I have a feeling most pro Twin users are, judging by their signature, highly invested in the UR colors and would love to play those very expensive cards at the top level. Which is totally understandable, and thus they preach for a Twin Unban with reasonably fair arguments. But the financial investment alone would cloud objective perspectives to some degree.
Its not this. I could play near anything, as I spent 3 years in the wilderness (still am really) looking for the 'feel' of a deck, more so than what it is. My financial investment is irrelevant as I've spent far more post Twin, than I did ON Twin.
I feel your pain. I'll be very sad the day amulet titan finally dies due to meta shift, bans, etc.
I think if fairness of a deck in MtG were quantified it would involve it's degree of synergy with itself. Most fair would be a deck with zero synergy while infinite synergy would be infinite combo or essentially infinite combo.
So Storm is very synergistic with itself all the cards work together to execute a particular game plan while UW control is less so. That's not to say UW has no synergy since snap+low cost spells is synergy or jace+terminus. But storm needs ALL the cards to synergize with all the OTHER cards.
It seems very unlikely there exists are very powerful but non synergistic deck. However, you can have a "low" synergy deck with high power level which would be a "high tier fair deck."
And in the spirit of this thread: There were 12 copies of Prime TIME in the top 4 of the last big event. THIS CARD IS THE REAL DEAL PLEASE BAN. #primetimeWinter
Anyone else a little sad they aren't doing their blurbs on how they're monitoring the formats anymore? It was nice reading the B/R updates regardless of change or no change.
Also, played KCI and...uh... holy moly; Second Sunrise flashbacks anyone?
I'm so lost. Control by definition doesn't have "free wins" unless you're running a combo (Counter/Top, Blood moon, Twin, etc). Control runs like 1 wincon that costs 800 mana. Mana leaks don't hit for 3 a turn. The cards you play matter, control isn't running that sweet creature curve to win. It's like the definition that control doesn't get free wins. If it got "free wins" then it would be control/combo.
Also interactivity isn't the hallmark for a deck to leverage skill. How complex a deck is would help leverage skill like storm for example. The deck also can't be total garbage either.
Just picking up on this deck and trying to lock down a list. I see a lot of lists are off serum visions... is there a reason for this?
So originally people went down Botanical Sanctum for Grove of the Burnwillows to have a better matchup against shadow. This led to the concession of not being able to play Serum Visions so enter explore. Now we are seeing less shadow but Field of Ruins and land destruction stuff so we still can't add the sanctums back; we have to play forests so explore stays.
Also, in my limited testing explore gets you a turn 4 titan on the play around 80% of the time while serum visions is closer to 75% of the time. Turn 3 titan on the draw appears to be the same with either explore or serum visions; right around 50%. So all along explore may have been the better card to begin with anyways.
Jace has actually seen play in combo decks in legacy like SneaknShow. Back when Miracles was the best deck and Stoneblade was kicking around, a turn 1 or 2 Jace was absolutely devastating from the SneaknShow side. It seems like Jace sort of fills a similar role in Amulet except that our plan B is midrange beats which Jace can excel at. It's worst case function fog+brainstorm is similar to what titan will do (khalni garden+radiant fountain which is 2 cards, a blocker and life) except it would usually be a turn earlier.
I think the big concern is how fast is the deck you're playing against? Jace just seems bad against any swarm type deck which was already not a great matchup to begin with.
there are just too many moving parts imo. its the reason that, as far as i know, no one has attempted to create/use a standardized method to assess the difficulty of decks, or judge how much variance plays a role in a certain decks success. for instance how would categorize events where a player actively attempts to put themselves in a position to get lucky - and then do. identifying potential outs is a pretty common occurrence when in a bad position.
if i understand correctly, it looks like you are assuming that skilled players always play more difficult or complex decks. which is most definitely not true. some pros like to play decks that include a number of decisions over a long game to hopefully leverage their play skill, but plenty of others play decks that are powerful or consistent because they deemed it the best avenue to winning.
for instance the recent MOCS tournament won by boggles. the MOCS is an invitational tournament so the baseline skill of the players is higher than it would be otherwise, yet multiple players chose to sleeve up boggles because it employs a strategy that is strong against jund - which ended up being the most played deck at the event. are these players less skilled because of their choice?
assigning values to cards sorta makes sense, but i have no clue how you would even attempt to create a comprehensive system. the card effects are so varied that you would have to create an enormous list of assumptions that people would have to agree on in order to take your results seriously.
so the magic community falls back on generalizations like 'linear', or 'reactive'. which goes back to my comment about intuition. people can grasp what you mean by these terms just by seeing a decks strategy play out or by eyeballing a decklist. the unfortunate side effect of this is that certain decks or their pilots dont get enough credit when they do play skillfully.
at the end of the day though you have to ask yourself: what does it matter? i say let people play the decks they enjoy. any deck that becomes too good, by whatever metric, should get the same treatment.
Quantifying complex systems using algorithms is a good way of solving complex problems. Models will typically outperform human intuition without models.
Knowing and maximizing your outs is a skill. Over the long run the skill would become apparent.
Players aren't less skilled for picking Bogles. However, Bogles is still the same deck regardless if it's picked or not. Interestingly, if a deck does well in some event and people start to pick it up and it puts up a lot of results quickly; does that mean the deck is easy to play? It might be too difficult to parse this from all the noise but it's fun to think about.
Words like linear and reactive reveal what the deck does but it doesn't tell us how much skill matters in playing the deck. I consider this an important point as 2 decks with high skill caps playing against each other will probably be more enjoyable for everyone involved as opposed to bogle vs bogle. Interesting games are good for the game overall and I would be sad if I saw only bogles
Just because cards are varied doesn't mean they can't be put into categories. For example "there are so many fruits how could you possibly classify all of them???!" Well, we do. Are there fringe cases, yes. In general though fruit fits into the fruit category.
Unfortunately I can't answer why something matters in any sense.
I tried to quantify interactivity by evaluating every card in a deck and how many modes it has that interact with an opponent's cards. For instance, a card like Ethereal Armor gets 0 points as it doesn't interact at all barring absurd corner cases. Path/Push gets 1 point for targeting just creatures. Bolt gets 2 for targeting creatures and planeswalkers. Negate would get 5 for all card types it can hit. I haven't re-tested this system recently, but it was a good first attempt at objetively quantifying a very subjective topic.
Interesting that you did this! I'm assuming results weren't great. I feel like only having one axis is not enough. Interactivity can also be interactive within the deck itself. Like tutoring for an answer. The tutor isn't particularly interactive but it can get something interactive. So it's more complex than ethereal armor but it's not necessarily more interactive. I've been toying with an interactivity scale along with complexity scale. So in this case ethereal armor will score low and in both categories while negate is high in interactivity but fairly low in complexity and a tutor is high in complexity but low in interactivity.
My assumption for complexity playing into interactivity is this: Chess is really only interactive because of the sheer complexity. I believe complexity plays a large role in interactivity.
that would be waaaaaaay too simplistic of an approach. it assumes the wins were all due to skill, and the losses due to luck. i know some people love to believe that their wins are because of skill, but luck wins you as many games as it loses. this is true even at the pro level.
there are also cases where skilled players get outplayed by other skilled players, or lucky events happening at different moments even within a single game. not to mention the natural advantage gained from one decks strategy being innately good versus another, which includes card choices even before a single game is played.
good players win more, and becomes especially evident over a large series of games/matches.
as for how hard a deck is to pilot i think looking at weighted decision trees over a series of games is a decent approach.
that would involve an extensive analysis though, for the most part players can intuit the difficulty of a deck by playing it and seeing how hard it was to find a winning line of play.
there is also something to be said about players gravitating towards certain strategies because they intuitively understand certain aspects of it better. which makes 'difficulty' concept partially relative.
I think luck is a zero sum game in the long run otherwise some players would naturally be luckier than others. Great players going against other great players certainly puts some strain on using MWP to determine luck in MTG.
I wonder if calculating complexity and interactivity of each card and then summing them up in a deck would bear any meaningful results. Like for example lava spike is a low complexity and low interactivity card while lightning bolt is much higher in both categories and Bogles most interactive card is a normal creature with lowish complexity and moderate interactivity. Hollow Derp actively tries to increase randomness so I dunno how that fits into calculations. Summing up the parts of decks could reveal inner complexity and interactivity which, I assume, help the more skilled player in winning.
To be clear I'm not putting burn in the same category as Bogles. I personally think Burn is middle of the pack in complexity and interactivity.
Intuition is important in the beginning but the best players put in tons of reps to be as good as they are. Or at least I hope lol.
This popped into my head because of the rise of Hollow One and Bogles. Do we really want to see these decks across from us every few matches or consistently at the top tables?
Why do you think luck and variance are a large part of winning games? Is that in Magic as a whole or Modern specifically? If Modern specifically, how is this affecting player performance at events?
Have you done any calculations for how much luck plays into modern or mtg in general? Would it just be ~100%-(a great player's winrate)? Maybe add a couple percentage points for the occasional misplay?
It would be interesting to tease out the luck differences from say Hollow Chimp and Bogles (perceived low skill and luckbased decks) vs Lantern and Shadow (perceived high skill low luckbased decks). I'm not entirely sure how it would be done but there has to be a difference, right?
Can we make fun of the Hollow one deck? Like with Show and Tell in legacy? "Show and derp put Griselchimp into play?"
"Chimp Lore into Hollow Derp play land trigger Bloodchimp?"
Seriously though, with all of the RNG doesn't the deck just play itself? I feel like people would get bored of it after awhile like Scapeshift. Agreed on FotM.
5 jaces in top 8 SCG modern classic. 4 BBE. Looks like Jace is doing just fine in modern. I'll admit I was wrong. I thought Jace was going to be way more OP than he is turning out to be.
modern just isnt supposed to be the most popular format. its that simple. selective reprintings have very little effect, but outside of a massive reprint cycle covering all modern staples at once (which they cant justify) there is no recourse.
if wotc has failed anything, it is their poor development of standard sets.
Yup 100% agree here. It's interesting how focusing on only draft led to dumpster fire standard. /s
It'll be interesting to see how modern will be affected when standard finally improves. Modern is head and shoulders the best format so I feel like people aren't just gonna up and leave to go to standard.
I feel your pain. I'll be very sad the day amulet titan finally dies due to meta shift, bans, etc.
So Storm is very synergistic with itself all the cards work together to execute a particular game plan while UW control is less so. That's not to say UW has no synergy since snap+low cost spells is synergy or jace+terminus. But storm needs ALL the cards to synergize with all the OTHER cards.
It seems very unlikely there exists are very powerful but non synergistic deck. However, you can have a "low" synergy deck with high power level which would be a "high tier fair deck."
And in the spirit of this thread: There were 12 copies of Prime TIME in the top 4 of the last big event. THIS CARD IS THE REAL DEAL PLEASE BAN. #primetimeWinter
Also, played KCI and...uh... holy moly; Second Sunrise flashbacks anyone?
Let's see how this "OP" vengevine deck shakes out or if "OP" ancient stirrings decks take it down a peg
Also unban preordain because it should be unbanned.
Also interactivity isn't the hallmark for a deck to leverage skill. How complex a deck is would help leverage skill like storm for example. The deck also can't be total garbage either.
So originally people went down Botanical Sanctum for Grove of the Burnwillows to have a better matchup against shadow. This led to the concession of not being able to play Serum Visions so enter explore. Now we are seeing less shadow but Field of Ruins and land destruction stuff so we still can't add the sanctums back; we have to play forests so explore stays.
Also, in my limited testing explore gets you a turn 4 titan on the play around 80% of the time while serum visions is closer to 75% of the time. Turn 3 titan on the draw appears to be the same with either explore or serum visions; right around 50%. So all along explore may have been the better card to begin with anyways.
I think the big concern is how fast is the deck you're playing against? Jace just seems bad against any swarm type deck which was already not a great matchup to begin with.
Quantifying complex systems using algorithms is a good way of solving complex problems. Models will typically outperform human intuition without models.
Knowing and maximizing your outs is a skill. Over the long run the skill would become apparent.
Players aren't less skilled for picking Bogles. However, Bogles is still the same deck regardless if it's picked or not. Interestingly, if a deck does well in some event and people start to pick it up and it puts up a lot of results quickly; does that mean the deck is easy to play? It might be too difficult to parse this from all the noise but it's fun to think about.
Words like linear and reactive reveal what the deck does but it doesn't tell us how much skill matters in playing the deck. I consider this an important point as 2 decks with high skill caps playing against each other will probably be more enjoyable for everyone involved as opposed to bogle vs bogle. Interesting games are good for the game overall and I would be sad if I saw only bogles
Just because cards are varied doesn't mean they can't be put into categories. For example "there are so many fruits how could you possibly classify all of them???!" Well, we do. Are there fringe cases, yes. In general though fruit fits into the fruit category.
Unfortunately I can't answer why something matters in any sense.
Interesting that you did this! I'm assuming results weren't great. I feel like only having one axis is not enough. Interactivity can also be interactive within the deck itself. Like tutoring for an answer. The tutor isn't particularly interactive but it can get something interactive. So it's more complex than ethereal armor but it's not necessarily more interactive. I've been toying with an interactivity scale along with complexity scale. So in this case ethereal armor will score low and in both categories while negate is high in interactivity but fairly low in complexity and a tutor is high in complexity but low in interactivity.
My assumption for complexity playing into interactivity is this: Chess is really only interactive because of the sheer complexity. I believe complexity plays a large role in interactivity.
Also holy moly Dominaria spoilers????
I think luck is a zero sum game in the long run otherwise some players would naturally be luckier than others. Great players going against other great players certainly puts some strain on using MWP to determine luck in MTG.
I wonder if calculating complexity and interactivity of each card and then summing them up in a deck would bear any meaningful results. Like for example lava spike is a low complexity and low interactivity card while lightning bolt is much higher in both categories and Bogles most interactive card is a normal creature with lowish complexity and moderate interactivity. Hollow Derp actively tries to increase randomness so I dunno how that fits into calculations. Summing up the parts of decks could reveal inner complexity and interactivity which, I assume, help the more skilled player in winning.
To be clear I'm not putting burn in the same category as Bogles. I personally think Burn is middle of the pack in complexity and interactivity.
Intuition is important in the beginning but the best players put in tons of reps to be as good as they are. Or at least I hope lol.
This popped into my head because of the rise of Hollow One and Bogles. Do we really want to see these decks across from us every few matches or consistently at the top tables?
Have you done any calculations for how much luck plays into modern or mtg in general? Would it just be ~100%-(a great player's winrate)? Maybe add a couple percentage points for the occasional misplay?
It would be interesting to tease out the luck differences from say Hollow Chimp and Bogles (perceived low skill and luckbased decks) vs Lantern and Shadow (perceived high skill low luckbased decks). I'm not entirely sure how it would be done but there has to be a difference, right?
"Chimp Lore into Hollow Derp play land trigger Bloodchimp?"
Seriously though, with all of the RNG doesn't the deck just play itself? I feel like people would get bored of it after awhile like Scapeshift. Agreed on FotM.
Grixis control had 3 and Amulet Titan had 2 jaces in the top8.
Link: http://sales.starcitygames.com//deckdatabase/deckshow.php?&t[C1]=28&start_date=03/03/2018&end_date=03/04/2018&start=1&finish=16&event_ID=36&city=Worcester&state=MA
Yup 100% agree here. It's interesting how focusing on only draft led to dumpster fire standard. /s
It'll be interesting to see how modern will be affected when standard finally improves. Modern is head and shoulders the best format so I feel like people aren't just gonna up and leave to go to standard.