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).
Sunday, 2 October 2016
Thursday, 29 September 2016
Post-Kaladesh Standard Brews: Ghirapur Orrery, Key to the City + Robowolf, Artifact Aggro
Kaladesh, a new set, meant for inventing. And my brewing brain is really going off, so let's dig into some more.
The first card from Kaladesh that really jumped out at me as being one I wanted to build around was Ghirapur Orrery. There are two halves of the card, and I suppose it's the third different play-an-extra-land effect in Standard nwo, but really the thing that interested me here was the ability to draw three extra cards fairly consistently. You need to do it once (once more than your opponent, to be more precise) to get to a 4 mana draw 3, which is a good but not outstanding rate in Standard. Getting there twice is an enormous advantage - game-winning.
Obviously the card wants you to play your stuff out. This suggests to me you want to be proactive, and for the most part, reasonably aggressive. My first thought, then, was for a RG aggressive deck, leveraging Noose Constrictor's ability to empty your hand out. The esteemed Dr. Frank Karsten had a similar idea as deck #17 in his list of Kaladesh brews on ChannelFireball.com. Here's my version:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482358#online
One card I want to highlight here which I think is very good, but is missing from the above-mentioned list from Frank Karsten, is Key to the City. It discards things for benefit to help you keep handsize down when you want it, loots through to find important cards when you need that, is a discard outlet for Fiery Temper (and the miser's Stromkirk Occultist), and of course pushes through damage. It's good here with Noose Constrictor, letting you 6 them or something out of nowhere, and it's also very good with the RoboWolf itself.
A couple other notes on this list: I have a Ravenous Bloodseeker as a 5th way to empty your hand at any point (yes, it will kill itself in that process, but you can do it - make sure you hold priority and respond to the ability's activation). I'm pretty unsure of exactly what the right suite of Burn spells is, but I like the aggro creatures, the hand emptying, and having a lot of burn in this kind of deck.
My next take on Orrery was built around some ideas I first saw in Neal Oliver's excellent stream (twitch.tv/nealoliver88) - from Neal himself, as well as fellow viewers Blm4l and wujo444. It takes a GB spin on things:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482377#online
I'm pretty dubious of this one in many ways, but it does have some sweet things going for it. In some ways it's very similar to the GB Delirium decks we've seen. And we have Olivia's Dragoon in the party to help us empty our hands out. But we've also got The Gitrog Monster as a payoff, and that gets us a few things going on. It turns our Noose Constrictor to turn all lands into spells (by repeatedly discarding - Gitrog draws you a card). There's some definite synergy in that fashion.
Finally, we get to the Orrery deck I expect to be the best of them all.... Vampires?!
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482382#online
Obviously, the deck needs a much better name (I'm taking suggestions!). Who would have guessed that it was the set AFTER Innistrad block, in which there are 0 Vampires, that we would see the vampire deck finally succeed? I guess it's me, because I really think this can be a player. We have Olivia's Dragoon as a way to get insta-hellbent. We have Stromkirk Condemned, Heir of Falkenrath, and Key to the City (and to some extent, Olivia, Mobilized for War) to fuel discard synergies/madness and help us to get to that hellbent status. We have lots of Madness effects to get value from those discards at all times. Plus we have other synergies, besides Orrery, that care about us being hellbent - from the Wolf to Bloodhall Priest to the Miser's Asylum Visitor. I definitely expect the exact numbers to be wrong here, but I really like the general look of this deck - lots of evasive threats, lots of burn, and some efficient, big creatures that can hold the board a little bit, too.
This takes me to the second half of the post. It also looks to me like there is another powerful Black/Red Aggressive deck in the format. There are certainly some overlaps between the two, and it's possible that the best build is somewhere in the middle, but for now, let's look at the straight-up Red/Black Artifact Aggro deck:
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/482399#online
Obviously here we have some of the same synergies we saw before, with Madness (now also enabled by Smuggler's Copter), but we also have some nice aggressive artifact and artifact-related cards. The Copter itself is almost certainly the best of these. Nerd Ape and the Lookout chip in as early attackers for 2. Lookout is also particularly good with vehicles of course. I'm not sure how good Bomat Courier is - I am skeptical, but reports I've heard say it's good...... This is probably near the best area for Unlicensed Disintegration. I think I'm much lower on Pia Nalaar than most other people, and a big part of me wants to lower the curve even more and cut some lands, but it's a bit difficult to know how right that is.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/483010#online
On this one, we've swapped out the black for white. This gets us access to a couple good 1 drops (most notably Toolcraft Exemplar), along with cards like Depala. It also gets us Fragmentize in the sideboard, along with the potential for Gideon. I think this deck is not quite there, but wouldn't at all be surprised to something along these lines doing well. Also notice the Built to Smash which are present here - I think they might be important for a deck like this having success.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/483013#online
This is obviously a spin off of the previous deck, but more on the equipment theme. Inventor's Goggles get you another cheap equipment (12 creatures in the deck it equips free to). Weapons Trainer gives us a nice bonus, and between it and bushwhacker, reason to go wide. My number balance is probably not correct here - needs more equipment perhaps, or to focus more or less on the wide theme. Maybe you cut some Smuggler's Copters even. But I do think this is another interesting direction to explore.
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/483016#online
Finally, when you try to mash the Boros and Rakdos versions of the artifact aggro decks together, you get this disgusting monstrosity. I can't say I really recommend this one - the manabase is really bad, and the payoffs aren't much higher than the 2 color versions. But it's there to try, if you're ambitious.
Obviously the card wants you to play your stuff out. This suggests to me you want to be proactive, and for the most part, reasonably aggressive. My first thought, then, was for a RG aggressive deck, leveraging Noose Constrictor's ability to empty your hand out. The esteemed Dr. Frank Karsten had a similar idea as deck #17 in his list of Kaladesh brews on ChannelFireball.com. Here's my version:
One card I want to highlight here which I think is very good, but is missing from the above-mentioned list from Frank Karsten, is Key to the City. It discards things for benefit to help you keep handsize down when you want it, loots through to find important cards when you need that, is a discard outlet for Fiery Temper (and the miser's Stromkirk Occultist), and of course pushes through damage. It's good here with Noose Constrictor, letting you 6 them or something out of nowhere, and it's also very good with the RoboWolf itself.
A couple other notes on this list: I have a Ravenous Bloodseeker as a 5th way to empty your hand at any point (yes, it will kill itself in that process, but you can do it - make sure you hold priority and respond to the ability's activation). I'm pretty unsure of exactly what the right suite of Burn spells is, but I like the aggro creatures, the hand emptying, and having a lot of burn in this kind of deck.
My next take on Orrery was built around some ideas I first saw in Neal Oliver's excellent stream (twitch.tv/nealoliver88) - from Neal himself, as well as fellow viewers Blm4l and wujo444. It takes a GB spin on things:
I'm pretty dubious of this one in many ways, but it does have some sweet things going for it. In some ways it's very similar to the GB Delirium decks we've seen. And we have Olivia's Dragoon in the party to help us empty our hands out. But we've also got The Gitrog Monster as a payoff, and that gets us a few things going on. It turns our Noose Constrictor to turn all lands into spells (by repeatedly discarding - Gitrog draws you a card). There's some definite synergy in that fashion.
Finally, we get to the Orrery deck I expect to be the best of them all.... Vampires?!
Obviously, the deck needs a much better name (I'm taking suggestions!). Who would have guessed that it was the set AFTER Innistrad block, in which there are 0 Vampires, that we would see the vampire deck finally succeed? I guess it's me, because I really think this can be a player. We have Olivia's Dragoon as a way to get insta-hellbent. We have Stromkirk Condemned, Heir of Falkenrath, and Key to the City (and to some extent, Olivia, Mobilized for War) to fuel discard synergies/madness and help us to get to that hellbent status. We have lots of Madness effects to get value from those discards at all times. Plus we have other synergies, besides Orrery, that care about us being hellbent - from the Wolf to Bloodhall Priest to the Miser's Asylum Visitor. I definitely expect the exact numbers to be wrong here, but I really like the general look of this deck - lots of evasive threats, lots of burn, and some efficient, big creatures that can hold the board a little bit, too.
This takes me to the second half of the post. It also looks to me like there is another powerful Black/Red Aggressive deck in the format. There are certainly some overlaps between the two, and it's possible that the best build is somewhere in the middle, but for now, let's look at the straight-up Red/Black Artifact Aggro deck:
Obviously here we have some of the same synergies we saw before, with Madness (now also enabled by Smuggler's Copter), but we also have some nice aggressive artifact and artifact-related cards. The Copter itself is almost certainly the best of these. Nerd Ape and the Lookout chip in as early attackers for 2. Lookout is also particularly good with vehicles of course. I'm not sure how good Bomat Courier is - I am skeptical, but reports I've heard say it's good...... This is probably near the best area for Unlicensed Disintegration. I think I'm much lower on Pia Nalaar than most other people, and a big part of me wants to lower the curve even more and cut some lands, but it's a bit difficult to know how right that is.
On this one, we've swapped out the black for white. This gets us access to a couple good 1 drops (most notably Toolcraft Exemplar), along with cards like Depala. It also gets us Fragmentize in the sideboard, along with the potential for Gideon. I think this deck is not quite there, but wouldn't at all be surprised to something along these lines doing well. Also notice the Built to Smash which are present here - I think they might be important for a deck like this having success.
This is obviously a spin off of the previous deck, but more on the equipment theme. Inventor's Goggles get you another cheap equipment (12 creatures in the deck it equips free to). Weapons Trainer gives us a nice bonus, and between it and bushwhacker, reason to go wide. My number balance is probably not correct here - needs more equipment perhaps, or to focus more or less on the wide theme. Maybe you cut some Smuggler's Copters even. But I do think this is another interesting direction to explore.
Finally, when you try to mash the Boros and Rakdos versions of the artifact aggro decks together, you get this disgusting monstrosity. I can't say I really recommend this one - the manabase is really bad, and the payoffs aren't much higher than the 2 color versions. But it's there to try, if you're ambitious.
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.
Wednesday, 21 September 2016
Post-Rotation Standard Deck Idea: 4 Color Jolly Green Giants
https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/478204#online
This is a rough sketch or outline of a deck I think could be strong in a post-rotation metagame. The idea is very straightforward: play the biggest, best creatures, be able to block any small stuff, and smash face. We get to play a lot of colors because of Aether Hub, basic-land-searchers (Attune with Aether, Traverse the Ulvenwald, Evolving Wilds), and the new Servant of the Conduit. We want to play a lot of colors mostly for Woodland Wanderer.
Tamiyo is tremendous with both the aforementioned Woodland Wanderer as well as Sylvan Advocate. It's also just a straight-up good card, of course. Verdurous Gearhulk makes sure that we have the biggest creatures around and can push through big damage.
There are a lot of things I'm a bit less sure on with the deck. What should the 4th color be? Red gives us access to Radiant Flames, plus a few other cards. Should we go up to the 4th Tamiyo? How good is the new Nissa here? How many 2 drops do we want - Servant of the Conduit and Sylvan Advocate seem like locks, and here I've supplemented 2 Lambholt Pacifist, but this probably isn't the best Lambholt deck ever - we're all sorcery speed, which makes it hard to flip, for instance. It's possible we want more or less, or we might want Selfless Spirits instead - one of our biggest weaknesses is to Wraths (which really look to be white now).
The 3 drop slot is another big question - there are a lot of options here, between Kambal, Tracker, Fairgrounds Warden, Spell Queller, Thalia, Reflector Mage... and that's only the creatures. Maybe some removal, card draw, planeswalkers also could fit in that slot.
So there are a lot of ways the deck can go. But one thing I want to touch on is of course the mana base. If we count Aether Hub as a source of all colors (which is a little bit precipitous), then our lands give us 18 sources of green (13 of which are untapped), with 10 land-based sources of each other color. On top of that, we have the 6 spell-based basic-searchers, which gets us to 16 sources of each of those colors contingent on having a Green mana, plus the 4 Servants of the Conduit. This looks like a lot - 20 sources for the splash colors certainly is - but of course in reality we're counting all the land searchers and Aether Hub can't reliably be sources of 4 different colors. I think this should be sufficient to be ok, but I'd definitely want to do some testing (or at least simulation) to make sure we're actually hitting our mana reasonably, and that we aren't over-fixing. If we could trim a land-searcher or two, that would be tremendous, especially because A) we're currently sitting on 32 mana sources (counting the 1 CMC searchers and the mana dorks), and B) counting the searchers as tap-lands, we have fully 12 of those. I would be remiss if I didn't note that while we can definitely tweak the mana a bit, it's pretty hard to get to double of any non-green color reliably (I think), though you probably could if you really wanted to (though it would mean some sacrifices).
In terms of the sideboard, this is really thrown together quickly. Selfless Spirits are protection against sweepers (reasonable against other ground decks). Kambal seems good against burn, as does the Stomper. Negate is good against control and burn. And there are a handful of other cards against control. Frankly the sideboard is probably really bad, and I at least want to consider some Naturalize effects, but mostly you need to have some expectation of a metagame before you can properly build a 'board.
This is a rough sketch or outline of a deck I think could be strong in a post-rotation metagame. The idea is very straightforward: play the biggest, best creatures, be able to block any small stuff, and smash face. We get to play a lot of colors because of Aether Hub, basic-land-searchers (Attune with Aether, Traverse the Ulvenwald, Evolving Wilds), and the new Servant of the Conduit. We want to play a lot of colors mostly for Woodland Wanderer.
Tamiyo is tremendous with both the aforementioned Woodland Wanderer as well as Sylvan Advocate. It's also just a straight-up good card, of course. Verdurous Gearhulk makes sure that we have the biggest creatures around and can push through big damage.
There are a lot of things I'm a bit less sure on with the deck. What should the 4th color be? Red gives us access to Radiant Flames, plus a few other cards. Should we go up to the 4th Tamiyo? How good is the new Nissa here? How many 2 drops do we want - Servant of the Conduit and Sylvan Advocate seem like locks, and here I've supplemented 2 Lambholt Pacifist, but this probably isn't the best Lambholt deck ever - we're all sorcery speed, which makes it hard to flip, for instance. It's possible we want more or less, or we might want Selfless Spirits instead - one of our biggest weaknesses is to Wraths (which really look to be white now).
The 3 drop slot is another big question - there are a lot of options here, between Kambal, Tracker, Fairgrounds Warden, Spell Queller, Thalia, Reflector Mage... and that's only the creatures. Maybe some removal, card draw, planeswalkers also could fit in that slot.
So there are a lot of ways the deck can go. But one thing I want to touch on is of course the mana base. If we count Aether Hub as a source of all colors (which is a little bit precipitous), then our lands give us 18 sources of green (13 of which are untapped), with 10 land-based sources of each other color. On top of that, we have the 6 spell-based basic-searchers, which gets us to 16 sources of each of those colors contingent on having a Green mana, plus the 4 Servants of the Conduit. This looks like a lot - 20 sources for the splash colors certainly is - but of course in reality we're counting all the land searchers and Aether Hub can't reliably be sources of 4 different colors. I think this should be sufficient to be ok, but I'd definitely want to do some testing (or at least simulation) to make sure we're actually hitting our mana reasonably, and that we aren't over-fixing. If we could trim a land-searcher or two, that would be tremendous, especially because A) we're currently sitting on 32 mana sources (counting the 1 CMC searchers and the mana dorks), and B) counting the searchers as tap-lands, we have fully 12 of those. I would be remiss if I didn't note that while we can definitely tweak the mana a bit, it's pretty hard to get to double of any non-green color reliably (I think), though you probably could if you really wanted to (though it would mean some sacrifices).
In terms of the sideboard, this is really thrown together quickly. Selfless Spirits are protection against sweepers (reasonable against other ground decks). Kambal seems good against burn, as does the Stomper. Negate is good against control and burn. And there are a handful of other cards against control. Frankly the sideboard is probably really bad, and I at least want to consider some Naturalize effects, but mostly you need to have some expectation of a metagame before you can properly build a 'board.
Monday, 19 September 2016
Vehicles: Analogy and Analysis
One of the two hot new mechanics from the upcoming Magic: the Gathering set, Kaladesh, is Vehicles. There's a lot of hype, a lot of discussion, a lot of comparisons being made. In the end, it's pretty hard to grok quite how they'll play - we don't have experience with them at all. But let's try to start breaking them down.
Comparison One: Equipment
The thing I have seen Vehicles compared to most often are Equipment. I think this is largely from a conceptual level - both are artifacts, both require creatures to do anything, both take two cards to make one larger creature, both represent tools which augment a person/creature's ability to perform tasks, especially from a real-world perspective. But while there are a number of parallels, there are also a number places where the comparison doesn't really work. The most obvious is probably that, once you cast the Vehicle, it doesn't require more mana to do its thing, rather a creature. Also, with a vehicle, the only attribute of the 'base', small creature that matters is its power.
But the biggest difference comes when an opponent kills the combined giant monster. With equipment, you just move it over, and presto change-o, you have a new giant monster. Or, at least you did back when they would print substantial buffs on equipment, from cards like Vulshok Battlegear or Vulshok Morningstar. Because that was such a huge advantage, so hard to beat, they've generally stopped doing that - equipment tends to be much weaker nowadays. (Similarly, you used to be able to move equipment to have effect on both attack and defense, but that's dampened by weaker equipment and higher equip costs).
You can't do this with vehicles; kill the vehicle, you're left with [a] smaller creature[s]. And that's it - there's no way to go big again. So of course, this makes vehicles in some way inherently 'worse' than equipment... except that R&D understands all of this, so the development team has thus balanced the cards... accordingly? It remains to be seen if they're actually stronger or weaker in practice, I suppose, but the point is that you actually need to look at the rates on the cards to know for sure. Gaining Life is 'inherently weaker' than doing damage, but W for gain a billion would be stronger than Shock.
Comparison Two: Bestow
So bestow also has many similarities to vehicles - again, you're using 2 cards to make one bigger creature, investing a reasonable amount of mana to get this, but in two chunks. And in this case, if you kill the big creature, you're left with a small one, just like is the case with vehicles. This analogy still has the smaller creatures total attributes mattering though, which is still different from how vehicles work.
Comparison Three: Emerge
The last comparison I'd like to draw is with Emerge creatures. We just saw these, of course, so they're fresh in everyone's mind. And once again, we're using two creatures, and a requisite amount of mana split into two chunks, to get one large creature in the end. Emerge is a better analogue to vehicles in the sense that, in the end, your big creature is just what's printed on that big card. But vehicles lack the on-cast triggers of emerge cards, and Emerge creatures, when killed, leave nothing behind. They do, though, point out nicely that how the cards are balanced by the development has the biggest impact on the cards' strength, and not just the inherent mechanic. If the emerge creatures didn't get you card advantage from their cast triggers, just putting two cards in for one big body would be pretty bad. But they did give us these effects, and the cards turned out strong.
Analysis
So I think all three of these provide decent analogies for Vehicles, but as I said at the top, none are perfect, and you really need some independent analysis to go on. I'm going to try my hand at this, but I do want to note that I'm going to be talking about general/generic case here, which applies more to limited than anything else - in constructed, you're obviously only aiming for good case scenarios.
The first thing I want to note here is what I'm calling "Effective Power" - on a board where your opponent has no creatures, your vehicle is hitting them with only their power minus their crew cost, since you have to sacrifice attacking with that much power in order to animate your vehicle (best case - sometimes, you sacrifice more). When you do this subtraction, their at-first-gaudy numbers start to look significantly worse.
On the flip side, of course, when you're squaring your vehicles off against opposing creatures, they still trade with the full force as printed on the card. In this case, they're an excellent deal. Thus, we get to a simple conclusion/motto: with vehicles, trading is good, racing is bad. (No, the irony that vehicles don't want to race is not at all lost on me).
Still, this isn't exactly a huge secret, so of course when you're playing against vehicles, you'll be working cross-purposes to that. When someone activates a vehicle and attacks, the best response is generally going to be not to trade with it, but either take the damage, or chump block. Attacking with a vehicle is going to open up a weakness - you're tapping what's probably a significant portion of your board presence, leaving yourself open to a crack-back; this kind of play leads to, you guessed it, racing (so the flavor isn't all lost, I guess?)
So in order to get advantage with vehicles, you have a few options:
Of course, I would be remiss to not note that the Development team has understood this play pattern, where vehicles tend to inherently be better on defense. They have compensated for this by giving very many of them offensive-minded abilities. Trample, Menace, Haste, Attack triggers, blocking restrictions on opposing creatures... even flying is generally more useful on offense than defense. Look at the vehicles in the set, and you'll see that a huge percentage of them have something like this, and you'll see it's pretty clear that there is this inherent defensive nature to the subtype. These inducements will probably make it right to attack a lot of the time, but they of course won't always. And it's extra worth noting that, on the few vehicles which don't have these kinds of incentives, blocking is going to be the go-to way to be.
To learn more, you really need to look at individual cards... but that's a separate post.
Comparison One: Equipment
The thing I have seen Vehicles compared to most often are Equipment. I think this is largely from a conceptual level - both are artifacts, both require creatures to do anything, both take two cards to make one larger creature, both represent tools which augment a person/creature's ability to perform tasks, especially from a real-world perspective. But while there are a number of parallels, there are also a number places where the comparison doesn't really work. The most obvious is probably that, once you cast the Vehicle, it doesn't require more mana to do its thing, rather a creature. Also, with a vehicle, the only attribute of the 'base', small creature that matters is its power.
But the biggest difference comes when an opponent kills the combined giant monster. With equipment, you just move it over, and presto change-o, you have a new giant monster. Or, at least you did back when they would print substantial buffs on equipment, from cards like Vulshok Battlegear or Vulshok Morningstar. Because that was such a huge advantage, so hard to beat, they've generally stopped doing that - equipment tends to be much weaker nowadays. (Similarly, you used to be able to move equipment to have effect on both attack and defense, but that's dampened by weaker equipment and higher equip costs).
You can't do this with vehicles; kill the vehicle, you're left with [a] smaller creature[s]. And that's it - there's no way to go big again. So of course, this makes vehicles in some way inherently 'worse' than equipment... except that R&D understands all of this, so the development team has thus balanced the cards... accordingly? It remains to be seen if they're actually stronger or weaker in practice, I suppose, but the point is that you actually need to look at the rates on the cards to know for sure. Gaining Life is 'inherently weaker' than doing damage, but W for gain a billion would be stronger than Shock.
Comparison Two: Bestow
So bestow also has many similarities to vehicles - again, you're using 2 cards to make one bigger creature, investing a reasonable amount of mana to get this, but in two chunks. And in this case, if you kill the big creature, you're left with a small one, just like is the case with vehicles. This analogy still has the smaller creatures total attributes mattering though, which is still different from how vehicles work.
Comparison Three: Emerge
The last comparison I'd like to draw is with Emerge creatures. We just saw these, of course, so they're fresh in everyone's mind. And once again, we're using two creatures, and a requisite amount of mana split into two chunks, to get one large creature in the end. Emerge is a better analogue to vehicles in the sense that, in the end, your big creature is just what's printed on that big card. But vehicles lack the on-cast triggers of emerge cards, and Emerge creatures, when killed, leave nothing behind. They do, though, point out nicely that how the cards are balanced by the development has the biggest impact on the cards' strength, and not just the inherent mechanic. If the emerge creatures didn't get you card advantage from their cast triggers, just putting two cards in for one big body would be pretty bad. But they did give us these effects, and the cards turned out strong.
Analysis
So I think all three of these provide decent analogies for Vehicles, but as I said at the top, none are perfect, and you really need some independent analysis to go on. I'm going to try my hand at this, but I do want to note that I'm going to be talking about general/generic case here, which applies more to limited than anything else - in constructed, you're obviously only aiming for good case scenarios.
The first thing I want to note here is what I'm calling "Effective Power" - on a board where your opponent has no creatures, your vehicle is hitting them with only their power minus their crew cost, since you have to sacrifice attacking with that much power in order to animate your vehicle (best case - sometimes, you sacrifice more). When you do this subtraction, their at-first-gaudy numbers start to look significantly worse.
On the flip side, of course, when you're squaring your vehicles off against opposing creatures, they still trade with the full force as printed on the card. In this case, they're an excellent deal. Thus, we get to a simple conclusion/motto: with vehicles, trading is good, racing is bad. (No, the irony that vehicles don't want to race is not at all lost on me).
Still, this isn't exactly a huge secret, so of course when you're playing against vehicles, you'll be working cross-purposes to that. When someone activates a vehicle and attacks, the best response is generally going to be not to trade with it, but either take the damage, or chump block. Attacking with a vehicle is going to open up a weakness - you're tapping what's probably a significant portion of your board presence, leaving yourself open to a crack-back; this kind of play leads to, you guessed it, racing (so the flavor isn't all lost, I guess?)
So in order to get advantage with vehicles, you have a few options:
- Be so far ahead that they HAVE to trade/can't race
- Have the board so clogged that they can't crack back
- Use them on defense more than offense
Of course, I would be remiss to not note that the Development team has understood this play pattern, where vehicles tend to inherently be better on defense. They have compensated for this by giving very many of them offensive-minded abilities. Trample, Menace, Haste, Attack triggers, blocking restrictions on opposing creatures... even flying is generally more useful on offense than defense. Look at the vehicles in the set, and you'll see that a huge percentage of them have something like this, and you'll see it's pretty clear that there is this inherent defensive nature to the subtype. These inducements will probably make it right to attack a lot of the time, but they of course won't always. And it's extra worth noting that, on the few vehicles which don't have these kinds of incentives, blocking is going to be the go-to way to be.
To learn more, you really need to look at individual cards... but that's a separate post.
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