Separately, the point I made in the podcast is that the defining feature of Magic is variance. While lamented in some respects, by being non-deterministic, Magic actually introduces skill aspects that could otherwise not exist. For example, without variance, deck construction would look very differently.

My main point, though, is that different aspects of the game - deck construction rules, floor rules, the sideboard - are all attempts to manage variance in one direction or another.

The 4 card max/60 card min rule fixes variance at a certain rate (that is, create variance - a no minimum deck size could be entirely deterministic).

The best 2/3 match structure and the mulligan are two additional rules (generally floor rules) that try reduce variance in the other direction. That is, matches that are played as best 2 of 3 have less variance that best of one matches. It moves you closer to the statistical norm.

I am of the firm belief that you want to produce a balance of variance into a Goldilocks zone, not too much, but not too little variance either.

My overall fear is that the London rule reduces variance too much. I don't think that decks should have that kind of starting hand consistency. I wouldn't mind it as much if starting deck size were a bit larger, but I think it makes it too easy to find a single card, and also to assemble 2-card combos.

While I have this fear, I also like the fact that the rule should help non-tier one decks the most. The decks that stand to benefit the most are those that are not Xerox, PO or Shops (the three tier 1 decks).

So, for the short term, I think the London rule will be good for the metagame, in the sense of 1) increasing metagame diversity, 2) increasing metagame balance, and 3) increasing win rates for (some) lower tier decks. But the long term effects are harder to gauge, and I am less sanguine in the long run.

Anyway, that is a very brief synopsis of my remarks in the podcast, which were more elaborate and detailed.

@smmenen said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

If I am reading this table correctly, it says that the probability of finding a particular/specific restricted card in your opening hand under the London system and with 4 powders is 75.52%?

I'm assuming that Bazaar is the column, and Powder the row. That's pretty astounding.

This is quite exciting and scary. In addition to what you pointed out above, if you include tutors as additional copies of restricted cards, you can get access to any restricted card as a consistent gameplan. I wonder how much this opens up building around restricted cards. Of course it's already done to some degree, but this could catapult it even further.

@smmenen said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

My overall fear is that the London rule reduces variance too much. I don't think that decks should have that kind of starting hand consistency. I wouldn't mind it as much if starting deck size were a bit larger, but I think it makes it too easy to find a single card, and also to assemble 2-card combos.

Mechanically this is problematic for a number of reason. Larger decks in paper lead to longer shuffle cycles and are more cumbersome. I'm not saying 70 is substantially different than 60, but it depends where you set the limit.

Increasing deck size would increase variance yet again, which is counter to what they are trying to achieve. I don't think I need to explain the math to you but a 120 card deck that is literally just 2x of every thing in a 60 card deck will have wildly different hands because of how the odds change every time you draw a card.

If I draw a card from a 60 card deck with 30 lands, I have a 50% chance that my first card is a land, then if I drew a land a 49.1525% chance of another on my second draw from it. If I drew a non-land my chances of a land are now 50.8474%.

That same example, with 120 card deck with 60 lands, is 50% on the first card, 49.5798% on the second if I drew a land, and 50.4201% if I did not. The gamut between the numbers gets wider the more you go down the hyper geometric wormhole. I know the difference does not seem substantial but in the long run it does lead to a swingier range of possibilities. It also has the consequence of making tutors more powerful since they have a wider range of options, mill less viable (not really an issue but still) and cantrips better in some ways and worse in others.

That being said, if you want to increase variance without distorting proportions or increasing mechanical challenges, you could go to a 3 of a kind format. This does have the added bonus of limiting cards that cause issues when they compound upon themselves like spheres, as well as reduces the price point of the format. It still has some other consequences like making tutors more powerful by increasing the range of cards they inherently can find, but you can already build your deck that way if you so chose.

@smmenen I listened to the VSL analysis (good stuff, tough breaks in the games as well) and the initial part of the London Mulligan on reducing variance. I think it will actually benefit Shops and PO. A 58% chance of hitting a single restricted card without Powder is very high and both Shops and PO have powerful cards that they can mulligan to if their opener is not a typical Shops or PO opener. PO has potential access to Timetwister, Tinker, Ancestral, Tutors, Mentor, Balance, Wheel, Windfall (which could get much better), any 1 of which could eliminate the disadvantage of mulliganing. Shops has access to Trinisphere, Chalice, and to a lesser degree Thorn, Sphere, Strip Mine, and Workshop as powerful cards that can enable degenerate openings and win games with fewer cards. Dredge and Survival both benefit as Bazaar decks, though for Survival finding Bazaar is neither necessary or sufficient to win and so the rule's change won't help as much. The decks that get hit the most are the control decks that generally don't operate well on few cards. The only card that really saves them on mulligans is Ancestral. BUG Fish and Blue Aggro-Control are both going to be impacted by the new rules change.

@hrishi

Considering you have to mulligan all the way to a single card to get that probability, I'd say it doesn't open up much at all. Maybe Tolarian decks are slightly more viable, but its not like you can cut your cards that search for lands.

@chubbyrain said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

@smmenen I listened to the VSL analysis (good stuff, tough breaks in the games as well) and the initial part of the London Mulligan on reducing variance. I think it will actually benefit Shops and PO. A 58% chance of hitting a single restricted card without Powder is very high and both Shops and PO have powerful cards that they can mulligan to if their opener is not a typical Shops or PO opener. PO has potential access to Timetwister, Tinker, Ancestral, Tutors, Mentor, Balance, Wheel, Windfall (which could get much better), any 1 of which could eliminate the disadvantage of mulliganing. Shops has access to Trinisphere, Chalice, and to a lesser degree Thorn, Sphere, Strip Mine, and Workshop as powerful cards that can enable degenerate openings and win games with fewer cards. Dredge and Survival both benefit as Bazaar decks, though for Survival finding Bazaar is neither necessary or sufficient to win and so the rule's change won't help as much. The decks that get hit the most are the control decks that generally don't operate well on few cards. The only card that really saves them on mulligans is Ancestral. BUG Fish and Blue Aggro-Control are both going to be impacted by the new rules change.

I think you are missing the forest for the trees in the middle part of your analysis.

While it's true that Shops has a (growing) number of restricted lock parts, a Shops deck is unlikely to mulligan more aggressively (relative to other strategies) to find them, simply because modern Shops decks rely on cumulative pressure (both lock parts and damage) more than a single tactic to hold an opponent at bay, like it could do in the days of unrestricted Trinisphere.

Similarly, PO is not going to want to mulligan any more aggressively (relative to other strategies) to find the titular card. PO requires a density of mana rocks and other perms to make PO payoff. Thus, it needs a larger starting hand in general.

Your math is correct, but you are applying it in a way that does not properly account for the context in which the mulligan occurs.

What really matters is the relative rate of mulliganing in the assessment of 'who benefits?'. It's possible that all decks will be more likely to mulligan to 6 as a result of the rule change. But I think both PO and Shops (as well as Xerox) will have a lower mulligan rate increase relative to the other strategies described in the podcast.

So, if PO and Shops were to increase their mulligan rate by, say, 5% under the London rule (such as from 1 out of every 5 games to 1 out of every 4 games), then Survival and Eldrazi's will be even greater (say, 8%, from 1 out of every 4 games to 1 out of every 3), and that's accounting for any imbalance in starting levels of mulligan rates.

@smmenen said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

I think you are missing the forest for the trees in the middle part of your analysis.

While it's true that Shops has a (growing) number of restricted lock parts, a Shops deck is unlikely to mulligan more aggressively (relative to other strategies) to find them, simply because modern Shops decks rely on cumulative pressure (both lock parts and damage) more than a single tactic to hold an opponent at bay, like it could do in the days of unrestricted Trinisphere.

Similarly, PO is not going to want to mulligan any more aggressively (relative to other strategies) to find the titular card. PO requires a density of mana rocks and other perms to make PO payoff. Thus, it needs a larger starting hand in general.

The point of my post is that this dynamic potentially changes with the rule change. These decks can now potentially function as hybrids where "mulligan to restricted or broken cards (X,Y,Z)" is a much more viable plan B. You no longer have to keep a medium 6-7 on PO because you were a critical mass deck as now you can reasonably hope to mise a Timetwister, Tinker, Ancestral, or whatever. It's less true for Shops but I actually think that PO is a huge beneficiary of the new rule.

Has the new mulligan rule actually been implemented? I thought it was just an experiment?

@desolutionist said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

Has the new mulligan rule actually been implemented? I thought it was just an experiment?

It hasn't even been tested yet. Mythic Championship London is only at the end of April.

@fsecco said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

@desolutionist said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

Has the new mulligan rule actually been implemented? I thought it was just an experiment?

It hasn't even been tested yet. Mythic Championship London is only at the end of April.

Yeah, but as you can tell from the card evaluation threads, Vintage players like arguing about things when no evidence exists much more than they like talking about things when you can actually really on evidence, data, and experience.

The mulligan rule will also be the mulligan rule used on MTGO for 3 weeks starting on April 10th.

Interesting talk.
I did not do any deep analysis about that but my fear is : what if people find out that mulligan agressively into hate is the best strategy under that mulligan rule ? It would lead in not very interesting games where the winner would be the one who found the hate in fewer mulligan than his opponent.

@albarkhane said in SMIP Podcast # 88 - The "London" Mulligan in Vintage:

Interesting talk.
I did not do any deep analysis about that but my fear is : what if people find out that mulligan agressively into hate is the best strategy under that mulligan rule ? It would lead in not very interesting games where the winner would be the one who found the hate in fewer mulligan than his opponent.

This is why dredge under the London Mulligan is not so scary to me.

@albarkhane

A lot of people already do this against Dredge. They just happen to have 7-8 hate pieces so its pretty high odds, even under current mulligan rules.

What is interesting is we keep looking at decks that benefit from the mulligan rule and try to figure out if any of them will break it. I think realistically we are forgetting 2 things here:

1 - A deck that naturally wants to mulligans fewer time than it's opponents overall will still be in better position to win most games. It would still be better to play a deck that has good ratios in its decks that lead to naturally stronger opening hands on average. In this regard "fair decks" like Humans/hatebears might actually be the big winners with this new rule. Being able to keep an opening grip of 7 that has like 3 pieces of relevant hate and all the mana I will likely need is stronger than mulling to 4 for a single card that may be answered.

2 - Decks that specifically do not roll over and die to one magic bullet are very well positioned in the new mull rule because they not only benefit from having more consistency with the new mull rule, but they also do not have to worry about their opponent being able to abuse the new rule to hose them out. Think something like a control deck that has pyromancer as a win con, but also has blightsteel tinker vault key backed by counter magic. In a lot of ways this rule is going to help blue more than others because free counters will be at more of a premium to stop hate cards.

I really enjoyed the podcast. I'm cautiously pessimistic about the implications of the new rule. It seems to make the already overpowered Vintage decks even more powerful. And the counterargument is that "well it's okay if Deck B gets more degenerate because Deck C gets even more degenerate." I'd prefer movement in the other direction. Always-Finds-Bazaar v. Always-Finds-Leyline is not good Magic.

@Smmenen @CHA1N5

Steve, do you and Kevin have additional thoughts on the London mulligan now that we have some data and experience from MTGO? I have to admit that even with experience, I'm honestly having difficultly formulating a binary yes/no opinion as I think it has significant advantages and disadvantages for Vintage if implemented. Not that my opinion matters necessarily to the DCI, but I'm curious what other perspectives are out there.