What data did you use to determine 1st turn Sol Ring was less prevalent with PP?
I used math. Excel does Hypergeometric distributions, and I calculated the likelihood of your opening hand containing Sol Ring or Mana Crypt with either method, assuming you were intentionally going to six or five just to find it. I also took a stab at calculating if the hand was "playable" or not, which I assumed meant containing at least 2 lands. The spreadsheets were on my old computer so I don't have it in front of me, but I could recreate it if you think it would be useful to the discussion.
What I can safely say is that if you are willing to go to 5 strictly to find Sol Ring or Mana Crypt, the "First-Free London" mulligan rule is more likely to find them (44.6%) than the old First-Free mulligan (40.8%), Partial Paris (33.2%), or even First-Free Partial Paris (44.3%). And now, your resulting 5-card hand also has a good chance of being decent in its own right since you basically get a 0-mana Faithless Looting tacked on.
So that's the reason for my hesitancy. Feel free to double-check my numbers because I'm just as fallible as anyone.
I guess one important metric is that ALL players get to do this.
in other words, combo finds their combos faster, but control finds their answers too. In that way, I don't think the numbers of finding turn 1 sol ring is all that relevant, because it also applies to each other player. So if player A gets sol ring without mulls, players B and C could find sol rings in their openers too but with a smaller hand. That sounds fine to me.
Also, I'm not sure how to quantify this, but the 'cost' of mulling in the other methods is 'higher' than that of london. this means that players are MORE likely to keep bad/unplayable hands. if i have a starting hand with 3 lands and 4 cmc>5 cards, i can mull that, knowing that i get to pick up 6 of the next 7 cards. With the other mulligan rules, it's a lot more 'costly' to do so, which means that more players are more likely to keep that bad hand. This leads to a higher chance of more players leading turn 1 sol ring (since players are more likely to ship dodgy hands).
Especially in 'casual' formats like EDH, easing decisions like mulligans (which are not the fun part of the game) should be emphasised. Complexity and difficult decisions should be done in the fun part of the game (i.e. after the first player's untap step).
This thread reads a lot like what people were saying about London mull in Modern before the event happened. Combo will reign supreme, people will dig out specific cards, your ad here. And then it worked fine, as per the general player consensus and now an official WOTC decree. Ya'll may have ran numbers on trying to dig up a Sol Ring, but those numbers don't account for the fact that Partial Paris is just inherently better than London at sculpting your hand. And guess what? EDH was still pretty playable with Partial Paris around. Tone down the needless alarmism a bit and take it out for a spin. It's seriously going to be fine.
My Zirilan of the Claw deck loves this I can now just mulligan to find lands and ramp and not worry about getting my best dragons trapped in hand. I was often just mulling to 4 just to find lands and ramp under the current system.
I expect we will have a lot less dead games now, but I think combo decks might get a lot more problematic, but combo abuse can be solved by individual groups
My Zirilan of the Claw deck loves this I can now just mulligan to find lands and ramp and not worry about getting my best dragons trapped in hand. I was often just mulling to 4 just to find lands and ramp under the current system.
I expect we will have a lot less dead games now, but I think combo decks might get a lot more problematic, but combo abuse can be solved by individual groups
answers to combos will be even easier to find by mull combo decks will find their combo pieces.
It's what's been happening in legacy, and it's what's going to happen in EDH too. The increase in combo was the first thing everyone thought too. But answers are always easier to find.
Schweineffet has it right, all decks will likely get faster overall, not just combo decks — the entire point of mulligans is to improve the quality of your starting hand.
I am doubtful it will have the same balancing effect as Legacy, though. EDH doesn’t have sideboards for one, but more importantly I just don’t see people aggressively tossing cards to dig for efficient answers vs. digging for something proactive like their own ramp, outside of cEDH. At least the multiplayer aspect will help with archenemy scenarios, as always.
This thread reads a lot like what people were saying about London mull in Modern before the event happened. Combo will reign supreme, people will dig out specific cards, your ad here. And then it worked fine, as per the general player consensus and now an official WOTC decree. Ya'll may have ran numbers on trying to dig up a Sol Ring, but those numbers don't account for the fact that Partial Paris is just inherently better than London at sculpting your hand. And guess what? EDH was still pretty playable with Partial Paris around. Tone down the needless alarmism a bit and take it out for a spin. It's seriously going to be fine.
I’m not sure why you think I’m being alarmist. EDH is pretty robust and would survive any number of suboptimal rules changes. You could strike out half the ban list and say “first five mulligans are free”, and we would still be playing it because it’s a fun game.
What I can safely say is that if you are willing to go to 5 strictly to find Sol Ring or Mana Crypt, the "First-Free London" mulligan rule is more likely to find them (44.6%) than the old First-Free mulligan (40.8%), Partial Paris (33.2%), or even First-Free Partial Paris (44.3%). And now, your resulting 5-card hand also has a good chance of being decent in its own right since you basically get a 0-mana Faithless Looting tacked on.
Aren't you basing these numbers of a wrong assumption? Maybe other people are different but I've never mulliganed for Sol Ring. I mulligan for a solid hand that does things vs the table. "More likely to find card X when aggressively mulling for it" doesn't seem that descriptive of the quality of a mulliganing system.
Especially in 'casual' formats like EDH, easing decisions like mulligans (which are not the fun part of the game) should be emphasised. Complexity and difficult decisions should be done in the fun part of the game (i.e. after the first player's untap step).
I like mullganing :c It's fun trying to predict how useful a 7-card hand will be against a somewhat known table.
The London mulligan seems both fair and good for eliminating non-games, but it's extremely not ergonomic. Imagine a mulligan to 5. You shuffle your deck and consider whether the hand is keepable like any other system. If it isn't, you shuffle all over again, and then have to deliberate on whether any of the 7 possible 6-card hands are keepable. If they aren't, you shuffle completely a third time so that you can deliberate on whether any of the 21 possible 5-card hands are keepable. And now that you've finally found one you like, you decide which order to put the other two cards on the bottom of your library. And then the final step is conceding and going home because your hands and brain are worn out from 3 full randomizations and 30 micro-decisions and you no longer feel like playing a high effort game like magic and would rather just watch Netflix for 4 hours straight until you pass out on the couch.
Most people I've played with use that rule. I use it myself whenever I play.
Also most of those decisions are non-decisions. If anything I've felt it's easier & faster to choose whether to mulligan with London than Vancouver when you have to make decisions. Deciding what 2 cards I'll ship out of four relevant one's is easier than deciding whether or not to keep a shaky 6-card hand or go down to five. I also think the slightly more added mulligan time in the long run (assuming it's longer, I haven't experienced it being longer) won't be longer to the time spent playing non-games with vancouver mulligan.
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():
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UG Arixmethes Combo UGR Wanderer UGB Tasigur Control URB Jeleva Storm RW Gisela Control
What I can safely say is that if you are willing to go to 5 strictly to find Sol Ring or Mana Crypt, the "First-Free London" mulligan rule is more likely to find them (44.6%) than the old First-Free mulligan (40.8%), Partial Paris (33.2%), or even First-Free Partial Paris (44.3%). And now, your resulting 5-card hand also has a good chance of being decent in its own right since you basically get a 0-mana Faithless Looting tacked on.
Aren't you basing these numbers of a wrong assumption? Maybe other people are different but I've never mulliganed for Sol Ring. I mulligan for a solid hand that does things vs the table. "More likely to find card X when aggressively mulling for it" doesn't seem that descriptive of the quality of a mulliganing system.
Well part of the problem is that the goalposts for such discussions tend to shift. When Partial Paris was relatively new, first the main point of contention was that you could more easily piece together 2-card combos (true, but impractical). Then it was that certain “problematic” cards would show up more often because you didn’t shuffle between hands (not true). Then it was that hands already containing those certain cards would be higher quality (sometimes true).
The subject is too deep and the rulesets too numerous to calculate everything, and so I started with specific complaints/truth claims that were circulating on the forums at the time. I hope you understand.
But either way, I expect more Sol Ring games to happen organically, even if we aren’t consciously digging for it:
- The presence of Sol Ring has a strong correlation with a hand’s “keepability”
- Mulligans are more likely to occur now that they are more forgiving
- Given that a player mulligans, they will see more cards than than in other systems
I don’t feel strongly about it either way, I just find the subject interesting, and I do what I can to help us all understand it better.
What I can safely say is that if you are willing to go to 5 strictly to find Sol Ring or Mana Crypt, the "First-Free London" mulligan rule is more likely to find them (44.6%) than the old First-Free mulligan (40.8%), Partial Paris (33.2%), or even First-Free Partial Paris (44.3%). And now, your resulting 5-card hand also has a good chance of being decent in its own right since you basically get a 0-mana Faithless Looting tacked on.
Aren't you basing these numbers of a wrong assumption? Maybe other people are different but I've never mulliganed for Sol Ring. I mulligan for a solid hand that does things vs the table. "More likely to find card X when aggressively mulling for it" doesn't seem that descriptive of the quality of a mulliganing system.
Well part of the problem is that the goalposts for such discussions tend to shift. When Partial Paris was relatively new, first the main point of contention was that you could more easily piece together 2-card combos (true, but impractical). Then it was that certain “problematic” cards would show up more often because you didn’t shuffle between hands (not true). Then it was that hands already containing those certain cards would be higher quality (sometimes true).
The subject is too deep and the rulesets too numerous to calculate everything, and so I started with specific complaints/truth claims that were circulating on the forums at the time. I hope you understand.
But either way, I expect more Sol Ring games to happen organically, even if we aren’t consciously digging for it:
- The presence of Sol Ring has a strong correlation with a hand’s “keepability”
- Mulligans are more likely to occur now that they are more forgiving
- Given that a player mulligans, they will see more cards than than in other systems
I don’t feel strongly about it either way, I just find the subject interesting, and I do what I can to help us all understand it better.
The context makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I agree that we'll see more Sol Rings since hands with Sol Ring simply are more keepable.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
UG Arixmethes Combo UGR Wanderer UGB Tasigur Control URB Jeleva Storm RW Gisela Control
My Zirilan of the Claw deck loves this I can now just mulligan to find lands and ramp and not worry about getting my best dragons trapped in hand. I was often just mulling to 4 just to find lands and ramp under the current system.
I expect we will have a lot less dead games now, but I think combo decks might get a lot more problematic, but combo abuse can be solved by individual groups
answers to combos will be even easier to find by mull combo decks will find their combo pieces.
It's what's been happening in legacy, and it's what's going to happen in EDH too. The increase in combo was the first thing everyone thought too. But answers are always easier to find.
It is the nature of this format that the threats are diverse and low cost moneywise while the efficient all-purpose answers are really expensive you have add them to all your decks regardless of theme plus their use in other formats. More causal playgroups just don't invest in more answers when it's so much more bang for your buck to get more threats that then leads to an arms race to combos (and there are so many low-cost combos). If you reduce the inherent randomness in the format when people are playing with threat dense but answer light decks you will run into problems. However, that is something that individual groups are going to have to work through if too many of their games are being ruined by too early combos.
My Zirilan of the Claw deck loves this I can now just mulligan to find lands and ramp and not worry about getting my best dragons trapped in hand. I was often just mulling to 4 just to find lands and ramp under the current system.
I expect we will have a lot less dead games now, but I think combo decks might get a lot more problematic, but combo abuse can be solved by individual groups
answers to combos will be even easier to find by mull combo decks will find their combo pieces.
It's what's been happening in legacy, and it's what's going to happen in EDH too. The increase in combo was the first thing everyone thought too. But answers are always easier to find.
It is the nature of this format that the threats are diverse and low cost moneywise while the efficient all-purpose answers are really expensive you have add them to all your decks regardless of theme plus their use in other formats. More causal playgroups just don't invest in more answers when it's so much more bang for your buck to get more threats that then leads to an arms race to combos (and there are so many low-cost combos). If you reduce the inherent randomness in the format when people are playing with threat dense but answer light decks you will run into problems. However, that is something that individual groups are going to have to work through if too many of their games are being ruined by too early combos.
consider yourself lucky that you face a variety of problems! I usually end up seeing the same threats over and over (Gx ramp to infinity).
Somewhat on-topic, i was forced to mull an opener with gemstone caverns 'cuz i managed to win the die roll in a 5-player pod. Sometimes, even with all the mulliganing and all that, it STILL comes back to bite me.
And just like that, the dream was gone.
I guess one important metric is that ALL players get to do this.
in other words, combo finds their combos faster, but control finds their answers too. In that way, I don't think the numbers of finding turn 1 sol ring is all that relevant, because it also applies to each other player. So if player A gets sol ring without mulls, players B and C could find sol rings in their openers too but with a smaller hand. That sounds fine to me.
Also, I'm not sure how to quantify this, but the 'cost' of mulling in the other methods is 'higher' than that of london. this means that players are MORE likely to keep bad/unplayable hands. if i have a starting hand with 3 lands and 4 cmc>5 cards, i can mull that, knowing that i get to pick up 6 of the next 7 cards. With the other mulligan rules, it's a lot more 'costly' to do so, which means that more players are more likely to keep that bad hand. This leads to a higher chance of more players leading turn 1 sol ring (since players are more likely to ship dodgy hands).
Especially in 'casual' formats like EDH, easing decisions like mulligans (which are not the fun part of the game) should be emphasised. Complexity and difficult decisions should be done in the fun part of the game (i.e. after the first player's untap step).
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
I expect we will have a lot less dead games now, but I think combo decks might get a lot more problematic, but combo abuse can be solved by individual groups
Pioneer:UR Pheonix
Modern:U Mono U Tron
EDH
GB Glissa, the traitor: Army of Cans
UW Dragonlord Ojutai: Dragonlord NOjutai
UWGDerevi, Empyrial Tactician "you cannot fight the storm"
R Zirilan of the claw. The solution to every problem is dragons
UB Etrata, the Silencer Cloning assassination
Peasant cube: Cards I own
I feel exactly how I fee about this as well.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
answers to combos will be even easier to find by mull combo decks will find their combo pieces.
It's what's been happening in legacy, and it's what's going to happen in EDH too. The increase in combo was the first thing everyone thought too. But answers are always easier to find.
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom
I am doubtful it will have the same balancing effect as Legacy, though. EDH doesn’t have sideboards for one, but more importantly I just don’t see people aggressively tossing cards to dig for efficient answers vs. digging for something proactive like their own ramp, outside of cEDH. At least the multiplayer aspect will help with archenemy scenarios, as always.
I’m not sure why you think I’m being alarmist. EDH is pretty robust and would survive any number of suboptimal rules changes. You could strike out half the ban list and say “first five mulligans are free”, and we would still be playing it because it’s a fun game.
Draft my Mono-Blue Cube!
lichess.org | chess.com
Aren't you basing these numbers of a wrong assumption? Maybe other people are different but I've never mulliganed for Sol Ring. I mulligan for a solid hand that does things vs the table. "More likely to find card X when aggressively mulling for it" doesn't seem that descriptive of the quality of a mulliganing system.
I like mullganing :c It's fun trying to predict how useful a 7-card hand will be against a somewhat known table.
Most people I've played with use that rule. I use it myself whenever I play.
Also most of those decisions are non-decisions. If anything I've felt it's easier & faster to choose whether to mulligan with London than Vancouver when you have to make decisions. Deciding what 2 cards I'll ship out of four relevant one's is easier than deciding whether or not to keep a shaky 6-card hand or go down to five. I also think the slightly more added mulligan time in the long run (assuming it's longer, I haven't experienced it being longer) won't be longer to the time spent playing non-games with vancouver mulligan.
UGR Wanderer
UGB Tasigur Control
URB Jeleva Storm
RW Gisela Control
---
Current Commanders: Derevi, Empyrial Tactician (coming soon) | [Primer] Sedris, the Traitor King | Maelstrom Wanderer | Najeela, the Blade Blossom | Yuriko, the Tiger's Shadow
---
Retired Commanders: [Primer] Jenara, Asura of War | [Primer] Ghave, Guru of Spores | Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury | Saskia the Unyielding | Sydri, Galvanic Genius
The subject is too deep and the rulesets too numerous to calculate everything, and so I started with specific complaints/truth claims that were circulating on the forums at the time. I hope you understand.
But either way, I expect more Sol Ring games to happen organically, even if we aren’t consciously digging for it:
- The presence of Sol Ring has a strong correlation with a hand’s “keepability”
- Mulligans are more likely to occur now that they are more forgiving
- Given that a player mulligans, they will see more cards than than in other systems
I don’t feel strongly about it either way, I just find the subject interesting, and I do what I can to help us all understand it better.
Draft my Mono-Blue Cube!
lichess.org | chess.com
The context makes a lot of sense, thanks!
I agree that we'll see more Sol Rings since hands with Sol Ring simply are more keepable.
UGR Wanderer
UGB Tasigur Control
URB Jeleva Storm
RW Gisela Control
Leylines and other “opening hand” cards and cheap mana rocks is what’s probably gonna be better despite cards like grenzo
I hope they allow it maybe the store I play at will allow it
It is the nature of this format that the threats are diverse and low cost moneywise while the efficient all-purpose answers are really expensive you have add them to all your decks regardless of theme plus their use in other formats. More causal playgroups just don't invest in more answers when it's so much more bang for your buck to get more threats that then leads to an arms race to combos (and there are so many low-cost combos). If you reduce the inherent randomness in the format when people are playing with threat dense but answer light decks you will run into problems. However, that is something that individual groups are going to have to work through if too many of their games are being ruined by too early combos.
Pioneer:UR Pheonix
Modern:U Mono U Tron
EDH
GB Glissa, the traitor: Army of Cans
UW Dragonlord Ojutai: Dragonlord NOjutai
UWGDerevi, Empyrial Tactician "you cannot fight the storm"
R Zirilan of the claw. The solution to every problem is dragons
UB Etrata, the Silencer Cloning assassination
Peasant cube: Cards I own
consider yourself lucky that you face a variety of problems! I usually end up seeing the same threats over and over (Gx ramp to infinity).
Somewhat on-topic, i was forced to mull an opener with gemstone caverns 'cuz i managed to win the die roll in a 5-player pod. Sometimes, even with all the mulliganing and all that, it STILL comes back to bite me.
And just like that, the dream was gone.
Legacy - Solidarity - mono U aggro - burn - Imperial Painter - Strawberry Shortcake - Bluuzards - bom