I saw a perfect example of poor decisions being written off as variance on Twitch this weekend. The streamer kept a two-lander on the play that was very strong if they ever hit three lands. They proceeded to brick on lands for 5 turns and lose the game. Naturally, the saltometer was sky high as they ripped on variance and the MTGO shuffler. All I could ask was, why the hell didn't this player mull that hand?? They knew they had zero cantrips to increase velocity, and they knew most of their bombs required three mana or more. With just 20ish lands left in their deck, they had around a 40% or so chance of drawing that land each turn, and only around a 60% cumulative chance of hurting it by T4 or so. The bad deckbuilding decision of running that curve with no consistency tools and that land count, and THEN not mulling, was not variance at work.
Luck plays a larger role in games between decks with closer matchups, and between players of closer skill.
The outcome of a match is influenced by a few factors, the key ones being
Difference in play skill
Specific deck strengths and weaknesses
Desirability of probability-based outcomes
I don't think it's clear that all games and matchups are influenced uniformly by these factors. What is clear is that skill is a relative measurement, and can be removed from the equation when it is equal.
I'd like to suggest that players who believe that luck plays a strong role in their games frequently play matches with low skill separation and small deck/match-specific edges. This would give the appearance of a large role for luck to play, when it really the marginalization of the other factors at play
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I saw a perfect example of poor decisions being written off as variance on Twitch this weekend. The streamer kept a two-lander on the play that was very strong if they ever hit three lands. They proceeded to brick on lands for 5 turns and lose the game. Naturally, the saltometer was sky high as they ripped on variance and the MTGO shuffler. All I could ask was, why the hell didn't this player mull that hand?? They knew they had zero cantrips to increase velocity, and they knew most of their bombs required three mana or more. With just 20ish lands left in their deck, they had around a 40% or so chance of drawing that land each turn, and only around a 60% cumulative chance of hurting it by T4 or so. The bad deckbuilding decision of running that curve with no consistency tools and that land count, and THEN not mulling, was not variance at work.
53 Cards, 3 draws, and 20 lands left in the deck comes out to over 76%. You just said you would love for this game to only be 25% luck, and this guy went all in at 24%.
Just to be clear, are you arguing that it is a reasonable position to go all in on a 75% chance, and then get angry when you miss? Missing being essentially a loss makes going all-in there fairly loose. How are you going to go X-1 or X-2 when you take 75% chances with payoffs of being able to play the game at all, and costs of losing on the spot?
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Just to be clear, are you arguing that it is a reasonable position to go all in on a 75% chance, and then get angry when you miss? Missing being essentially a loss makes going all-in there fairly loose. How are you going to go 6-1 when you take 75% chances?
Well, the expected value of 75% when you play 14-21 games is to lose anywhere from 3.75 to 5.25 individual games. So if you are closer to 14 you're about two games ahead of the value, and if you're closer to 21 you end up being over 3 games behind the value.
The point is that keeping the hand can never win the game on the spot, but it can lose the game on the spot. The difference in the value of the outcomes makes the 75% chance of a positive outcome an undesirable gamble since your expected value is very low compared to taking a mull and seeing if you can get a playable hand. 75% sounds nice, but when you're gambling "stay alive or die", 75% seems kinda low.
The point is that keeping the hand can never win the game on the spot, but it can lose the game on the spot. The difference in the value of the outcomes makes the 75% chance of a positive outcome an undesirable gamble since your value proposition sum is very low compared to taking a mull and seeing if you can get a playable hand. 75% sounds nice, but when you're gambling "stay alive or die", 75% seems kinda low.
The odds of a 22 land deck getting the 3 lands it wanted with that opening seven in its opening six is 38%. So the choices are: 76% draw land 3 on schedule, and a 71% chance (once factoring in the 3 draws grace-period the other hand got) on a mulligan with no guarantee on the rest of the hand's content.
The first mulligan gives you an equal number of card views due to the scry. The first mull is free from a card selection standpoint. I think Kenshin's example is spot on, but not a point I'm going to belabour further.
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Not to shame anyone, but look up GP Vegas results for random pros
I found one.
Gerry T
4-X
One of the best players in the world right now, one of the people that put shadow on the map, he had 2 byes, maybe a 3rd, not sure if he's plat
I'm assuming he didn't play another pro, so he lost 4, maybe 5 matches due to pure luck, that's over 50% of the games he played in a day. Those arguing the game/format is mostly skill need to observe larger data sets to notice how often "ringers" scrub out of events and they'll see that ringers typically just play way more events so are more likely to have a hot streak.
Not to shame anyone, but look up GP Vegas results for random pros
I found one.
Gerry T
4-X
One of the best players in the world right now, one of the people that put shadow on the map, he had 2 byes, maybe a 3rd, not sure if he's plat
I'm assuming he didn't play another pro, so he lost 4, maybe 5 matches due to pure luck, that's over 50% of the games he played in a day. Those arguing the game/format is mostly skill need to observe larger data sets to notice how often "ringers" scrub out of events and they'll see that ringers typically just play way more events so are more likely to have a hot streak.
So your argument at the end of your post is that people need to look at larger data sets, and your evidence is one singe player's most recent tournament? Are you not able to see the inherent flaw in logic there?
To use another example, Stephen Curry in the NBA shoots 50% from the 3-point line over a full season. We can all agree that is in fact a skill that he has developed, correct? And yet he has games where he shoots 2 for 11 (less than 20%). Those games aren't evidence that he is lucky the rest of the time. They are evidence that in competition, sometimes things don't go your way. Sometimes the other guy disrupts you and you miss.
Playing into or around cards aren't luck either. Case in point, my opponent does a lot of draw go stuff and casts and Elesh Norn. On my turn, I fire off a Slaughter Games naming Gifts Ungiven which my opponent didn't show me in game 1. I proceed to thumb through his deck and remove all 4 copies. As I was doing so, he asked me if I saw his deck before we started playing, to which I replied 'You're playing Elesh Norn.' It was not a 'lucky' guess.
That's cool and all, but the "luck" factor isn't your ability to guess correctly, it's whether or not your opponent actually has what you think he has. I have been Slaughter Games'd for some wildly irrelevant stuff (and total misses) when I was in my URx brewing phase. Based on the cards my opponent had seen, they usually made exactly the right call in what to name, but based on the luck of being matched up with me, instead of a more recognizable decklist, their SG result ranged from weak to whiff. Sometimes, even the "right" call is still wrong, and it's wrong because of luck.
Your example doesn't make a lot of sense. If your deck is way outside the norm, that isn't unlucky for your opponent, it's a good strategic play by you so long as your brew isn't total garbage that folds to commonly played decks.
All that said, I think your view on luck and Magic are ridiculously overblown. There is no way the data backs you up. The reason Owen Turtenwald won back to back GPs and made 7 top 8s in one year over 4 different formats was not because he was really lucky. It's because he was/is the best player in the world. If you or I played 10 matches against Owen where our decklist was favored 65/35, he would beat us 7 out of 10 times.
He also won back to back GPs because both of those GPs were not Modern. If they were Modern, I wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
Not to shame anyone, but look up GP Vegas results for random pros
I found one.
Gerry T
4-X
One of the best players in the world right now, one of the people that put shadow on the map, he had 2 byes, maybe a 3rd, not sure if he's plat
I'm assuming he didn't play another pro, so he lost 4, maybe 5 matches due to pure luck, that's over 50% of the games he played in a day. Those arguing the game/format is mostly skill need to observe larger data sets to notice how often "ringers" scrub out of events and they'll see that ringers typically just play way more events so are more likely to have a hot streak.
He lost 4-5 matches due to pure luck? How did you come to this conclusion? How do you know he wasn't outplayed?
A great player scrubbing out is not evidence that the game is mostly luck. That we consider him a great player in the first place is not due to him having a 'hot streak' every once in a while, but due to his performance over several hundred (or even thousand) matches, where he consistently wins more than he loses, which is itself indicative of the game being more skill-based than luck-based.
It's really hard to talk about this topic with some of the understanding of probability we see in this thread. I forget the name of this probabilistic fallacy, but it's the idea that people view anything over 50% as "certain," and if it doesn't happen, they blame bad luck. This is exactly what happens when you don't draw 3 lands in your opening hand, keep the hand, and then get mad when you don't draw land #3 over the next few turns; you viewed that draw as certain when it wasn't. The errors here are many; playing decks with no cantrips or filter, playing inadequate mana sources, making bad mulligans, choosing decks that mulligan poorly, etc. But believing in the certainty of that land draw is the biggest math error here.
The Curry example is another illustration of bad probability comprehension. When Curry goes 2-11 for threes in two games in a row, that doesn't mean his overall 50% three point rate has dropped. That's just two bad games, which will probably be offset by two good games, and will eventually all average to 50% over a huge population of games. Also, Curry's 50% rate also doesn't mean the missed 50% of shots are due to bad luck. It means that's a hard shot he has made easier with skill but sometimes even the best miss.
Honestly, I fully believe a huge degree of these misunderstandings arises from players overestimating their own skill and blaming luck for their losses. It's probably a human instinct, it's definitely a gamer instinct, and it's almost always an inaccurate instinct that doesn't play out in the numbers.
Playing into or around cards aren't luck either. Case in point, my opponent does a lot of draw go stuff and casts and Elesh Norn. On my turn, I fire off a Slaughter Games naming Gifts Ungiven which my opponent didn't show me in game 1. I proceed to thumb through his deck and remove all 4 copies. As I was doing so, he asked me if I saw his deck before we started playing, to which I replied 'You're playing Elesh Norn.' It was not a 'lucky' guess.
That's cool and all, but the "luck" factor isn't your ability to guess correctly, it's whether or not your opponent actually has what you think he has. I have been Slaughter Games'd for some wildly irrelevant stuff (and total misses) when I was in my URx brewing phase. Based on the cards my opponent had seen, they usually made exactly the right call in what to name, but based on the luck of being matched up with me, instead of a more recognizable decklist, their SG result ranged from weak to whiff. Sometimes, even the "right" call is still wrong, and it's wrong because of luck.
Your example doesn't make a lot of sense. If your deck is way outside the norm, that isn't unlucky for your opponent, it's a good strategic play by you so long as your brew isn't total garbage that folds to commonly played decks.
All that said, I think your view on luck and Magic are ridiculously overblown. There is no way the data backs you up. The reason Owen Turtenwald won back to back GPs and made 7 top 8s in one year over 4 different formats was not because he was really lucky. It's because he was/is the best player in the world. If you or I played 10 matches against Owen where our decklist was favored 65/35, he would beat us 7 out of 10 times.
He also won back to back GPs because both of those GPs were not Modern. If they were Modern, I wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
So him finishing 28th out of 3,264 GP Las Vegas modern entrants (top 1% of the field) and came in second at the team Modern GP means nothing because he didn't win?
How can you guys talk about GP finishes, but completely dismiss the hugely skewing effect of having 3 byes (3 free wins) in the part of the tournament where MU-luck is at its highest? That's what I was talking about earlier. Ktkenshin does not put luck into any contexts at all that are relevant to magic (e.g tournaments). Yes, there is a lot of skill in Magic, and yes, most people tend to overestimate luck, but let's not act like making T32 in huge 2,000+ tournaments doesn't have a significant luck factor. This would be borne out more if there were no byes at GP's. You'd see the top players all doing a lot worse (e.g. less cashes, less Top 8's, less Day 2's, etc.) because there is so much variance in this format. In a format like Legacy player skill determines a much higher % of games as MU's between T1/T2 decks tend to have more parity and relevant decision-making points than in modern.
Now, I think the big take away here and is evident with most pros is that the biggest area of skill that lesser players are completely garbage at is 1) Deck selection (there's a reason the best players in the world almost always play the best decks or try to play next-level deck) 2) not SB'ing for expected Day 2 meta primarily/tweak best deck to be better in mirror, etc. The best example is probably Brad Nelson. He's a master at 1 and 2 in formats like Standard and as such he does much better. 1 and 2 are NOT play skill. People overrate how much play skill effects the average game of magic imho. If you aren't making truly egregious plays and are competent SB'ing, 1 and 2 has more to do with you winning, than play skill. It's the "unseen" part of the tournament. It doesn't jump out to you when watching any individual game of magic, so it doesn't get as much focus, when in fact, it should get MORE focus than play skill stuff. It's the most criminally underrated part of Magic and magic writing. There are a million more articles about plays and lines, etc., but far less about meta, deck selection, prepping SB for Day 2 metas (the goal is to win), deck tuning, etc.
It's why I'm much more partial to Frank Karsten as being one of the best writers in Magic because his articles on mana and land bases (as well as people like Zvi's perspective on mana/deckbuilding) is of such a greater significance than any article about play skill/lines/etc. for increasing win %. The point I'm trying to make is that most of the skill found in Magic happens before you even sit down at the table. Too many people underappreciate this. There is also the flipside of people like Ktkenshin who over-value how much play skill there is in Magic or how much it effects the average game.
In a 15 round tournament with 25% variance, with NO BYES, even if you're 50% better than everyone requiring 13-2 and that first loss later in the tournament the percent of times you're expected to T8 or T32 is extremely low (hell even cash). Without byes the EV for even the best player in the world to attend GP's is negative. It's why WoTC awards 2 and 3 byes to the best players in the world to make it worthwhile for them to go to GP's. In context, there's too much variance/luck in Modern for GP-level events to make it monetarily reasonable (not making a fun/entertainment argument here - that's subjective and for each person to decide themselves) for most players to go, and without byes that would be true even for the best player in the world.
As just one anecdotal example. Everyone knows that Christian Calcano is in the top 1% of players in the world, but it even took him YEARS and YEARS and over 60 PTQ's to get on the pro tour and once on he just now after playing in 26 of them T8'ed.
Honestly, it'd be better for the game to cap GP attendance @ 1350 and run dual GP's side by side in the same venue. Yes, it's going to cost WoTC more, but GP EV is extremely terrible. I don't think this will ever happen because more people value the entertainment of a GP than the EV calculation. SCG has a much better structure for magic imho.
I suppose my argument is - there is too much variance/luck in magic for GP/Premier level events as they're currently structured to have the best players consistently do well enough (and this is further evidenced by the 2 and 3 byes which massively decrease the variance associated with these tournaments - really, it's an enormous unfair advantage). In any one game of Magic I think the skill/luck factor is probably appropriately balanced to maintain the "fun" factor and to give an amateur the sense that he has a chance to beat a pro, but the cumulative factor is too high with the structure of Magic tournaments. Kenshin never addressed these points that I made and just continued to reiterate his own. The point of criticism is to address the points made by the person you're penning your rejoinder to.
Now, I think the big take away here and is evident with most pros is that the biggest area of skill that lesser players are completely garbage at is 1) Deck selection (there's a reason the best players in the world almost always play the best decks or try to play next-level deck) 2) not SB'ing for expected Day 2 meta primarily/tweak best deck to be better in mirror, etc.
I'd like to add specifically to this, in that while it's true many people may be bad at deck selection, it's also incredibly difficult for the average player to quickly and efficiently swap between thousand dollar decks week to week (or even month to month), especially if there is little to no overlap between whatever they have and a good choice (or the "right" choice) for any given event. Therefore the other elements of SB skill and positive luck have to be much more prominent in order to do well, especially at a large event.
I actually saw what you described your post first hand at Vegas, and was exactly why I'm glad I didn't bother with the main event. (Instead, I got autographs from about 30+ pros, commentators, content creators, artists, and influential people while playing tons of side events).
I had a different response typed up but I'm just going to leave this here so we can actually talk about numbers and people can stop theorizing and citing personal and biased examples.
I've said this numerous times but I'll say it again: everyone here agrees that luck plays a role in MTG and all MTG formats. We just disagree about the extent to which that is true. The data is just waiting for people to look at, but no one really wants to. They want to just speculate about their theories and cite personal examples.
Here are some actual numbers because no one else wants to do this work.
I compared the 50 players with the highest format win percentages in Legacy and Modern, seeing where they ranked on a list of 150 players with the highest MTG-wide win percentages. Of those top 150 winningest players, 16 appeared in the Legacy top 50. For Modern, 18 of that top 150 appeared in the Modern top 50. This means that if we look at the winningest 150 players in the game, there is no statistical difference between how many appear in the bracket of top 50 winningest Modern players vs. the bracket of top 50 winningest Legacy players.
Taking it a step further, I checked the overall win percentage across MTG for all of those top 50 players in both Modern and Legacy, averaging the final results. In the end, the average MTG-wide win rate of a top 50 Legacy player is 63%. The average MTG-wide win percentage of a top 50 Modern player is 61%. This is a statistically significant difference, so it is possible that there is something about Legacy that allows better players to win 2% more in Legacy than in Modern.
I took this yet another step further and only looked at top 50 Modern/Legacy players who were also top 150 overall players. In essence, we’re narrowing down the Modern and Legacy lists only to big name top pros. This removes many players who just don’t have a lot of events in their portfolio, and those who aren’t in that elite top 150 overall subset. Looking at those top players (16 in Legacy, 18 in Modern), we find their average MTG-wide win % is identical: 63.8%. This, despite there being only two elite top 150 players overlapping in the Modern and Legacy subsets (BBD and Royce Walter). But their win rates within those formats are not identical. In Legacy, those players averaged a 71.8% win rate. In Modern, they averaged a 68% win rate. This magnifies the number above, suggesting that for top players, there’s something about Modern which is translating to a 3.8% lower win rate.
When we look at those players who aren’t top 150, there is a bigger difference between the Modern and Legacy win-rates. In Legacy, it’s 70.4%. In Modern, it’s 67.3%. So for the non-pro players, Modern is also affecting win rates.
If we assume the sample is big enough, and if we assume that skill should generally average out to decide matchups over many datapoints, we can conclude that there’s something about Modern which accounts for between a 2% and 4% drop in your win rate that would otherwise be expected in Legacy. I believe this is the variance that people cite as being present in Modern and not in Legacy, but I don’t actually know if variance causes it. I don't know what causes it. I just know it’s a real difference. And, again, it doesn’t actually affect how many top players appear at the top in Modern events.
I saw a perfect example of poor decisions being written off as variance on Twitch this weekend. The streamer kept a two-lander on the play that was very strong if they ever hit three lands. They proceeded to brick on lands for 5 turns and lose the game. Naturally, the saltometer was sky high as they ripped on variance and the MTGO shuffler. All I could ask was, why the hell didn't this player mull that hand?? They knew they had zero cantrips to increase velocity, and they knew most of their bombs required three mana or more. With just 20ish lands left in their deck, they had around a 40% or so chance of drawing that land each turn, and only around a 60% cumulative chance of hurting it by T4 or so. The bad deckbuilding decision of running that curve with no consistency tools and that land count, and THEN not mulling, was not variance at work.
Say whhhhaaaa???
Monday morning QB skills aside, I think its perfectly reasonable to keep a 2 lander and assume the deck will pay out a 3rd land by turn 4. The odds are well in my favor of that happening. No it's not a lock, but it's perfectly fine to call the 5 bricks in a row variance imo.
I saw a perfect example of poor decisions being written off as variance on Twitch this weekend. The streamer kept a two-lander on the play that was very strong if they ever hit three lands. They proceeded to brick on lands for 5 turns and lose the game. Naturally, the saltometer was sky high as they ripped on variance and the MTGO shuffler. All I could ask was, why the hell didn't this player mull that hand?? They knew they had zero cantrips to increase velocity, and they knew most of their bombs required three mana or more. With just 20ish lands left in their deck, they had around a 40% or so chance of drawing that land each turn, and only around a 60% cumulative chance of hurting it by T4 or so. The bad deckbuilding decision of running that curve with no consistency tools and that land count, and THEN not mulling, was not variance at work.
Say whhhhaaaa???
Monday morning QB skills aside, I think its perfectly reasonable to keep a 2 lander and assume the deck will pay out a 3rd land by turn 4. The odds are well in my favor of that happening. No it's not a lock, but it's perfectly fine to call the 5 bricks in a row variance imo.
A hand full of gas and two lands is usually a good keep, but this illustrates a bigger issue: there is not always a perfect and correct play, especially for very borderline calls made in the moment. There are too many unknown variables to make the perfect and correct decision at every possible opportunity. Nearly everything is a calculated guess based on the probability of something happening, and most of the time those are just estimates made on the fly. Higher skill may lead to better estimates and yes, over the aggregate of tons of games, you would see a smoothing out where this small difference comes in. But events aren't won on averages, they're won on individual, sequential match wins; matches that independently have huge amounts of luck and variance in very significant forms: deck matchup, your draws, your opponents draws, sideboard relevance, and being on the play/draw.
The reason why it's hard to quantitatively rate luck vs skill is that there are too many decision trees state whether or not someone made the best choice, especially when working in real time and with missing information. The other is that the two things are completely intertwined and inseparable. Whatever calculated decision you make doesn't affect what the opponent does or doesn't have in hand/draw. Your choice of what to do showcases skill (what are the odds of X/Y/Z outcome), but the result (whether or not they "have it" or "draw it") is based entirely in luck (assuming you haven't seen their hand, of course).
Firstly yes I agree it would be labour intensive. When it comes to measuring the complexities your right - no it would not. It would only indicate if skill in that particular format tested was significant or not. That said split each sample group into playing a poor constructed deck and a well constructed deck could also be used to calculate significance of deck construction. My instinct tell me that this would be highly important primarily driven by the business model of wotc to sell cards. I tend to think if you could buy a set of cards from 1999 and still be a world beater and not need to update cards from new sets then their business model is pretty bad..To be super annoying because a) I am attempting to change this thread direction and b) I am going to talk about rule changes. If one rule was to be changed or implemented to reduce the effect of luck what would anyone pick. My thought was a 3 card draw when on two cards or less in hand. Pick one card, two get put on bottom of deck. Any other crazy ideas out there.
A hand full of gas and two lands is usually a good keep, but this illustrates a bigger issue: there is not always a perfect and correct play, especially for very borderline calls made in the moment. There are too many unknown variables to make the perfect and correct decision at every possible opportunity. Nearly everything is a calculated guess based on the probability of something happening, and most of the time those are just estimates made on the fly. Higher skill may lead to better estimates and yes, over the aggregate of tons of games, you would see a smoothing out where this small difference comes in. But events aren't won on averages, they're won on individual, sequential match wins; matches that independently have huge amounts of luck and variance in very significant forms: deck matchup, your draws, your opponents draws, sideboard relevance, and being on the play/draw.
So why do we see the same top players winning or topping the same events over and over? Or, to cite my analysis earlier, why is it that the top 50 Legacy and top 50 Modern players have the same number of overall top 150 players in their pools? If Modern was as luck-intensive as you allege, we would expect to see far fewer pros in the top 50 Moderners. Instead, we see actually more than in Legacy: 18 vs. 16.
No one disagrees that all those luck elements are present in Magic and Modern. You are just dramatically overstating the effect they have in real games. If we take Legacy as this sacred baseline of "skill matters," which everyone here seems comfortable doing because the grass is greener on the other side, than I'm stickinng with my above estimate: various factors equate to a 2%-4% drop in win rate in Modern. This could be variance. It could also mean there are so many matchups that people are punished for not knowing them all. It could also mean the format is less forgiving of errors.
I'm guessing it's a mix of reasons, which suggests that variance and luck in Modern don't account for the full 2%-4% and likely account for no more than 1%-2% of the overall drop.
The reason why it's hard to quantitatively rate luck vs skill is that there are too many decision trees state whether or not someone made the best choice, especially when working in real time and with missing information. The other is that the two things are completely intertwined and inseparable. Whatever calculated decision you make doesn't affect what the opponent does or doesn't have in hand/draw. Your choice of what to do showcases skill (what are the odds of X/Y/Z outcome), but the result (whether or not they "have it" or "draw it") is based entirely in luck (assuming you haven't seen their hand, of course).
I said this either in this thread or the State of Modern thread: people need to take their odds-calculations a step further. First of all, the odds of drawing a land by T4 are not good. You have a 37.7% chance of drawing land on T2, 38% on T3, 39% on T4, and 40% on T5. Cumulatively, that's about a 64% chance of drawing your land by T5. Those ain't great odds! They also aren't even close to certain. And yet, people in this thread and the streamer treated the 64% chance as a sure thing. That was their first mistake. If I'm playing UW Control and keep a similar land, I'd feel much more confident. I have 24 lands remaining in the deck, 4 SV, 4 Seas, and 2 Walls. Now my odds of just drawing a land, ignoring the cantrips, are 73% by T5. Still not great, but a little better. Add in the 10 cantrip effects, however, and now I'm feeling really good; I have an 88% chance to hit any of those cards by T3 and still be on curve. But even there, I wouldn't keep that hand unless the hand had some early presence, like a Path or a Leak; that way, even if I brick on a draw, I can still do stuff.
This leads to the second skill-based error: bad deck construction. People don't include cantrips or consistency tools and then blame variance for ***** draws. Of course you are more likely to get ***** draws when you don't include those cards. That's why Grixis DS is so damn good; it sees a ton of cards in just the first few turns. Or players aren't including enough lands based on their curve. Errors like these are skill-based decisions that players make early.
Finally, people don't weigh the consequence of keeping certain hands. What are my odds of winning with the two-lander if I brick on my lands? Very, very low. In most cases, my odds of winning off a mulligan into a playable 6 will be much better than my odds of keeping the hand. People stop their probability at "what are the odds I draw this card?" They need to extent it to "what are the odds of the game just ending on the spot if this hand doesn't materialize?" When you make decisions in the latter category, you open yourself to variance. And that's a decision, it's not just variance.
You have a 37.7% chance of drawing land on T2, 38% on T3, 39% on T4, and 40% on T5. Cumulatively, that's about a 64% chance of drawing your land by T5. Those ain't great odds!
Well, the odds become much better when you consider the cumulative chance is actually closer to 77%. I'm fairly sure that's better odds than you'd get on a mulligan, making the keep the correct choice.
So why do we see the same top players winning or topping the same events over and over? Or, to cite my analysis earlier, why is it that the top 50 Legacy and top 50 Modern players have the same number of overall top 150 players in their pools? If Modern was as luck-intensive as you allege, we would expect to see far fewer pros in the top 50 Moderners. Instead, we see actually more than in Legacy: 18 vs. 16.
Ha. Haha. Hahahhahhahhaha.
Buddy the reason we see the same top players over and over is because there is only a handful of people stupid enough to play MTG professionally. This isn't the NBA where there are millions of dollars to be made. This is closer to an organized basketball tournament at your local YMCA.
Do you really think the pros are substantially better than you are? I don't. I see pros making misplays on camera all the time. Ask yourself this, where does all the innovation come from? The community. If the pros were really the ones pushing the envelope we would see THEM coming up with new dcks and new strats, instead they just champion the strat they think has the best matchups for this current week and roll the dice.
I've been warning people about this for years. Pro's are not to be emulated. Their judgment and decision making abilities are highly in question before the tourney even starts.
If only we had a word to describe how this skill gap could be closed!
The outcome of a match is influenced by a few factors, the key ones being
I'd like to suggest that players who believe that luck plays a strong role in their games frequently play matches with low skill separation and small deck/match-specific edges. This would give the appearance of a large role for luck to play, when it really the marginalization of the other factors at play
KnightfallGWUR
Azorius Control UW
Burn RBG
53 Cards, 3 draws, and 20 lands left in the deck comes out to over 76%. You just said you would love for this game to only be 25% luck, and this guy went all in at 24%.
KnightfallGWUR
Azorius Control UW
Burn RBG
Well, the expected value of 75% when you play 14-21 games is to lose anywhere from 3.75 to 5.25 individual games. So if you are closer to 14 you're about two games ahead of the value, and if you're closer to 21 you end up being over 3 games behind the value.
KnightfallGWUR
Azorius Control UW
Burn RBG
The odds of a 22 land deck getting the 3 lands it wanted with that opening seven in its opening six is 38%. So the choices are: 76% draw land 3 on schedule, and a 71% chance (once factoring in the 3 draws grace-period the other hand got) on a mulligan with no guarantee on the rest of the hand's content.
KnightfallGWUR
Azorius Control UW
Burn RBG
I found one.
Gerry T
4-X
One of the best players in the world right now, one of the people that put shadow on the map, he had 2 byes, maybe a 3rd, not sure if he's plat
I'm assuming he didn't play another pro, so he lost 4, maybe 5 matches due to pure luck, that's over 50% of the games he played in a day. Those arguing the game/format is mostly skill need to observe larger data sets to notice how often "ringers" scrub out of events and they'll see that ringers typically just play way more events so are more likely to have a hot streak.
So your argument at the end of your post is that people need to look at larger data sets, and your evidence is one singe player's most recent tournament? Are you not able to see the inherent flaw in logic there?
To use another example, Stephen Curry in the NBA shoots 50% from the 3-point line over a full season. We can all agree that is in fact a skill that he has developed, correct? And yet he has games where he shoots 2 for 11 (less than 20%). Those games aren't evidence that he is lucky the rest of the time. They are evidence that in competition, sometimes things don't go your way. Sometimes the other guy disrupts you and you miss.
RBGLiving EndRBG
EDH
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BRXantchaRB
BGVarolzGB
URWZedruuWRU
He also won back to back GPs because both of those GPs were not Modern. If they were Modern, I wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
He lost 4-5 matches due to pure luck? How did you come to this conclusion? How do you know he wasn't outplayed?
A great player scrubbing out is not evidence that the game is mostly luck. That we consider him a great player in the first place is not due to him having a 'hot streak' every once in a while, but due to his performance over several hundred (or even thousand) matches, where he consistently wins more than he loses, which is itself indicative of the game being more skill-based than luck-based.
The Curry example is another illustration of bad probability comprehension. When Curry goes 2-11 for threes in two games in a row, that doesn't mean his overall 50% three point rate has dropped. That's just two bad games, which will probably be offset by two good games, and will eventually all average to 50% over a huge population of games. Also, Curry's 50% rate also doesn't mean the missed 50% of shots are due to bad luck. It means that's a hard shot he has made easier with skill but sometimes even the best miss.
Honestly, I fully believe a huge degree of these misunderstandings arises from players overestimating their own skill and blaming luck for their losses. It's probably a human instinct, it's definitely a gamer instinct, and it's almost always an inaccurate instinct that doesn't play out in the numbers.
So him finishing 28th out of 3,264 GP Las Vegas modern entrants (top 1% of the field) and came in second at the team Modern GP means nothing because he didn't win?
RBGLiving EndRBG
EDH
UFblthpU
BRXantchaRB
BGVarolzGB
URWZedruuWRU
Now, I think the big take away here and is evident with most pros is that the biggest area of skill that lesser players are completely garbage at is 1) Deck selection (there's a reason the best players in the world almost always play the best decks or try to play next-level deck) 2) not SB'ing for expected Day 2 meta primarily/tweak best deck to be better in mirror, etc. The best example is probably Brad Nelson. He's a master at 1 and 2 in formats like Standard and as such he does much better. 1 and 2 are NOT play skill. People overrate how much play skill effects the average game of magic imho. If you aren't making truly egregious plays and are competent SB'ing, 1 and 2 has more to do with you winning, than play skill. It's the "unseen" part of the tournament. It doesn't jump out to you when watching any individual game of magic, so it doesn't get as much focus, when in fact, it should get MORE focus than play skill stuff. It's the most criminally underrated part of Magic and magic writing. There are a million more articles about plays and lines, etc., but far less about meta, deck selection, prepping SB for Day 2 metas (the goal is to win), deck tuning, etc.
It's why I'm much more partial to Frank Karsten as being one of the best writers in Magic because his articles on mana and land bases (as well as people like Zvi's perspective on mana/deckbuilding) is of such a greater significance than any article about play skill/lines/etc. for increasing win %. The point I'm trying to make is that most of the skill found in Magic happens before you even sit down at the table. Too many people underappreciate this. There is also the flipside of people like Ktkenshin who over-value how much play skill there is in Magic or how much it effects the average game.
In a 15 round tournament with 25% variance, with NO BYES, even if you're 50% better than everyone requiring 13-2 and that first loss later in the tournament the percent of times you're expected to T8 or T32 is extremely low (hell even cash). Without byes the EV for even the best player in the world to attend GP's is negative. It's why WoTC awards 2 and 3 byes to the best players in the world to make it worthwhile for them to go to GP's. In context, there's too much variance/luck in Modern for GP-level events to make it monetarily reasonable (not making a fun/entertainment argument here - that's subjective and for each person to decide themselves) for most players to go, and without byes that would be true even for the best player in the world.
As just one anecdotal example. Everyone knows that Christian Calcano is in the top 1% of players in the world, but it even took him YEARS and YEARS and over 60 PTQ's to get on the pro tour and once on he just now after playing in 26 of them T8'ed.
Honestly, it'd be better for the game to cap GP attendance @ 1350 and run dual GP's side by side in the same venue. Yes, it's going to cost WoTC more, but GP EV is extremely terrible. I don't think this will ever happen because more people value the entertainment of a GP than the EV calculation. SCG has a much better structure for magic imho.
I suppose my argument is - there is too much variance/luck in magic for GP/Premier level events as they're currently structured to have the best players consistently do well enough (and this is further evidenced by the 2 and 3 byes which massively decrease the variance associated with these tournaments - really, it's an enormous unfair advantage). In any one game of Magic I think the skill/luck factor is probably appropriately balanced to maintain the "fun" factor and to give an amateur the sense that he has a chance to beat a pro, but the cumulative factor is too high with the structure of Magic tournaments. Kenshin never addressed these points that I made and just continued to reiterate his own. The point of criticism is to address the points made by the person you're penning your rejoinder to.
Whatever, I don't expect much to come of this.
I'd like to add specifically to this, in that while it's true many people may be bad at deck selection, it's also incredibly difficult for the average player to quickly and efficiently swap between thousand dollar decks week to week (or even month to month), especially if there is little to no overlap between whatever they have and a good choice (or the "right" choice) for any given event. Therefore the other elements of SB skill and positive luck have to be much more prominent in order to do well, especially at a large event.
I actually saw what you described your post first hand at Vegas, and was exactly why I'm glad I didn't bother with the main event. (Instead, I got autographs from about 30+ pros, commentators, content creators, artists, and influential people while playing tons of side events).
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
I've said this numerous times but I'll say it again: everyone here agrees that luck plays a role in MTG and all MTG formats. We just disagree about the extent to which that is true. The data is just waiting for people to look at, but no one really wants to. They want to just speculate about their theories and cite personal examples.
Here are some actual numbers because no one else wants to do this work.
I compared the 50 players with the highest format win percentages in Legacy and Modern, seeing where they ranked on a list of 150 players with the highest MTG-wide win percentages. Of those top 150 winningest players, 16 appeared in the Legacy top 50. For Modern, 18 of that top 150 appeared in the Modern top 50. This means that if we look at the winningest 150 players in the game, there is no statistical difference between how many appear in the bracket of top 50 winningest Modern players vs. the bracket of top 50 winningest Legacy players.
Taking it a step further, I checked the overall win percentage across MTG for all of those top 50 players in both Modern and Legacy, averaging the final results. In the end, the average MTG-wide win rate of a top 50 Legacy player is 63%. The average MTG-wide win percentage of a top 50 Modern player is 61%. This is a statistically significant difference, so it is possible that there is something about Legacy that allows better players to win 2% more in Legacy than in Modern.
I took this yet another step further and only looked at top 50 Modern/Legacy players who were also top 150 overall players. In essence, we’re narrowing down the Modern and Legacy lists only to big name top pros. This removes many players who just don’t have a lot of events in their portfolio, and those who aren’t in that elite top 150 overall subset. Looking at those top players (16 in Legacy, 18 in Modern), we find their average MTG-wide win % is identical: 63.8%. This, despite there being only two elite top 150 players overlapping in the Modern and Legacy subsets (BBD and Royce Walter). But their win rates within those formats are not identical. In Legacy, those players averaged a 71.8% win rate. In Modern, they averaged a 68% win rate. This magnifies the number above, suggesting that for top players, there’s something about Modern which is translating to a 3.8% lower win rate.
When we look at those players who aren’t top 150, there is a bigger difference between the Modern and Legacy win-rates. In Legacy, it’s 70.4%. In Modern, it’s 67.3%. So for the non-pro players, Modern is also affecting win rates.
If we assume the sample is big enough, and if we assume that skill should generally average out to decide matchups over many datapoints, we can conclude that there’s something about Modern which accounts for between a 2% and 4% drop in your win rate that would otherwise be expected in Legacy. I believe this is the variance that people cite as being present in Modern and not in Legacy, but I don’t actually know if variance causes it. I don't know what causes it. I just know it’s a real difference. And, again, it doesn’t actually affect how many top players appear at the top in Modern events.
Say whhhhaaaa???
Monday morning QB skills aside, I think its perfectly reasonable to keep a 2 lander and assume the deck will pay out a 3rd land by turn 4. The odds are well in my favor of that happening. No it's not a lock, but it's perfectly fine to call the 5 bricks in a row variance imo.
A hand full of gas and two lands is usually a good keep, but this illustrates a bigger issue: there is not always a perfect and correct play, especially for very borderline calls made in the moment. There are too many unknown variables to make the perfect and correct decision at every possible opportunity. Nearly everything is a calculated guess based on the probability of something happening, and most of the time those are just estimates made on the fly. Higher skill may lead to better estimates and yes, over the aggregate of tons of games, you would see a smoothing out where this small difference comes in. But events aren't won on averages, they're won on individual, sequential match wins; matches that independently have huge amounts of luck and variance in very significant forms: deck matchup, your draws, your opponents draws, sideboard relevance, and being on the play/draw.
The reason why it's hard to quantitatively rate luck vs skill is that there are too many decision trees state whether or not someone made the best choice, especially when working in real time and with missing information. The other is that the two things are completely intertwined and inseparable. Whatever calculated decision you make doesn't affect what the opponent does or doesn't have in hand/draw. Your choice of what to do showcases skill (what are the odds of X/Y/Z outcome), but the result (whether or not they "have it" or "draw it") is based entirely in luck (assuming you haven't seen their hand, of course).
UR ....... WUBR ........... WB ............. RGW ........ UBR ....... WUB .... BGU
Spells / Blink & Combo / Token Grind / Dino Tribal / Draw Cards / Zombies / Reanimate
So why do we see the same top players winning or topping the same events over and over? Or, to cite my analysis earlier, why is it that the top 50 Legacy and top 50 Modern players have the same number of overall top 150 players in their pools? If Modern was as luck-intensive as you allege, we would expect to see far fewer pros in the top 50 Moderners. Instead, we see actually more than in Legacy: 18 vs. 16.
No one disagrees that all those luck elements are present in Magic and Modern. You are just dramatically overstating the effect they have in real games. If we take Legacy as this sacred baseline of "skill matters," which everyone here seems comfortable doing because the grass is greener on the other side, than I'm stickinng with my above estimate: various factors equate to a 2%-4% drop in win rate in Modern. This could be variance. It could also mean there are so many matchups that people are punished for not knowing them all. It could also mean the format is less forgiving of errors.
I'm guessing it's a mix of reasons, which suggests that variance and luck in Modern don't account for the full 2%-4% and likely account for no more than 1%-2% of the overall drop.
I said this either in this thread or the State of Modern thread: people need to take their odds-calculations a step further. First of all, the odds of drawing a land by T4 are not good. You have a 37.7% chance of drawing land on T2, 38% on T3, 39% on T4, and 40% on T5. Cumulatively, that's about a 64% chance of drawing your land by T5. Those ain't great odds! They also aren't even close to certain. And yet, people in this thread and the streamer treated the 64% chance as a sure thing. That was their first mistake. If I'm playing UW Control and keep a similar land, I'd feel much more confident. I have 24 lands remaining in the deck, 4 SV, 4 Seas, and 2 Walls. Now my odds of just drawing a land, ignoring the cantrips, are 73% by T5. Still not great, but a little better. Add in the 10 cantrip effects, however, and now I'm feeling really good; I have an 88% chance to hit any of those cards by T3 and still be on curve. But even there, I wouldn't keep that hand unless the hand had some early presence, like a Path or a Leak; that way, even if I brick on a draw, I can still do stuff.
This leads to the second skill-based error: bad deck construction. People don't include cantrips or consistency tools and then blame variance for ***** draws. Of course you are more likely to get ***** draws when you don't include those cards. That's why Grixis DS is so damn good; it sees a ton of cards in just the first few turns. Or players aren't including enough lands based on their curve. Errors like these are skill-based decisions that players make early.
Finally, people don't weigh the consequence of keeping certain hands. What are my odds of winning with the two-lander if I brick on my lands? Very, very low. In most cases, my odds of winning off a mulligan into a playable 6 will be much better than my odds of keeping the hand. People stop their probability at "what are the odds I draw this card?" They need to extent it to "what are the odds of the game just ending on the spot if this hand doesn't materialize?" When you make decisions in the latter category, you open yourself to variance. And that's a decision, it's not just variance.
Ha. Haha. Hahahhahhahhaha.
Buddy the reason we see the same top players over and over is because there is only a handful of people stupid enough to play MTG professionally. This isn't the NBA where there are millions of dollars to be made. This is closer to an organized basketball tournament at your local YMCA.
Do you really think the pros are substantially better than you are? I don't. I see pros making misplays on camera all the time. Ask yourself this, where does all the innovation come from? The community. If the pros were really the ones pushing the envelope we would see THEM coming up with new dcks and new strats, instead they just champion the strat they think has the best matchups for this current week and roll the dice.
I've been warning people about this for years. Pro's are not to be emulated. Their judgment and decision making abilities are highly in question before the tourney even starts.