
The essential point of this philosophy is to reduce the complexity of the game, particularly at the lower rarities.
The goal is to make the game more accessible to new players.
Good removal being shifted to uncommon/rare is just one small part of this.
Huh? What part of New World Order leads to "make removal worse?" If anything more expensive removal leads to more complicated board states since you get more board stalls.
nwo also has nothing to do with the power of cards printed - it has to do with the perceived complexity of the card. For instance the following card:
"Better than Swords"
W
Instant - Common
Exile target creature.
Would be a perfectly acceptable common under nwo. Board complexity has more to do with cards and mechanics that make the board state hard to process - things like Samite Healer and mechanics like Threshold can overwhelm new players by asking them to focus on too many variables.
A binomial distribution wont be very accurate with such small numbers as this is draw without replacement. Combinatorics is definitly the way to go. In which case under the circumstances you described the odds of there being 12 or more lands in the top 16 would be about .094165% or about 1/1000.
Ok, topic starting to derail - but for the life of me I can't get your number. How are you calculating it?
Edit:
Sorry, just got it. You were looking at drawing 16 cards off a randomly shuffled deck with 40 cards, 17 of which are land.
I was assuming the situation where he's starting with a hand of 4 land 3 spells, in which case the odds of getting the sequence of 12 lands in the next 16 draws is roughly 1 in 20000.
I think your reading of the scenario, Burkettryan, is more accurate.
squadronHawk - heh, thanks for telling me those stories. it's fun to hear that you also got 12 lands and 4 non-lands.
Phyrre -
You'll get 12 or more lands in your top 16 cards about 1-in-200 properly shuffled games. I wouldn't call 1-in-200 "absurdly unlikely." It's about the same odds as opening a Foil Mythic from any given pack.
i liked reading this. it makes me feel as lucky (or at least as special) as pulling a foil mythic rare
out of curiosity, how did you come up so quickly with that 1-in-200 fact? i took discrete mathematics in high school, so i (used to) have basic knowledge of this.
oh, and i kept a 4-land, 3-non-land hand. my fourth non-land was the font of fertility that i drew on my second-last turn.
An estimate for how likely this is to use a binomial distribution - what's "p[x >= 12] where x is binomial with p = 13/33 n=16"? Wolfram Alpha online tells me that percentage is about 0.4% or about the 1 in 200 number quoted above.
edit:
I'm not sure what it means, but I get much different number if I try a combinatoric approach. It probably means I'm doing something stupid, but I can't see my math error. This math gets kind of thorny, but let me explain my thinking:
Given 4 land 3 non-land card we have 33 choose 13 arrangements of the deck possible (the 13 land remaining in the deck can basically be in any of 33 positions). That's roughly 500M deck positions. Now basically we can look at each scenario - how many lands are in the top and bottom parts of the deck - in your case 12 lands in the top 16, 1 in the bottom 17. There are (16 choose 12) * (17 choose 1) deck configurations where that happens or about 30K. This leads to the odds of this scenario being about 1 in 10000. According to random google search for "1 in 10000" those are the odds of winning an Academy Award or Bowling a 300 game (which really? those are the same odds?)
Here's what I get for the probabilities of drawing n lands in the top 16 cards:
0 0.00%
1 0.02%
2 0.26%
3 1.90%
4 7.72%
5 18.53%
6 27.17%
7 24.70%
8 13.89%
9 4.75%
10 0.95%
11 0.10%
12 0.01%
13 0.00%
It's funny all the people here saying Obelisk is unplayable when in the prerelease experience thread one guy talks about how he got it in 3 of his 4 pools and it won hi8m a ton of games.
My own personal experience was pretty good i played U/G and had three coral barriers so my Squid tokens became real threats even if they didn't have islands. He also said souls were dumb and again I had the opposite experience playing with and against them.
I think it's a little more random than people expect.
I think the more nuanced point to take from this is that if you can make it more than a 6 mana "1 creature gets +2/+2" it's potentially very good. It still suffers from not being good on an empty board - heck, so does Dictate of Heliod - but that just means it's power comes with a liability. FWIW, I've died because Dictate just doesn't do enough too, and that has the advantage of having flash, not caring about creature type, and being 1 "cheaper".
I stand by my earlier assessment that Obelisk is unplayable in this deck.
Well he does have the hornet queen which could make the Obelisk a little bit better, but still - not really runnable. It would be interesting to see the original pool (assuming this was sealed), but I'm guessing it's probably been taken apart by now.
We can add that to the list of cards that Hornet Queen needs to take over the game
I agree, it would be interesting to see the pool (if this was sealed) or your sideboard (if this was draft); it would help us give more specific advice.
I also found it hard to tell targets (one spell buffing up a creature among multiple of the same name) and, IIRC, it was impossible to tell blocking order when multiple identical blockers blocked. the same creature. So it was harder to respond with removal. Maybe that's fixed.
I've been playing some casual standard (not ready to jump into the new client for real events yet) but I was able to click on the spell on the stack and it showed me visually what was being targeted. I don't remember how it displayed it exactly but it was pretty intuitive.
As for the multiple blockers thing.. well I was testing a budget RW burn list.
Looking at your deck I like the creature package - absurd bombs and then a bunch of low casting cost stuff to interact early. Like Phyrre56 I definitely would want to upgrade Black Cat but sometimes you don't have any better low drops.
19 Lands is an unusually high number of lands - I'd be tempted to trim it down to 18.
The non-creature spells seem really suboptimal. Let's walk through them: Gather Courage - This is a fine card, but your deck's plan is to play some cheap dudes, trade them off and then land a ridiculous bomb. This card doesn't really help you there - I'd be looking to play something that interacts with their board or trades early. Profane Memento - Pure lifegain spells are usually pretty abysmal in limited, this is no exception. Plummet - I don't mind one maindeck plummet, but I'm usually considering this as last card to add to my deck. Mind Rot - This is another fine card which I don't like in your deck. With so many stone cold bombs, I really just want to play cards that keep me alive by interacting with my opponents board. Mind Rot is at it's best in an attrition matchup coming out of the sideboard. Feast on the Fallen - This card doesn't do enough on it's own. For me it doesn't pass the "what does this card do on an empty board turn 10?" test. At least Typhoid Rats can attack and trades with their next creature. Hunter's Ambush - Cards that only prevent combat damage are usually not playable. However, this card might be able to trade for one of their cards if you set it up right - but you don't have enough green creatures for me to be tempted to run it. Obelisk of Urd - Same problem as Feast of the Fallen. In addition, you don't have too many creatures of the same type to make this much more than a 6 mana "1 of my creatures gets +2/+2" which is not good enough.
Game log not being on screen means you have to get used to looking next to the phase bar to see who's turn it is (overall I like that better, but it's different). This also means I have to be a little more vigilant to check scry outcomes and to remind myself whether opponent played a land first main phase.
I just keep these cards sleeved for all my deck building joy: Gifts Ungiven and Eternal Witness. Sometimes I'm playing my multiplayer astral slide deck, other times it's my arcane recursion deck or just my good stuff UGB deck, but always with these 2 cards.
That's probably true - maybe it's just the fact that he was really bad in M14: http://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/cards/draft/m14_m14_m14#online
That's probably clouding my judgment of Mystic.
With the huge caveat that as an MTGO player my ratings have to be pure theory craft right now - I can totally buy that Lightning Strike is the best common. I have trouble looking at the graphs to assess card ratings so I use this view:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_ZdBVXiHLW55FUfFJsYBPgHnuUeXqgTii_PML9Px8VM/pubhtml#
Here are the top 10 commons as of this moment:
1
Red Commons [Lightning Strike] B+ 10.13 1.10
2
White Commons [Triplicate Spirits] B 9.27 1.65
3
Green Commons [Elvish Mystic] B 9.02 1.47
4
Black Commons [Flesh to Dust] B 8.85 1.38
5
Blue Commons [Frost Lynx] B 8.74 1.36
6
Blue Commons [Welkin Tern] B 8.58 1.41
7
Black Commons [Accursed Spirit] B- 8.49 1.12
8
White Commons [Raise the Alarm] B- 8.13 1.50
9
Red Commons [Generator Servant] B- 8.10 1.87
10
Red Commons [Borderland Marauder] B- 8.04 1.53
And looking at the top 10, I can see arguments for these being the premium commons in the colors. I still think Generator Servant is overrated - but I don't think by much, I mean it's clearly at least a C+ as a piker, in red, with upside - but honestly I'd much rather have a 3/2 attacker for 2. Also I'm not sure I love Elvish Mystic in a format where the common green fattie has convoke.
Ratings in real life were apparently something of a net negative for WotC - as was mentioned on the same thread "Of course, the problem from Wizards side is that it's bad business to tell half your audience that they are below-average at the game."
I can understand as something that was essentially meaningless (a high rating got you nothing), and an artifact of a system the paper game didn't use anymore, Wizards can be forgiven for thinking the deletion of Elo would go unnoticed. However, I loved having a rating - and the fact that this conversation is happening at Wizards gives me hope.
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/172
http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/mm/293
The BIGGEST (and really only) focus of nwo is commons. At common R&D have to limit the types of complexity that make the game inaccessible for new players. This has had side effects outside of common - as mentioned in the articles uncommons have ticked up in complexity, but the focus is on keeping the commons simple and easy to understand.
nwo also has nothing to do with the power of cards printed - it has to do with the perceived complexity of the card. For instance the following card:
"Better than Swords"
W
Instant - Common
Exile target creature.
Would be a perfectly acceptable common under nwo. Board complexity has more to do with cards and mechanics that make the board state hard to process - things like Samite Healer and mechanics like Threshold can overwhelm new players by asking them to focus on too many variables.
http://cardboard-crack.com/post/91809071232/creature-removal
Ok, topic starting to derail - but for the life of me I can't get your number. How are you calculating it?
Edit:
Sorry, just got it. You were looking at drawing 16 cards off a randomly shuffled deck with 40 cards, 17 of which are land.
I was assuming the situation where he's starting with a hand of 4 land 3 spells, in which case the odds of getting the sequence of 12 lands in the next 16 draws is roughly 1 in 20000.
I think your reading of the scenario, Burkettryan, is more accurate.
An estimate for how likely this is to use a binomial distribution - what's "p[x >= 12] where x is binomial with p = 13/33 n=16"? Wolfram Alpha online tells me that percentage is about 0.4% or about the 1 in 200 number quoted above.
edit:
I'm not sure what it means, but I get much different number if I try a combinatoric approach. It probably means I'm doing something stupid, but I can't see my math error. This math gets kind of thorny, but let me explain my thinking:
Given 4 land 3 non-land card we have 33 choose 13 arrangements of the deck possible (the 13 land remaining in the deck can basically be in any of 33 positions). That's roughly 500M deck positions. Now basically we can look at each scenario - how many lands are in the top and bottom parts of the deck - in your case 12 lands in the top 16, 1 in the bottom 17. There are (16 choose 12) * (17 choose 1) deck configurations where that happens or about 30K. This leads to the odds of this scenario being about 1 in 10000. According to random google search for "1 in 10000" those are the odds of winning an Academy Award or Bowling a 300 game (which really? those are the same odds?)
Here's what I get for the probabilities of drawing n lands in the top 16 cards:
0 0.00%
1 0.02%
2 0.26%
3 1.90%
4 7.72%
5 18.53%
6 27.17%
7 24.70%
8 13.89%
9 4.75%
10 0.95%
11 0.10%
12 0.01%
13 0.00%
Also I'm still looking for suggestions about to how to improve the interface/result reporting.
I think the more nuanced point to take from this is that if you can make it more than a 6 mana "1 creature gets +2/+2" it's potentially very good. It still suffers from not being good on an empty board - heck, so does Dictate of Heliod - but that just means it's power comes with a liability. FWIW, I've died because Dictate just doesn't do enough too, and that has the advantage of having flash, not caring about creature type, and being 1 "cheaper".
I stand by my earlier assessment that Obelisk is unplayable in this deck.
We can add that to the list of cards that Hornet Queen needs to take over the game
I agree, it would be interesting to see the pool (if this was sealed) or your sideboard (if this was draft); it would help us give more specific advice.
I've been playing some casual standard (not ready to jump into the new client for real events yet) but I was able to click on the spell on the stack and it showed me visually what was being targeted. I don't remember how it displayed it exactly but it was pretty intuitive.
As for the multiple blockers thing.. well I was testing a budget RW burn list.
Welcome to the boards!
Looking at your deck I like the creature package - absurd bombs and then a bunch of low casting cost stuff to interact early. Like Phyrre56 I definitely would want to upgrade Black Cat but sometimes you don't have any better low drops.
19 Lands is an unusually high number of lands - I'd be tempted to trim it down to 18.
The non-creature spells seem really suboptimal. Let's walk through them:
Gather Courage - This is a fine card, but your deck's plan is to play some cheap dudes, trade them off and then land a ridiculous bomb. This card doesn't really help you there - I'd be looking to play something that interacts with their board or trades early.
Profane Memento - Pure lifegain spells are usually pretty abysmal in limited, this is no exception.
Plummet - I don't mind one maindeck plummet, but I'm usually considering this as last card to add to my deck.
Mind Rot - This is another fine card which I don't like in your deck. With so many stone cold bombs, I really just want to play cards that keep me alive by interacting with my opponents board. Mind Rot is at it's best in an attrition matchup coming out of the sideboard.
Feast on the Fallen - This card doesn't do enough on it's own. For me it doesn't pass the "what does this card do on an empty board turn 10?" test. At least Typhoid Rats can attack and trades with their next creature.
Hunter's Ambush - Cards that only prevent combat damage are usually not playable. However, this card might be able to trade for one of their cards if you set it up right - but you don't have enough green creatures for me to be tempted to run it.
Obelisk of Urd - Same problem as Feast of the Fallen. In addition, you don't have too many creatures of the same type to make this much more than a 6 mana "1 of my creatures gets +2/+2" which is not good enough.
http://www.twitch.tv/modogrinder1
He tends to stream later at night, but his recorded streams are worth checking out.