Unfortunately, I've been sick most of the past week, so this analysis may not be quite as detailed as I'd hoped. Nevertheless, we move forward!
Also, a special shout-out to Scryfall (https://scryfall.com/), which has been immensely helpful in putting this analysis together.
Final numbers for Amass, +1/+1 counters, and Proliferate
Per draft of WAR, you can expect 32.5 Amass cards to be opened; 11.7 of these are mono blue, 9.3 mono black, 8.0 mono red, and the rest multicolored. So if you have an opponent in two of these colors, you should expect them to likely have several Amass cards. But if they're in only one of those colors, they'll probably only have a few. It's also good to note that almost all of these cards are Amass 1 or Amass 2.
In terms of non-amass cards that produce +1/+1 counters, you can expect 12.8 of those to be opened per draft in White, 8.4 in Blue, 0.9 in Black, 6.0 in Red, and 12.1 in Green. So in the proliferate colors, there's lots of cards that are going to enable proliferation (note that blue also gets to count the Amass cards as noted above, so they're actually in first here). On the other hand, this is not so many cards that you can expect to have just tons of different permanents to proliferate onto at any point - one target will happen, two will be common, and you'll be quite happy to manage getting three.
Speaking of Proliferate, it ends up on 5.7 cards per draft in both White and Blue, and 8.4 in Green. So, don't expect to be able to build a deck around proliferating over and over again - unless you get one of the cards which singlehandedly pumps trigger after trigger out, you're more likely to get one, or maybe two over the course of a game, even in these colors.
Is spellslinger a real strategy?
As is so often the case in these sets, Blue/Red's theme seems to be "spellslinger", i.e. it wants you to play lots of instants and sorceries. Slightly confusingly, in this set in particular, some of the cards in this direction point you towards those particular types, but some care about noncreature spells more generally. And I expect most decks in this format to have a few noncreatures which aren't in these types (mainly planeswalkers, though there's some playable enchantment-based removal as well).
So what are the numbers? Well, on the non-creature side, there's 5.1 monored, 4.2 monoblue, and .9 hybrit Izzet cards per draft. And on the Instant/Sorcery side, we're at 4.4 blue, 1.5 red, and 1.3 Izzet gold cards. Overall, if you're completely alone in your lane, you might be able to scrape together a deck based around these.... but I wouldn't really bank on it. I think the biggest way to get into this deck is to open a good rare that's on theme and then pick up another couple early - but don't be trying to get payoffs later, it's just not likely enough to happen.
Of note, the red cards here also work with the red-white (even less supported) subtheme of pumping your own stuff - I don't think both of those decks can exist at the same table, though obviously you can build decks in these colors that don't exactly follow those themes.
Mana Fixing, or lack thereof
There are 10.4 pieces of mana fixing per draft which are colorless (i.e., lands or artifacts); you get access to an additional 6.6 if you are base green. This is actually a reasonable amount of fixing... but it's a LOT less than we've seen in the last couple of sets set on Ravnica (or actually, any of the Ravnica sets). So five color decks will be nigh impossible to make... three color decks are even going to be very ambitious. Especially if you aren't green, you'd need basically all the fixing at the table. Plus, since most of the fixing isn't in lands, you would end up with like half your spells just being dedicated to fixing, and I just don't see the payoff being worth it. (Sorry, Niv-Mizzet).
Having said that, splashing seems very plausible. It's definitely not to the point where you would say that splashing some spells from a third color is free, by any stretch - you still have to work a bit to get your mana to get there, like normal - but if you have a reason, you should be able to find something to get you there most of the time (provided it's not like, halfway through pack three already or something).
Creature Sizing
How big are the creatures in the format? Obviously it's a little bit tough to tell just by looking at a list of cards, since there are questions of playability, plus a lot of +1/+1 counters running around and affecting the sizing.
But if we look at everything, just on the base stats, then in terms of power, there's a massive hump at 2 power. There are nearly as many creatures with exactly 2 power (58.1 per draft) as there are with greater than 2 power. Moving from 3 power (28.2 creatures per draft) to 4 (21.1 creatures per draft), there's not nearly as big of a drop off. Per normal, not many creature get to the 5+ power range (12.4), so don't be super surprised if your opponent has one of those, but it won't be often they have multiples.
On the Toughness side of the equation, things are more spread out. 31.4 creature per draft have 1 toughness, so most of your opponents will have a target for your ping effect to hit (although in many of these cases, you would need to time it precisely, as a few of these creatures grow from an ETB counter, and some others are unplayable... so be ready to sideboard around this situation one way or another, which ia fairly common problem if we're honest). 50.2 creatures opened have 2 toughness, and 43.4 have 3. This is the point where the biggest drop-off is, with only 20.4 creatures per draft having 4 toughness, with an additional 16.5 at 5 toughness, and 7.9 at 6.
In the hopes of finding a "magic toughness" or sizing in general, it's also important to look at the toughness-based removal the set provides (damage or -N toughness). 6.4 such cards per draft punish 1 toughness, 8.2 on 2 toughness, 4.6 on 3 toughness, 5.1 take care of creatures with 4 toughness, and 2.3 (1 common) deal with creatures having 5 toughness or less.
Based on looking at this, I doubt that there really well be any "magic size" for creatures in the set, though I guess that most things with 5 toughness will be fairly hard to take out using a single card, especially if that card isn't one of the few premium removal spells in white or black that don't care about size at all (or the fight-like spells in green which are pretty close)
Final thoughts
Overall, The biggest thing about this set is that it looks much closer to a 'normal set' to me than we've had in a while. Well, except for having a couple of planeswalkers per deck, which is, I guess, a pretty significant difference. But the fixing numbers, creature sizing, and for the most part lack of cohesive on-rails plan for each color combination makes things mostly more block-and-tackle. Or more, uh... I feel like there should be a better metaphor which doesn't draw a parallel to a sport which is virtually exclusively played in a single country. Anyway, I digress.
Take good cards, probably don't splash, realize your opponent will have a couple planeswalkers, but also realize they won't be the be-all and end-all. Try to have board presence. And most of all, have fun! It's a new set, that's what they're for.
Hopefully I'll have time to get a moxiously early pick-order list generated before the end of the week, with some notes about specific cards, but we'll see...
Showing posts with label Run the Numbers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Run the Numbers. Show all posts
Tuesday, 23 April 2019
Sunday, 2 October 2016
Math on Treasure Chests, New Entry/Prize Structure, and EV
WotC recently announced a huge amount of changes coming for MTGO. I'm not going to touch here on Redemption changes (which basically seem to be straight negatives for the consumer - only silver lining is that online cards won't be cheaper; older cards having value suggests MTGO economy won't completely collapse, but more than that I can't really say). However there have been many other changes announced, dealing with Entry Fees, Prize Payouts, and the new "Treasure Chests". Let's use some analytical mindset, some math, and try to break it down.
I want to note before we begin that, I've spent a decent chunk of time (several hours) putting this together. I've gone through my methodology in a decent amount of detail. Having said that, it's very possible I'm wrong about one or more things here. And I expect, given my conclusions, that many people will want to shout that I am wrong, because they seem dead-set that my end conclusion is wrong. That's fine - if you think I am wrong, I actually actively want to know. But I don't want just a "You're wrong!" or especially a bunch of vitriol without explanation. I want you to point out, at what point am I going wrong? Which of my estimations or assumptions or methodology is wrong? And why? In short, tell me I'm wrong, but give me a reason. Thanks in advance.
Pack Prices:
The most obvious thing here that most people are jumping on is that non-pack entries to drafts/sealed events are lower now than before (while entry fees including packs haven't changed). The supposition is then that pack prices are going to decrease, which de facto will reduce the price of packs and therefore any prize support which includes packs. And this isn't nothing - improving the quality of options competing with using packs should make the packs less valuable to some extent.
Things, however, are not so cut-and-dried. If you look at current booster prices, they're well below 3.33 tickets per pack. The cut-off point is simply not a huge factor as to why they are priced where they are. So what does cause this? Supply and Demand, of course. More specifically in this case, the supply is determined by how many packs people buy from the store plus how many packs are being paid out as prizes. The demand is how many packs people want to crack plus how many they use in limited events.
I assume that far more boosters are being used for limited than just cracked. This is simply because cracking packs is really bad EV. Prices of cards is a factor in this, but that bottom cut-off, like the top cut-offs of buying from the store or being worse than equivalent entry using non-pack entry options, is far enough away from actual price points that it doesn't come into consideration.
I also assume far more packs get put into the system from prizes than are being bought from the store. Again, this assumption stems merely from the fact that it's far cheaper to get packs from other places than buying them from the store.
Given these sources of supply and demand, I'm actually expecting pack prices to increase (slightly, if we don't account for the Redemption Change anyway). This is because supply should be going down - the number of packs awarded in constructed events have been slashed fairly significantly, in favor of other prizes. In the meantime, the demand for packs should not change terribly much. Sure, lower price on the Play Point/ticket entries should change that somewhat, but because that option was and still will be more expensive in practice, this difference shouldn't be a large one. A more significant factor will be actually how many people want to play in those limited events - which has a lot to do with the quality of the format. Of course, being a totally different format is going to make a 'real' comparison somewhat difficult. But the important point here is that if you think the decrease in prizes from constructed events is relatively larger than the decrease in demand because people will enter for play points/tix, then pack prices should go up rather than down. I certainly believe this to be likely, but more importantly, I find it very unlikely that it's so far out of whack that pack prices will significantly drop.
Treasure Chest value:
Each treasure chest has 3 items in it. One of the 3 is guaranteed to be a random Rare/Mythic from a modern set OR a 'curated' card OR some number of Play Points. I'm going to call this a 'value' slot hereafter, even though a lot of the time, this slot will have virtually 0 value. The other two slots will usually be a common or uncommon from Standard, but there's a 1 in 4.5 chance that you'll get one additional 'value' slot and a 1 in 239 chance that all three slots will be 'value' slots. This means you expect 1.23 'value' slots per Chest, on average.
I'm going to assume standard-legal commons and uncommons have 0 value. This isn't strictly true, of course, but typically very few of them have significant value, and there are many many many commons and uncommons in standard, so this approximation is very likely to not be wrong by more than 1 cent or so, which is small compared the estimation errors we have to make from approximations.
So then we need to figure out what the EV of a 'value' slot is. This is hard, because there are a good number of unknowns. Let's start with the knowns though. I will note that for the following, I'm taking everything Pre-Kaladesh, since that set isn't online yet, and the economy for that set hasn't stabilized. Kaladesh will change the numbers a bit, but likely not by much (and probably slightly upward at first, given that most of the cards about to rotate out of Standard have lost most of their value already)
Random Rares/Mythics from Modern:
There are 3063 different rare printings in Modern sets (including Timeshifted cards, and each printing separately). There are 434 different Mythic Rare printings (again, counting each printing separately). In the chests, each rare appears twice as often as each mythic, so there is a (3063*2)/(3063*2+434) = 93.4% chance of hitting a rare, leaving 6.6% to hit a mythic.
I went through https://www.mtggoldfish.com/ set lists and added the prices of each rare and mythic, rounding for convenience and generally ignoring cards less than about half a ticket. I realize that these prices are sell prices rather than buy prices, but I will try to account for that later on (if I knew of a source that had clean lists of buy prices, I would use that instead, as it would be more accurate. Please please let me know if you have seen someone do this analysis more precisely somewhere else). (I should also note that I think I used non-premium versions for everything, which is wrong for a few cases I believe). I came out with a total value of 2067 tickets (this looks more precise than it is; I expect I'm off by maybe 15 or 20 tickets one way or the other, wouldn't be surprised if it's a bit more). This gets to .675 tix per rare, on average, in modern (again, sell prices). I will note that most of the value here comes from the pre-mythic era, with another significant amount on Standard cards. Mythics come up to 1170 tickets (again, I expect to be off by 10-15 tickets in some direction or other), which gets us to 2.70 tickets per Mythic on average. When you combine all of this, you get to a weighted average of 0.81 tickets per Rare/Mythic from Modern. This is pretty closely in line with the number produced here, which I saw after doing my calculations.
Now, as I mentioned before, this is using sell prices, whereas to actually determine the value to most people opening the chest (i.e. people who wouldn't be buying the card), you need a buy price. Doing spot checks on the differences between these, they seem to, for the most part, be a little bit below 90% of the sell price. So I am going to be a little conservative here and estimate a 15% reduction in the sell price to get an estimated buy price of (after artificially rounding down) 0.68 tickets per Rare/Mythic in a Treasure Chest.
Curated Slots
The list of curated cards can be found here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/articles/archive/magic-online/treasure-chest-curated-card-list-2016-09-29 I've seen the (unweighted) average of prices of the list as anywhere from 5 to 7 tickets. The best analysis I've seen is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/554g55/value_of_mtgo_treasure_chests_curated_cards/?st=itpryd7g&sh=468d6663 and it suggests slightly over 5 tickets per card, not including any value from the Gearhulks (which will probably bump the average between .1 and .2). It's very hard to know the actual value of what these will be, because the frequency of the different cards are different. I haven't seen anyone who thinks the opened average will be anything besides less than the unweighted average (generally they are going to want to keep the rarer cards rarer); it's just a question of how much less. My guess is that it will probably between the 3-4 range, closer to 4. I've seen other people estimate on the order of 2.23. When I calculate different potential EVs for a chest, I'll present a number of different options.
Play Points
I'm going to use a conversion of 10 Play Points = 1 ticket. This holds for entry into events. Tickets are obviously more liquid assets, and thus more valuable. But the loss in value really only comes in in one of two places: First, if you're winning enough that you're always running a surplus of Play Points. In this case, you end up with excess play points, rather than other assets, and because you can't transform them into other assets, it's merely a waste. Second, if you want to sell all the assets out of your account, you can't get any value out of the play points. However, there are very few people in the first scenario (plus they are very profitable already, just less so than they otherwise would be). And my assumption is that people will typically play in more events at a far higher rate than they will sell out of their account. So all in all, yes, I would definitely rather have 1 ticket than 10 play points. But over the large scale, the differences are so small that I'm using the conversion. Take that for what you will.
I will add for a moment that these changes, because they increase the number of play points going out as prizes, necessarily will make more people fall into category one, where they are left with mounds of play points that just go up and up and up over time - particularly players who are pretty good at constructed but rarely if ever draft. That's a serious negative for that group.
In terms of how many Play Points you can expect from Treasure Chests, in the video where Lee Sharpe demonstrates the chests, we see him open 10 total chests. By counting the number of cards contained (26), and subtracting that from the total number of slots (30), we can see that 4 of the slots must have been devoted to Play Points. We also see that he opened a total of 50 Play Points, which gets us to a displayed average of 12.5 Play Points per Play Point payout. Obviously this average is based on a very small sample, so it could be off by a reasonable amount. My guess is that this was 3 sets of 10 Play Points and 1 set of 20 Play Points. So I'm guessing there's some distribution for Play Points which is unknown, but most likely 10 is the lowest and most common payout, sometimes you get 20, maybe sometimes you get more.
Adding it all up
If we look at the same video, we can see that Lee opened, from his 10 Chests, 12 'value' slots, which is close to the average we'd expect based on the reported numbers (in fact, it's the most likely number; DEFINITELY within normal variation). Of these 12 'value' slots, as I said 4 were Play Point bundles. Two were curated cards (Remand and Force of Will). This leaves the remaining 6 as being random rares/mythics from Modern (unless I've missed somewhere that one of those was curate - please let me know if that's the case).
This gets us to seen averages of 1/6 Curated Cards, 1/3 Play Points, and 1/2 random rare/mythic from Modern. Again, this is small sample size, and there's a very good chance it's off a little bit in some direction or the other, but it also seems quite plausible that this is the distribution.
If we take the seen averages as real averages, then if we take average curated card at 3.5 tickets, we end up with 'Value Slot' EV of:
(1/6 chance of curated)*3.5 Tickets + (1/3 chance of play points)*1.25 tickets + (1/2 chance of Rare/Mythic) *.68 Tickets = 1.34 Tickets. This leads to a Chest EV of 1.65 Tickets.
If we shift Curated average to 3 tickets, we fall to 'value slot' EV of 1.26 Tickets and Chest EV of 1.55 Tickets.
At Curated = 2.5, 'value slot' = 1.17, Chest = 1.44. And at Curated = 2.0, 'value slot' = 1.09, Chest = 1.34.
Other values, you can do the Math yourself (or if you ask nicely, I will probably get back to you).
In terms of the bottom line on restructuring of Prizes and Entries:
This post has the best breakdown I have seen so far. If we apply current pack prices and make our 10 play points to 1 ticket equivalency, then Competitive Leagues need Treasure Chest value to be .733 Tickets/Chest in order to be equal overall (weighted average of all records). As you can see, even the most conservative calculations above are showing Chest values to be will in excess of this figure, which means effectively that prize payouts in these leagues have increased (though not necessarily that they've increased by a large amount).
In Friendly leagues, if we also ignore QPs being gone, then Chests need to have an EV of 1.46 tickets in order to break even overall before compared to now. The pessimistic view would then show these leagues as now paying out less. However the more optimistic or average-case-best-guess estimates show an increase in payouts for friendly leagues, too.
Bottom Line: Payouts are increasing for Competitive Leagues almost certainly, and there's a good chance (but less sure) they're going up for Friendly Leagues as well.
Caveats and Downsides:
It's not all good.
Of course, we don't actually know the distribution of things. I think you'd have to be quite cynical to think that they've rigged what Lee showed in the video to be unrepresentative of average in a big way, but it's of course possible he got slightly luckier than average on categories. The big question, though, remains in the Curated Cards. If they weight it such that the expensive cards are WAY less likely than the Atogs of the world, EV will plummet. At the worst case of Curated Card EV = 0, Chest EV goes all the way to .93 Tickets per chest, which means Competitive Leagues would STILL go up, but if you factor in that Play Point and other distribution might be different, it could be a little worse.
Furthermore, WotC's lack of transparency on these points is troubling. I certainly don't expect them to tell us the EV of a chest, since that will be in Flux, and they want to avoid appearances of paying a set rate of $$ so as to not look like gambling. However, I see little reason why they can't give us more information about the distribution of the Curated cards (or their methodology here) and especially why we can't know how often you get Play Points vs Curated vs random Rare/Mythic. It's also somewhat bothersome that they have given us no information about the distribution of the different sized bundles Play Points come in - or even that there are bundles of different sizes.
Also, this prize situation creates an enormous Variance in prize payouts beyond what existed before. So even though on average things work out ok, in the short run, there's a big chance that you are worse off than before, because many curated cards and most random rares/mythics are worth very little (and also somewhat harder to trade than packs, because they all have different names). People want to have stable prizes. They also want to make sure that a 5-0 will get them a bigger prize than a 4-1, which will be bigger than a 3-2, which is no longer the case. Yes, we were getting more packs before, and those could be opened which also has big variance. But WotC knows, just as the community knows, that people weren't, for the most part, using these packs to open them; they are either entering limited events with them or trading them away - neither of which are things that Treasure Chests can do. Making the Chests themselves tradeable would go a long way to solving the variance problems, but of course it's not a panacea.
As I mentioned above with play points, the prizes now are less liquid than before. And more players will be stuck with playpoints they aren't using (at which point those play points become valueless). This has its definite negatives, and... no real positives for the consumer.
Card prices for a lot of the curated cards (as well as the random rares/mythics from Modern) will also likely fall to some extent following this, which will eat into the EV. It's really hard to know exactly the size of this effect, and it probably won't be much, but that is something which can definitely be a negative as well. Actually let me expand on this a little bit. For any given Modern rare, the chance you get one from any slot is 1/2 of 2 in 6560, so for any chest it's about 1 in 5330. The average league run hands out 1.03 chests. So 1 in 5170 leagues will add an Engineered Explosives to the system (for example). A given Mythic is half as common. 1000 leagues per day (very rough guess) means 1.3 to 1.4 of any given Rare, and somewhat less than 1 of any given mythic, are entering the system per week. The numbers for Curated cards are going to be likely on the same order of magnitude - there is less of a chance to get a curated card, but there are fewer of them as well, and we again don't know the weighting between the different cards. In any event, it seems very clear that the influx rate is significantly lower than we're getting from the Flashback drafts. This is a continual increase in supply of course though, and would need to be offset by a sustained increase in demand over time to keep prices from falling; however, the rate of a few per week entering the system means that not that much net increase in game play (of that specific card) has to occur for prices to remain fairly stable. Therefore, I expect prices to drop on cards which are expensive mostly because they've been stupendously rare (e.g. Rishadan Port), while remaining reasonably steady (not bigger changes than normal variations we've seen in the past) for cards which are expensive because they see gobs of play (e.g. Tarmogoyf, Liliana of the Veil).
Finally, and this one hasn't been talked about much, contents of the chests are set on opening, rather than on obtaining the chest. This is not surprising given that it would be a bit of a disaster to try to show "this is the chest you got on date X, this is the one you got on date Y", etc. But the important thing is, it encourages you in many ways to hold your chests until they change the curated card list/distribution to be more monetarily favorable. In fact, there's a decent chance that this is the reason they aren't telling us the curated frequencies. But if that's the case, it's a poor remedy, a medicine that is likely worse than the disease. What would be far preferable would be a way to solve the original problem, to remove the incentive for sitting on chests (by not allowing that to be possible/plausible).
I want to note before we begin that, I've spent a decent chunk of time (several hours) putting this together. I've gone through my methodology in a decent amount of detail. Having said that, it's very possible I'm wrong about one or more things here. And I expect, given my conclusions, that many people will want to shout that I am wrong, because they seem dead-set that my end conclusion is wrong. That's fine - if you think I am wrong, I actually actively want to know. But I don't want just a "You're wrong!" or especially a bunch of vitriol without explanation. I want you to point out, at what point am I going wrong? Which of my estimations or assumptions or methodology is wrong? And why? In short, tell me I'm wrong, but give me a reason. Thanks in advance.
Pack Prices:
The most obvious thing here that most people are jumping on is that non-pack entries to drafts/sealed events are lower now than before (while entry fees including packs haven't changed). The supposition is then that pack prices are going to decrease, which de facto will reduce the price of packs and therefore any prize support which includes packs. And this isn't nothing - improving the quality of options competing with using packs should make the packs less valuable to some extent.
Things, however, are not so cut-and-dried. If you look at current booster prices, they're well below 3.33 tickets per pack. The cut-off point is simply not a huge factor as to why they are priced where they are. So what does cause this? Supply and Demand, of course. More specifically in this case, the supply is determined by how many packs people buy from the store plus how many packs are being paid out as prizes. The demand is how many packs people want to crack plus how many they use in limited events.
I assume that far more boosters are being used for limited than just cracked. This is simply because cracking packs is really bad EV. Prices of cards is a factor in this, but that bottom cut-off, like the top cut-offs of buying from the store or being worse than equivalent entry using non-pack entry options, is far enough away from actual price points that it doesn't come into consideration.
I also assume far more packs get put into the system from prizes than are being bought from the store. Again, this assumption stems merely from the fact that it's far cheaper to get packs from other places than buying them from the store.
Given these sources of supply and demand, I'm actually expecting pack prices to increase (slightly, if we don't account for the Redemption Change anyway). This is because supply should be going down - the number of packs awarded in constructed events have been slashed fairly significantly, in favor of other prizes. In the meantime, the demand for packs should not change terribly much. Sure, lower price on the Play Point/ticket entries should change that somewhat, but because that option was and still will be more expensive in practice, this difference shouldn't be a large one. A more significant factor will be actually how many people want to play in those limited events - which has a lot to do with the quality of the format. Of course, being a totally different format is going to make a 'real' comparison somewhat difficult. But the important point here is that if you think the decrease in prizes from constructed events is relatively larger than the decrease in demand because people will enter for play points/tix, then pack prices should go up rather than down. I certainly believe this to be likely, but more importantly, I find it very unlikely that it's so far out of whack that pack prices will significantly drop.
Treasure Chest value:
Each treasure chest has 3 items in it. One of the 3 is guaranteed to be a random Rare/Mythic from a modern set OR a 'curated' card OR some number of Play Points. I'm going to call this a 'value' slot hereafter, even though a lot of the time, this slot will have virtually 0 value. The other two slots will usually be a common or uncommon from Standard, but there's a 1 in 4.5 chance that you'll get one additional 'value' slot and a 1 in 239 chance that all three slots will be 'value' slots. This means you expect 1.23 'value' slots per Chest, on average.
I'm going to assume standard-legal commons and uncommons have 0 value. This isn't strictly true, of course, but typically very few of them have significant value, and there are many many many commons and uncommons in standard, so this approximation is very likely to not be wrong by more than 1 cent or so, which is small compared the estimation errors we have to make from approximations.
So then we need to figure out what the EV of a 'value' slot is. This is hard, because there are a good number of unknowns. Let's start with the knowns though. I will note that for the following, I'm taking everything Pre-Kaladesh, since that set isn't online yet, and the economy for that set hasn't stabilized. Kaladesh will change the numbers a bit, but likely not by much (and probably slightly upward at first, given that most of the cards about to rotate out of Standard have lost most of their value already)
Random Rares/Mythics from Modern:
There are 3063 different rare printings in Modern sets (including Timeshifted cards, and each printing separately). There are 434 different Mythic Rare printings (again, counting each printing separately). In the chests, each rare appears twice as often as each mythic, so there is a (3063*2)/(3063*2+434) = 93.4% chance of hitting a rare, leaving 6.6% to hit a mythic.
I went through https://www.mtggoldfish.com/ set lists and added the prices of each rare and mythic, rounding for convenience and generally ignoring cards less than about half a ticket. I realize that these prices are sell prices rather than buy prices, but I will try to account for that later on (if I knew of a source that had clean lists of buy prices, I would use that instead, as it would be more accurate. Please please let me know if you have seen someone do this analysis more precisely somewhere else). (I should also note that I think I used non-premium versions for everything, which is wrong for a few cases I believe). I came out with a total value of 2067 tickets (this looks more precise than it is; I expect I'm off by maybe 15 or 20 tickets one way or the other, wouldn't be surprised if it's a bit more). This gets to .675 tix per rare, on average, in modern (again, sell prices). I will note that most of the value here comes from the pre-mythic era, with another significant amount on Standard cards. Mythics come up to 1170 tickets (again, I expect to be off by 10-15 tickets in some direction or other), which gets us to 2.70 tickets per Mythic on average. When you combine all of this, you get to a weighted average of 0.81 tickets per Rare/Mythic from Modern. This is pretty closely in line with the number produced here, which I saw after doing my calculations.
Now, as I mentioned before, this is using sell prices, whereas to actually determine the value to most people opening the chest (i.e. people who wouldn't be buying the card), you need a buy price. Doing spot checks on the differences between these, they seem to, for the most part, be a little bit below 90% of the sell price. So I am going to be a little conservative here and estimate a 15% reduction in the sell price to get an estimated buy price of (after artificially rounding down) 0.68 tickets per Rare/Mythic in a Treasure Chest.
Curated Slots
The list of curated cards can be found here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/MTGO/articles/archive/magic-online/treasure-chest-curated-card-list-2016-09-29 I've seen the (unweighted) average of prices of the list as anywhere from 5 to 7 tickets. The best analysis I've seen is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/554g55/value_of_mtgo_treasure_chests_curated_cards/?st=itpryd7g&sh=468d6663 and it suggests slightly over 5 tickets per card, not including any value from the Gearhulks (which will probably bump the average between .1 and .2). It's very hard to know the actual value of what these will be, because the frequency of the different cards are different. I haven't seen anyone who thinks the opened average will be anything besides less than the unweighted average (generally they are going to want to keep the rarer cards rarer); it's just a question of how much less. My guess is that it will probably between the 3-4 range, closer to 4. I've seen other people estimate on the order of 2.23. When I calculate different potential EVs for a chest, I'll present a number of different options.
Play Points
I'm going to use a conversion of 10 Play Points = 1 ticket. This holds for entry into events. Tickets are obviously more liquid assets, and thus more valuable. But the loss in value really only comes in in one of two places: First, if you're winning enough that you're always running a surplus of Play Points. In this case, you end up with excess play points, rather than other assets, and because you can't transform them into other assets, it's merely a waste. Second, if you want to sell all the assets out of your account, you can't get any value out of the play points. However, there are very few people in the first scenario (plus they are very profitable already, just less so than they otherwise would be). And my assumption is that people will typically play in more events at a far higher rate than they will sell out of their account. So all in all, yes, I would definitely rather have 1 ticket than 10 play points. But over the large scale, the differences are so small that I'm using the conversion. Take that for what you will.
I will add for a moment that these changes, because they increase the number of play points going out as prizes, necessarily will make more people fall into category one, where they are left with mounds of play points that just go up and up and up over time - particularly players who are pretty good at constructed but rarely if ever draft. That's a serious negative for that group.
In terms of how many Play Points you can expect from Treasure Chests, in the video where Lee Sharpe demonstrates the chests, we see him open 10 total chests. By counting the number of cards contained (26), and subtracting that from the total number of slots (30), we can see that 4 of the slots must have been devoted to Play Points. We also see that he opened a total of 50 Play Points, which gets us to a displayed average of 12.5 Play Points per Play Point payout. Obviously this average is based on a very small sample, so it could be off by a reasonable amount. My guess is that this was 3 sets of 10 Play Points and 1 set of 20 Play Points. So I'm guessing there's some distribution for Play Points which is unknown, but most likely 10 is the lowest and most common payout, sometimes you get 20, maybe sometimes you get more.
Adding it all up
If we look at the same video, we can see that Lee opened, from his 10 Chests, 12 'value' slots, which is close to the average we'd expect based on the reported numbers (in fact, it's the most likely number; DEFINITELY within normal variation). Of these 12 'value' slots, as I said 4 were Play Point bundles. Two were curated cards (Remand and Force of Will). This leaves the remaining 6 as being random rares/mythics from Modern (unless I've missed somewhere that one of those was curate - please let me know if that's the case).
This gets us to seen averages of 1/6 Curated Cards, 1/3 Play Points, and 1/2 random rare/mythic from Modern. Again, this is small sample size, and there's a very good chance it's off a little bit in some direction or the other, but it also seems quite plausible that this is the distribution.
If we take the seen averages as real averages, then if we take average curated card at 3.5 tickets, we end up with 'Value Slot' EV of:
(1/6 chance of curated)*3.5 Tickets + (1/3 chance of play points)*1.25 tickets + (1/2 chance of Rare/Mythic) *.68 Tickets = 1.34 Tickets. This leads to a Chest EV of 1.65 Tickets.
If we shift Curated average to 3 tickets, we fall to 'value slot' EV of 1.26 Tickets and Chest EV of 1.55 Tickets.
At Curated = 2.5, 'value slot' = 1.17, Chest = 1.44. And at Curated = 2.0, 'value slot' = 1.09, Chest = 1.34.
Other values, you can do the Math yourself (or if you ask nicely, I will probably get back to you).
In terms of the bottom line on restructuring of Prizes and Entries:
This post has the best breakdown I have seen so far. If we apply current pack prices and make our 10 play points to 1 ticket equivalency, then Competitive Leagues need Treasure Chest value to be .733 Tickets/Chest in order to be equal overall (weighted average of all records). As you can see, even the most conservative calculations above are showing Chest values to be will in excess of this figure, which means effectively that prize payouts in these leagues have increased (though not necessarily that they've increased by a large amount).
In Friendly leagues, if we also ignore QPs being gone, then Chests need to have an EV of 1.46 tickets in order to break even overall before compared to now. The pessimistic view would then show these leagues as now paying out less. However the more optimistic or average-case-best-guess estimates show an increase in payouts for friendly leagues, too.
Bottom Line: Payouts are increasing for Competitive Leagues almost certainly, and there's a good chance (but less sure) they're going up for Friendly Leagues as well.
Caveats and Downsides:
It's not all good.
Of course, we don't actually know the distribution of things. I think you'd have to be quite cynical to think that they've rigged what Lee showed in the video to be unrepresentative of average in a big way, but it's of course possible he got slightly luckier than average on categories. The big question, though, remains in the Curated Cards. If they weight it such that the expensive cards are WAY less likely than the Atogs of the world, EV will plummet. At the worst case of Curated Card EV = 0, Chest EV goes all the way to .93 Tickets per chest, which means Competitive Leagues would STILL go up, but if you factor in that Play Point and other distribution might be different, it could be a little worse.
Furthermore, WotC's lack of transparency on these points is troubling. I certainly don't expect them to tell us the EV of a chest, since that will be in Flux, and they want to avoid appearances of paying a set rate of $$ so as to not look like gambling. However, I see little reason why they can't give us more information about the distribution of the Curated cards (or their methodology here) and especially why we can't know how often you get Play Points vs Curated vs random Rare/Mythic. It's also somewhat bothersome that they have given us no information about the distribution of the different sized bundles Play Points come in - or even that there are bundles of different sizes.
Also, this prize situation creates an enormous Variance in prize payouts beyond what existed before. So even though on average things work out ok, in the short run, there's a big chance that you are worse off than before, because many curated cards and most random rares/mythics are worth very little (and also somewhat harder to trade than packs, because they all have different names). People want to have stable prizes. They also want to make sure that a 5-0 will get them a bigger prize than a 4-1, which will be bigger than a 3-2, which is no longer the case. Yes, we were getting more packs before, and those could be opened which also has big variance. But WotC knows, just as the community knows, that people weren't, for the most part, using these packs to open them; they are either entering limited events with them or trading them away - neither of which are things that Treasure Chests can do. Making the Chests themselves tradeable would go a long way to solving the variance problems, but of course it's not a panacea.
As I mentioned above with play points, the prizes now are less liquid than before. And more players will be stuck with playpoints they aren't using (at which point those play points become valueless). This has its definite negatives, and... no real positives for the consumer.
Card prices for a lot of the curated cards (as well as the random rares/mythics from Modern) will also likely fall to some extent following this, which will eat into the EV. It's really hard to know exactly the size of this effect, and it probably won't be much, but that is something which can definitely be a negative as well. Actually let me expand on this a little bit. For any given Modern rare, the chance you get one from any slot is 1/2 of 2 in 6560, so for any chest it's about 1 in 5330. The average league run hands out 1.03 chests. So 1 in 5170 leagues will add an Engineered Explosives to the system (for example). A given Mythic is half as common. 1000 leagues per day (very rough guess) means 1.3 to 1.4 of any given Rare, and somewhat less than 1 of any given mythic, are entering the system per week. The numbers for Curated cards are going to be likely on the same order of magnitude - there is less of a chance to get a curated card, but there are fewer of them as well, and we again don't know the weighting between the different cards. In any event, it seems very clear that the influx rate is significantly lower than we're getting from the Flashback drafts. This is a continual increase in supply of course though, and would need to be offset by a sustained increase in demand over time to keep prices from falling; however, the rate of a few per week entering the system means that not that much net increase in game play (of that specific card) has to occur for prices to remain fairly stable. Therefore, I expect prices to drop on cards which are expensive mostly because they've been stupendously rare (e.g. Rishadan Port), while remaining reasonably steady (not bigger changes than normal variations we've seen in the past) for cards which are expensive because they see gobs of play (e.g. Tarmogoyf, Liliana of the Veil).
Finally, and this one hasn't been talked about much, contents of the chests are set on opening, rather than on obtaining the chest. This is not surprising given that it would be a bit of a disaster to try to show "this is the chest you got on date X, this is the one you got on date Y", etc. But the important thing is, it encourages you in many ways to hold your chests until they change the curated card list/distribution to be more monetarily favorable. In fact, there's a decent chance that this is the reason they aren't telling us the curated frequencies. But if that's the case, it's a poor remedy, a medicine that is likely worse than the disease. What would be far preferable would be a way to solve the original problem, to remove the incentive for sitting on chests (by not allowing that to be possible/plausible).
Sunday, 25 September 2016
Kaladesh Limited Numbers
This set, I've done something a bit different. Mostly this is down to not having as much time. Instead of making a comprehensive spreadsheet with every card in it, I've gone through the specific traits I cared about, and counted up the number of cards at each rarity which fit the bill. End result should be the same, but in all likelihood I've been a bit less comprehensive.
Again, the numbers I give here are all going to be on a per-draft basis, i.e. the average number you expect to be opened over 24 packs. I'm excluding foils, as always, as well as the new entry into the Masterpiece series, Kaladesh Inventions. And again, this is all the cards in the set - I'm not making any judgments here based on "what's playable" (I leave that up to you, the reader).
Artifacts
Kaladesh is an artifact set, so let's start there. There are 68.9 Artifacts per draft, plus 18.8 Fabricate cards and 4.5 other cards that make artifacts, for a grand total of 92.3 cards in each draft that either are or make an artifact. Obviously a lot of these cards are mediocre to bad, but the point here is that if you want to have enough artifacts to make sure you have one in play when you want to, you can do that - an average of over 11 per drafter is plenty, and even discounting the bad ones, if you put a bit of emphasis on getting them, this shouldn't be a problem.
On the flip side, how many cards care about you having artifacts? 9.5 per draft care about you having a certain number (on most of those, the threshold is one, but in a few it's higher). Beyond that, 22.1 want you to have effectively as many as possible (either buffing them, cheapening them, triggering off them entering the battlefield, etc). So in total, that's 31.7 cards per draft for which you actively want artifacts.
Energy
I would love to go deep on energy, but likely won't for a couple reasons. First, it would take a long time to do the justice I want to. And second, good analyses already exist. I recommend checking those links out if you're interested. I will give some perfunctory numbers - 58.6 cards per draft generate energy, of which 45.8 cards per draft use it.
Vehicles
I've already done some analysis of the mechanic, so here I'll just add that the cards are, as a whole, strong. Also, some numbers - only 12.1 Vehicles per draft, which is a lot fewer than I think most people are imagining. Definitely enough that they're around, but I think you'd kind of need to go out of your way to get too many - as most decks should be able to hold two without much problem, and three pretty reasonably as well. You do still want to not draft too many of them, but as long as you keep creature balance in mind, I think you'll be fine.
I will also note that 8.75 cards per draft care about Vehicles, either by explicitly referring to them (some of the pilots, Start Your Engines), or by giving you some bonus when they become tapped.
Enchantments
There are 13.2 Enchantments per draft in the set. I basically just bring this up for use when you're trying to figure out how main-deckable your Naturalize effects are.
+1/+1 Counters
One half of Fabricate is artifacts, and how many cards care about those; the other half is +1/+1 counters. 28.75 cards per draft do this beyond the Fabricate critters, which gets you to a total of 47.6 cards per draft when you include the Fabricators as well.
On the flip side of the mechanic, just below 5 cards per draft actually care about +1/+1 counters, definitely focused more in Green than anywhere else.
ETB
75.6 Creatures per draft have some kind of enter-the-battlefield effect. Of these, 34.8 are providing energy, 18.8 are Fabricate, and the remaining 21.9 are "something else". To compliment that, the number of blink or flicker or self-bounce cards per draft is 12.7 per draft - not tons, but in fairness, more than the number of Vehicles. Of course, some of those aren't great, and more are generally going to be targeting your opponent's stuff. But you can notice this, anyway.
Removal
There are 40 pieces of removal per draft, or 5 per player. This is very marginally less than EMN (41) and OGW (42), and marginally more than SOI (38). I will note, though, that there are more-than-average sweepers - black, black/green, and red all have uncommons that care about toughness (along with a Black Mythic which does as well), and White has a rare and a mythic (both of which don't). That gets us to a total of 3.5 Sweepers per draft, which is still small but, way way higher than we normally get. This in turn means we've got very slightly less spot removal than we typically do, but I don't think this will be noticeable.
Please let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to run the numbers on here - I will try to do so if I can find time. I'll try to give some impressions of cards to give 'hot takes' or opinions on, but we'll see if I get the time. I do have some more constructed deck sketches I am working on for sure.
Again, the numbers I give here are all going to be on a per-draft basis, i.e. the average number you expect to be opened over 24 packs. I'm excluding foils, as always, as well as the new entry into the Masterpiece series, Kaladesh Inventions. And again, this is all the cards in the set - I'm not making any judgments here based on "what's playable" (I leave that up to you, the reader).
Artifacts
Kaladesh is an artifact set, so let's start there. There are 68.9 Artifacts per draft, plus 18.8 Fabricate cards and 4.5 other cards that make artifacts, for a grand total of 92.3 cards in each draft that either are or make an artifact. Obviously a lot of these cards are mediocre to bad, but the point here is that if you want to have enough artifacts to make sure you have one in play when you want to, you can do that - an average of over 11 per drafter is plenty, and even discounting the bad ones, if you put a bit of emphasis on getting them, this shouldn't be a problem.
On the flip side, how many cards care about you having artifacts? 9.5 per draft care about you having a certain number (on most of those, the threshold is one, but in a few it's higher). Beyond that, 22.1 want you to have effectively as many as possible (either buffing them, cheapening them, triggering off them entering the battlefield, etc). So in total, that's 31.7 cards per draft for which you actively want artifacts.
Energy
I would love to go deep on energy, but likely won't for a couple reasons. First, it would take a long time to do the justice I want to. And second, good analyses already exist. I recommend checking those links out if you're interested. I will give some perfunctory numbers - 58.6 cards per draft generate energy, of which 45.8 cards per draft use it.
Vehicles
I've already done some analysis of the mechanic, so here I'll just add that the cards are, as a whole, strong. Also, some numbers - only 12.1 Vehicles per draft, which is a lot fewer than I think most people are imagining. Definitely enough that they're around, but I think you'd kind of need to go out of your way to get too many - as most decks should be able to hold two without much problem, and three pretty reasonably as well. You do still want to not draft too many of them, but as long as you keep creature balance in mind, I think you'll be fine.
I will also note that 8.75 cards per draft care about Vehicles, either by explicitly referring to them (some of the pilots, Start Your Engines), or by giving you some bonus when they become tapped.
Enchantments
There are 13.2 Enchantments per draft in the set. I basically just bring this up for use when you're trying to figure out how main-deckable your Naturalize effects are.
+1/+1 Counters
One half of Fabricate is artifacts, and how many cards care about those; the other half is +1/+1 counters. 28.75 cards per draft do this beyond the Fabricate critters, which gets you to a total of 47.6 cards per draft when you include the Fabricators as well.
On the flip side of the mechanic, just below 5 cards per draft actually care about +1/+1 counters, definitely focused more in Green than anywhere else.
ETB
75.6 Creatures per draft have some kind of enter-the-battlefield effect. Of these, 34.8 are providing energy, 18.8 are Fabricate, and the remaining 21.9 are "something else". To compliment that, the number of blink or flicker or self-bounce cards per draft is 12.7 per draft - not tons, but in fairness, more than the number of Vehicles. Of course, some of those aren't great, and more are generally going to be targeting your opponent's stuff. But you can notice this, anyway.
Removal
There are 40 pieces of removal per draft, or 5 per player. This is very marginally less than EMN (41) and OGW (42), and marginally more than SOI (38). I will note, though, that there are more-than-average sweepers - black, black/green, and red all have uncommons that care about toughness (along with a Black Mythic which does as well), and White has a rare and a mythic (both of which don't). That gets us to a total of 3.5 Sweepers per draft, which is still small but, way way higher than we normally get. This in turn means we've got very slightly less spot removal than we typically do, but I don't think this will be noticeable.
Please let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to run the numbers on here - I will try to do so if I can find time. I'll try to give some impressions of cards to give 'hot takes' or opinions on, but we'll see if I get the time. I do have some more constructed deck sketches I am working on for sure.
Monday, 11 July 2016
EMN Limited Set Review Part II: Card Highlights
This is the segment of the set review where I just go through some individual cards that either have some math analysis on how good they are, which I think are interesting, or that I think are being significantly misunderstood or mis-evaluated. Last time I did this, I definitely had some misses. But I don't think you go into the set review business expecting to get them all right. Actually, I don't think you go into the set review business at all.... in any case, let's get back on the horse (and hope it doesn't eldrazi-fy in the meantime)!
How often are you going to hit with this? Well, a hypergeometric calculator gives us this table (which I expect to see in an article from the wonderful Dr. Frank Karsten soon):
The big point is that 3/4 for 4 is already pretty serviceable, so drawing the card is gravy on the cake. That's the right expression, right? Well, it's a baguette at any rate. Anyway, about half of white's creatures are humans, and a big chunk of greens, with a smattering in other colors. If you just stay true to average (and I probably wouldn't go far out of my way to play humans for this card), then in GW you will probably have roughly 7-8 other humans (roughly 60% hit rate), whereas if you're pairing white with another color, it will be closer to 5-6 (slightly less than 50%). In the cases you miss, you're probably getting a tiny bit of value by digging towards humans, but that's pretty slight.
So on the whole, you're getting about half a card. Seems pretty darn good, but not broken.
The card is going to be swingy, no question about it. Instant speed removal can really blow you out badly, especially if it's giving your opponent a surprise blocker. Knowing what's in the format will help you play around that in many cases. Most such removal is sitting at the Uncommon level. But I actually think there's going to be a lot of play in this card as well - when do you cast it on a big creature, which will be more secure, and when on a small one, to avoid all your eggs going in one basket? In general, I think the card will be pretty darn good, but of course, it's not without its risks.
This is my early pick for best blue common. Between your own ETB effects, opposing werewolf transforms for a zillion mana, Emerge creatures, and the occasional permanent buff (creatures that get counters from when other stuff dies or is sacrificed, or might I suggest the card right above this one), there's going to be quite a bit of value to be had, I think, when you get an extra card to boot. But even in a bad case, bouncing any creature with CMC of 4 or more is a tempo-positive cantrip, 3 is tempo-even, and even bouncing an opposing 2-drop is a 1-mana-down cantrip, which isn't the worst thing ever.
Casting one of this is obviously bad. Casting the second is obviously good. Does getting to cast the second make up for having to cast the first? I think so, but it isn't fantastic - 4 mana for +1 card is below rate, but you do get to split it up, and I expect this to be a bit of a slow format. Compare to Courrier's Capsule. It's worth pointing out that Mill/Looting and to some extent discard can help you out here. But I still don't think I would run these almost ever with less than 3 in my deck. You won't get 3 very often (on average, only 2 will be opened in a draft), so I wouldn't pick it high, but you can spend a mid-pack pick on one if you tihnk another will wheel. If you ever get to cast 3 in a game, you've obviously done it, with a split-cost Opportunity.
It's worth noting that this is really the best chance you have in this set of reliably getting an enchantment in your graveyard (at common, since SOI commons are now rarer than EMN uncommons), which is fairly important for Delirium. It also kills 80% of the format (or more, if you include tokens). Not only is this going to be the best Black Common, it won't be all that close. I'm fairly confident there's a bigger gap here than in any other color.
I think I've learned my lesson from Angelic Purge and Sinister Concoction: This card will be good. Now, it is worth noting that between costing 5, there being less madness overall and in black in particular, and actually wanting your lands in play because of additional mana sinks, you're going to get to mitigate that discard cost much much less than you did with the Concoction. This is also worse for Delirium. On the flipside, though, the "sacrifice a creature" part is actually less painful now - we have a lot more fodder now, probably largely because they needed to make Emerge work. You can't load yourself up on too many sac effects without enough fodder, but I think you can make this work.
It's also worth noting that you need them to have two creatures for this to be not bad - there's no 'up to' clause. Still, that's not uncommon, and 3-for-2ing yourself when the 2 are their two best creatures, has got to be worth it, in general. So I expect this to be one of the better black uncommons, while still far far below the top dog (Murder).
I am not a fan of playing Hill Giant, and the tribal benefits are pretty minor here. But Madness is a real thing, especially because it's the only black madness card in the set, and you're reasonably likely to have a discard outlet lying around somewhere. If you can ever flash this in to effect, for only 3 mana, it's a pretty big game. Hill Giant isn't that far below the curve, so I expect to be playing it fairly often even if I only have a couple cheap outlets - maybe half the time overall, maybe a little more.
I think a good comparison here is Fireshrieker. That card was pretty good, but not absolutely amazing. You could pay its cost in installments, but once you were going to the second creature, it cost more overall. It was colorless, though, and importantly, it worked on defense. So it's hard for me to think this will be a good card, but with the number of boardstalls that seem likely, it will probably be at least playable.
As I noted in my mathy review, this kills about 20% of the creatures in the format. My guess is that that's enough to make it begrudgingly main-deck-able, or more likely, a card I'd like to have in my sideboard. Worth noting that I think it would be pretty playable as an instant (where it can block and kill an x/3, with some options for upside), or as a 1 mana card. Also, this does have some applications in "finish a creature off, get a devil", but.... a devil for 3 mana is too bad to help you on such a minor trade-up, I think.
This card is very good. 3 mana shock is a bit below rate, but would get played reasonably often anyway. 4 mana to deal 3 to a single creature is in a similar reasonable-not-good territory. The option between the two is already getting to be a fine inclusion. This also has the board-sweep option, which is a nice little plus. Four mana is going to be very common - killing one thing, and trading up with one or more others (and picking off X/1s). People are going to learn to expect this and play around it - that'll be a key skill in the format. Problem is, it's going to be pretty touch to play around most of the time.
The big thing I want to point out, though, is that the fully escalated version is actually an overrun variant. 5 mana, probably kill a thing, all your stuff gets trample, and hits in for 1 more because you pinged their stuff. Not as big pump for sure, and scales off their blockers rather than your attackers. But one cheaper, instant speed, and probably most important, with lots of flexibility.
There's enough sacrifice that I expect this to make the cut... probably a bit more than half the time. Friendly reminder that clues count.
The nice thing about this is that you can just "raw dog" it on turn 2, and you'll almost never miss. With very few Vessels of Nascency anymore, this is going to be one of the better ways to get to Delirium, which is quite a bit harder now. The more important this is for you, the better this card is.
I think this card might actually be reasonable. Transform costs are a lot more than this, and flipping is very much like a combat trick much of the time. The thing I really want to note, though, is that this is the only way to get the new eldrazi werewolves back to the front side.... though you'd almost never want to. I guess someone somewhere will at some point use this to get around a Humble the Brute or something, and I will be happy then.
People seem to think this card will be very good. I look at the font side and see... well, 3 mana for an 0/3 and a 3/2 is fine, but not worth sacrificing a permanent, unless you're getting big value from that. We see lots of fodder in this set, but I'm still rather skeptical. It's certainly not a turn 3 play. But I think that, in general, to be good enough, you have to have a reasonable chance of turning on Delirium. I am thinking that's going to be a good bit harder now than it was before, which makes me think that this card is middling. If you can get it fairly reliably, then the card becomes quite good.
I think this is getting slept on significantly. 3 mana 2/3 is only slightly under where we want to be. Tap to mill for 2 is fairly powerful in the format. If you can ever flip it, the back half is really game-winning if you aren't massively behind - and even if you are, paying 3 mana for a 4/6 is more or less better than you can hope for. Hard to imagine the card can be too great, since it will be a bit tricky getting enough colorless creatures to make this reliable (remember, you only count front faces). That brings the average number of colorless creatures per draft to 11.6. I expect you can get a disproportionate number of those, so let's say 3 on average. That means you'll usually draw or mill one within a couple turns of this being out, which makes it such that you're reasonably likely to flip it by the time you'd be flipping a wolf (assuming it isn't too hard to trade a critter off) - but with no additional mana cost.
And the last card is one I think is pretty overrated. Yes, gravedigger is usually pretty good. Adding a mana, power, and toughness.... you can debate if that's good or not - I think it's a weakening. But being limited to CMC 3 or less is a real cost, and one I think is being underestimated. There are a couple things it stops you from doing; first of all, you can't loop this thing. So your endless loop of value has been cut off. Possibly more importantly, you can't get actually good creatures back with this very often. Finally, you're going to have 0 legal targets for this, which is a molten disaster, way more often than with normal Gravedigger. So I expect this to be a mid-late pick (6th-10th ish), and while totally playable, also definitely cuttable.
So on the whole, you're getting about half a card. Seems pretty darn good, but not broken.
This is my early pick for best blue common. Between your own ETB effects, opposing werewolf transforms for a zillion mana, Emerge creatures, and the occasional permanent buff (creatures that get counters from when other stuff dies or is sacrificed, or might I suggest the card right above this one), there's going to be quite a bit of value to be had, I think, when you get an extra card to boot. But even in a bad case, bouncing any creature with CMC of 4 or more is a tempo-positive cantrip, 3 is tempo-even, and even bouncing an opposing 2-drop is a 1-mana-down cantrip, which isn't the worst thing ever.
Casting one of this is obviously bad. Casting the second is obviously good. Does getting to cast the second make up for having to cast the first? I think so, but it isn't fantastic - 4 mana for +1 card is below rate, but you do get to split it up, and I expect this to be a bit of a slow format. Compare to Courrier's Capsule. It's worth pointing out that Mill/Looting and to some extent discard can help you out here. But I still don't think I would run these almost ever with less than 3 in my deck. You won't get 3 very often (on average, only 2 will be opened in a draft), so I wouldn't pick it high, but you can spend a mid-pack pick on one if you tihnk another will wheel. If you ever get to cast 3 in a game, you've obviously done it, with a split-cost Opportunity.
It's worth noting that this is really the best chance you have in this set of reliably getting an enchantment in your graveyard (at common, since SOI commons are now rarer than EMN uncommons), which is fairly important for Delirium. It also kills 80% of the format (or more, if you include tokens). Not only is this going to be the best Black Common, it won't be all that close. I'm fairly confident there's a bigger gap here than in any other color.
I think I've learned my lesson from Angelic Purge and Sinister Concoction: This card will be good. Now, it is worth noting that between costing 5, there being less madness overall and in black in particular, and actually wanting your lands in play because of additional mana sinks, you're going to get to mitigate that discard cost much much less than you did with the Concoction. This is also worse for Delirium. On the flipside, though, the "sacrifice a creature" part is actually less painful now - we have a lot more fodder now, probably largely because they needed to make Emerge work. You can't load yourself up on too many sac effects without enough fodder, but I think you can make this work.
It's also worth noting that you need them to have two creatures for this to be not bad - there's no 'up to' clause. Still, that's not uncommon, and 3-for-2ing yourself when the 2 are their two best creatures, has got to be worth it, in general. So I expect this to be one of the better black uncommons, while still far far below the top dog (Murder).
I think a good comparison here is Fireshrieker. That card was pretty good, but not absolutely amazing. You could pay its cost in installments, but once you were going to the second creature, it cost more overall. It was colorless, though, and importantly, it worked on defense. So it's hard for me to think this will be a good card, but with the number of boardstalls that seem likely, it will probably be at least playable.
As I noted in my mathy review, this kills about 20% of the creatures in the format. My guess is that that's enough to make it begrudgingly main-deck-able, or more likely, a card I'd like to have in my sideboard. Worth noting that I think it would be pretty playable as an instant (where it can block and kill an x/3, with some options for upside), or as a 1 mana card. Also, this does have some applications in "finish a creature off, get a devil", but.... a devil for 3 mana is too bad to help you on such a minor trade-up, I think.
This card is very good. 3 mana shock is a bit below rate, but would get played reasonably often anyway. 4 mana to deal 3 to a single creature is in a similar reasonable-not-good territory. The option between the two is already getting to be a fine inclusion. This also has the board-sweep option, which is a nice little plus. Four mana is going to be very common - killing one thing, and trading up with one or more others (and picking off X/1s). People are going to learn to expect this and play around it - that'll be a key skill in the format. Problem is, it's going to be pretty touch to play around most of the time.
The big thing I want to point out, though, is that the fully escalated version is actually an overrun variant. 5 mana, probably kill a thing, all your stuff gets trample, and hits in for 1 more because you pinged their stuff. Not as big pump for sure, and scales off their blockers rather than your attackers. But one cheaper, instant speed, and probably most important, with lots of flexibility.
There's enough sacrifice that I expect this to make the cut... probably a bit more than half the time. Friendly reminder that clues count.
The nice thing about this is that you can just "raw dog" it on turn 2, and you'll almost never miss. With very few Vessels of Nascency anymore, this is going to be one of the better ways to get to Delirium, which is quite a bit harder now. The more important this is for you, the better this card is.
I think this card might actually be reasonable. Transform costs are a lot more than this, and flipping is very much like a combat trick much of the time. The thing I really want to note, though, is that this is the only way to get the new eldrazi werewolves back to the front side.... though you'd almost never want to. I guess someone somewhere will at some point use this to get around a Humble the Brute or something, and I will be happy then.
People seem to think this card will be very good. I look at the font side and see... well, 3 mana for an 0/3 and a 3/2 is fine, but not worth sacrificing a permanent, unless you're getting big value from that. We see lots of fodder in this set, but I'm still rather skeptical. It's certainly not a turn 3 play. But I think that, in general, to be good enough, you have to have a reasonable chance of turning on Delirium. I am thinking that's going to be a good bit harder now than it was before, which makes me think that this card is middling. If you can get it fairly reliably, then the card becomes quite good.
I think this is getting slept on significantly. 3 mana 2/3 is only slightly under where we want to be. Tap to mill for 2 is fairly powerful in the format. If you can ever flip it, the back half is really game-winning if you aren't massively behind - and even if you are, paying 3 mana for a 4/6 is more or less better than you can hope for. Hard to imagine the card can be too great, since it will be a bit tricky getting enough colorless creatures to make this reliable (remember, you only count front faces). That brings the average number of colorless creatures per draft to 11.6. I expect you can get a disproportionate number of those, so let's say 3 on average. That means you'll usually draw or mill one within a couple turns of this being out, which makes it such that you're reasonably likely to flip it by the time you'd be flipping a wolf (assuming it isn't too hard to trade a critter off) - but with no additional mana cost.
I'm actually going to go ahead and predict this will be the best green common, over Prey Upon. I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong on that, but they're at least in the same ballpark. Mana dorks are typically good anyway, and this format has tons of mana sink. This has the extra bonus of being quite relevant in the late game, too. It's just a win/win/win.
People seem to think this card won't be good. I don't think it will be amazing - 3 is kind of a lot to equip - but +2/+2 is a big bonus, and if it's slow and board-stall-y, as I expect, this one will be above average.
People are really scared of the rider here. Obviously, that's not a good thing for you. But you can plan for it, and this creature is just sooo big. Artifact creature also helps delirium. You have to be wary of enchantment-based removal here, which probably makes this a tiny better if you have sac effects to get out from under it, but I think that just by itself, it's already something I'm never cutting form my deck, and usually pretty happy to have.
And the last card is one I think is pretty overrated. Yes, gravedigger is usually pretty good. Adding a mana, power, and toughness.... you can debate if that's good or not - I think it's a weakening. But being limited to CMC 3 or less is a real cost, and one I think is being underestimated. There are a couple things it stops you from doing; first of all, you can't loop this thing. So your endless loop of value has been cut off. Possibly more importantly, you can't get actually good creatures back with this very often. Finally, you're going to have 0 legal targets for this, which is a molten disaster, way more often than with normal Gravedigger. So I expect this to be a mid-late pick (6th-10th ish), and while totally playable, also definitely cuttable.
Saturday, 9 July 2016
EMN Limited Set Review Part I: Gory Numbers and Differences from SOI
The set is fully spoiled, and I've been chugging some math - the numbers are in! In this first part of the set review, I'm going to go through the major themes and mechanics, and see how much support they have now that EMN is around. Importantly, because this is the second set of the block, I am going to use heavy comparisons between this format and the previous one. Because EMN is a small set, and because it's 2/3 of packs now, things can potentially have changed a lot. On the other hand, for many of the themes, the fine folks in WotC R&D have re-supported what was there before, at least to some extent.
A quick note before we begin, just like in SOI, I have done a tiny bit of guesswork on the numbers. I'm assuming every pack has one common/uncommon DFC (in place of a common), and 1/8 packs also have a Rare/Mythic DFC (in place of another common). I haven't seen this confirmed, but I'd be very surprised if it weren't correct. Also, there was a little bit of guesswork on how the print sheets worked to get the ratios right (particularly for DFC). However, it's worked out such that for Uncommons, Rares, and Mythics, the number you expect to open doesn't care if the card is DFC or not, and for Commons, you are getting about 1% more of the non-DFCs - not enough for the vast majority of people to notice over the course of the format, particularly given that card-to-card variation is going to swamp that for at least several hundred packs.
And just like in BFZ/OGW, you want to realize that the old cards are much rarer now: in fact, you're slightly more likely to open a particular card of one rarity higher from EMN than you are from one a single rarity lower in SOI. To give an example there, I'm slightly more likely to open Hamlet Captain than Byway Courier in any given draft, slightly more likely to open Bedlam Reveler than Rise From the Tides, and slightly more likely to open Tamiyo than her Journal. You don't want to know what your chances of opening Avacyn are now (but I'm going to tell you anyway: one out of 120 drafts; on the plus side someone at the table will open one only one out of 15 drafts now, so you get wrecked less often).
Without further ado, onto the analysis!
Madness is significantly down in this format. Madness cards themselves are down 26.5%, and discard outlets are down 15.5%. Note that this is also a significant shift in the ratio of Enablers to Payoffs - before, we had about 1.3 enablers for every madness card, now that ratio is up to 1.45. What that means is that the simple ability to have a discard outlet should be somewhat less valuable (both because there are fewer payoffs overall, and also because it is proportionally more likely to be redundant). But the actual effect of Madness itself might be better - if you really want to use those activations, you are going to want to be getting value, and there's just fewer options for that now. It's unclear how that will trade off against slightly fewer enablers existing.
Delirium
Delirium is also less prevalent (maybe Emrakul doesn't have people crazy so mcuh now as completely gone, crazy Eldrazi?), down about 10% from last format. More importantly, though, it's going to be harder to turn on. We have a 9% drop in, for example, enchantments that go to the graveyard through play, but that's including Crop Sigil, which only goes if you already have delirium, Spontaneous Mutation, which likely only gets there if you use it as a trick to win a combat you would otherwise have been trading, and Choking Restraints, which you need to activate for potentially little value to get there. If we take those out, we'd be down over 60%. Of course, that's not entirely fair, because there were more unplayable Vessels than questionable Lunar Forces we have now, and sometimes you will get those things to happen, but the point stands that it's significantly harder. Enchantment was a fairly easy type before, if you wanted it; now your only really good bet is Boon of Emrakul (which should make that effect a bit better).
In terms of other types, there's about 5% more instants now, while sorceries remain within 1% of where they were before. These aren't huge issues, since those cards were already disproportionately being cut in order to keep creature counts high. Milling was very important though, since it tends to be your best bet at lands (and even more so now with fewer Forks in the Road and Warped Landscapes). That, too, is down about 5% from where it was previously.
So it's not a massive change, but it's a little less important than before, and a bit harder to get turned on.
Skulk
Skulk is down 39%. It wasn't all that important before (a little more than the flavor text it was oft joked to be, but not tons), and I don't expect it to be now - there are a couple rares which try to use it to effect, but well, ok, that's rares for you.
Investigate
Investigate is not present in Eldritch Moon, so naturally it's exactly 1/3 as present in this format as it was in the previous. The implications of this are that cards which care about investigating or having lots of clues (Graf Mole, Erdwal Illuminator) will get significantly worse. On the other hand, the actual act of investigating will probably get better, since you're less likely to get to the point where you have too many clues and not enough time to crack them all.
Humans
There are about 4% fewer humans than before, along with about 5.3% fewer cards that care about them. About 35% are now in white, and 31% in green, with the rest spread over the other colors, which is within a couple percent of where they were before. Of note, the green cards that care about the type are a bit more aggressive than the white ones.
Spirits
The number of spirits is down about 6%; the number of cards for which the type matters is down from the already paltry 4.7 per draft by an additional 43%, all the way to 2.7 per draft. This tribe continues to not be an important factor in terms of typeline in limited, being more impactful here in terms of flying.
Zombies
The number of zombies is steady from last format to this, but the number of payoffs or cards that care about them is up by over 14%... but still only at about 5 and 1/6 per draft. That's enough to do something with in certain cases, but not something you should expect to see on a draft-by-draft basis.
Vampires
The count of vampires are up about 3%, but the number of payoffs is down 18%. Again, this wasn't a huge number before, but the only non-rare card (out of 2 total) that does something in this set is a cantripping lava spike that cares about the number of vampires (which is probably unplayable unless you get very all-in somehow).
Wolves and Werewolves
More of these now care explicitly about Werewolves, whereas before it was almost always either or. Furthermore, the total number of these is down about 11% now, and the payoffs are down by 26%. This is one of the tribes that had some cohesiveness before, with cards like Howlpack Resurgence, Moonlight Hunt, Howlpack Wolf all seeing pretty serious play, but now there's far less reason, which in turn probably makes all of those cards worse. Also, they used to have mechanical cohesion with their flip triggers playing well together, but that's more or less out the window now - all but a mythic from the new set are based on pouring mana in (more on that later), which really function pretty independently.
The fist thing I want to note about emerge is that all of the Emerge costs total 1 less than the creature's normal CMC - so even if you're sacrificing a token, you are getting a discount. Next, strictly speaking, they're colorless, but they're expensive enough that I imagine that you aren't gong to be playing them in very many decks at all where you can't at least pay that color of mana to Emerge them out some of the time. (Note that sacrificing even an on-color creature can never reduce the colored mana portion of the emerge cost). Some of the cheaper ones might be good to keep in mind as sideboard options even when out-of-color in the durdliest of matchups, though. That they are, by themselves, very expensive, can potentially make them more susceptible to bounce (though once you have the mana to hardcast them, that flips around). It's also worth noting, though, that you are going in on one big creature, which makes you a bit more susceptible, at least potentially, to go-wide strategies, and potentially removal.
There aren't all that many Emerge cards in the set, to be perfectly honest, coming in at just under 9 opened per draft. That they are centered in one three color wedge (Sultai) will help you see more if you're in those colors, to be totally fair. And almost all of them seem at least reasonable to think about playing, so that helps, too. It's a bit hard to tell how much worse this mechanic will make enchantment-based removal, like Sleep Paralysis and Choking Restraints, but my best basis of comparison is the similar Exploit mechanic from Dragons of Tarkir - in both cases, you tend to be getting a spell-like effect worth roughly the cost of a card, then when you exploited and now just when you cast.
This comparison to exploit leads me to needing fodder to sacrifice, which more generally gets me to:
Sacrifice more broadly
We still have 6 and 3/4 other sac outlets besides emerge cards in the format (depending slightly on how you define a sac outlet), for a total that's 79% higher than we had in triple SOI. On top of that, we go from 11.8 cards per draft with death or sacrifice triggers all the way up to 18.9 (again, there's some slightly different ways you can define this, but the underlying point remains the same), getting us a massive 61% increase. Worth noting is that msot of these trigger on their own deaths, but a few care about other things dying.
On top of this, for more fodder, we are up to 40.3 Enter the Battlefield triggers per draft from 39.1 before. This is only about a 3% increase, but in my estimation, a bit higher percentage of the triggers now give you the value of a card (a la Enlightened Maniac), as opposed to being a nice tack-on bonus (see Gibbering Fiend).
This last point on ETB effects makes bounce spells on their creatures potentially a little worse, but bounce on your own creatures much better, and obviously blink and flicker effects quite a bit better. With the addition of EMN, the format comes up to 8.3 of these per draft from 7, an increase of 19%.
Mana Sinks
The way most werewolves transform is now a pretty simple mana activation. This has some things in common with Morph from KTK and especially, as several others have pointed out, Monstrosity from Theros block. There are more of these cards with low CMCs than there were with morph or especially monstrous, which is a bit different, but on the whole, I expect similar play patterns - they reward you and help you hold mana up at instant speed, as well as providing early plays which let you continue to use mana and have good plays later on in the game. Thraben Gargoyle is the one example of this kind of card in the last set - it was pretty good, and I expect basically all of these cards to be pretty good as well.
Beyond that, we also have Escalate, which is another mechanic that gives a lot of flexibility, and can also serve as a mana sink of sorts. These cards also seems to generally be good to me. And then we have just traditional mana sinks as well. When you combine all three of these effects, the number of mana sinks in the format jumps a blistering 125% (not to 25% more than it was, but 125% MORE, or 225% of the original SOI number). We do lose out on a lot of clues, which helped to be mana before, but even accounting for that, we remain at a 72% increase.
Because of all that, I expect EMN EMN SOI to be a format where you will usually be wanting to play with 18 land.
Flash
There are going to be about 3 more flash spells per draft now than there were before, a 55% increase over the previous format. This works well with the hold-mana-up-for-sinks plans, as well as other instants in general. So it makes a card like Silverstrike better, but on top of this, it's just something to be aware of in order for you to be able to play around it effectively.
Graveyards
I mentioned Mill before, but something important to add is that the number of cards with activated abilities in graveyards is sharply down, by about 53%. We're mostly left with a couple new zombies with similar return-to-play abilities as some we've seen before, plus all the old stuff.
As a side note, there are way fewer lands in this set as well, such that the number is down nearly 60%, and almost all of those are in pack 3. That does mean that you'll see more spells, which in turn means that you'll likely be taking from a slightly higher quality cut of cards, in terms of what you actually play - though this effect will be minor.
More about specific kinds of removal when I get to creature size in a moment. For now, I'm going to say that there's about 7% more removal overall now compared to before. At instant speed, though, it's about 6.7% less; when you look at interactive spells at instant speed (including bounce and flicker), we're about the same, and when you add in the flash creatures, the current format is again in that same 7% range lower than we were before.
The average toughness of a creature now is 2.70, compared to 2.74 previously, and the average power is down to 2.39 from 2.57. Again, there are playability issues here, but there is something significant in terms of the shift to a lower Power:Toughness ratio. That means the format will likely be a little slower, with more groundstalls. More groundstalls make evasion better, but the rate of flying is also down by about 13%, so those cards probably go up in value ever so slightly.
I would be remiss to not note that these figures don't take into account the 2/2 zombies and 1/1 flying spirits which still litter the plane, nor do they account for the now fairly common 3/2 Eldrazi Horrors.
When you look at actual distributions, 2 is the most common power for a creature, followed closely by 3, and a bit further behind by 1. Only 9 or so creatures per draft have power greater than 3, at least without looking at the back half of DFC. On toughness, 3 edges out 2, with 1 still being ahead of 4.
More concretely, when you're looking at creature combat, defensively, a 2/4 is where you start to get a very stable body. It stops the tokens, eats most of the 2s and 3s, and bounces off of most things until a few 4 drops and a decent number of 5s can rumble through. Moving up to 3/4 allows you to eat almost all 2s and 3s, and most of the 4s, and 4/4s are bigger than just about everything below 5 mana, and not smaller than much even then. The 5th point of toughness lets you live to block to the vast, vast majority of attackers.
Offensively, the 2nd point of power is as important as ever, to provide a threat and be at least able to trade with basically any playable creature. The 3rd point gets you to where you at least trade with cards up to 4 and 5 drops (and even with some of those). The 4th point of power means very little is going to straight-up eat your creature, and very little will bounce with it as well. There are a few X/5s in the format, but for the most part, 4 power will be able to attack more or less freely. The third toughness is important, as usual, to be able to get through 2/Xs, but the 4th is pretty important, here, too, with a healthy number of 3/2s, 3/3s, and even some 3/4s, plus all the Eldrazi Horror 3/2 tokens.
In short, the creature sizes vary pretty typically for a modern limited format. It's not the world were Bears rule the roost and Pikers are fine to hold off the bears, as Origins was, nor is it the one with lots of giant monsters all around, as BFZ was - though it's a lot closer to the latter than the former.
In terms of how the creature sizing interacts with toughness-based removal:
1 or less toughness = 19.5% of creatures
2 or less toughness = 48.6% of creatures
3 or less toughness = 79.6% of creatures
4 or less toughness = 92.7% of creatures
5 or less toughness = 97.6% of creatures
6 or less toughness = 99.0% of creatures
7 or less toughness = 99.96% of creatures
13 or less toughness = 100% of creatures (base stats)
Again, these numbers don't take into account tokens, which typically have 2 or sometimes 1 toughness.
A quick note before we begin, just like in SOI, I have done a tiny bit of guesswork on the numbers. I'm assuming every pack has one common/uncommon DFC (in place of a common), and 1/8 packs also have a Rare/Mythic DFC (in place of another common). I haven't seen this confirmed, but I'd be very surprised if it weren't correct. Also, there was a little bit of guesswork on how the print sheets worked to get the ratios right (particularly for DFC). However, it's worked out such that for Uncommons, Rares, and Mythics, the number you expect to open doesn't care if the card is DFC or not, and for Commons, you are getting about 1% more of the non-DFCs - not enough for the vast majority of people to notice over the course of the format, particularly given that card-to-card variation is going to swamp that for at least several hundred packs.
And just like in BFZ/OGW, you want to realize that the old cards are much rarer now: in fact, you're slightly more likely to open a particular card of one rarity higher from EMN than you are from one a single rarity lower in SOI. To give an example there, I'm slightly more likely to open Hamlet Captain than Byway Courier in any given draft, slightly more likely to open Bedlam Reveler than Rise From the Tides, and slightly more likely to open Tamiyo than her Journal. You don't want to know what your chances of opening Avacyn are now (but I'm going to tell you anyway: one out of 120 drafts; on the plus side someone at the table will open one only one out of 15 drafts now, so you get wrecked less often).
Without further ado, onto the analysis!
Returning Mechanics
MadnessMadness is significantly down in this format. Madness cards themselves are down 26.5%, and discard outlets are down 15.5%. Note that this is also a significant shift in the ratio of Enablers to Payoffs - before, we had about 1.3 enablers for every madness card, now that ratio is up to 1.45. What that means is that the simple ability to have a discard outlet should be somewhat less valuable (both because there are fewer payoffs overall, and also because it is proportionally more likely to be redundant). But the actual effect of Madness itself might be better - if you really want to use those activations, you are going to want to be getting value, and there's just fewer options for that now. It's unclear how that will trade off against slightly fewer enablers existing.
Delirium
Delirium is also less prevalent (maybe Emrakul doesn't have people crazy so mcuh now as completely gone, crazy Eldrazi?), down about 10% from last format. More importantly, though, it's going to be harder to turn on. We have a 9% drop in, for example, enchantments that go to the graveyard through play, but that's including Crop Sigil, which only goes if you already have delirium, Spontaneous Mutation, which likely only gets there if you use it as a trick to win a combat you would otherwise have been trading, and Choking Restraints, which you need to activate for potentially little value to get there. If we take those out, we'd be down over 60%. Of course, that's not entirely fair, because there were more unplayable Vessels than questionable Lunar Forces we have now, and sometimes you will get those things to happen, but the point stands that it's significantly harder. Enchantment was a fairly easy type before, if you wanted it; now your only really good bet is Boon of Emrakul (which should make that effect a bit better).
In terms of other types, there's about 5% more instants now, while sorceries remain within 1% of where they were before. These aren't huge issues, since those cards were already disproportionately being cut in order to keep creature counts high. Milling was very important though, since it tends to be your best bet at lands (and even more so now with fewer Forks in the Road and Warped Landscapes). That, too, is down about 5% from where it was previously.
So it's not a massive change, but it's a little less important than before, and a bit harder to get turned on.
Skulk
Skulk is down 39%. It wasn't all that important before (a little more than the flavor text it was oft joked to be, but not tons), and I don't expect it to be now - there are a couple rares which try to use it to effect, but well, ok, that's rares for you.
Investigate
Investigate is not present in Eldritch Moon, so naturally it's exactly 1/3 as present in this format as it was in the previous. The implications of this are that cards which care about investigating or having lots of clues (Graf Mole, Erdwal Illuminator) will get significantly worse. On the other hand, the actual act of investigating will probably get better, since you're less likely to get to the point where you have too many clues and not enough time to crack them all.
Tribes
All the same tribes are back, though maybe not all at the same level of importance.Humans
There are about 4% fewer humans than before, along with about 5.3% fewer cards that care about them. About 35% are now in white, and 31% in green, with the rest spread over the other colors, which is within a couple percent of where they were before. Of note, the green cards that care about the type are a bit more aggressive than the white ones.
Spirits
The number of spirits is down about 6%; the number of cards for which the type matters is down from the already paltry 4.7 per draft by an additional 43%, all the way to 2.7 per draft. This tribe continues to not be an important factor in terms of typeline in limited, being more impactful here in terms of flying.
Zombies
The number of zombies is steady from last format to this, but the number of payoffs or cards that care about them is up by over 14%... but still only at about 5 and 1/6 per draft. That's enough to do something with in certain cases, but not something you should expect to see on a draft-by-draft basis.
Vampires
The count of vampires are up about 3%, but the number of payoffs is down 18%. Again, this wasn't a huge number before, but the only non-rare card (out of 2 total) that does something in this set is a cantripping lava spike that cares about the number of vampires (which is probably unplayable unless you get very all-in somehow).
Wolves and Werewolves
More of these now care explicitly about Werewolves, whereas before it was almost always either or. Furthermore, the total number of these is down about 11% now, and the payoffs are down by 26%. This is one of the tribes that had some cohesiveness before, with cards like Howlpack Resurgence, Moonlight Hunt, Howlpack Wolf all seeing pretty serious play, but now there's far less reason, which in turn probably makes all of those cards worse. Also, they used to have mechanical cohesion with their flip triggers playing well together, but that's more or less out the window now - all but a mythic from the new set are based on pouring mana in (more on that later), which really function pretty independently.
New Mechanics and Themes
EmergeThe fist thing I want to note about emerge is that all of the Emerge costs total 1 less than the creature's normal CMC - so even if you're sacrificing a token, you are getting a discount. Next, strictly speaking, they're colorless, but they're expensive enough that I imagine that you aren't gong to be playing them in very many decks at all where you can't at least pay that color of mana to Emerge them out some of the time. (Note that sacrificing even an on-color creature can never reduce the colored mana portion of the emerge cost). Some of the cheaper ones might be good to keep in mind as sideboard options even when out-of-color in the durdliest of matchups, though. That they are, by themselves, very expensive, can potentially make them more susceptible to bounce (though once you have the mana to hardcast them, that flips around). It's also worth noting, though, that you are going in on one big creature, which makes you a bit more susceptible, at least potentially, to go-wide strategies, and potentially removal.
There aren't all that many Emerge cards in the set, to be perfectly honest, coming in at just under 9 opened per draft. That they are centered in one three color wedge (Sultai) will help you see more if you're in those colors, to be totally fair. And almost all of them seem at least reasonable to think about playing, so that helps, too. It's a bit hard to tell how much worse this mechanic will make enchantment-based removal, like Sleep Paralysis and Choking Restraints, but my best basis of comparison is the similar Exploit mechanic from Dragons of Tarkir - in both cases, you tend to be getting a spell-like effect worth roughly the cost of a card, then when you exploited and now just when you cast.
This comparison to exploit leads me to needing fodder to sacrifice, which more generally gets me to:
Sacrifice more broadly
We still have 6 and 3/4 other sac outlets besides emerge cards in the format (depending slightly on how you define a sac outlet), for a total that's 79% higher than we had in triple SOI. On top of that, we go from 11.8 cards per draft with death or sacrifice triggers all the way up to 18.9 (again, there's some slightly different ways you can define this, but the underlying point remains the same), getting us a massive 61% increase. Worth noting is that msot of these trigger on their own deaths, but a few care about other things dying.
On top of this, for more fodder, we are up to 40.3 Enter the Battlefield triggers per draft from 39.1 before. This is only about a 3% increase, but in my estimation, a bit higher percentage of the triggers now give you the value of a card (a la Enlightened Maniac), as opposed to being a nice tack-on bonus (see Gibbering Fiend).
This last point on ETB effects makes bounce spells on their creatures potentially a little worse, but bounce on your own creatures much better, and obviously blink and flicker effects quite a bit better. With the addition of EMN, the format comes up to 8.3 of these per draft from 7, an increase of 19%.
Mana Sinks
The way most werewolves transform is now a pretty simple mana activation. This has some things in common with Morph from KTK and especially, as several others have pointed out, Monstrosity from Theros block. There are more of these cards with low CMCs than there were with morph or especially monstrous, which is a bit different, but on the whole, I expect similar play patterns - they reward you and help you hold mana up at instant speed, as well as providing early plays which let you continue to use mana and have good plays later on in the game. Thraben Gargoyle is the one example of this kind of card in the last set - it was pretty good, and I expect basically all of these cards to be pretty good as well.
Beyond that, we also have Escalate, which is another mechanic that gives a lot of flexibility, and can also serve as a mana sink of sorts. These cards also seems to generally be good to me. And then we have just traditional mana sinks as well. When you combine all three of these effects, the number of mana sinks in the format jumps a blistering 125% (not to 25% more than it was, but 125% MORE, or 225% of the original SOI number). We do lose out on a lot of clues, which helped to be mana before, but even accounting for that, we remain at a 72% increase.
Because of all that, I expect EMN EMN SOI to be a format where you will usually be wanting to play with 18 land.
Flash
There are going to be about 3 more flash spells per draft now than there were before, a 55% increase over the previous format. This works well with the hold-mana-up-for-sinks plans, as well as other instants in general. So it makes a card like Silverstrike better, but on top of this, it's just something to be aware of in order for you to be able to play around it effectively.
Graveyards
I mentioned Mill before, but something important to add is that the number of cards with activated abilities in graveyards is sharply down, by about 53%. We're mostly left with a couple new zombies with similar return-to-play abilities as some we've seen before, plus all the old stuff.
Fixing
I mentioned I think it's going to largely be an 18 land format already, but it's worth noting that there's also very little fixing in this set. You have Terrarion, a green 2 mana 0/3 common that needs to die to Rampant Growth you, and a very strange 3 mana rock. Then there's the smattering of duals and fixing you had from last pack (Fork in the Road, duals, Wild-Field Scarecrow), but that is much diminished now. Even if you assume you can always kill Primal Druid to get the effect, fixing is down 35%, to less than 10 pieces opened per draft now. In fact, you're more likely than not to see more fixing in the last pack than in the first two combined. Worse still, a lot of that is tied up in uncommon duals from SOI, which will be very unreliable to be your colors. Almost all the rest is green. So 3 colors is a very strong no-go, and you really don't want to splash unless you have a massive incentive - I'm talking Tamiyo here.As a side note, there are way fewer lands in this set as well, such that the number is down nearly 60%, and almost all of those are in pack 3. That does mean that you'll see more spells, which in turn means that you'll likely be taking from a slightly higher quality cut of cards, in terms of what you actually play - though this effect will be minor.
Removal
As a note here, I am not including combat tricks or bounce spells as removal; there are some other cards which I had to choose one way or the other, as they aren't hard removal per se, but but often incapacitate a creature; I tend to include these as removal, but it's a bit of a judgment call - certainly all the numbers here are within a margin that, depending on what's good or bad in the format, it could 'go either way'.More about specific kinds of removal when I get to creature size in a moment. For now, I'm going to say that there's about 7% more removal overall now compared to before. At instant speed, though, it's about 6.7% less; when you look at interactive spells at instant speed (including bounce and flicker), we're about the same, and when you add in the flash creatures, the current format is again in that same 7% range lower than we were before.
Creature Size
Overall, creatures are slightly more expensive than they were in triple SOI - an increase of about 1 CMC, which is about 3.4%. However, this doesn't take into account things like Emerge, and in any case this is well within the margin of "but how good are the cards" changing the conclusions there.The average toughness of a creature now is 2.70, compared to 2.74 previously, and the average power is down to 2.39 from 2.57. Again, there are playability issues here, but there is something significant in terms of the shift to a lower Power:Toughness ratio. That means the format will likely be a little slower, with more groundstalls. More groundstalls make evasion better, but the rate of flying is also down by about 13%, so those cards probably go up in value ever so slightly.
I would be remiss to not note that these figures don't take into account the 2/2 zombies and 1/1 flying spirits which still litter the plane, nor do they account for the now fairly common 3/2 Eldrazi Horrors.
When you look at actual distributions, 2 is the most common power for a creature, followed closely by 3, and a bit further behind by 1. Only 9 or so creatures per draft have power greater than 3, at least without looking at the back half of DFC. On toughness, 3 edges out 2, with 1 still being ahead of 4.
More concretely, when you're looking at creature combat, defensively, a 2/4 is where you start to get a very stable body. It stops the tokens, eats most of the 2s and 3s, and bounces off of most things until a few 4 drops and a decent number of 5s can rumble through. Moving up to 3/4 allows you to eat almost all 2s and 3s, and most of the 4s, and 4/4s are bigger than just about everything below 5 mana, and not smaller than much even then. The 5th point of toughness lets you live to block to the vast, vast majority of attackers.
Offensively, the 2nd point of power is as important as ever, to provide a threat and be at least able to trade with basically any playable creature. The 3rd point gets you to where you at least trade with cards up to 4 and 5 drops (and even with some of those). The 4th point of power means very little is going to straight-up eat your creature, and very little will bounce with it as well. There are a few X/5s in the format, but for the most part, 4 power will be able to attack more or less freely. The third toughness is important, as usual, to be able to get through 2/Xs, but the 4th is pretty important, here, too, with a healthy number of 3/2s, 3/3s, and even some 3/4s, plus all the Eldrazi Horror 3/2 tokens.
In short, the creature sizes vary pretty typically for a modern limited format. It's not the world were Bears rule the roost and Pikers are fine to hold off the bears, as Origins was, nor is it the one with lots of giant monsters all around, as BFZ was - though it's a lot closer to the latter than the former.
In terms of how the creature sizing interacts with toughness-based removal:
1 or less toughness = 19.5% of creatures
2 or less toughness = 48.6% of creatures
3 or less toughness = 79.6% of creatures
4 or less toughness = 92.7% of creatures
5 or less toughness = 97.6% of creatures
6 or less toughness = 99.0% of creatures
7 or less toughness = 99.96% of creatures
13 or less toughness = 100% of creatures (base stats)
Again, these numbers don't take into account tokens, which typically have 2 or sometimes 1 toughness.
Sunday, 3 April 2016
SOI Math-y Limited Set Review
It's that time again. The prerelease of another Magic: The Gathering set... has come and gone (ok, I'm a little late in getting this out). The full spoiler was put out Friday before last, and it's time to get cranking in on the numbers to see what will and won't be true about the format from the point of view of pure Math Math Math Math Maths.
For this set, I had to do a little legwork to figure out how often each card will show up, because Double-Faced Cards (hereafter DFC) change the normal pack breakdown. I am not actually 100% sure how this shakes out, but following the best information I could find (hat tip to the kind people in this reddit thread), it seems like every pack will have either 1 Common OR Uncommon DFC (each common will be in 5/80 of packs and each uncommon in 3/80), and 1/8 packs will have a Rare OR Mythic DFC (of those, each mythic will be in 1/15 of packs, and each rare in 2/15). Those packs with 2 DFC will only have 8 'normal' commons, whereas the rest will have 9. And every pack, per normal, will have 3 'regular' uncommons and 1 rare or mythic (in a 7:1 ratio there). All of this is still ignoring foils, but I still don't know how often those pop up, and anyway I'm pretty sure they rarity-match fairly well, so in the end you only get a very slight drop in commons and a very, very slight raise in everything else.
Beyond this, for most of my analysis here, except where it's incredibly obvious to do otherwise (or where I specify), I only looked at the front half of DFC. The big shakeouts of this are going to be that there are a little fewer humans than what I suggest (lots of them transform into werewolves), and creatures will generally be very slightly bigger than I suggest. However, since I think you're going to expect ot see front faces most of the time, this is a reasonable simplification. If you really want to know something specific about how back-sides affect something, you can ping me; if you want lots of things, you are of course free to analyze that yourself :P
Having gotten all that boringness out of the way, let's begin!
Madness
Most of what I've seen discussed is assuming that Madness will be a huge influence on the limited format. People are talking about the ability to discard things at will being a big benefit on cards, just for the sake of having that cost of "discard a card". And the justification is, of course, that "it enables Madness". And indeed, if you get to flash in a 3/5 for 3 mana, that's a big game. However, in order for "discard a card" to be something you actively seek out, you would need to have lots of Madness in your deck. Is that a realistic thing?
Well, Madness appears on 18 cards, (along with a 19th, a rare, giving Madness to all of your vampires) - 4 rares, 6 uncommons, and 8 commons. Not worrying for a moment about playability, this comes to an average of 23.6 Madness cards per draft - that's just under 3 per drafter. Now, it is worth noting that these are compressed into the Grixis trio of colours, meaning that you're going to get these cards disproportionately often when you're in a combination of those colours. What does that amount to? Well, if you're just one of the colors, it doesn't help much - you expect to get maybe 3-4 Madness cards in a draft. If you're in two, it can go up to 7-8, but I think even in these cases, and you're prioritizing Madness, you're not going to get more than 8 very often (and indeed, I'd expect you usually to have fewer Madness cards than this, especially in a 'normal' deck).
We also need to look at the other side of the equation: Discard outlets. There are a bit more of these than actual Madness cards - 30.7 per draft - though that includes a number which are very limited in what they can discard, or how often they can. So in terms of actual enablers, we're looking at roughly the same number as we have of actual Madness cards.
The next thing we want to do is consider what those numbers mean for gameplay. On the one side, if you have an enabler, you usually are pretty happy with as many madness spells as possible. So we don't need so much of a calculation here, but how many madness spells can we expect to cast? If our deck has 6 madness spells (I think this will be a reasonably typical number), then we're fairly likely to have at least one to go with our enabler in our opening hand (66%), and by the time we get to the point we could madness it, it's quite likely. We start to get better than an even chance of getting a second Madness card once we're maybe four turns into the game. But you need the game to go very long (or have lots of draw) to get to a third - we're talking 10+ turns for any kind of reliability.
At this point, I think it's worth noting that, not only do you need to assemble your Madness combo, but you also need for it to be relevant. Madness costs tend to get you two things: a discount on mana, and/or instant speed. You probably aren't going to hold spells to play them at instant speed, at least once you've played everything out. And once you're far enough into the game, the mana discount isn't doing much either. So all told, I think you can expect to get one to two benefits from just being able to madness things.
Because of all this, I think that what you're really looking for are cards where you'd more or less be happy playing otherwise. For instance, a looting effect will get a card of value out of the discard anyway, so it's a really optimal case. And a card like Elusive Tormentor gives you a very good rate, so the cost of discarding a card isn't a bad deal there, either.
Delirium
Delirium is another one of the major mechanics of the set. We'll look at how important it is, and how easy it is to turn on.
In terms of sheer frequency, cards with Delirium are slightly more numerous than those with Madness - an average of 24.8 per draft. Of course, the size of the bonus Delirium gives you varies quite widely. I'm not going to try to get into how important it is just yet, because I think that's something you have to worry about on a card-to-card basis, draft by draft. However, I think it's fair to say that it will be highly infrequent that going very far out of your way in a draft to enable Delirium is worth it: there simply aren't that many cards which care about it, and from looking at them, on many it doesn't make that huge of a difference. Still, it's a significant benefit in many cases, and it's worth looking at seeing how easy it is to turn on.
First, let's look at the 'natural' case. Creatures are going to trade pretty naturally. And instants and sorceries naturally go into the graveyard. Obviously there are enough creatures in the set to have more or less as many as you want. How about instants and sorceries? At 53.8 and 47.9 per draft, respectively, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. The limiting factor therefore seems to then be how many of these cards you can stuff in your deck - you usually need to have a pretty decent number of creatures, which limits your room for these other cards.
In order to get Delirium ion, you'll need one of each, which means you're going to have chances maximized by having equal numbers in your deck. With 4 instants, and 4 sorceries, you'll have drawn enough to have at least one of each with at least 50% probability by about turn 5, but you won't get up to being very likely until about 10 turns later. The thing to note here, though is that you still need to be able to play both of these, plus that's assuming a creature for free, AND you still need another type in yard! This leads us to a couple of other things you can do to help you out. First, there are self-mill cards (looters can jump in here in a pinch). Milling 2-3 cards is usually going to be enough to get you a land, plus shore up percentages on one of the types you were potentially hoping to get otherwise (Creature, Sorcery, Instant). There are a number of mill outlets (more on that later). Second, artifacts. There are a handful of artifact creatures, as well as another graveyardable artifact or two in the set, and that can be an extra type also. (If you're lucky enough to get a planeswalker, having it be another type in your yard is... probably not a great consolation for it having died, but it's not nothing I guess).
However, all of that isn't enough to really get Delirium reliably early - at best, you're looking at having it pretty often in the late game, and if you get very lucky, you'll get it midgame sometimes. This is where the serious enablers jump in - and they're mostly enchantments, which are often self-sacrificing. The Vessel cycle is the key here, with the Blue and Green ones the best for Delirium purposes, getting you most of the way to your threshold by themselves. Overall, I count about 13.2 cards per draft that have enchantments go to the yard for Delirium, to go with 11.6 cards for lands and a bit under 9 for Artifacts (depending on how much you count artifact creatures). The UG vessels are absolutely the key cards here, but other than them, a good combination of other cards can get you there in the midgame. I want to stress that you need a mix, because at the end of the day, you need at least a few of several types in order to check four boxes. Counting on your one sorcery is going to be sketchy, no matter how many other enablers you have.
Other Graveyard Effects
So I talked a bit ago about mill effects. There are 16.6 per draft, or enough for everyone to get a couple - probably for everyone who wants them to get a few. Delirium is one obvious reason you would want them, but it's not the only one - there are a number of cards that either care about graveyards, or have some effect (usually an activated ability) while in the graveyard. 7.2 of the former plus 11.4 of the latter comes, overall per draft, to 18.6, or a bit over two per player. When you're milling these, it's pure value - which mostly means that you should be fairly wary of milling your opponents, and a bit eager to mill yourself - but it's not a huge bonus, just a nice value bump.
Investigate
As we make our way through the mechanics of the set, our next stop is Investigate. There's less of a numbers problem - the mechanic is a lot more about card advantage and format speed than anything else - but it's still something to be aware of. In particular, there are 32.2 cards per draft that investigate, which on average is going to work out to about 4 per drafter (though some aren't playable), which means roughly 1-2 clues per game, which is probably a very good amount. There are also 8.6 cards which care about clues per draft. These cards are disproportionately in Green and Blue, which means it's probably possible to draft some kind of "Clue deck", getting a couple build-arounds and a number of Investigators. I don't know that this will be particularly viable, because it's very durdly, but it should at least be sweet.
Tribal synergies
There are several tribes worth talking about here.
Vampires
21.7 vampires per draft, but only 4.9 cards that care about that creature type. I think what this means is that you aren't really going to get much of a "Vampire" deck almost ever, though BR is probably going to have a good number of these, and there's some mechanical overlap with Madness as well.
(Were)Wolves
Wolves and werewolves more or less always get lumped together in terms of what cares about them, so I am counting them together here. We get 25.3 per draft, and 6.2 cards that care about the type. It's also worth noting that the flipping of the werewolves all dealing with the same mechanic leads to some synergy there, as well. This means you can make a deck built on the synergies, but I think mostly it will be down to "big creature beatdown".
Spirits
Spirits are even less cohesive than Vampires, with 22.6 cards per draft and only 4.7 cards caring about the type. It is a little worth noting that a number of these cards make multiple spirits, so that's somewhat of a plus. I suspect this will play more like a stereotypical UW fliers deck most of the time, and not be terribly concerned with the creature type.
Zombies
Zombies are once again in the ballpark of many of these other tribes - 25.5 cards per draft (gain some token makers mean the total number of zombies will be higher), and 4.5 cards that care about the type. Actually, because so many of these cards make 2/2s exactly, and a number of them, I think you will want some way to take advantage of that - unfortunately, UB doesn't seem to have terribly many of those...
Humans
Humans definitely look to be the premier tribal archetype, clocking in with not only 57.0 per draft, but also 11.1 cards which care about the type. It's worth noting that while these are centered in GW, there are quite a number in other colors as well. This means you're less likely to get as big of a percentage of those 57 creatures as you are in other tribes, but it's also possible to play some of the 'lord' kind of card to good effect in other color combinations.
There are a few other tribes that show up in decent numbers (Horrors, Angels, etc.), but none with enough rules baggage to worry about.
Skulk and Creature Size
The last mechanic to talk about is Skulk. I think this is one which is very easy to underrate. If you think about it, if you have a 3/3 with Skulk, it can't be blocked by higher-power creatures, but you also need to consider that lower-power creatures naturally have a hard time blocking it. This means you either need multiple small creatures to gang-block - at which point any effects you have become very powerful - or a 'good blocker' (high toughness low power creature). Either way, you can choose to not attack, effectively occupying those blockers for the turn while you look for more pressure to apply. The big benefit is that these cards are really hard to 'eat' - you need a creature with power higher than their toughness, but not more than their power, AND toughness higher than their power.
Feeding into that, several people have noted that there are more creatures in the set with power higher than toughness than vice versa. I want to stress that this is actually NOT true when you account for rarity - there are 50.3 creatures per draft with power> toughness, 62.5 with 'square stats', and 56.3 with toughness>power. Still, this is a higher power to toughness ratio than we've had in most sets recently.
As for the actual size of creatures, let's start with power:
At 1 power, we have 33.3 creatures per draft, or 19.8% of the format.
2 power: 56.7 creatures = 33.7%
3 power: 48.4 creatures = 28.7%
4 power: 11.8 creatures = 7.0%
5 power: 8.1 creatures = 4.8%
6+ power: 5.4 creatures = 3.2%
In terms of toughness:
1 toughness: 40.0 creatures, 23.8%
2 toughness: 44.0 creatures, 26.1%
3 toughness: 45.7 creatures, 27.1%
4 toughness: 16.7 creatures, 9.9%
5 toughness: 14.2 creatures, 8.4%
6+ toughness: 6.6 creatures, 3.9%
In both cases, we see a big drop-off from 3 to 4. In particular, this makes 2/4 and 3/4 pretty excellent defensive sizes, as they normally are - most opponents will only have a few creatures that can punch through in their whole deck. When we throw in Converted mana cost, we see that there are significant jumps in size once we hit 5 and 6 mana - 5 gives you some 3/5s, 4/5s, 5/4s, and the common 6/6 for 6 (along with the uncommon 7/7 at that cost) rules the roost.
Miscellany
Over 42 enchantments per draft, together with 19 plus artifacts might make it seem like Root Out, the set's Naturalize effect, would be main-deckable. And that might be fine, in a pinch, but you have to realize that a good chunk of these are unplayable, and perhaps more importantly, a big percentage have sacrifice effects - which mean that they aren't really going to be sitting around in play for you to take out. The big number of build-around enchantments mean that you should still like to have this in your sideboard, but I would try not to maindeck the card.
There is very little fixing in the format - 15.3 cards per draft. A lot of this comes from lands at higher rarities, where it's very hard to line them up with the color combination you want. Most of the rest is in some mediocre green cards. Don't play three colors, and don't try to splash without a very, very good reason.
The number of mana sinks is WAY down from OGW - 40.2 per draft to 19.8 per draft. That, together with fewer 7 drops et al, is going to be a big reason to cut down to 17 lands from the 18 you were often running before. Now, if you have enough discard outlets, that could still be a reason to run 18, so I don't expect 17 to be as ubiquitous as it is in some formats, but I do expect it to be the norm.
Cards
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather just a smattering of cards I find interesting, especially that I think are being largely misevaluated.
Mad Prophet
I think this card is being significantly overrated. In most sets, I would guess I wouldn't want to play it at all (though probably it' would be fringe playable, depending on format speed). Between Madness and Delirium, this set has enough going on that I think I'll usually play it - and indeed, it's the kind of Madness enabler I'm looking for. But it's not going to be great, the 'it draws a card every turn' feeling I've been getting from many people.
Angelic Purge (And Sinister Concoction)
I'm not big fans of these cards either. Certainly I expect to play one, if I get it, in most decks, but I certainly wouldn't call them premium removal - they are far, far worse than Oblivion Strike, I think.Having to sac a permanent is too big a cost, and while Concoction is probably better than Purge, I still think discarding is a net negative, and by a non-trivial amount.
Skin Invasion
I get that most people are reasonably high on the card, but I think it's even better. A low-average case scenario is that you stick this on an opponent's creature you then trade for, and get a 1-mana 3/4. 3/4 are quite good stats in the format, and that's a very, very efficient price. But we also got to force an attack, so likely a favorable trade. Also, there are going to be a lot of cases where you can actually eat a creature out of it - not a particularly big one very often, but when you do get a 2-for-1 with the efficient creature attached, it's going to be close to the best card in the set.
Thraben Gargoyle
This card seems good to me. It trades with a decent amount of stuff for just 1 mana, and then later in the game, it's a 6 mana 4 power flier. Neither of those cards is particularly good, but the combination of them is enough to make this above-average.
Declaration in Stone
Much like Angelic Purge, I don't think this card is all that great. The comparison that comes to mind is Reality Shift, from Fate Reforged - and that card wasn't particularly playable. Now, I do think that this card is better - a bear is enough better than a clue to overcome the sorcery vs instant thing by a significant amount, I think - but that's only enough to make this playable, not great.
Grotesque Mutation
Keep in mind on this one that firing it off on an unblocked creature is basically just Alms of the Vein, which I think is quite bad. Of course this card is a good bit better than that overall, but you really need the +3/+1 to do work in winning a fight for that to be the case, and this being 2 mana and only +1 toughness keeps it from being great in my eyes. Playable, sure, but one of the worse tricks, not one of the better. Worth noting that the green pseudo-fight cards probably make this card in that color combo than elsewhere.
Indulgent Aristocrat
I don't think this card is very good at all. You need probably 2 other vampires in play, plus some fodder, for it to really be worth it? This sounds like too much set-up for probably not all that hot of a pay-off. There aren't that many vampires, and I don't think boards will stall that much, either.
Dual Shot
I'm going to guess this is probably main-deckable. There are lots and lots of 1 toughness creatures to take out. Of course, most of those aren't all that great, but this is only 1 mana. Plus, let's not forget you can use it as a pseudo-trick to trade a 3 power for a 4 toughness creature. Between all that, I think it will work out most of the time - though it probably won't be great all that often.
Malevolent Whispers
This card seems very good to me. Let's ignore that it can be Ray of Command for a second. Just as a sorcery, it compares reasonably well to the last Threaten effect we saw, Press Into Service. +2/+0 is worse than Support 2, to be sure (though not strictly worse, since it's easier to top-deck this for a win). But given the main use of these kinds of cards - namely, to kill - I think being 1 less mana probably makes up for that? It's comparable, anyway, and I thought that card was quite powerful already (in the right deck of course). Adding the possibility of Ray of Command is a BIG game.
Confront the Unknown
I actually like this trick pretty darn well. Early game +1/+1 is often enough to win combat, and then getting another card makes this a cheap 2-for-1. Later on, you're more likely to have multiple clues. Worst case 3 mana to cycle isn't that bad anyway, but I really like the trick - it's excellent if you can ever get the pump to be a card for you.
Runaway Carriage
Card seems perfectly playable to me. Not good, mind you, but enough that I could see it being your 23rd card reasonably often. In aggressive decks/situations, it's a pseudo-Lava Axe for 4 mana. Lava Axe isn't very good very often, but 4 mana is ok, and though they can soak up damage by blocking... you're generally not too upset about that - it's not down cards then. And defensively... well, it can trade for almost any ground creature. Sure, you don't really want it to be your only blocker, but even the bad case of stopping their big things from attacking and then being forced to trade for a smaller thing isn't too terrible. Obviously you can construct scenarios where it's pretty bad, but I think most of the time, it's perfectly fine, though not great, out of the 4-drop slot. Plus it's 2 types for Delirium, small bonus that is.
For this set, I had to do a little legwork to figure out how often each card will show up, because Double-Faced Cards (hereafter DFC) change the normal pack breakdown. I am not actually 100% sure how this shakes out, but following the best information I could find (hat tip to the kind people in this reddit thread), it seems like every pack will have either 1 Common OR Uncommon DFC (each common will be in 5/80 of packs and each uncommon in 3/80), and 1/8 packs will have a Rare OR Mythic DFC (of those, each mythic will be in 1/15 of packs, and each rare in 2/15). Those packs with 2 DFC will only have 8 'normal' commons, whereas the rest will have 9. And every pack, per normal, will have 3 'regular' uncommons and 1 rare or mythic (in a 7:1 ratio there). All of this is still ignoring foils, but I still don't know how often those pop up, and anyway I'm pretty sure they rarity-match fairly well, so in the end you only get a very slight drop in commons and a very, very slight raise in everything else.
Beyond this, for most of my analysis here, except where it's incredibly obvious to do otherwise (or where I specify), I only looked at the front half of DFC. The big shakeouts of this are going to be that there are a little fewer humans than what I suggest (lots of them transform into werewolves), and creatures will generally be very slightly bigger than I suggest. However, since I think you're going to expect ot see front faces most of the time, this is a reasonable simplification. If you really want to know something specific about how back-sides affect something, you can ping me; if you want lots of things, you are of course free to analyze that yourself :P
Having gotten all that boringness out of the way, let's begin!
Madness
Most of what I've seen discussed is assuming that Madness will be a huge influence on the limited format. People are talking about the ability to discard things at will being a big benefit on cards, just for the sake of having that cost of "discard a card". And the justification is, of course, that "it enables Madness". And indeed, if you get to flash in a 3/5 for 3 mana, that's a big game. However, in order for "discard a card" to be something you actively seek out, you would need to have lots of Madness in your deck. Is that a realistic thing?
Well, Madness appears on 18 cards, (along with a 19th, a rare, giving Madness to all of your vampires) - 4 rares, 6 uncommons, and 8 commons. Not worrying for a moment about playability, this comes to an average of 23.6 Madness cards per draft - that's just under 3 per drafter. Now, it is worth noting that these are compressed into the Grixis trio of colours, meaning that you're going to get these cards disproportionately often when you're in a combination of those colours. What does that amount to? Well, if you're just one of the colors, it doesn't help much - you expect to get maybe 3-4 Madness cards in a draft. If you're in two, it can go up to 7-8, but I think even in these cases, and you're prioritizing Madness, you're not going to get more than 8 very often (and indeed, I'd expect you usually to have fewer Madness cards than this, especially in a 'normal' deck).
We also need to look at the other side of the equation: Discard outlets. There are a bit more of these than actual Madness cards - 30.7 per draft - though that includes a number which are very limited in what they can discard, or how often they can. So in terms of actual enablers, we're looking at roughly the same number as we have of actual Madness cards.
The next thing we want to do is consider what those numbers mean for gameplay. On the one side, if you have an enabler, you usually are pretty happy with as many madness spells as possible. So we don't need so much of a calculation here, but how many madness spells can we expect to cast? If our deck has 6 madness spells (I think this will be a reasonably typical number), then we're fairly likely to have at least one to go with our enabler in our opening hand (66%), and by the time we get to the point we could madness it, it's quite likely. We start to get better than an even chance of getting a second Madness card once we're maybe four turns into the game. But you need the game to go very long (or have lots of draw) to get to a third - we're talking 10+ turns for any kind of reliability.
At this point, I think it's worth noting that, not only do you need to assemble your Madness combo, but you also need for it to be relevant. Madness costs tend to get you two things: a discount on mana, and/or instant speed. You probably aren't going to hold spells to play them at instant speed, at least once you've played everything out. And once you're far enough into the game, the mana discount isn't doing much either. So all told, I think you can expect to get one to two benefits from just being able to madness things.
Because of all this, I think that what you're really looking for are cards where you'd more or less be happy playing otherwise. For instance, a looting effect will get a card of value out of the discard anyway, so it's a really optimal case. And a card like Elusive Tormentor gives you a very good rate, so the cost of discarding a card isn't a bad deal there, either.
Delirium
Delirium is another one of the major mechanics of the set. We'll look at how important it is, and how easy it is to turn on.
In terms of sheer frequency, cards with Delirium are slightly more numerous than those with Madness - an average of 24.8 per draft. Of course, the size of the bonus Delirium gives you varies quite widely. I'm not going to try to get into how important it is just yet, because I think that's something you have to worry about on a card-to-card basis, draft by draft. However, I think it's fair to say that it will be highly infrequent that going very far out of your way in a draft to enable Delirium is worth it: there simply aren't that many cards which care about it, and from looking at them, on many it doesn't make that huge of a difference. Still, it's a significant benefit in many cases, and it's worth looking at seeing how easy it is to turn on.
First, let's look at the 'natural' case. Creatures are going to trade pretty naturally. And instants and sorceries naturally go into the graveyard. Obviously there are enough creatures in the set to have more or less as many as you want. How about instants and sorceries? At 53.8 and 47.9 per draft, respectively, the answer is a pretty definitive yes. The limiting factor therefore seems to then be how many of these cards you can stuff in your deck - you usually need to have a pretty decent number of creatures, which limits your room for these other cards.
In order to get Delirium ion, you'll need one of each, which means you're going to have chances maximized by having equal numbers in your deck. With 4 instants, and 4 sorceries, you'll have drawn enough to have at least one of each with at least 50% probability by about turn 5, but you won't get up to being very likely until about 10 turns later. The thing to note here, though is that you still need to be able to play both of these, plus that's assuming a creature for free, AND you still need another type in yard! This leads us to a couple of other things you can do to help you out. First, there are self-mill cards (looters can jump in here in a pinch). Milling 2-3 cards is usually going to be enough to get you a land, plus shore up percentages on one of the types you were potentially hoping to get otherwise (Creature, Sorcery, Instant). There are a number of mill outlets (more on that later). Second, artifacts. There are a handful of artifact creatures, as well as another graveyardable artifact or two in the set, and that can be an extra type also. (If you're lucky enough to get a planeswalker, having it be another type in your yard is... probably not a great consolation for it having died, but it's not nothing I guess).
However, all of that isn't enough to really get Delirium reliably early - at best, you're looking at having it pretty often in the late game, and if you get very lucky, you'll get it midgame sometimes. This is where the serious enablers jump in - and they're mostly enchantments, which are often self-sacrificing. The Vessel cycle is the key here, with the Blue and Green ones the best for Delirium purposes, getting you most of the way to your threshold by themselves. Overall, I count about 13.2 cards per draft that have enchantments go to the yard for Delirium, to go with 11.6 cards for lands and a bit under 9 for Artifacts (depending on how much you count artifact creatures). The UG vessels are absolutely the key cards here, but other than them, a good combination of other cards can get you there in the midgame. I want to stress that you need a mix, because at the end of the day, you need at least a few of several types in order to check four boxes. Counting on your one sorcery is going to be sketchy, no matter how many other enablers you have.
Other Graveyard Effects
So I talked a bit ago about mill effects. There are 16.6 per draft, or enough for everyone to get a couple - probably for everyone who wants them to get a few. Delirium is one obvious reason you would want them, but it's not the only one - there are a number of cards that either care about graveyards, or have some effect (usually an activated ability) while in the graveyard. 7.2 of the former plus 11.4 of the latter comes, overall per draft, to 18.6, or a bit over two per player. When you're milling these, it's pure value - which mostly means that you should be fairly wary of milling your opponents, and a bit eager to mill yourself - but it's not a huge bonus, just a nice value bump.
Investigate
As we make our way through the mechanics of the set, our next stop is Investigate. There's less of a numbers problem - the mechanic is a lot more about card advantage and format speed than anything else - but it's still something to be aware of. In particular, there are 32.2 cards per draft that investigate, which on average is going to work out to about 4 per drafter (though some aren't playable), which means roughly 1-2 clues per game, which is probably a very good amount. There are also 8.6 cards which care about clues per draft. These cards are disproportionately in Green and Blue, which means it's probably possible to draft some kind of "Clue deck", getting a couple build-arounds and a number of Investigators. I don't know that this will be particularly viable, because it's very durdly, but it should at least be sweet.
Tribal synergies
There are several tribes worth talking about here.
Vampires
21.7 vampires per draft, but only 4.9 cards that care about that creature type. I think what this means is that you aren't really going to get much of a "Vampire" deck almost ever, though BR is probably going to have a good number of these, and there's some mechanical overlap with Madness as well.
(Were)Wolves
Wolves and werewolves more or less always get lumped together in terms of what cares about them, so I am counting them together here. We get 25.3 per draft, and 6.2 cards that care about the type. It's also worth noting that the flipping of the werewolves all dealing with the same mechanic leads to some synergy there, as well. This means you can make a deck built on the synergies, but I think mostly it will be down to "big creature beatdown".
Spirits
Spirits are even less cohesive than Vampires, with 22.6 cards per draft and only 4.7 cards caring about the type. It is a little worth noting that a number of these cards make multiple spirits, so that's somewhat of a plus. I suspect this will play more like a stereotypical UW fliers deck most of the time, and not be terribly concerned with the creature type.
Zombies
Zombies are once again in the ballpark of many of these other tribes - 25.5 cards per draft (gain some token makers mean the total number of zombies will be higher), and 4.5 cards that care about the type. Actually, because so many of these cards make 2/2s exactly, and a number of them, I think you will want some way to take advantage of that - unfortunately, UB doesn't seem to have terribly many of those...
Humans
Humans definitely look to be the premier tribal archetype, clocking in with not only 57.0 per draft, but also 11.1 cards which care about the type. It's worth noting that while these are centered in GW, there are quite a number in other colors as well. This means you're less likely to get as big of a percentage of those 57 creatures as you are in other tribes, but it's also possible to play some of the 'lord' kind of card to good effect in other color combinations.
There are a few other tribes that show up in decent numbers (Horrors, Angels, etc.), but none with enough rules baggage to worry about.
Skulk and Creature Size
The last mechanic to talk about is Skulk. I think this is one which is very easy to underrate. If you think about it, if you have a 3/3 with Skulk, it can't be blocked by higher-power creatures, but you also need to consider that lower-power creatures naturally have a hard time blocking it. This means you either need multiple small creatures to gang-block - at which point any effects you have become very powerful - or a 'good blocker' (high toughness low power creature). Either way, you can choose to not attack, effectively occupying those blockers for the turn while you look for more pressure to apply. The big benefit is that these cards are really hard to 'eat' - you need a creature with power higher than their toughness, but not more than their power, AND toughness higher than their power.
Feeding into that, several people have noted that there are more creatures in the set with power higher than toughness than vice versa. I want to stress that this is actually NOT true when you account for rarity - there are 50.3 creatures per draft with power> toughness, 62.5 with 'square stats', and 56.3 with toughness>power. Still, this is a higher power to toughness ratio than we've had in most sets recently.
As for the actual size of creatures, let's start with power:
At 1 power, we have 33.3 creatures per draft, or 19.8% of the format.
2 power: 56.7 creatures = 33.7%
3 power: 48.4 creatures = 28.7%
4 power: 11.8 creatures = 7.0%
5 power: 8.1 creatures = 4.8%
6+ power: 5.4 creatures = 3.2%
In terms of toughness:
1 toughness: 40.0 creatures, 23.8%
2 toughness: 44.0 creatures, 26.1%
3 toughness: 45.7 creatures, 27.1%
4 toughness: 16.7 creatures, 9.9%
5 toughness: 14.2 creatures, 8.4%
6+ toughness: 6.6 creatures, 3.9%
In both cases, we see a big drop-off from 3 to 4. In particular, this makes 2/4 and 3/4 pretty excellent defensive sizes, as they normally are - most opponents will only have a few creatures that can punch through in their whole deck. When we throw in Converted mana cost, we see that there are significant jumps in size once we hit 5 and 6 mana - 5 gives you some 3/5s, 4/5s, 5/4s, and the common 6/6 for 6 (along with the uncommon 7/7 at that cost) rules the roost.
Miscellany
Over 42 enchantments per draft, together with 19 plus artifacts might make it seem like Root Out, the set's Naturalize effect, would be main-deckable. And that might be fine, in a pinch, but you have to realize that a good chunk of these are unplayable, and perhaps more importantly, a big percentage have sacrifice effects - which mean that they aren't really going to be sitting around in play for you to take out. The big number of build-around enchantments mean that you should still like to have this in your sideboard, but I would try not to maindeck the card.
There is very little fixing in the format - 15.3 cards per draft. A lot of this comes from lands at higher rarities, where it's very hard to line them up with the color combination you want. Most of the rest is in some mediocre green cards. Don't play three colors, and don't try to splash without a very, very good reason.
The number of mana sinks is WAY down from OGW - 40.2 per draft to 19.8 per draft. That, together with fewer 7 drops et al, is going to be a big reason to cut down to 17 lands from the 18 you were often running before. Now, if you have enough discard outlets, that could still be a reason to run 18, so I don't expect 17 to be as ubiquitous as it is in some formats, but I do expect it to be the norm.
Cards
This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but rather just a smattering of cards I find interesting, especially that I think are being largely misevaluated.
Mad Prophet
I think this card is being significantly overrated. In most sets, I would guess I wouldn't want to play it at all (though probably it' would be fringe playable, depending on format speed). Between Madness and Delirium, this set has enough going on that I think I'll usually play it - and indeed, it's the kind of Madness enabler I'm looking for. But it's not going to be great, the 'it draws a card every turn' feeling I've been getting from many people.
Angelic Purge (And Sinister Concoction)
I'm not big fans of these cards either. Certainly I expect to play one, if I get it, in most decks, but I certainly wouldn't call them premium removal - they are far, far worse than Oblivion Strike, I think.Having to sac a permanent is too big a cost, and while Concoction is probably better than Purge, I still think discarding is a net negative, and by a non-trivial amount.
Skin Invasion
I get that most people are reasonably high on the card, but I think it's even better. A low-average case scenario is that you stick this on an opponent's creature you then trade for, and get a 1-mana 3/4. 3/4 are quite good stats in the format, and that's a very, very efficient price. But we also got to force an attack, so likely a favorable trade. Also, there are going to be a lot of cases where you can actually eat a creature out of it - not a particularly big one very often, but when you do get a 2-for-1 with the efficient creature attached, it's going to be close to the best card in the set.
Thraben Gargoyle
This card seems good to me. It trades with a decent amount of stuff for just 1 mana, and then later in the game, it's a 6 mana 4 power flier. Neither of those cards is particularly good, but the combination of them is enough to make this above-average.
Declaration in Stone
Much like Angelic Purge, I don't think this card is all that great. The comparison that comes to mind is Reality Shift, from Fate Reforged - and that card wasn't particularly playable. Now, I do think that this card is better - a bear is enough better than a clue to overcome the sorcery vs instant thing by a significant amount, I think - but that's only enough to make this playable, not great.
Grotesque Mutation
Keep in mind on this one that firing it off on an unblocked creature is basically just Alms of the Vein, which I think is quite bad. Of course this card is a good bit better than that overall, but you really need the +3/+1 to do work in winning a fight for that to be the case, and this being 2 mana and only +1 toughness keeps it from being great in my eyes. Playable, sure, but one of the worse tricks, not one of the better. Worth noting that the green pseudo-fight cards probably make this card in that color combo than elsewhere.
Indulgent Aristocrat
I don't think this card is very good at all. You need probably 2 other vampires in play, plus some fodder, for it to really be worth it? This sounds like too much set-up for probably not all that hot of a pay-off. There aren't that many vampires, and I don't think boards will stall that much, either.
Dual Shot
I'm going to guess this is probably main-deckable. There are lots and lots of 1 toughness creatures to take out. Of course, most of those aren't all that great, but this is only 1 mana. Plus, let's not forget you can use it as a pseudo-trick to trade a 3 power for a 4 toughness creature. Between all that, I think it will work out most of the time - though it probably won't be great all that often.
Malevolent Whispers
This card seems very good to me. Let's ignore that it can be Ray of Command for a second. Just as a sorcery, it compares reasonably well to the last Threaten effect we saw, Press Into Service. +2/+0 is worse than Support 2, to be sure (though not strictly worse, since it's easier to top-deck this for a win). But given the main use of these kinds of cards - namely, to kill - I think being 1 less mana probably makes up for that? It's comparable, anyway, and I thought that card was quite powerful already (in the right deck of course). Adding the possibility of Ray of Command is a BIG game.
Confront the Unknown
I actually like this trick pretty darn well. Early game +1/+1 is often enough to win combat, and then getting another card makes this a cheap 2-for-1. Later on, you're more likely to have multiple clues. Worst case 3 mana to cycle isn't that bad anyway, but I really like the trick - it's excellent if you can ever get the pump to be a card for you.
Runaway Carriage
Card seems perfectly playable to me. Not good, mind you, but enough that I could see it being your 23rd card reasonably often. In aggressive decks/situations, it's a pseudo-Lava Axe for 4 mana. Lava Axe isn't very good very often, but 4 mana is ok, and though they can soak up damage by blocking... you're generally not too upset about that - it's not down cards then. And defensively... well, it can trade for almost any ground creature. Sure, you don't really want it to be your only blocker, but even the bad case of stopping their big things from attacking and then being forced to trade for a smaller thing isn't too terrible. Obviously you can construct scenarios where it's pretty bad, but I think most of the time, it's perfectly fine, though not great, out of the 4-drop slot. Plus it's 2 types for Delirium, small bonus that is.
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