After the vintage challenges rotated to a weekly schedule, Matt and I have been trying to enter as many as possible to collect data. We've had several people, most frequently Shawn Anthony, help us out. This is greatly appreciated. However, this workload has been weighing us both down. After having a miserable time playing through a challenge I entered solely to collect data, I decided to reach out to the community for some help.

What we need from you (these don't need to be done by the same person):

1. Watch replays to determine what deck people are playing who played below the top32. This is typically between 8 and 18 people. This should not take more than an hour. This is the most essential part since otherwise we don't know the metagame breakdown. This is also the only task that requires entering the tournament.

2. Record who played whom in each round. This can be up while the tournament is running, up to several hours after it ends, or you can take a screenshot for someone to input in later.

That's it! The rest we can either set up ahead of time or figure out afterwards. If you value the data that Matt and I collect we would greatly appreciate you helping us out on occasion. If we can get several people to step up, it won't be much work for any individual.

Thanks

@diophan do you need to pay the entry fee to see these matchups/replays?

@pugsuperstar Watching the replays requires paying the 250 play point entry fee. Anyone used to be able to watch replays, but they imposed this restriction to stop bots from collecting too much data and "solving" formats. In particular, mtggoldfish used to have insightful articles on how well the color combinations fared in draft, how well correlated playing various cards was with winning the game, and so forth.

The Vintage Challenges are great EV though. You get your entry fee back for top 32 (over half the players) and prizes increase for top 16, top 8, etc.

It's finding the 5-6 hours to both play in the event to recoup EV and gather data during/after that is the problem!