Tron brings in removal for stony because it is good against them, but it isn't backbreaking. In fact I'd rather see a vial in my opener so I can actually use LD vs them than stony. There are even cards that work as splash hate for them. Eidolon of rhetoric for instance makes those baubles awkward. Remember, we're favored vs them already. Altho surgical vs them is mighty tasty if you're so inclined.
Lantern is likely to discard your opening hand stony anyway. That means you have to draw it before they don't let you and then kill them before they bridge up and eventually draw decay. The cards good, but it's just not a good MU for many taxes variants. As catmix said, it probably isn't worth hedging slots for since it make a up a low meta %. If you really had to beat it, leyline of sanctity is probably the best card for you since it hoses them from the start AND lets your other hoses stay in your hand.
Affinity is certainly effected by the lack of stony and I'd argue it's the 1 real MU that make a me occasionally want it. HOWEVER cards like copter actually do put in quite a bit of good work here. Spot removal and anti aggro stuff like ghostly prison should be able to cover it.
Ad naus is hosed by stony very well, but the MU is pretty much free.
I guess I can mention eggs, but the deck can be attacked from a ton of angles and is probably favored for us already.
Ultimately, thraben inspector and copter are so excellent in so many MU as they give a mono W deck much needed card filtering. If you really want to beat affinity you can still run stony (or kataki which we haven't really talked about) and swallow the nonbo. I truly believe copter and inspector are excellent in mono W.
ReCatmix's humans rant:
If you're on a multicolor version of the deck, EE on 2 wrecks them. Ghostly prison is an absolute house vs them. Settle the wreckage can also be good, altho you might have trouble getting to it/ having opponents play around it. Imo, ghostly is an excellent option for D&T in general.
I decided to recently revisit trophy taxes and ended up pulling out a 5-0. The deck grinds very well while still having game against some combo which is why I tried it. In the 5-0 league, I played vs GW valuetown, GR tron, martyr proc, jeskai, and WB drazi (not E&T). I also streamed 2 leagues with the deck yesterday and ended up dropping from both leagues. The deck seems to always go 1-2 or 2-1 meaning they're a lot of close games. I don't think the deck is quite perfect, but it's a blast to play and has some neat tools.
@redtwister Yeah, I tend to like copter slightly more than reshaper,but it's pretty close. It's just that copter has evasion and can take over the game if not answered. The only creature that can't really crew it imo is smasher. It just gives a lot of your dudes pseudo haste/ unblockability.
I wouldn't cut big thalia though. I might even try to up the number of her to 3 with copter as she's just that good. Granted, the meta seems to be moving back towards bolt, so perhaps she's worse than she was.
I just played vs 5c humans with a version of WU D&T 2x and went 1-2, 2-1. I have also played a decent amount of the humans list recently myself as well as against it with various colors of D&T. Mind you all, my SB is very spot removal heavy, but I don't find the matchup that much in favor of either side. I haven't played enough vs them yet to give an exact percentage (partly because it seems like a lot of the MODO humans players don't always make the best plays at this point in time so I don't feel good about the data I have), but it feels like it might be 45-55 in their favor g1 and the reverse postboard. The older company versions of humans felt much better vs us than this one because every game that I could grind out that humans list, they'd just find a coco and crush me while still having the possibility of getting a quick kill like the current version does.
Having played with the list and against the list, the part about it that has my interest for us at the moment is the card meddling mage, which I had tested previously, but dismissed. I'm not sure the card does the same thing for us as them in that we don't have team pump effects or the same clock, but I will be testing it again in WU.
@SteveMont When dredge was a deck, you'd consistently see 1-2 relic of progenitus in the MD of BW E&T. If you want to pack MD GY hate (other than trying to fit a bojuka bog in the mana somewhere), I'd recommend relic. It replaces itself so it's not as dead as rip in the bad MUs.
Btw, I'm surprised to hear that you find storm a bad MU. It should be quite favorable for WB E&T. How are you siding?
Which brings me to @Spsiegel1987 We're a metadeck. This means that our SBs change and that we have more MD flex slots than many other decks. This makes having a SB guide a difficult task, especially because many people can't agree on what SB cards should be played. This means that if you want a specific guide, your best bet is something like the Coval article you already read. Beyond that, I'd try paying attention to other players SBs and getting a better understanding of how to build a proper SB with our deck and how to use it. I tried to build a general SBing guide that I try to update to more reflect the meta. It isn't splash specific and more teaches you how to craft one and how SBing generally goes. As Dsmonsta mentioned, it's in leonin's library (there's links in it at the bottom of the primer on the 1st page).
Playstyle might influence how you board as well. For instance, even if I played Coval's exact 75(which I wouldn't), I wouldn't SB the same way he does. But Coval won a large tournament, which is why you might be more tempted to listen to his advice.
The only MU I'd cut all the vials is vs BGx midrange decks where they're going to strip you of your resources and get you into topdeck wars where vial is actively bad. I also never board out vials vs storm. If I had a ton of amazing SB cards, I might board out 1 if I needed the room. I also wouldn't board them out vs dredge or GDS like he does. You need it to stay at some semblance of parody vs dredge and it greatly helps you win the tempo war vs GDS. I forget where else he boards them out.
The 22nd place in the challenge was me. Altho I'm very surprised to hear it called stock. I can do a brief recap if people are interested and would be happy to talk about deck choices.
He opened a hand with natural tron, smasher, balista, the equipment with deattouch and lifelink, i just scooped.
EDIT: i'm playing E&T
Mana disruption is key because you're not beating them if they 're casting a lot of spells. Ghost Quarter and Tec Edge are super important. Post-Board side in artifact hate and phyrexian revokers if you have them. Side out 1-toughness creatures like thalia and fickerwisp to avoid ballista blowouts.
While you're correct about siding in artifact hate and that 1 toughness creatures such as thalia aren't great vs them, I think it's absolutely wrong to sb out fliers. Wisp can work as resource denial and can help us race when you vial out that attacking smasher. And it has evasion. I should also note that I like to keep in ~2 thalias on the play as her tax can be relevant in the earlier stages of the game and she beats reshapers in combat. She's much worse on the draw though.
Hey guys, I just ordered the pieces for Eldrazi and Taxes
Is there a good resource for sideboard guides, or very good primers?
I tried googling, checking channelfireball and whatnot, but didn't see anything too detailed
I mainly want to see a resource guide so I can grasp what cards are good and bad against archetypes and what to sideboard in and out as reference points
EDIT: I'd recommend going through the rest of the primer. There's a lot of good resources compiled there. If that's not enough, https://go.twitch.tv/kponcemtg streams BW E&T a lot. I also stream it occasionally, and Catmix also releases regular D&T content.
He opened a hand with natural tron, smasher, balista, the equipment with deattouch and lifelink, i just scooped.
EDIT: i'm playing E&T
They have some god hands like that which are tough to beat. Our plan is essentially to keep them in an earlier stage of the game where we're favored via mana denial since their late game is so good. stony silence is fine vs them, but vial helps our plan vs them a lot. If you're looking for a good SB card, big game hunter is also excellent vs them.
Has anyone put in the work to compile a 'basics being played' list for every deck? Since this is usually the same number for the already established decks it might be a nice resource to have access to? I think it's important to know the number of basics every deck usually plays so we know when GQ / Field of Ruin are at their best
As far as I'm aware, the answer is no. Typically people check general lists on place like here. The problem with making such a resource is that decks update their land counts now and again, altho it's not a bad idea. For now, I'd just go ahead and use metagame sites like the aforementioned. As you get a feel for the format, you'll also have a good idea of how many basics the main decks run. I can start to compile something to that effect, although it may be a bit.
"Wow! Really? How many?" This puzzled him as he now stared at a field with a tapped fetch land and a Valakut as his remaining mana sources on turn 5. A Field of Ruin and pair of Ghost Quarter just brought shear misery for him. It was a truly apathetic scene. Leonin arbiter, Aether Vial, And Thalia, Heretic Cathar were threatening to end the game in a mere two turns.
What you need to know:
Mono-White has proven to be very powerful! While I was not certain about how many field of ruin to run, I was certain that the card is good. I am perfectly confident that two makes a world of difference in the deck. It does require a reimagining of the mana base, though. I have not done that work yet.
Where it matters:
It has bene good against pretty much everything other than Grixis Death Shadow. On paper it should seem like that's the prime match up but the mana requirements in that match up are a bit hard to pull the trick off. Affinity, Scapeshift, Tron variants, and even Burn, struggle when you have at least 6 Ghost Quarter affects in your deck. With or without Arbiter, the affect has major upsides. Fixing mana for color is great and depriving mana is greater.
Settle The Wreckage. Is it good?:
Seems like a reasonable sideboard option. I am not certain that it is a balanced SB option yet. It helps against problematic match ups but could be a card opps learn to play through if it proves to be popular.
Overall:
I am happy to see the additions from Ixalan actually being useful. We still have to wait and see what decks adopt new tools and if the ban list changes. But I think we can continue pushing as a tier 1 deck for the next few months! That's it! Tell me what you experience you have had with Field of Ruin!
-Catmix
I similarly have been testing field of ruin as a 2x. The card isn't phenomenal (it's not better than tec edge or GQ), but it is an effect we like to have as many as we can of and it's the next best option after GQ and Tec edge. It also does have corner cases where it's actually better than our other LD (when we need to activate it and our opponent doesn't have 4 lands and or we don't want to fall behind on lands), but they are corner cases for a reason. Still, having 10 LD effects in our deck makes taking people off colors or troublesome lands quite doable (with or without leonin arbiter). The question on how many to run hinges on how many we can fit. Since it's not replacing our other LD and we still want 13 colored sources, I believe that number to be 2 (making for 10 colorless LD lands).
The reality of the matter is that it's not going to revolutionize our deck. It's a slight change, but one that I believe does make our deck a better deck. It gives our LD element of our deck some more redundancy. Where I'll depart from catmix's mana is in our basic count. Since running field of ruin, I've noticed that having those extra basics to search out can matter. 8 plains seems to be the magic number (there's also the whole debate on 23 vs 22 lands and 4x canopy or not, but I'm not getting into that here as it's not the focus of the matter).
I have successfully taken many decks off a color with my 10 LD lands. This does include DS MUs. It usually only happens in the grindier games, but many decks having only 2-3 basics means that even without arbiter, we can simply remove all of our opponents colored sources of a particular kind over the course of a longer game.
Settle the Wreckage has been good in my testing. It seems that opponents expect resto when we have 4 mana up and have to attack either wide to go around her or attack with their better creatures. Even if they play around the card, it often results in a 2 for 1. After playing with catmix in the mirror, we saw that the card was still strong when we expected, albeit less strong than it would be if our opponents didn't know about the card.
Spider, I'm just going to let this one go. Obviously, you're entitled to build your manabase however you want and I'm not going to stop you. I'm just trying to stop the lurkers from feeling obligated to run 23 lands with 4 Canopies in Mono-white D&T.
There is an interesting article on Thraben university for mana bases with vial taken into consideration. There is also source code for a small programm. http://www.thrabenuniversity.com/?page_id=1288
Maybe this will help settle your argument.
Unfortunately, it won't. Both Spider and I have access to pretty comprehensive probability distribution tables for this deck, and I have additional access to a Monte Carlo simulator for figuring out everything else (e.g., "what are the odds I draw a Hierarch, Arbiter, Ghost Quarter, and WG source in my opening hand?"). Both Spider and I know the math, although I'm more of a purist about it (as you can probably tell).
Either way, neither of us need additional resources on this topic. We've both played this game for a very long time. We both know this deck inside and out. We're arguing about performance information that's really on the margin of mainstream gameplay and not readily answerable using a goldfish simulator.[/quote]
I very nearly said the same thing instead of my last tirade there . I know we're both making our arguments for the community here, altho there may have been a bit of pride involved there ;). You're right that it's not a hard and fast rule that people always need to follow. I was trying to stress that in our discussion. I do however, think that for people unfamiliar with he deck that 23 lands with 4 canopy is a good place to start. Obviously it's possible to do well without canopy. Catmix just had a good finish with a list with 22 lands and a number of canopy that was not 4. It's a well crafted list. My understanding is that you had a similar list and also did quite well.
@Soladoc that is an excellent resource however that is worth putting into leonin's library.
Obviously, the range of keepable hands varies by matchup. But given you have access to perfect mathematical information about probability distributions, the situation that you optimize for should be G1 in some reasonable approximation of the metagame.
If you're not willing to use the perfect information that math gives you, that's fine. You don't have to. You can run 23 lands or 30 lands. But as far as I'm concerned, you've provided no evidence for why 23 lands is the right number.
Since you refuse to present your own logical framework of what a keepbable hand is and instead chose to cherry pick my argument with your position being simply that of a contrarian with no logical explanation behind it, I suppose I'll have to send you to other magic players explanation of what a good 7 might mean. Here Reid Duke breaks down how different general archetypes mulligan. Of course, this isn't about our deck in particular, and we have to define our deck via one of his general deck types. D&T is often called a "aggro-control" deck, but that doesn't much clear things up. Based on the amount of turns the game tends to go, we'd likely be defined as a midrange deck, but we do this by often taxing our opponents and keeping the game in a approximation of the early game longer than it might otherwise go. Thus, while this is a useful tool, it can be challenging to fit our deck neatly into a category. However, according to his breakdown, I'd say that we most closely resemble a midrange deck what with having some cards that are very good in some MUs, but absolutely terrible in others. Then the question becomes, how many lands does a generic midrange deck want to typically see?
To better understand what makes one mulligan, modern nexus breaks it down here . The mulligans we're talking about fall into their type #1, the inherent mulligan. That is, we're mulliganing because our hand is in some way not okay due to the land in or the lack of lands in the hand.
This is true, but I could spin this the exact opposite way. Given the percentage difference is small mathematically, why haven't you cut that 23rd land?
(In practice, exactly how small of a difference depends on what constitutes a keepable opening hand. If keepable hands have 2-3 lands, then the difference between 22 and 23 land is only 0.62% in favor of 22. But if keepable hands have 3-4 lands, then the difference between 22 and 23 lands becomes 2.69% in favor of 23.)
This is basically a direct contradiction of your previous sentiment. If you're mulliganing significantly more hands having only 22 land as opposed to 23, that's probably variance, because they're so probabilistically similar. You would have to play literal thousands of games before you would notice this, which again begs the question: why are you still playing that 23rd land?
Unfortunately, we don't know what percentage of mulligans come specifically from "inherent mulligans," making this even harder to pin down.
This was me offering you the olive branch in that unless you play thousands of games, as you said, it's going to be hard to see the difference between the two different land counts. HOWEVER, since you insist that we are able to find the ultimate truth of how many lands should we run, I'm going to have to throw my anecdotal evidence in the 23 land side of things as I have played literally thousands of games with this deck. You seem to assume that I never tried 22 lands. This couldn't be farther from the truth. In actuality, the difference between the two land counts likely comes down to preference, but that ~1% difference in mulligans, according to the program I've been using since the start of the year, agrees with the rest of the games I've played and my experience with it in that I get to mulligan less. While I have played MANY games, they're not all with the stock mono W list (with 22vs23 lands) verbatim, which makes this even harder to say is a certainty. Of course, most every top finish with the deck has 23 lands and 4 canopies, but you refuse to see those results. Now, just because everyone does something does not make it the truth, but it certainly makes us wonder if there is a reason behind their choices. We have the statistics, but can't seem to agree on how they should be interpreted. While the math represents the truth of the situation, how we interpret it introduces opinion and human error.
I would like to have a higher chance of having Canopy in my 4-land opener. But the cost is that I also have a higher chance of having Canopy in my 2-land opener, which feels much worse.
Again, math can answer your question. Regardless of whether you have 22 or 23 lands, the chance of you having exactly 2 lands (30.02%, 28.56%) is higher than you having exactly 4 lands (15.98%, 17.82%). That means that you're more likely to have a 2-land opener with Canopy than a 4-land opener with Canopy. (That statement would still be true even if you only had one Canopy as opposed to four, but I digress.) My point is that the cost of making your 4-land openers better is making your 2-land openers significantly worse; not only are 2-land openers more likely, but the Canopies are probably costing you more life in the 2-land openers than the 4-land openers.
I agree with you that Canopy should be played in mono-white. I just think the correct number is probably 2-3.
Where does having canopy feel much worse? I reiterate, the only deck that can consistently punish us is burn. Where's the math behind the canopy numbers? I'd love to see the average damage taken from canopies over the course of the game with 2vs3vs4 of them. Currently, we're just saying why we like one or the other and explaining it via play theory.
EDIT: I realize your issue with my initial statement may have been with the strength of the rhetoric I used; "I wouldn't be caught dead running 22 lands (and less than 4 canopies in mono W)."
Tron brings in removal for stony because it is good against them, but it isn't backbreaking. In fact I'd rather see a vial in my opener so I can actually use LD vs them than stony. There are even cards that work as splash hate for them. Eidolon of rhetoric for instance makes those baubles awkward. Remember, we're favored vs them already. Altho surgical vs them is mighty tasty if you're so inclined.
Lantern is likely to discard your opening hand stony anyway. That means you have to draw it before they don't let you and then kill them before they bridge up and eventually draw decay. The cards good, but it's just not a good MU for many taxes variants. As catmix said, it probably isn't worth hedging slots for since it make a up a low meta %. If you really had to beat it, leyline of sanctity is probably the best card for you since it hoses them from the start AND lets your other hoses stay in your hand.
Affinity is certainly effected by the lack of stony and I'd argue it's the 1 real MU that make a me occasionally want it. HOWEVER cards like copter actually do put in quite a bit of good work here. Spot removal and anti aggro stuff like ghostly prison should be able to cover it.
Ad naus is hosed by stony very well, but the MU is pretty much free.
I guess I can mention eggs, but the deck can be attacked from a ton of angles and is probably favored for us already.
Ultimately, thraben inspector and copter are so excellent in so many MU as they give a mono W deck much needed card filtering. If you really want to beat affinity you can still run stony (or kataki which we haven't really talked about) and swallow the nonbo. I truly believe copter and inspector are excellent in mono W.
If you're on a multicolor version of the deck, EE on 2 wrecks them. Ghostly prison is an absolute house vs them. Settle the wreckage can also be good, altho you might have trouble getting to it/ having opponents play around it. Imo, ghostly is an excellent option for D&T in general.
Thanks friend!
I decided to recently revisit trophy taxes and ended up pulling out a 5-0. The deck grinds very well while still having game against some combo which is why I tried it. In the 5-0 league, I played vs GW valuetown, GR tron, martyr proc, jeskai, and WB drazi (not E&T). I also streamed 2 leagues with the deck yesterday and ended up dropping from both leagues. The deck seems to always go 1-2 or 2-1 meaning they're a lot of close games. I don't think the deck is quite perfect, but it's a blast to play and has some neat tools.
I wouldn't cut big thalia though. I might even try to up the number of her to 3 with copter as she's just that good. Granted, the meta seems to be moving back towards bolt, so perhaps she's worse than she was.
Having played with the list and against the list, the part about it that has my interest for us at the moment is the card meddling mage, which I had tested previously, but dismissed. I'm not sure the card does the same thing for us as them in that we don't have team pump effects or the same clock, but I will be testing it again in WU.
Btw, I'm surprised to hear that you find storm a bad MU. It should be quite favorable for WB E&T. How are you siding?
Which brings me to @Spsiegel1987 We're a metadeck. This means that our SBs change and that we have more MD flex slots than many other decks. This makes having a SB guide a difficult task, especially because many people can't agree on what SB cards should be played. This means that if you want a specific guide, your best bet is something like the Coval article you already read. Beyond that, I'd try paying attention to other players SBs and getting a better understanding of how to build a proper SB with our deck and how to use it. I tried to build a general SBing guide that I try to update to more reflect the meta. It isn't splash specific and more teaches you how to craft one and how SBing generally goes. As Dsmonsta mentioned, it's in leonin's library (there's links in it at the bottom of the primer on the 1st page).
Playstyle might influence how you board as well. For instance, even if I played Coval's exact 75(which I wouldn't), I wouldn't SB the same way he does. But Coval won a large tournament, which is why you might be more tempted to listen to his advice.
The only MU I'd cut all the vials is vs BGx midrange decks where they're going to strip you of your resources and get you into topdeck wars where vial is actively bad. I also never board out vials vs storm. If I had a ton of amazing SB cards, I might board out 1 if I needed the room. I also wouldn't board them out vs dredge or GDS like he does. You need it to stay at some semblance of parody vs dredge and it greatly helps you win the tempo war vs GDS. I forget where else he boards them out.
While you're correct about siding in artifact hate and that 1 toughness creatures such as thalia aren't great vs them, I think it's absolutely wrong to sb out fliers. Wisp can work as resource denial and can help us race when you vial out that attacking smasher. And it has evasion. I should also note that I like to keep in ~2 thalias on the play as her tax can be relevant in the earlier stages of the game and she beats reshapers in combat. She's much worse on the draw though.
Yes. There are. Here is Craig Wescoe's take, here's Patxi Sanchez's guide, and for a more general SBing guide, here's something I wrote up. All except patxi's guide are in our primer (@DeathandCatmix we should add his guide to Leonin's Library).
EDIT: I'd recommend going through the rest of the primer. There's a lot of good resources compiled there. If that's not enough, https://go.twitch.tv/kponcemtg streams BW E&T a lot. I also stream it occasionally, and Catmix also releases regular D&T content.
They have some god hands like that which are tough to beat. Our plan is essentially to keep them in an earlier stage of the game where we're favored via mana denial since their late game is so good. stony silence is fine vs them, but vial helps our plan vs them a lot. If you're looking for a good SB card, big game hunter is also excellent vs them.
As far as I'm aware, the answer is no. Typically people check general lists on place like here. The problem with making such a resource is that decks update their land counts now and again, altho it's not a bad idea. For now, I'd just go ahead and use metagame sites like the aforementioned. As you get a feel for the format, you'll also have a good idea of how many basics the main decks run. I can start to compile something to that effect, although it may be a bit.
I similarly have been testing field of ruin as a 2x. The card isn't phenomenal (it's not better than tec edge or GQ), but it is an effect we like to have as many as we can of and it's the next best option after GQ and Tec edge. It also does have corner cases where it's actually better than our other LD (when we need to activate it and our opponent doesn't have 4 lands and or we don't want to fall behind on lands), but they are corner cases for a reason. Still, having 10 LD effects in our deck makes taking people off colors or troublesome lands quite doable (with or without leonin arbiter). The question on how many to run hinges on how many we can fit. Since it's not replacing our other LD and we still want 13 colored sources, I believe that number to be 2 (making for 10 colorless LD lands).
The reality of the matter is that it's not going to revolutionize our deck. It's a slight change, but one that I believe does make our deck a better deck. It gives our LD element of our deck some more redundancy. Where I'll depart from catmix's mana is in our basic count. Since running field of ruin, I've noticed that having those extra basics to search out can matter. 8 plains seems to be the magic number (there's also the whole debate on 23 vs 22 lands and 4x canopy or not, but I'm not getting into that here as it's not the focus of the matter).
I have successfully taken many decks off a color with my 10 LD lands. This does include DS MUs. It usually only happens in the grindier games, but many decks having only 2-3 basics means that even without arbiter, we can simply remove all of our opponents colored sources of a particular kind over the course of a longer game.
Settle the Wreckage has been good in my testing. It seems that opponents expect resto when we have 4 mana up and have to attack either wide to go around her or attack with their better creatures. Even if they play around the card, it often results in a 2 for 1. After playing with catmix in the mirror, we saw that the card was still strong when we expected, albeit less strong than it would be if our opponents didn't know about the card.
Ultimately between thalia, heretic cathar, ghost quarter, path to exile, and field of ruin (and the potential SB settle the wreckage) we can apply quite a bit of pressure on our opponents basics count. That's not even mentioning the added tectonic edge.
Unfortunately, it won't. Both Spider and I have access to pretty comprehensive probability distribution tables for this deck, and I have additional access to a Monte Carlo simulator for figuring out everything else (e.g., "what are the odds I draw a Hierarch, Arbiter, Ghost Quarter, and WG source in my opening hand?"). Both Spider and I know the math, although I'm more of a purist about it (as you can probably tell).
Either way, neither of us need additional resources on this topic. We've both played this game for a very long time. We both know this deck inside and out. We're arguing about performance information that's really on the margin of mainstream gameplay and not readily answerable using a goldfish simulator.[/quote]
I very nearly said the same thing instead of my last tirade there
@Soladoc that is an excellent resource however that is worth putting into leonin's library.
To better understand what makes one mulligan, modern nexus breaks it down here
. The mulligans we're talking about fall into their type #1, the inherent mulligan. That is, we're mulliganing because our hand is in some way not okay due to the land in or the lack of lands in the hand.
Unfortunately, we don't know what percentage of mulligans come specifically from "inherent mulligans," making this even harder to pin down.
This was me offering you the olive branch in that unless you play thousands of games, as you said, it's going to be hard to see the difference between the two different land counts. HOWEVER, since you insist that we are able to find the ultimate truth of how many lands should we run, I'm going to have to throw my anecdotal evidence in the 23 land side of things as I have played literally thousands of games with this deck. You seem to assume that I never tried 22 lands. This couldn't be farther from the truth. In actuality, the difference between the two land counts likely comes down to preference, but that ~1% difference in mulligans, according to the program I've been using since the start of the year, agrees with the rest of the games I've played and my experience with it in that I get to mulligan less. While I have played MANY games, they're not all with the stock mono W list (with 22vs23 lands) verbatim, which makes this even harder to say is a certainty. Of course, most every top finish with the deck has 23 lands and 4 canopies, but you refuse to see those results. Now, just because everyone does something does not make it the truth, but it certainly makes us wonder if there is a reason behind their choices. We have the statistics, but can't seem to agree on how they should be interpreted. While the math represents the truth of the situation, how we interpret it introduces opinion and human error.
Where does having canopy feel much worse? I reiterate, the only deck that can consistently punish us is burn. Where's the math behind the canopy numbers? I'd love to see the average damage taken from canopies over the course of the game with 2vs3vs4 of them. Currently, we're just saying why we like one or the other and explaining it via play theory.
EDIT: I realize your issue with my initial statement may have been with the strength of the rhetoric I used; "I wouldn't be caught dead running 22 lands (and less than 4 canopies in mono W)."