There is no magic line at top-8 that separates great decks from the rest. Having a bunch of other decks in the top 16 or top 19 is still a very strong showing. I suspect if you calculate the winning percentage for all of these commanders, Vial and Breya will both look in a class above, as they do in the Cockatrice tournament and will continue to do. Zurgo and Geist had a good day but one good day isn't enough to put them in a class with Vial and Breya IMO.
If we're being reactionary based on recent results, it's also worth mentioning that this tournament and the 3 most recently posted on MTGTop8, were all won by Breya or Vial. All four of them.
just chiming in from the sidelines... you can do double elim, or any tournament setup you want. you just need HARD RULES. make it clear, and no excuses. matches are reported within X days, or the judge makes a decision. there may be tears, but too bad.
+1. This has nothing to do with the style of tournament, but only the rules around time to play and report.
I'd also consider organizing around time zones next time. I'm sure most people won't like that, because they might be playing locals or people they know, but it's so much easier to schedule matches when someone's within 1-3 hours of your time zone, as opposed to 8-10.
Yeah, about Breya, I dont realy watch mtgtop8 but I heard it somewhere. I looked on mtgtop8 last week and saw that she placed 3 in top8 at ZAP Palaiseau but I didnt look closely. And on closer look she looks nowhere near as played as smasher
Nowhere nearly as played as Vial, but looks to possibly be nearly as strong. Very good results in that tournament you mention (identical lists make T8 and a quite different list also making T8), and similar winning percentage to Vial in the Cockatrice tournament here. With the smaller usership of Breya though, it is also possible that some of this is due to player skill and some of the better players having chosen Breya.
It's a little clunky in a way, but it's also how I assumed the partner mechanic would work when I first saw it. I think it makes total sense to require Partner commanders to precisely match colors, i.e. you can use Akiri and Bruse but not Akiri and Tymna.
Partner is unfortunately a pretty overpowered mechanic, giving users both card quality (more colors) and quantity (being able to replay commanders with individual commander taxes). The legacy card pool has too many ways to help 4c players fix their mana and not nearly enough ways to punish them for it.
That said, I feel we should be very careful on analysing Top 8 data. It's hard to understand how a tournament played out just by looking at the Top 8.
They played just for fun, 2-0 to vial izi.
In my data, I actually gave the win to Prossh and the second place to Vial. And I did not give out two first-places to Vial, they got first and second. So the situation is worse than my numbers show and I am *under* estimating the strength of Vial.
In general I'm sympathetic to the limitations of data, but that is not an excuse to throw up your hands and say we'll never know the truth. I put far more stock into results and analysis than I put in people's subjective impressions of things.
In one of the parts of your post you talk about Top 8 victories, but in my understanding a lot of Duel Commander tournaments are Swiss-only. So assuming that Top 8's were actually played out is not a given.
Mathematically, the top 8 that comes out of swiss rounds is far more predictive of deck strength than the top 8 that comes out of single-elimination. In other words, I am *under* estimating the strength of Vial by assuming single-elimination top 8's.
understanding that consistency of Top 8s is a great measure for a deck, since it shows it's well prepared for the meta as a whole.
Great, yes. But far better is to incorporate more information, and we have that additional information from MTGTop8. So why not use it?
You know how Pro Player's value greatly their Top 16-32 in ProTours, because it shows consistency? There's a common knowledge that making a PT Top 8 requires perfect metagaming and a bit of luck. But But if you look at the Top 16-32, you'll always see those great consistent Pro Players there.
Making a top 8 does not require perfect metagaming, and it certainly requires a lot more than "a bit" of luck. If it only required "a bit" of luck, you would see the same top 8 every other tournament. The fact is, it takes an enormous amount of luck (even if you're perfectly prepared and play perfectly) and that is why you'll never see another Jon Finkel or Kai Budde or Wayne Gretzky or Babe Ruth. Top 16-32 takes less luck than top 8, so I get why someone would look to that metric rather than top 8's. And I would generally agree that # of top 32's is a better metric for judging a player than # of top 8's.
I think that looking at the % of top 8's number is better than nothing, but a poor way to examine deck usage and dominance. I give a lot more weight to decks that (a) place higher in the top 8's, and (b) place in larger tournaments.
For example, if you compare the big 4 decks (Vial, Titania, Geist, Zurgo) and assign:
5 points for 1st place, 3 points for 2nd place, 2 points for 3rd-4th, 1 point for 5th-8th
9x for a *** tournament, 4x for **, 1x for *
(these numbers sort of model prize payouts, i.e. larger prizes for better finishes and larger prizes for bigger tournaments)
...you see:
Geist 204 points in 31 placings (6.6 points per placing)
Titania 211 points in 33 placings (6.4 points per placing)
Vial 396 points in 31 placings (12.8 points per placing)
Zurgo 143 points in 28 placings (5.1 points per placing)
One of these things is not like the other...
If you don't like my fancy math, you can also consider:
Geist: 8 wins, 4 second, 11 third/fourth, 8 fifth/eighth
Titania: 3 wins, 5 second, 9 third/fourth, 16 fifth/eighth
Vial: 14 wins, 6 second, 5 third/fourth, 6 fifth/eighth
Zurgo: 5 wins, 4 second, 8 third/fourth, 11 fifth/eighth
Let's look at this one more way. In a top 8 of a tournament, we know the winner has won 3 matches, 2nd place has won 2 matches, and 3rd/4th place have won 1 match. And we know 1st place lost 0 matches and everyone else lost 1 match. So here are the records within a top 8:
Geist looks to be closing the gap here on Vial, though its success was mostly in smaller tournaments whereas Vial succeeded in larger ones against presumably better top 8's. That's why I like my very first analysis best. But I think this is pretty telling too.
The reason no one complains about Titania is because she doesn't dominate. Her top 8's are overwhelmingly in the middle or bottom of the top 8.
Honestly the only argument I can see for ignoring Vial's dominance is something along the lines of: only the most competitive and rich players have adopted Vial so quickly and its dominance is as much a factor of their skill/experience/competitiveness as it is the strength of the card.
Vial has 10-11% presence ... people didn't have to throw away their decks.
I'll say two things about this. One is that there is a lot of intertia with decks IRL - that is to say, people build their decks and hang onto them for quite some time. So the fact that people have built up some Vial decks in the past few months and dominated to this degree is pretty alarming to me.
The other thing I'll mention is right in your post as well. People playing Vial *did* throw away their decks - whatever they were using before Vial - to sleeve up Vial decks. Early adopters of broken cards are absolutely not the folks you need to worry about with additions to the banlist. They're the ones you need to worry about when you let them continue to use overpowered cards that run rampant on a format.
The second list is very un-tested, and I've actually not heard of Hewed Stone Retainers before. Seems like a great inclusion. Eye of Ugin was mostly because I just copied the mana base from the first deck and didn't adjust it yet. Again, neither of these lists are remotely "finalized".
I dropped Skullclamp in favor of Cursed Totem right before posting this, but this was mostly a reaction to the low critter count in the first list, and realizing I wasn't using Hope's ability much. Geist and GAAIV are the main instances in which I'd use Hope's ability. Most other common matchups would rather have the pesky flyer stay out there. I'm really trying to make a colorless control deck, just for playstyle reasons, but it's hard.
Pacification Array is good in a colorless control deck, and Avarice Totem is really really really good too. I think it might be the most skill-intensive card I have ever seen, right up there with Mindslaver. It makes board states and decisions you'd never otherwise come across and forces people to think on their feet.
There's definitely room for improvement (Platinum Emperion for example, is in there for Zurgo but never got to test this and I suspect it's not great for that purpose). I also started building a more aggro-oriented version:
That one has very little testing, but seemed to do pretty well. Plenty of room for improvement but like every other artifact-oriented deck I've tried to build in this format, there's just not enough redundancy in fast mana and not enough "I Win" cards either.
I tried Orrery, with a much lower curve, but glad you're finding success with it. Still, I'll put the plus/minus on its inclusion in your deck at 2 months from now
I loved Sundering Titan in this deck. It's one of the few cards that can turn around the Vial Smasher matchup, if they happened to have a slow start. It was my most common fetch with Eye of Ugin and/or Inventors' Fair.
I like the idea of Titan's Presence but for 3 mana most decks will get removal with a little more card advantage, i.e. Repulse or Exclude or Electrolyze or something.
I found Marchesa to be not too bad (a 1/1 flyer is actually pretty well suited to take back Monarch status). Titania was annoying, yes
You're going to cut Ghirapur Orrery almost immediately; curve is way too high for that.
The unfortunate thing about this type of deck is there is a severe limit on the number of actual bombs. Off the top of my head:
Sundering Titan
All is Dust
Karn Liberated
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Mindslaver
Winter Orb
...are the only ones that really tend to win the game immediately (in most cases). Tangle Wire is good but I don't think the deck is fast enough for that. Turn 1 Hope, turn 2 something, turn 3 Tangle? But you just sacrificed Hope to ensure it landed?
Another issue is that there's not too much control/combo out there these days. This deck will destroy High Tide Jace, which is fun, but it's not played that much. Vial Smasher will still outrace you, Zurgo probably can too.
I tested something like this for a bit and found that most of the time I never even sacrificed Hope of Ghirapur when I could. I was happier with the 1/1 flyer.
The deck lacks removal, which hurts it severely. Ensnaring Bridge, or a good Planeswalker, or a big enemy creature that dominates the board, can be all it takes to beat this.
Your fabrications were reported for flaming, but there is one upside here and it's that I have a new addition to my signature (as soon as I can remember how to update it!):
If we're being reactionary based on recent results, it's also worth mentioning that this tournament and the 3 most recently posted on MTGTop8, were all won by Breya or Vial. All four of them.
I'd also consider organizing around time zones next time. I'm sure most people won't like that, because they might be playing locals or people they know, but it's so much easier to schedule matches when someone's within 1-3 hours of your time zone, as opposed to 8-10.
totally fair card, that Vial Smasher, glad we get another 3 months of it
Nowhere nearly as played as Vial, but looks to possibly be nearly as strong. Very good results in that tournament you mention (identical lists make T8 and a quite different list also making T8), and similar winning percentage to Vial in the Cockatrice tournament here. With the smaller usership of Breya though, it is also possible that some of this is due to player skill and some of the better players having chosen Breya.
Partner is unfortunately a pretty overpowered mechanic, giving users both card quality (more colors) and quantity (being able to replay commanders with individual commander taxes). The legacy card pool has too many ways to help 4c players fix their mana and not nearly enough ways to punish them for it.
In general I'm sympathetic to the limitations of data, but that is not an excuse to throw up your hands and say we'll never know the truth. I put far more stock into results and analysis than I put in people's subjective impressions of things.
Mathematically, the top 8 that comes out of swiss rounds is far more predictive of deck strength than the top 8 that comes out of single-elimination. In other words, I am *under* estimating the strength of Vial by assuming single-elimination top 8's.
Great, yes. But far better is to incorporate more information, and we have that additional information from MTGTop8. So why not use it?
Making a top 8 does not require perfect metagaming, and it certainly requires a lot more than "a bit" of luck. If it only required "a bit" of luck, you would see the same top 8 every other tournament. The fact is, it takes an enormous amount of luck (even if you're perfectly prepared and play perfectly) and that is why you'll never see another Jon Finkel or Kai Budde or Wayne Gretzky or Babe Ruth. Top 16-32 takes less luck than top 8, so I get why someone would look to that metric rather than top 8's. And I would generally agree that # of top 32's is a better metric for judging a player than # of top 8's.
I think that looking at the % of top 8's number is better than nothing, but a poor way to examine deck usage and dominance. I give a lot more weight to decks that (a) place higher in the top 8's, and (b) place in larger tournaments.
For example, if you compare the big 4 decks (Vial, Titania, Geist, Zurgo) and assign:
5 points for 1st place, 3 points for 2nd place, 2 points for 3rd-4th, 1 point for 5th-8th
9x for a *** tournament, 4x for **, 1x for *
(these numbers sort of model prize payouts, i.e. larger prizes for better finishes and larger prizes for bigger tournaments)
...you see:
Geist 204 points in 31 placings (6.6 points per placing)
Titania 211 points in 33 placings (6.4 points per placing)
Vial 396 points in 31 placings (12.8 points per placing)
Zurgo 143 points in 28 placings (5.1 points per placing)
One of these things is not like the other...
If you don't like my fancy math, you can also consider:
Geist: 8 wins, 4 second, 11 third/fourth, 8 fifth/eighth
Titania: 3 wins, 5 second, 9 third/fourth, 16 fifth/eighth
Vial: 14 wins, 6 second, 5 third/fourth, 6 fifth/eighth
Zurgo: 5 wins, 4 second, 8 third/fourth, 11 fifth/eighth
Let's look at this one more way. In a top 8 of a tournament, we know the winner has won 3 matches, 2nd place has won 2 matches, and 3rd/4th place have won 1 match. And we know 1st place lost 0 matches and everyone else lost 1 match. So here are the records within a top 8:
Geist: 43-23 (65% win)
Titania: 28-30 (48% win)
Vial: 59-17 (78% win)
Zurgo 31-23 (57% win)
Geist looks to be closing the gap here on Vial, though its success was mostly in smaller tournaments whereas Vial succeeded in larger ones against presumably better top 8's. That's why I like my very first analysis best. But I think this is pretty telling too.
The reason no one complains about Titania is because she doesn't dominate. Her top 8's are overwhelmingly in the middle or bottom of the top 8.
Honestly the only argument I can see for ignoring Vial's dominance is something along the lines of: only the most competitive and rich players have adopted Vial so quickly and its dominance is as much a factor of their skill/experience/competitiveness as it is the strength of the card.
The other thing I'll mention is right in your post as well. People playing Vial *did* throw away their decks - whatever they were using before Vial - to sleeve up Vial decks. Early adopters of broken cards are absolutely not the folks you need to worry about with additions to the banlist. They're the ones you need to worry about when you let them continue to use overpowered cards that run rampant on a format.
I dropped Skullclamp in favor of Cursed Totem right before posting this, but this was mostly a reaction to the low critter count in the first list, and realizing I wasn't using Hope's ability much. Geist and GAAIV are the main instances in which I'd use Hope's ability. Most other common matchups would rather have the pesky flyer stay out there. I'm really trying to make a colorless control deck, just for playstyle reasons, but it's hard.
Pacification Array is good in a colorless control deck, and Avarice Totem is really really really good too. I think it might be the most skill-intensive card I have ever seen, right up there with Mindslaver. It makes board states and decisions you'd never otherwise come across and forces people to think on their feet.
// 37 Artifact
1 Clock of Omens
1 Jeweled Amulet
1 Winter Orb
1 Static Orb
1 Tangle Wire
1 Mind Stone
1 Contagion Clasp
1 Contagion Engine
1 Everflowing Chalice
1 Welding Jar
1 Memory Jar
1 Umezawa's Jitte
1 Thran Dynamo
1 Worn Powerstone
1 Tumble Magnet
1 Expedition Map
1 Ensnaring Bridge
1 Cursed Scroll
1 Mox Opal
1 Mox Diamond
1 Voltaic Key
1 Codex Shredder
1 Phyrexian Furnace
1 Torpor Orb
1 Fellwar Stone
1 Thought Vessel
1 Avarice Totem
1 Icy Manipulator
1 Springleaf Drum
1 Basalt Monolith
1 Mindslaver
1 Candelabra of Tawnos
1 Crucible of Worlds
1 Oblivion Stone
1 Staff of Nin
1 Cursed Totem
1 Guardian Idol
// 13 Creature
1 Kuldotha Forgemaster
1 Lodestone Golem
1 Metalworker
1 Sundering Titan
1 Wurmcoil Engine
1 Thought-Knot Seer
1 Filigree Familiar
1 Solemn Simulacrum
1 Pilgrim's Eye
1 Duplicant
1 Platinum Emperion
1 Silent Arbiter
1 Runed Servitor
1 Warping Wail
1 Spatial Contortion
// 42 Land
1 Cavern of Souls
17 Wastes
1 Rishadan Port
1 Wasteland
1 Tectonic Edge
1 Inventors' Fair
1 Buried Ruin
1 Crystal Vein
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Darksteel Citadel
1 Haunted Fengraf
1 Throne of the High City
1 Scorched Ruins
1 Thespian's Stage
1 Blasted Landscape
1 Tower of the Magistrate
1 Mage-Ring Network
1 Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
1 Eye of Ugin
1 Drownyard Temple
1 Haven of the Spirit Dragon
1 Deserted Temple
1 Lotus Vale
1 Blinkmoth Nexus
1 Mutavault
1 Mishra's Factory
// 2 Planeswalker
1 Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
1 Karn Liberated
// 1 Sorcery
1 All Is Dust
// 2 unknown
1 Pacification Array
1 Universal Solvent
There's definitely room for improvement (Platinum Emperion for example, is in there for Zurgo but never got to test this and I suspect it's not great for that purpose). I also started building a more aggro-oriented version:
// 27 Artifact
1 Winter Orb
1 Static Orb
1 Tangle Wire
1 Lightning Greaves
1 Contagion Clasp
1 Welding Jar
1 Umezawa's Jitte
1 Culling Dais
1 Expedition Map
1 Aeolipile
1 Cursed Scroll
1 Mox Opal
1 Mox Diamond
1 Key to the City
1 Bonesplitter
1 Shuko
1 Hero's Blade
1 Ghostfire Blade
1 Sai of the Shinobi
1 Avarice Totem
1 Smuggler's Copter
1 Fleetwheel Cruiser
1 Ovalchase Dragster
1 Bone Saw
1 Tumble Magnet
1 Springleaf Drum
1 Mortarpod
// 27 Creature
1 Metallic Mimic
1 Scrap Trawler
1 Treasure Keeper
1 Lodestone Golem
1 Metalworker
1 Thought-Knot Seer
1 Matter Reshaper
1 Hangarback Walker
1 Runed Servitor
1 Eager Construct
1 Foundry Inspector
1 Chief of the Foundry
1 Adaptive Automaton
1 Phyrexian Revoker
1 Arcbound Ravager
1 Arcbound Worker
1 Etched Champion
1 Memnite
1 Frogmite
1 Signal Pest
1 Phyrexian Walker
1 Ornithopter
1 Eldrazi Mimic
1 Reality Smasher
1 Eternal Scourge
1 Endless One
1 Lore Seeker
1 Warping Wail
1 Spatial Contortion
// 42 Land
1 Cavern of Souls
20 Wastes
1 Rishadan Port
1 Wasteland
1 Tectonic Edge
1 Inventors' Fair
1 Buried Ruin
1 Crystal Vein
1 Ghost Quarter
1 Darksteel Citadel
1 Haunted Fengraf
1 Throne of the High City
1 Scorched Ruins
1 Thespian's Stage
1 Blasted Landscape
1 Tower of the Magistrate
1 Mage-Ring Network
1 Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
1 Eye of Ugin
1 Drownyard Temple
1 Mishra's Factory
1 Mutavault
1 Blinkmoth Nexus
// 1 Sorcery
1 All Is Dust
That one has very little testing, but seemed to do pretty well. Plenty of room for improvement but like every other artifact-oriented deck I've tried to build in this format, there's just not enough redundancy in fast mana and not enough "I Win" cards either.
I loved Sundering Titan in this deck. It's one of the few cards that can turn around the Vial Smasher matchup, if they happened to have a slow start. It was my most common fetch with Eye of Ugin and/or Inventors' Fair.
I like the idea of Titan's Presence but for 3 mana most decks will get removal with a little more card advantage, i.e. Repulse or Exclude or Electrolyze or something.
I found Marchesa to be not too bad (a 1/1 flyer is actually pretty well suited to take back Monarch status). Titania was annoying, yes
The unfortunate thing about this type of deck is there is a severe limit on the number of actual bombs. Off the top of my head:
Sundering Titan
All is Dust
Karn Liberated
Ugin, the Spirit Dragon
Mindslaver
Winter Orb
...are the only ones that really tend to win the game immediately (in most cases). Tangle Wire is good but I don't think the deck is fast enough for that. Turn 1 Hope, turn 2 something, turn 3 Tangle? But you just sacrificed Hope to ensure it landed?
Another issue is that there's not too much control/combo out there these days. This deck will destroy High Tide Jace, which is fun, but it's not played that much. Vial Smasher will still outrace you, Zurgo probably can too.
I tested something like this for a bit and found that most of the time I never even sacrificed Hope of Ghirapur when I could. I was happier with the 1/1 flyer.
The deck lacks removal, which hurts it severely. Ensnaring Bridge, or a good Planeswalker, or a big enemy creature that dominates the board, can be all it takes to beat this.