Budget deck frequency in paper metas/EW?
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I am planning to go to Eternal Weekend this year, but was wondering if the prices of paper power caused large Vintage events to be more populated with budget or tier 2.5 decks? I imagine there is some draw to just play the Vintage event with a legacy deck with a few null rods jammed in?
I don't play events, and this will be my first Vintage experience, so just trying to analyze if i should be planning on playing against a lot more unpowered Eldrazi, Death and Taxes/Hatebears, and Grixis Delver than i would 'normally expect' to face shops and Outcome.
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I would say, generally not. I think the last times I played at EW I played against 0 budget decks. I didn't play last year, when the Mono brown eldrazi deck was around, that is 0 power, but yeah. I only played against "real" decks.
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@Sovarius played 6 rounds of EW last year and only played against one 'budget' deck (jaco-drazi). Roughly the same list went on to make t8, so its possible for budget lists to do well (Kurt Crane also made t16 with a budget mono red magus/moon deck iirc)
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I actually just messaged @ChubbyRain last week about this. I attended EW 2016 as my first legacy event and plan to attend this year playing in my first vintage event. I found Matt's data from last year with all the decks (I can try to find and link it) But you can filter which were "budget". It appeared the vast majority of the budget decks were in fact JacoDrazi, but I distinctly remember several others including a maverick/hatebears-esque list and a mono red prison. They were only an handful of budget lists compared to the powered list though to answer your initial question.
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Here's the link to the data: http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/744/vintage-championships-2016-decklists-and-metagame-analysis
62/343 were budget
41/62 were colorless eldrazi
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@Sovarius I think the emergence of the powerless Eldrazi deck led to an increase in budget decks (about 20%), but you should still expect about 15% of the metagame to be budget. There are unpowered prizes that create incentives and if you are there for Legecy, I think most people would also want to play Vintage. Budget decks can be pretty diverse, not just hatebears. Grixis Landstill top 32'd the year prior as a budget deck. They tend to run Rod, so I would have a plan against it but I wouldn't specifically metagame against it.
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Personally? I wouldn't factor budget decks in. If 20% of the field is a budget deck in round one, significantly less than that is in the field round in round two. If your endgame is to finish high, you're going to get a lot more mileage out of anti Shops/Mentor/Outcome cards than you are anti powerless-Eldrazi/Hatebears/Delver cards
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@ZaKustom05 Sweet stuff, thanks for finding it to share with me!
@ChubbyRain Okay, interesting. Yes, i was thinking that having Legacy the same weekend, maybe there be large numbers of people who don't even play Vintage just jamming their legacy decks for whatever reason (minus BStorm and Ponder)
@Brass-Man Ahh, yea that's the kind of perspective i need. I could not really imagine what kind of portion of folks are just 'playing just to play'. I figured if half the people there were playing D&T or Eldrazi you would want a couple cards just due to their frequency of being paired with them, not necessarily their power level. But you raise a good point, a couple rounds in, if i am winning, then those types of decks are going to be much less frequent.
