MTGO August 2016 Power 9 Challenge

[diophan]

We were fortunate to have an influx of players this month, with 69 players total.

Congratulations to thediabetical for taking the tournament down with Ravager TKS Shops.

Top 8:
thediabetical - Ravager TKS Shops
kingneckbeard - Pitch Dredge
Lux-Adrastos - DPS
ravidel85 - Tezz
littledarwin - UW Mentor
Lexor19 - WR Eldrazi
TKC55 - Doomsday
neo_altoid - Ravager TKS Shops

Remaining 5-2s:
oddseidank - 2 Card Monte with Intuition
Garlan - Esper Mentor
pedroj - Ravager TKS Shops with Reality Smasher
Legion273 - Dredge
Atog_215 - Esper Mentor
diophan - Grixis Therapy
Thiim - UB Ratstill

Top16 Decklists: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2016-08-29

Metagame Breakdown:

Shops continued its streak from Waterbury with a strong performance. After a dryspell, Dredge came back to do well today. Part of this may be due to players skimping on dredge hate due to its slimming percentage of the metagame recently; I can personally attest to cutting dredge hate in my list in favor of more cards against thorn archetypes.

Link to googledoc:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lEQCm8GMM-jAZBlo-XUqozy5fx3AMprdLxHmMYXFzc0/edit?usp=sharing

Let me know if anyone spots errors.

EDIT: There was an incorrect formula in about 8 of the matches in round 6. I corrected this and updated the charts above.

[The Atog Lord]

As always, Ryan, this is a huge service to the community. Thank you for doing so much work to keep us informed and aware.

[TurboK]

Thank you Ryan, you are doing great work. Legend!

[HatchetWoundHero]

Would really love to see the pitch dredge list!

[Apokkalippz7]

@HatchetWoundHero http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/572/2nd-place-in-the-august-power-9-challenge-videos/3

[Juggernaut GO]

i timed out and kicked from the event at the start of rnd 3 due to waiting for my chinese food derivery.

was having a lot of fun storming with u/b/w landstill too...

mind's desire fits in every deck!

[A Former User]

I learned something that won't show up in Ryan's numbers:

Ubastax is an awesome deck; Ensnaring Bridge is a game ending spell in most matches, but utimately this format is no longer a home for true prison control decks. In this format you need something dynamic. Like my Ensnaring Bridges would have also had to have hexproof, have 3/2 first strike bodies, and make my opponents spells cost more. My Uba Masks should have been more like Thought-Knot Seers, which discard a card and attack/block as a 4/4. Cards need to be flexible.

I lost to Lexor19 (White Eldrazi). Game 3 he got down that turn 1 New Thalia, which was pretty impressive.

I lost to a Dredge deck. I cut down to 3 dredge hate because I figured Ensnaring Bridge would help out and it did, but in game 3 he just got off a Serenity.

I lost to a Storm deck in game 3; once again to Serenity.

So had my prison deck not been so slow and linear, those Serenities never would have happened. That White Thalia wins every time though. I'm not sure what to do about that.

[Leoj]

@Juggernaut-GO said:

i timed out and kicked from the event at the start of rnd 3 due to waiting for my chinese food derivery.

was having a lot of fun storming with u/b/w landstill too...

mind's desire fits in every deck!

Gonna need to see this list.

[thediabetical]

Thank you guys for turning out these numbers, the tournament was a blast despite many poor plays on my own behalf. Shout out to Kingneckbeard on his performance, I believe he was one of the innovators of his dredge build with Marit Lage access. Despite beating him in the finals he was my one loss on the day.

[Islandswamp]

Just out of curiosity, how long do these usually take?
I'm going to try like hell to get a babysitter so I can play in one of these finally.

[ajfirecracker]

@Islandswamp Between rounds I put up a graphic on stream with estimated time until next round, 50 minutes from round start to round start seems to be reasonably accurate on average

[A Former User]

For 0-2 drop, about 1 hour.

[Islandswamp]

@desolutionist If I pay to play, I'll lose all the rounds if I have to. I'll get that value somehow.

[TurboK]

@Islandswamp If you don't make top 8 and play all rounds approx 6 hours

[Arianeira]

Nice to see the results so quickly. Thank you.

I tried to play in this after scrubbing out of GP Indy but updating MTGO on hotel wifi didn't work so well so I literally was about to clicked on join when it fired. Watched The_Atog_Lord stream for a little bit before going out with friends. One of these days I will play in one of these just usually out doing something on a Saturday.

Lists are up here
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2016-08-29

[TurboK]

This post is deleted!

[Minkar]

How come the Ratstill deck is considered "BUG"? I dont see any green in it. Is that just due to it playing some of the disruption elements seen in BUG (crucible/wastes/null rods)?

[diophan]

@Minkar It's because I watched a couple replays and I thought it was a deck a couple people ran in the Northeast which included green. It can be easy to make small mistakes like that when trying to figure out so many decks in a short amount of time. I corrected the deckname on the googledoc but forgot to on this post, so thanks for pointing it out.

[Smmenen]

This is the lowest win %age we've seen for Gush decks in some time (perhaps this year?). I'm curious what folks make of it. One of the arguments against being concerned about that metric is that, with large numbers of players, decks tend towards the mean. Yet, a 43.5% win rate is well below the mean.

[ajfirecracker]

Re-Sampling Link
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QpZ0IccGk5SoY54TJBeTZdvdmJ_ysPVKrQLWAHjAggM/edit?usp=sharing

Most of the decks that struggle against Gush are bad against the field overall (based on this data). Most of the decks that are strong against Gush are also good against the field overall (based on this data). This suggests Gush may have a systemic issue in the current metagame, so it either has to reverse the matchup on Shops, Eldrazi, or Dredge or hope that someone else pushes those decks out of the metagame.

To illustrate:
The "expectation" for Gush is actually 46.19% win-rate in this dataset. If you take the observed win% in each matchup and the observed metagame share of each deck and multiply them, you will end up with a 46.19% win-rate. This can be thought of as the expected Round 1 win-rate of Gush decks. (Round 1 because it is against all decks in the event, so no one has dropped out or entered a different bracket)

(Discovered an error and @diophan corrected it, so Gush's Round 1 rate is actually 46% and not 49%)