@desolutionist I believe mtggoldfish had a bot to scrape data from all the events, so it's definitely possible. It's not like MTGO has an API to pull this data from though so I never seriously considered attempting to automate this. It would certainly be great if someone wants to look into this route.

As a less daunting task, someone could figure out how to take a screengrab of the results from every round and convert it into text that's easier to work with. Several of us tried to figure out a way to do this over a year ago, but after minimal effort led to incomplete results we gave up. It's much easier to do metagame analyses for paper events because I just open the .WER file in notepad and parse the results.

@desolutionist said in MTGO March 2017 Power 9 Challenge:

@brianpk80

I'm not sure if this is something you've been playing for a while, but I'm interested in your approach. (Specifically the Sylvan Caryatid)

How was the Caryatid? Could you envision a Vintage deck that plays more than one? Or is it just only viable as a singleton with GSZ?

I've been testing GSZ for about a month and a half. The list I played on the VSL had no general meta applicability as it was tuned for what I expected in the Pod.

The Caryatid is great. I like the extra acceleration to pump out Jace, GSZ, Leo, and the Titan and to have a residual board position after Gushing. I prefer that mana sources simply do their job and had no patience anymore for the hassle of Deathrite Shaman, where you have no idea whether it will generate mana due to the ubiquity of Misstep, Plow, Decay, surprise Dig Through Times, and opposing Shamans as well as the awkwardness that results when there are no lands in the graveyard.

If there is any deck that would run more than 1 Caryatid, it would be a Superfriends list with 4 CMC sweepers/Moat where you really benefit from the color fixing and significantly from the untargetable 0/3 blocker while setting up or defending walkers. I would definitely play a Sylvan Caryatid and Sylvan Library in Nahiri if I ran it again.

@enderfall Honestly, I thought the field now wasnt nearly as good as last time I played the P9C. Even at 4-0 some opponents played very suboptimal. For example, in my previous P9C I just got owned by Diophan and ended up in 9th. So I'm not too sure how much this data even tells you about the various matchups.

I've missed the last two Power 9 Challenges, sadly. I need to plan my schedule better. If I had made it, Oath would have performed better.

I'm generally happy for Saheeli Oath to continue to be underrated. If I sideboard correctly and play patiently, I can beat other Gush decks reasonably well.

Meanwhile, Shops is a good matchup if I can counter the first disruption spell (Thorn, Sphere, Revoker, etc.) and either lay down an Oath or get a Dack on the board. White Eldrazi, however, is a real problem: the new Thalia is even more painful than the old Thalia.

If I were to say anything about the results of this challenge, it would be that the MTGO meta is really swingy. People really move back and forth across the archetypes. There are some of us who play one archetype exclusively, or at least 90%+ of the time, but more people seem to really react strongly to the last big tournament.

@TigersBadger said:

That doesn't actually answer my question about why big blue does so poorly against Oath specifically.

If you want to just bash the deck, you do you, but I would like an answer to that specific question rather than a dismissive response from someone.

Gush decks in these lists include mentor which packs white. So you get StP, disenchant effects and containment priest to combat oath.

I ran into that when I was listing the deck archetypes for each player. And at first I wanted to list it as Gush because it plays Gush and operates with the Gush "rules" and that's the easiest way to classify it quickly. But I agree the mindset of playing the deck is more like Combo. But I believe the main archetype and the sub archetype are sort of interchangeable for this deck. You could call it Gush Combo or call it Combo Gush. The metagame breakdown takes into account the first word.

I'll do it, I was thinking about doing it anyway because I figured you weren't playing. If you could help with the spreadsheets that would be awesome.

I like the top8 decks.

I feel like my deck was unfavored in the finals. @diophan had a better "card advantage" gameplan. Its hard to win the control game vs 4 cabal therapy + 1 fluster/1pyroblast even though I also had alot of counters. My mentor build is/was not that fast.

I really like @diophan 's deck and I think he played well in our games. He deserved to win this thing imo.

@VintageFamiliar What @diophan said.

The way we have our spreadsheets written is that they deal exclusively in wins - The number of match wins Shops has against Gush is the number of match losses Gush has against Shops and so counting losses is somewhat redundant. Doing this, I guess Draws would count as losses for both parties, but the net result is that the match isn't counted as no winner was determined.

If you were to count wins and losses separately and include draws as losses you would depress the overall win percentage of the field (using our method, the number of wins is always equal to the number of losses so the overall win % will be 50% - counting draws as losses means there will be more losses than wins and the overall win percentage will be less as a result). This will also disproportionately affect certain archetypes as Ryan mentioned. There isn't one correct way to do statistical analysis, though. Just whatever you do, I would mention it.

Thanks for doing this analysis it is really helpful. I am a little scared about what this graph starts to look like now that shops took its big hit, but only by looking at the facts can we really understand the meta.