I have no reason to suspect that going first is much better than going second. Not to the point of calling it broken.
MTGgoldfish's data from traditional draft formats would suggest going first vs second can be better or worse from set to set, and the MODO cube from 2014 had a 50.5% winrate for going first.
There are matchups where going first are better, sure. But even for a set known to be very volatile with early drops being of paramount importance (magic origins) the winrate for first is 51.1%
Power Play's go-first ability is a bit more pronounced the better your aggressive builds are. In power/rare cubes, it's pretty broken for the mono red or white weenie deck to always go first. When those same decks pop up in peasant, it's similar since those decks take advantage of having an 'extra turn' each game going first. I don't know about the stats of it as I've never tracked it, but it feels like it carries its weight when my aggro decks are always starting first.
I thought it was more important to go first than that.. but are those game-win stats or match-win stats? Probably the effect of going first game 1, 2 & 3 is much more pronounced than going first game 1 and then playing at least one game on the draw in the match.
Salmo
That would make intuitive sense, but then going first *against* the super aggro deck should also lead to a fairly pronounced winrate since you're denying them their purported advantage.
There are individual cards that get much better going first (the cheap innistrad werewolves) but there are some cards that get better going second (pyroclasm, land tax). Also, every turn that you went second gives you an extra draw to hit land drops, to remain on curve, to have the perfect topdecked answer, and just in general you're up on card advantage.
Put another way, the absolute best hands want to go first for the aggro decks, but most hands aren't the absolute best hands.
Salmo
That would make intuitive sense, but then going first *against* the super aggro deck should also lead to a fairly pronounced winrate since you're denying them their purported advantage.
There are individual cards that get much better going first (the cheap innistrad werewolves) but there are some cards that get better going second (pyroclasm, land tax). Also, every turn that you went second gives you an extra draw to hit land drops, to remain on curve, to have the perfect topdecked answer, and just in general you're up on card advantage.
Put another way, the absolute best hands want to go first for the aggro decks, but most hands aren't the absolute best hands.
I would argue it does for aggro decks, despite what the stats you have on other formats say. (Which I'm not convinced are fully applicable/enough to mention here due to how different the formats are. Like, Origins has 10 non-rare/myhic one drops, one of those is a 0/4, a number of those are 1/Xs; in comparison, your cube has ~18 aggressively-statted one drops. I forget who said it, but even in the fastest formats a normal retail limited 'draft' deck's speed is more midrange and most decks are ranges of midrange vs being one of the three defined theatres.)
And every creature in an aggro deck is better going first because it gets to attack before your opponent plays spells of the same cost. Due to the nature of your deck, it is always much better to be attacking with your two drop before they get to do anything with their 3 mana. Yeah, they get to do stuff when it gets to their turn, but they have to get there and going first gives the aggro deck another chance to deny them. There are few spells which you are excited to wait to cast, whereas I'm never disappointed that my creatures lose summoning sickness first when playing aggro.
The difference between two hands in an aggro deck with similar land-to-spell ratios really aren't that great due to the composition of an aggro deck. A handful of 1-3 drops with some burn and 2 lands is often going to be similar to a similar hand with completely different cards in the same deck. The lines of play will be different to some degree, but I feel like pointing that out is picking at hairs and missing the macro concepts of aggro i.e. it's more like a combo deck than a regular deck in that every card in your deck is building towards the very specific goal of killing ASAP and being able to cast everything you draw, whereas a midrange or control deck will finish the game in different manners a number of times. (Mind Controlling my opponent's creatures plays out much differently then riding a Jetting Glasskite, whereas attacking with a bunch of 1-3 drops often plays out similarly; 2 counters and a path will play out much differently than a draw spell your bomb and a mana rock, but most aggro creatures are similar in a bottom-line sense and most burn/removal is similar too, even when different.)
This might just end up being a agree-to-disagree thing, but it would be tough to convince me going first isn't a huge boon for an aggro deck as experience dictates otherwise.
Without citing specific statistics, my intuitive sense with limited Magic is that always going first will probably add a few percentage points on your match win percentage, but that it is likely around 3-5% than ~10% or so. That is still pretty good for a card that you do not even need to place in your deck.
I can imagine for the correct aggro decks that Power Play could possibly push up your win percentage up towards 10%, but I feel like that is infrequent at best.
@JovianHomarid: The great thing about Hidden Agenda conspiracies is that they can literally apply to any spell, so it is hard for an opponent to prepare for them even if they know you have them. So it is not entirely like Morph, because so many options exist even with just a few Hidden Agenda conspiracies.
The point of statistics is that intuition isn't accurate.
There are 14 formats being analyzed here, ranging from Invasion block to Battle for Zendikar. This also includes at least two iterations of cubes on modo.
In those 14 formats, only 5 had a higher winrate for going first than going second. 36%.
The best winrates for going first were 51.1% in Magic origins and 50.6% in triple Theros. Magic Origins also has the third shortest average game time out of the 14 formats, with 8.7 turns.
The two best winrates for going second were in Mirrodin block draft at 54.3% and in Invasion block draft at 56.1%.
So the absolute best % difference in favor of going first is a 2.2% difference. The absolute best % difference for going second is 12.2%.
//
"And every creature in an aggro deck is better going first because it gets to attack before your opponent plays spells of the same cost"
If the creature doesn't have haste, this is plainly untrue.
//
As for whether Origins is an "aggressive" format or not... it was at the very least faster than normal. The best deck was RB and the win percentage for landing a 2 drop is 56%. That's not even landing a 2 drop when your opponent misses a 2 drop, which I must be much higher (which sounds a lot like an aggressive format to me).
Also you're only looking at one side of the coin, salmo. You have better and more 1 drops in cube, but you also have better spot removal, kitchen finks, etc that allow midrange decks to brush off that early assault.
I mean, until someone runs the stats on 100 or 1000 or 10000 Peasant cube games, intuition is still definitely worth something.
And if Origins is the example here, when I can be on the play and trade a cast-for-no-value-pure-Gray-Ogre Auramancer for your format-warping Topan Freeblade... that makes me just that much more interested in a 100%-on-the-play conspiracy card.
Going first in ORI buys you a 2.2% bonus to your winrate, which is fine. Your example of slamming a 3 drop into topan freeblade doesn't really change that (my topan freeblade is probably trading with your 2 drop renown creature on the draw anyway).
You do at least get the conspiracy's effect every game, unlike a card you would have to draw. We can even estimate how good a card you would need to draft in order to make up for cards in your deck only showing up in 16/40 games (Considering you get to turn 8/9 in ORI, and that's about 16 cards, especially if at least one player drew or scryed at least once in an average game that would make sense)
40/40 games is 2.5 times better than 16/40, so you would want a card with a 2.5 times better winrate. 2.2x2.5 is 5.5.
Cards with a 55.5% winrate puts you in some very good company: Eyeblight assassin, posessed skaab, etc. Not broken, but good.
//
I should probably talk about this
One of the formats in these 14 is the 2014 cube https://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/analysis/draft/cube_2014
The best deck by a decent margin was Red deck wins. Plated geopede had an absurd 61% winrate, probably thanks to snapping up fetches. White weenie was second, it seems, thanks to having both ravages of war and armageddon. Even in this format, where it seems as though the two best decks are both aggro decks, and their aggro decks have much better cards than ours, the winrate for going first is only 50.5%.
So how much do you really think peasant cube is going to deviate from established patterns across over a decade of magic? Are you really going to tell me that it is likely the best format for going first between it and 14 other formats? Top 5, top 4 maybe, I could let go. But first? That's an awfully bold claim to make with zero data to back it up, especially considering the cube I just talked about with multiple armageddons and 5/5 plated geopedes as best decks #1 and #2 is currently sitting third on that list.
You're overvaluing things like perfectly curving out and undervaluing things like having the chance to topdeck yourself into a better play. Every land drop you hit thanks to being on the draw that lets you cast your 4 drop on time, every sketchy 2 land hand that gets there, and every time you got dragged into a card advantage war is being dismissed in favor of your intuition.
I can't think of a single draft set that allowed us to draft aggro decks that resemble our cube aggro decks. Modo cube is not a good comparison either, because the kinds of answers people have access to is very different than the answers we have. You're right that we don't have data to back up the claim that C/Ube is different, but the data we have isn't necessarily a helpful for us either.
I mean if we assume Lightning Bolt is a 4, then a colorless, never-missing-your-deck-always-in-effect card like Power Play seems pretty in line with that. +2.2 win percent just for putting the card into your draft pile is pretty absurd, and that's completely ignoring how much more relevant T1 aggro is in our format (where Savannah Lions is a staple playable for three out of five colors).
If you really only want to talk about cubes, then fine
The only "kind" of answer we don't have at our rarity are wraths. Most removal that's good against aggro is perfectly available for us at common and uncommon. Moreover, we are far more likely to gameplan against aggro because a card like staggershock is always useful for us, when spot removal is significantly more of a liability in a format with tendrils of agony and emrakul.
The most drafted color in that Modo cube is blue, with no wraths.
The draft statistics from the site only take into account game one, and wraths are historically not automatic maindecks thanks to how dead they are in degenerate combo matchups or control matchups.
Wrath of god was cast in 532 games, Damnation was cast in 521 games. That's good for roughly the 45th percentile. In between 532 and 521 sits the utterly pedestrian Taurean mauler and even Condemn.
The win percentages for games in which you cast Wrath is 48%, and casting damnation gets you a paltry 42%. They aren't even that good when you need them.
If wraths are depressing the winrate of aggro decks, it isn't by a whole lot.
//
The kinds of threats that aggro decks have in rare cubes are significantly more potent than we have. This seems to be a point that is not being acknowledged.
We don't have two copies of "four mana win the game if you're aggro" with armageddon. We don't have the best one drop ever printed in goblin guide, and we don't have Isamaru, Hound of Konda. Our top end doesn't have access to Hellrider or sulfuric vortex. We don't have the reach of Grim lavamancer or the snowballing of stromkirk noble (both with 57% winrates). What we do have are enter the battlefield tapped lands and terrible consistency for our aggro mana bases.
Perhaps most noteworthy, we especially don't have the card that shows up more than any other permanent in the list: Umezawa's Jitte. (Top may be higher, but I think goldfish is counting cards that get cast more than once per game more than once, since the top 3 cards are top, recurring nightmare, and lingering souls.) Many of us actually ban the equipment that likely leads to the best winrate (Grafted wargear), when meanwhile traditional cubes have access to the Swords of X and Y which are winning games (body and mind in particular with 60%!).
Aggro decks in that format are faster, have more reach, have cards that are almost automatic win conditions, and are more resilient.
//
Splinter twin is a legitimate issue for the cubes that include them. You would think that with blue being the most drafted color, being able to get a turn ahead for countermagic would make a difference, but it doesn't seem to be true.
The other Modo cube analyzed is the 2014 Holiday cube, which has splinter twin unlike the first cube I looked at. This cube has a going-second bias to the tune of 51.1%. The best deck in this format is splinter twin. After that it's RDW once again.
2.2% isn't absurd, io. It lines up with getting one of a draft format's better commons. Let's not be hyperbolic.
Besides, that would be 2.2% in Origins.
In the modo cube where RDW is far and away the best deck, it only gets you 1%. 5/11ths of the potency from ORI. And it actively hurts you in the other modo cube where the second best deck is still RDW.
Umezawa's Jitte doesn't get to be top 3 most played cards in the cube with a 54% winrate for no reason, io.
Jitte provides both white and red based aggro decks with reach. The two best, most consistently viable decks in that first cube are red and white aggro decks. Rare cubes pose themselves as places where people power out insane combos, and the reality is that they still lose to turn one guy. Grim monolith (52%) has a lower winrate than rakdos cackler, calciderm, cursed scroll, and even whipcorder (53% each).
It's not a coincidence that LSV refers to RDW as the fun police.
Two jitte counters actually does get you past consecrated sphinx, by the way.
So yes, I would call that a game changer.
Clearly something is going on where people are either misplaying grim monolith, or perhaps the explosive starts are somehow mitigated by single answers more than we realize
"Draft this card, it's on color, it's relevant to your archetype, you see it in whatever amount of cards you draw before the game ends and get to cast it at a time where it matters"
Do you seriously not see the parts of my posts where I compare that % gain of passively having the conspiracy on the sideline to the percentage gain you get from casting a card in your deck? I have already addressed this.
To reiterate something that I will render into a moot point momentarily, casting eyeblight assassin at some point in the game gives you a 55.5% chance of winning. Eyeblight assassin is perhaps the most generalist common creature in magic origins: if you're in black, you're taking it and mainboarding it unless you want to lose.
The proportion of games where you draw eyeblight assassin in magic origins (roughly 40%, considering the game length of the format) compared to the games where you "draw" going first (exactly 100% with the conspiracy) is almost exactly the same as the proportion of game wins that you get from going first (2.2%) compared to the bonus you get from casting the elf (5.5%). This would make the net value of the two outcomes over multiple games exactly the same. Hence why it is a valid point of reference.
But the reason why I said that the point is moot is because I forgot something incredibly important this entire argument. Your conspiracy is only active half of the time. This is necessarily true because half of the time you would win the dice roll and go first without it.
So you can go ahead and cut the expected value of your card exactly in half. 2.2%, meet 1.1%.
/
Regardless, this still neglects the fact that you're trying to claim that going first in our cubes has a higher winrate than it would in the magic 2014 cube, where it isn't a 2.2% difference but a flat 1% difference. This is the cube where the without-equal best deck happens to be a posterchild for the deck you would want to argue for. And where what appears to be the second best deck would also be exemplary of the playstyle you think should benefit the most from going first.
For what reason should you suspect that peasant cube, where we actively maindeck anti aggro answers, would have a more pronounced aggro bias for going first than the format with better aggro tools and fewer maindecked answers against it?
Even generally speaking midrange is some sort of "answer" to aggro. But midrange is a deck that barely exists in the cube I am citing and is quite possibly the most common "theater" of deck in our lists.
/
Even if you could reasonably demonstrate that it's true that the winrate for going first in peasant was as good as it is in that cube, your card is still not absurdly good. It's accounting for a half of a percentage point difference.
I found an article on play draw statistics about standard in 2013. Going first had a winrate of a little more than 53% in that context.
Considering how much more consistent a standard deck is than a limited deck, this disparity makes sense. We simply have a ton more variance in our draws and our decks and can't fully take advantage of the tempo boost going first gives you. This could even explain why invasion and mirrodin have double that bias in the opposite direction, since it's possible that the variance in those formats was even higher than it is for us and going second reduces variance in what cards you have access to.
I will admit that deferring to my intuition instead of statistics is not the best way to make a point. After doing a little more research, I have three points:
1) Which of the available statistics best apply to CUbe? Is it the 2014 Holiday Cube with a 48.9% on the play win percentage? Magic Origins with the 51.1% win percentage? Or Fall 2015 Modern of Standard at 53.8% and 54.6% respectively (based on MTG Goldfish as well)? Because I imagine most of us do not have fully detailed cube statistics, I would be included to guess closest to Origins, maybe a 1-2% jump on the play.
2) Can we identify anything different about CUbes compared to those formats? A small thing is that almost all of those MTGGoldfish results were prior to the new mulligan rules, which could admittedly have an effect in other direction, but is worth considering. PVDDR also has a video posted to the ChannelFireball YouTube page from September 6, 2017 called "Tiny Edges: Don't Draw First." His main points are that the worst case scenario for most blind matchups on the play is that your win rate is slightly lower (45-48%) but that the worst case scenario for most blind matchups on the draw can be much more damaging to your win rate (~40%). Granted, this is a general strategy around play vs draw whether than specific statistics either. He also cites the concept that playing has become better due to threats being more proactive (think ETB effects, haste, bonuses on the first attack and planeswalkers that activate their first turn on the battlefield). I think this is generally become more true of Cube threats as well. That said, we also have the most effective answers in Magic history, although few of them regain card advantage (think Wraths). I think this might be another very slight increase to win percentage on the play, like 0-1% win percentage boost.
3) Specifically in regards to Power Play, I think that card might have a more pronounced effect because the decks that select it in draft are doing so earlier because they sense that it will be better for them. That is not a novel idea that certain decks want certain cards more than others, but I think speaking to the specific card means it should have a greater effect in practice than the general format win/loss percentages.
Related to this, it is definitely true that certain decks have a much higher win percentage on the play compared to draw that is greater in magnitude that the general format win/loss percentage.
Tl:dr- A number of small things likely differentiate CUbe from other draft formats, and push the win percentage on the play up very slightly. Also, the play/draw win percentages can be greater for specific decks, which are more likely to select Power Play higher, leading to a greater effect on play/draw win percentage than the format in general.
"See Assassin in your top sixteen cards" isn't at all the same as "cast it and get +5.5% to win", though!
You have to actually CAST the card. And unless there's an X/1 on the other side of the table or you can use it to tweak combat into your favor, you'll quite often have better things to do with your mana than play out a Gray Ogre. Just look at the Origins commons and see which have the highest win-rate. That should be enough to show you that that single stat is pretty flimsy, unless you really want pick Bone to Ash and Act of Treason over the actual format all-star Topan Freeblade
And you to even get a chance to cast it, if it's good... you have to put it into your deck! Which means, obviously you're playing black; in the case of 'archetype' it doesn't REALLY matter for Assassin, but there's lots of very good Cube cards which are early picks but can still be left out even when on-color -- Propaganda or Pyroclasm, Carnophage or Keldon Champion.
Also, the play/draw win percentages can be greater for specific decks, which are more likely to select Power Play higher, leading to a greater effect on play/draw win percentage than the format in general.
This sums up my point in general. Looking at a format like peasant cube's overall win percentage for going first doesn't really illustrate where powerplay shines. When you are the beatdown deck in peasant, Power Play has a much greater effect on what your deck would do than for a control deck, which would still be better with Power Play but not nearly as much. Unless we have stats *specifically* on aggro deck's winning percentages, the stats mean very little to me because they account for control and midrange decks, which isn't really power play's true home.
Also, most retail limited format's aggro decks aren't really aggro, I forget when it was said or by who (LR Cast, maybe?) but essentially retail limited is all just different shades of midrange, which I agree with and especially so in comparison to peasant cube. Like, we're talking about a 2/2 for 2B that gives -1-1 as this card you never not play, but that card sucks when put next to peasant cube cards and if it excelled in a format considered fast and isn't good enough in peasant, then I think it's safe to assume that peasant has some more efficient, faster threats. There's no retail limited deck that can play an aggressive 1 drop t1 in most/a high percentage of games, which is a world you can choose to live in for peasant, and that's a real difference to note when pulling up stats and applying them in comparison.
(aside: Jitte is broken, despite the Grim Monoliths of the world. One broken play doesn't invalidate another.)
@io
Yes, that single stat would be flimsy. I didn't just do that though, and a look at the amount of games played would show you that comparing the elf to bone to ash or act of treason is a mistake.
Bone to ash- 2300 games
Act of treason - 5600 games
Eyeblight assassin - 11700 games
Topan freeblade - 1400 games
Clearly the first two are much more narrow than the last two. Roughly every 7 games the freeblade gets cast matches up with 6 games for the elf.
This almost perfectly lines up with the play percentage for their home colors. 43.5% of decks had white in them, 38.8% of decks had black in them.
So I reject your topical claim that the elf is being held in the hand a significant number of games.
The assassin is the 20th most played card in the format, higher than suppression bonds. This despite white being a more played color, probably because people are playing it as a valueless gray ogre rather frequently.
/
This is still secondary to the point though. Not to be accusatory but it certainly feels like you're skimming my posts. Or ignoring a lot of what's written.
1) The winrate bonus is going to be half of the going first bonus because youre already going to go first half the time.
2) I still dont know how you establish that the first bonus is higher than the RDW-is-best-deck cube, much less over twice as high.
Yeah, it is annoying that we don't really have data on aggro in particular. However, while you may be playing aggro only maybe a third of the time, aggro should be on the table half of the time (out of the six matchups between aggro control and midrange, half have aggro as a deck).
So the effect of an aggro deck may be somewhat lost in the noise, but it's definitely accounted for quite a bit.
The more that you think aggro is affected by going first, then it must be true that midrange and control matchups are less so. In fact, if you think that aggro is doubly affected compared to the average, it would mean that non aggro matchups are a 50/50 split for first and second in order to make the math work out. If you thinl aggro is more effected to the tune of 55/45%, then it must mean that for nonaggro matchups its 45.5/54.5 in favor of going second.
We still havent established why the baseline would be higher than in the RDW cube, though.
MTGgoldfish's data from traditional draft formats would suggest going first vs second can be better or worse from set to set, and the MODO cube from 2014 had a 50.5% winrate for going first.
There are matchups where going first are better, sure. But even for a set known to be very volatile with early drops being of paramount importance (magic origins) the winrate for first is 51.1%
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
Cubetutor Peasant'ish-Funbox
Project: Khans of Tarkir Cube (cubetutor)
Salmo
That would make intuitive sense, but then going first *against* the super aggro deck should also lead to a fairly pronounced winrate since you're denying them their purported advantage.
There are individual cards that get much better going first (the cheap innistrad werewolves) but there are some cards that get better going second (pyroclasm, land tax). Also, every turn that you went second gives you an extra draw to hit land drops, to remain on curve, to have the perfect topdecked answer, and just in general you're up on card advantage.
Put another way, the absolute best hands want to go first for the aggro decks, but most hands aren't the absolute best hands.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
I would argue it does for aggro decks, despite what the stats you have on other formats say. (Which I'm not convinced are fully applicable/enough to mention here due to how different the formats are. Like, Origins has 10 non-rare/myhic one drops, one of those is a 0/4, a number of those are 1/Xs; in comparison, your cube has ~18 aggressively-statted one drops. I forget who said it, but even in the fastest formats a normal retail limited 'draft' deck's speed is more midrange and most decks are ranges of midrange vs being one of the three defined theatres.)
And every creature in an aggro deck is better going first because it gets to attack before your opponent plays spells of the same cost. Due to the nature of your deck, it is always much better to be attacking with your two drop before they get to do anything with their 3 mana. Yeah, they get to do stuff when it gets to their turn, but they have to get there and going first gives the aggro deck another chance to deny them. There are few spells which you are excited to wait to cast, whereas I'm never disappointed that my creatures lose summoning sickness first when playing aggro.
The difference between two hands in an aggro deck with similar land-to-spell ratios really aren't that great due to the composition of an aggro deck. A handful of 1-3 drops with some burn and 2 lands is often going to be similar to a similar hand with completely different cards in the same deck. The lines of play will be different to some degree, but I feel like pointing that out is picking at hairs and missing the macro concepts of aggro i.e. it's more like a combo deck than a regular deck in that every card in your deck is building towards the very specific goal of killing ASAP and being able to cast everything you draw, whereas a midrange or control deck will finish the game in different manners a number of times. (Mind Controlling my opponent's creatures plays out much differently then riding a Jetting Glasskite, whereas attacking with a bunch of 1-3 drops often plays out similarly; 2 counters and a path will play out much differently than a draw spell your bomb and a mana rock, but most aggro creatures are similar in a bottom-line sense and most burn/removal is similar too, even when different.)
This might just end up being a agree-to-disagree thing, but it would be tough to convince me going first isn't a huge boon for an aggro deck as experience dictates otherwise.
Also, follow us on twitter! @TurnOneMagic
I can imagine for the correct aggro decks that Power Play could possibly push up your win percentage up towards 10%, but I feel like that is infrequent at best.
@JovianHomarid: The great thing about Hidden Agenda conspiracies is that they can literally apply to any spell, so it is hard for an opponent to prepare for them even if they know you have them. So it is not entirely like Morph, because so many options exist even with just a few Hidden Agenda conspiracies.
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/peasantsnowcube
-- Updated with Fallout Commander
The PioneWer Peasant CUbe
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/pionewer
-- Updated with Murders at Karlov Manor
There are 14 formats being analyzed here, ranging from Invasion block to Battle for Zendikar. This also includes at least two iterations of cubes on modo.
In those 14 formats, only 5 had a higher winrate for going first than going second. 36%.
The best winrates for going first were 51.1% in Magic origins and 50.6% in triple Theros. Magic Origins also has the third shortest average game time out of the 14 formats, with 8.7 turns.
The two best winrates for going second were in Mirrodin block draft at 54.3% and in Invasion block draft at 56.1%.
So the absolute best % difference in favor of going first is a 2.2% difference. The absolute best % difference for going second is 12.2%.
//
"And every creature in an aggro deck is better going first because it gets to attack before your opponent plays spells of the same cost"
If the creature doesn't have haste, this is plainly untrue.
//
As for whether Origins is an "aggressive" format or not... it was at the very least faster than normal. The best deck was RB and the win percentage for landing a 2 drop is 56%. That's not even landing a 2 drop when your opponent misses a 2 drop, which I must be much higher (which sounds a lot like an aggressive format to me).
Also you're only looking at one side of the coin, salmo. You have better and more 1 drops in cube, but you also have better spot removal, kitchen finks, etc that allow midrange decks to brush off that early assault.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
And if Origins is the example here, when I can be on the play and trade a cast-for-no-value-pure-Gray-Ogre Auramancer for your format-warping Topan Freeblade... that makes me just that much more interested in a 100%-on-the-play conspiracy card.
You do at least get the conspiracy's effect every game, unlike a card you would have to draw. We can even estimate how good a card you would need to draft in order to make up for cards in your deck only showing up in 16/40 games (Considering you get to turn 8/9 in ORI, and that's about 16 cards, especially if at least one player drew or scryed at least once in an average game that would make sense)
40/40 games is 2.5 times better than 16/40, so you would want a card with a 2.5 times better winrate. 2.2x2.5 is 5.5.
Cards with a 55.5% winrate puts you in some very good company: Eyeblight assassin, posessed skaab, etc. Not broken, but good.
//
I should probably talk about this
One of the formats in these 14 is the 2014 cube
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/limited/analysis/draft/cube_2014
The best deck by a decent margin was Red deck wins. Plated geopede had an absurd 61% winrate, probably thanks to snapping up fetches. White weenie was second, it seems, thanks to having both ravages of war and armageddon. Even in this format, where it seems as though the two best decks are both aggro decks, and their aggro decks have much better cards than ours, the winrate for going first is only 50.5%.
So how much do you really think peasant cube is going to deviate from established patterns across over a decade of magic? Are you really going to tell me that it is likely the best format for going first between it and 14 other formats? Top 5, top 4 maybe, I could let go. But first? That's an awfully bold claim to make with zero data to back it up, especially considering the cube I just talked about with multiple armageddons and 5/5 plated geopedes as best decks #1 and #2 is currently sitting third on that list.
You're overvaluing things like perfectly curving out and undervaluing things like having the chance to topdeck yourself into a better play. Every land drop you hit thanks to being on the draw that lets you cast your 4 drop on time, every sketchy 2 land hand that gets there, and every time you got dragged into a card advantage war is being dismissed in favor of your intuition.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
The only "kind" of answer we don't have at our rarity are wraths. Most removal that's good against aggro is perfectly available for us at common and uncommon. Moreover, we are far more likely to gameplan against aggro because a card like staggershock is always useful for us, when spot removal is significantly more of a liability in a format with tendrils of agony and emrakul.
The most drafted color in that Modo cube is blue, with no wraths.
The draft statistics from the site only take into account game one, and wraths are historically not automatic maindecks thanks to how dead they are in degenerate combo matchups or control matchups.
Wrath of god was cast in 532 games, Damnation was cast in 521 games. That's good for roughly the 45th percentile. In between 532 and 521 sits the utterly pedestrian Taurean mauler and even Condemn.
The win percentages for games in which you cast Wrath is 48%, and casting damnation gets you a paltry 42%. They aren't even that good when you need them.
If wraths are depressing the winrate of aggro decks, it isn't by a whole lot.
//
The kinds of threats that aggro decks have in rare cubes are significantly more potent than we have. This seems to be a point that is not being acknowledged.
We don't have two copies of "four mana win the game if you're aggro" with armageddon. We don't have the best one drop ever printed in goblin guide, and we don't have Isamaru, Hound of Konda. Our top end doesn't have access to Hellrider or sulfuric vortex. We don't have the reach of Grim lavamancer or the snowballing of stromkirk noble (both with 57% winrates). What we do have are enter the battlefield tapped lands and terrible consistency for our aggro mana bases.
Perhaps most noteworthy, we especially don't have the card that shows up more than any other permanent in the list: Umezawa's Jitte. (Top may be higher, but I think goldfish is counting cards that get cast more than once per game more than once, since the top 3 cards are top, recurring nightmare, and lingering souls.) Many of us actually ban the equipment that likely leads to the best winrate (Grafted wargear), when meanwhile traditional cubes have access to the Swords of X and Y which are winning games (body and mind in particular with 60%!).
Aggro decks in that format are faster, have more reach, have cards that are almost automatic win conditions, and are more resilient.
//
Splinter twin is a legitimate issue for the cubes that include them. You would think that with blue being the most drafted color, being able to get a turn ahead for countermagic would make a difference, but it doesn't seem to be true.
The other Modo cube analyzed is the 2014 Holiday cube, which has splinter twin unlike the first cube I looked at. This cube has a going-second bias to the tune of 51.1%. The best deck in this format is splinter twin. After that it's RDW once again.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Try to use two or four Jitte counters against Grim Monolith'd Consecrated Sphinx, Wildfire, Storm, Channel... sure. Sure, dude.
Besides, that would be 2.2% in Origins.
In the modo cube where RDW is far and away the best deck, it only gets you 1%. 5/11ths of the potency from ORI. And it actively hurts you in the other modo cube where the second best deck is still RDW.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Jitte provides both white and red based aggro decks with reach. The two best, most consistently viable decks in that first cube are red and white aggro decks. Rare cubes pose themselves as places where people power out insane combos, and the reality is that they still lose to turn one guy. Grim monolith (52%) has a lower winrate than rakdos cackler, calciderm, cursed scroll, and even whipcorder (53% each).
It's not a coincidence that LSV refers to RDW as the fun police.
Two jitte counters actually does get you past consecrated sphinx, by the way.
So yes, I would call that a game changer.
Clearly something is going on where people are either misplaying grim monolith, or perhaps the explosive starts are somehow mitigated by single answers more than we realize
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Do you seriously not see the difference between
"Draft this card"
And
"Draft this card, it's on color, it's relevant to your archetype, you see it in whatever amount of cards you draw before the game ends and get to cast it at a time where it matters"
To reiterate something that I will render into a moot point momentarily, casting eyeblight assassin at some point in the game gives you a 55.5% chance of winning. Eyeblight assassin is perhaps the most generalist common creature in magic origins: if you're in black, you're taking it and mainboarding it unless you want to lose.
The proportion of games where you draw eyeblight assassin in magic origins (roughly 40%, considering the game length of the format) compared to the games where you "draw" going first (exactly 100% with the conspiracy) is almost exactly the same as the proportion of game wins that you get from going first (2.2%) compared to the bonus you get from casting the elf (5.5%). This would make the net value of the two outcomes over multiple games exactly the same. Hence why it is a valid point of reference.
But the reason why I said that the point is moot is because I forgot something incredibly important this entire argument. Your conspiracy is only active half of the time. This is necessarily true because half of the time you would win the dice roll and go first without it.
So you can go ahead and cut the expected value of your card exactly in half. 2.2%, meet 1.1%.
/
Regardless, this still neglects the fact that you're trying to claim that going first in our cubes has a higher winrate than it would in the magic 2014 cube, where it isn't a 2.2% difference but a flat 1% difference. This is the cube where the without-equal best deck happens to be a posterchild for the deck you would want to argue for. And where what appears to be the second best deck would also be exemplary of the playstyle you think should benefit the most from going first.
For what reason should you suspect that peasant cube, where we actively maindeck anti aggro answers, would have a more pronounced aggro bias for going first than the format with better aggro tools and fewer maindecked answers against it?
Even generally speaking midrange is some sort of "answer" to aggro. But midrange is a deck that barely exists in the cube I am citing and is quite possibly the most common "theater" of deck in our lists.
/
Even if you could reasonably demonstrate that it's true that the winrate for going first in peasant was as good as it is in that cube, your card is still not absurdly good. It's accounting for a half of a percentage point difference.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Considering how much more consistent a standard deck is than a limited deck, this disparity makes sense. We simply have a ton more variance in our draws and our decks and can't fully take advantage of the tempo boost going first gives you. This could even explain why invasion and mirrodin have double that bias in the opposite direction, since it's possible that the variance in those formats was even higher than it is for us and going second reduces variance in what cards you have access to.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
1) Which of the available statistics best apply to CUbe? Is it the 2014 Holiday Cube with a 48.9% on the play win percentage? Magic Origins with the 51.1% win percentage? Or Fall 2015 Modern of Standard at 53.8% and 54.6% respectively (based on MTG Goldfish as well)? Because I imagine most of us do not have fully detailed cube statistics, I would be included to guess closest to Origins, maybe a 1-2% jump on the play.
2) Can we identify anything different about CUbes compared to those formats? A small thing is that almost all of those MTGGoldfish results were prior to the new mulligan rules, which could admittedly have an effect in other direction, but is worth considering. PVDDR also has a video posted to the ChannelFireball YouTube page from September 6, 2017 called "Tiny Edges: Don't Draw First." His main points are that the worst case scenario for most blind matchups on the play is that your win rate is slightly lower (45-48%) but that the worst case scenario for most blind matchups on the draw can be much more damaging to your win rate (~40%). Granted, this is a general strategy around play vs draw whether than specific statistics either. He also cites the concept that playing has become better due to threats being more proactive (think ETB effects, haste, bonuses on the first attack and planeswalkers that activate their first turn on the battlefield). I think this is generally become more true of Cube threats as well. That said, we also have the most effective answers in Magic history, although few of them regain card advantage (think Wraths). I think this might be another very slight increase to win percentage on the play, like 0-1% win percentage boost.
3) Specifically in regards to Power Play, I think that card might have a more pronounced effect because the decks that select it in draft are doing so earlier because they sense that it will be better for them. That is not a novel idea that certain decks want certain cards more than others, but I think speaking to the specific card means it should have a greater effect in practice than the general format win/loss percentages.
Related to this, it is definitely true that certain decks have a much higher win percentage on the play compared to draw that is greater in magnitude that the general format win/loss percentage.
Tl:dr- A number of small things likely differentiate CUbe from other draft formats, and push the win percentage on the play up very slightly. Also, the play/draw win percentages can be greater for specific decks, which are more likely to select Power Play higher, leading to a greater effect on play/draw win percentage than the format in general.
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/peasantsnowcube
-- Updated with Fallout Commander
The PioneWer Peasant CUbe
https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/pionewer
-- Updated with Murders at Karlov Manor
You have to actually CAST the card. And unless there's an X/1 on the other side of the table or you can use it to tweak combat into your favor, you'll quite often have better things to do with your mana than play out a Gray Ogre. Just look at the Origins commons and see which have the highest win-rate. That should be enough to show you that that single stat is pretty flimsy, unless you really want pick Bone to Ash and Act of Treason over the actual format all-star Topan Freeblade
And you to even get a chance to cast it, if it's good... you have to put it into your deck! Which means, obviously you're playing black; in the case of 'archetype' it doesn't REALLY matter for Assassin, but there's lots of very good Cube cards which are early picks but can still be left out even when on-color -- Propaganda or Pyroclasm, Carnophage or Keldon Champion.
This sums up my point in general. Looking at a format like peasant cube's overall win percentage for going first doesn't really illustrate where powerplay shines. When you are the beatdown deck in peasant, Power Play has a much greater effect on what your deck would do than for a control deck, which would still be better with Power Play but not nearly as much. Unless we have stats *specifically* on aggro deck's winning percentages, the stats mean very little to me because they account for control and midrange decks, which isn't really power play's true home.
Also, most retail limited format's aggro decks aren't really aggro, I forget when it was said or by who (LR Cast, maybe?) but essentially retail limited is all just different shades of midrange, which I agree with and especially so in comparison to peasant cube. Like, we're talking about a 2/2 for 2B that gives -1-1 as this card you never not play, but that card sucks when put next to peasant cube cards and if it excelled in a format considered fast and isn't good enough in peasant, then I think it's safe to assume that peasant has some more efficient, faster threats. There's no retail limited deck that can play an aggressive 1 drop t1 in most/a high percentage of games, which is a world you can choose to live in for peasant, and that's a real difference to note when pulling up stats and applying them in comparison.
(aside: Jitte is broken, despite the Grim Monoliths of the world. One broken play doesn't invalidate another.)
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Yes, that single stat would be flimsy. I didn't just do that though, and a look at the amount of games played would show you that comparing the elf to bone to ash or act of treason is a mistake.
Bone to ash- 2300 games
Act of treason - 5600 games
Eyeblight assassin - 11700 games
Topan freeblade - 1400 games
Clearly the first two are much more narrow than the last two. Roughly every 7 games the freeblade gets cast matches up with 6 games for the elf.
This almost perfectly lines up with the play percentage for their home colors. 43.5% of decks had white in them, 38.8% of decks had black in them.
So I reject your topical claim that the elf is being held in the hand a significant number of games.
The assassin is the 20th most played card in the format, higher than suppression bonds. This despite white being a more played color, probably because people are playing it as a valueless gray ogre rather frequently.
/
This is still secondary to the point though. Not to be accusatory but it certainly feels like you're skimming my posts. Or ignoring a lot of what's written.
1) The winrate bonus is going to be half of the going first bonus because youre already going to go first half the time.
2) I still dont know how you establish that the first bonus is higher than the RDW-is-best-deck cube, much less over twice as high.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article
Yeah, it is annoying that we don't really have data on aggro in particular. However, while you may be playing aggro only maybe a third of the time, aggro should be on the table half of the time (out of the six matchups between aggro control and midrange, half have aggro as a deck).
So the effect of an aggro deck may be somewhat lost in the noise, but it's definitely accounted for quite a bit.
The more that you think aggro is affected by going first, then it must be true that midrange and control matchups are less so. In fact, if you think that aggro is doubly affected compared to the average, it would mean that non aggro matchups are a 50/50 split for first and second in order to make the math work out. If you thinl aggro is more effected to the tune of 55/45%, then it must mean that for nonaggro matchups its 45.5/54.5 in favor of going second.
We still havent established why the baseline would be higher than in the RDW cube, though.
Malone, I'll read your post soon.
My CubeCobra (draft 20 card packs, 2 packs.)
430, Peasant, Very Unpowered
Why you should take your hybrids out of your gold section
Manamath Article