@Topical_Island said in Vintage Championships 2016 - Decklists and Metagame Analysis:
Some more breakdown here. Decks that used Mindbreak Trap and Mental Misstep together, did much much better than ones that only used Misstep.
I think that's spot on, considering that after the tournament even Montolio was playing Mindbreak in Shops. Wondering though, how did decks do without Misstep, but with Mindbreak and Force?
@Lesbimagical Yeah, I'm doing a lot of these, and very often I get to the end of computing it all out (Swords) and I'm just scratching my head going... is there meaning there?
I think it does mean something though. Basically you should test 3 Missteps and a Trap before you just play 4 Misstep without ever thinking about trap... that's my takeaway.
Although I appreciate the effort, I think that the sample size is much too small for such a high variance game that Magic is to tell if there is a correlation.
While that might be the case, one could technically provide statistical uncertainties along with percentage win rates. It would give a clearer picture since most people don't really have a good idea of how large the sample size needs to be before they'll feel satisfied with the conclusion.
Both statements I agree with. What I'm basically doing here is combing the data for hypotheses rather than conclusions. For example, I only said that people should test Trap. I think that Mindbreak Trap is a little underplayed right now. I thought that before, and this data supports that hypothesis in a mild sort of way. I'm not claiming it confirms the conclusion that you should certainly play Trap or anything. I'm only claiming that as a card, it outperformed other counterspells (not technically countermagic btw) in this tourney, which is just a fact. And since this forum is about sharing knowledge, I humbly suggest that people test it in place of possibly superfluous Missteps.
More crazy facts about champs.
There were 342 "real" decks. (Excluding the non-sense decks) And 342 x 4 = 1368, which is the maximum possible number of any single card being played in the field. (Excluding basic lands).There were 528 copies of Mental Misstep at champs, or 39% of the maximum possible number. That is the highest number of any card.
As staggering as that number might seem, it shouldn't at all be surprising. On mtgtop8, Misstep is the most common card in vintage decks top8ing for the last year, when you count copies in sideboards. It's in 61% of mainboards, at an average of 3.6 copies per mainboard. So that's an even higher rate of saturation among top 8 decks. 55% of the maximum number of Missteps that could appear in top 8 decks of the past year.
Yet in this data that just got compiled from champs, (thanks again Matt and Ryan) there is basically no association with actually winning games. (At least going by Swiss points.) And the main reason for that is probably (and I'm just hypothesizing here) that there are just so many Missteps floating around. As many Missteps are on the winning side of match ups as losing ones. They just saturate the format.
The clear exception here is Shops and Eldrazi style decks that just sidestep the issue by playing few or no cards at the 1CMC level. And those decks do enjoy a better than 50/50 win rate as we all know. Which might mean that Misstep as a card is both, the most commonly played card in Vintage, and loses more games than it wins. (Though pitch Dredge might balance out its win loss somewhat in regards to Shops decks, I really haven't done the work to check out those hypotheses yet, and that would take a long long time.)
@Topical_Island said in Vintage Championships 2016 - Decklists and Metagame Analysis:
Yet in this data that just got compiled from champs, (thanks again Matt and Ryan) there is basically no association with actually winning games. (At least going by Swiss points.) And the main reason for that is probably (and I'm just hypothesizing here) that there are just so many Missteps floating around. As many Missteps are on the winning side of match ups as losing ones. They just saturate the format.
What about blue non-misstep decks? Did those out perform blue misstep decks?
@spook That's a great question. Gimme and hour and I'll look it up... care to define a "blue deck" or should I do that for us?
This is amazing, thank you guys! I was going to ask if you were going to try to control for player skill, how would you do that? Use DCI ratings, assuming you can get them? That would be incredible.
@Smmenen I actually thought about using MTGO ratings as a proxy for player skill. It has it's pros and cons but the programmers closed the loophole that allowed MTGBot to look up other player's ratings before we could implement that in the MTGO P9 events. For paper, I'm not sure WotC still calculates ELO ratings since they moved to Planeswalker Points; and since most Vintage events are unsanctioned, I assume those would not be factored in. If you or anyone else has a practical ideal, I'd love to hear it.
@spook Short answer is actually, not really. The average Swiss points of all decks carrying Misstep was 11.04. The average Swiss points of all "Non-Blue decks" was 14.4. I just defined "non-blue" as any deck that doesn't contain at least 1 island of some kind (not just basic island).
Some thoughts on that definition - there were three Belcher decks that were pretty blue, but didn't carry any island. All ran multiple copies of Day's Undoing or Diminishing Returns. There was also an Oath deck that didn't run islands at all, but ran Mana Confluence and 3 Preordains among other blue spells. I included those in this 14.4 average, but if you want to take them out, the average swiss points for non-blue decks would drop to 10.9. Which is basically just a bunch of pitch dredge, a few storm combo, and a rogue red deck packing Misstep, and a Martello Shops deck doing the same.
So we can't really say non-blue decks carrying Missteps did better or worse, especially because we are talking about a really small subset (21 decks) out of 164 decks running Misstep. And what most people would call "non-blue" decks did about the same or maybe a little worse, but there's really no conclusion one way or the other.
@Smmenen Steve, no question in my mind that if I were betting on games or something, and had perfect knowledge of decklists, who was piloting them... what those pilots ate for breakfast... everything. I would just bet based on the win rate of the pilots. It is clearly the biggest factor in who wins magic games right now. Which I suppose is really good, and emblematic of a healthy format where players who make more skillful decisions win more games.
I'm not sure how to begin teasing that out of the numbers though.
@Topical_Island I think the question was for Blue decks without Misstep vs Blue decks with Misstep. Also, appreciate that you are using our data. It's validating and why we do this, so thank you.
@ChubbyRain @spook Ok, to answer the actual question, the answer is no, but with caveats. Twenty-six decks were blue under our definition. They averaged 10.03 Swiss pts. This group also included some of the most impressive performers of the tourney, namely Cordy Preston, Justin Franks, David Fleishman-Rose, and Reid Duke (#Baewatch), all with 21 Swiss points. But the average was still a touch lower than the average of decks with Misstep.
So we can't say that blue decks without Misstep did better. We can say they did a little worse, but we probably shouldn't, given that we are talking about really small sample size and that among the handful of decks in this category, 4 of them were some of the best in the field, so there's no real reason to think that you can't make a blue deck without Misstep that wins.
Most of these decks were Storm decks that just omitted Misstep. There was a really weird Horn of Greed deck with 64 cards mainboard... that actually scored 3 Swiss points. There was a goofy looking Rug Fish deck with Tarmogoyf that finished with 12 points making it above average. Fleishman-Rose was on Oathstill, and Cody Preston on Tezzerator.
@Topical_Island thanks for digging through this. It looks like it is not insane not to run Misstep, even though it is the consensus "best card". But it might also be the case that there are too many players of varying skill, and hard to define deck types with combo raising up the results.
@spook My pleasure. I really do love doing it, and props to these fellas one for doing the real work and making this possible.
As for Missteps, I'm not really sure what it says about how to play or build around Misstep yourself in the micro level. On the macro level, it certainly shows that Misstep makes for this odd prisoner's dilemma, since the more an opponent plays Misstep, the more valuable additional Missteps are for you as well. (Assuming there are any other CMC1 spells in either deck to begin with.)
I think on the micro, level you want to decide what you think your specific Missteps are trying to (mostly) do in your specific deck, amid this play environment where you know opposing Missteps are everywhere. I'm seeing a lot of these decks that are blue and run few or no Missteps (Brian Kelly for example isn't on the no-Misstep list, but he only ran 2) and they tend to be these super aggressive combo style things, ala Reid Duke.
For more defensive hard control deck, I would guess that more Missteps might be better?
A side thought I had is, if people really did want to restrict a card that would balance out Shops decks, I really think the card to restrict would be Misstep. It would make blue decks automatically spend fewer card slots fighting each other, and make the field of non-taxing effect decks have far fewer dead cards game one against Shops/Eldrazi/Hatebears type things. Plus you would see expanded use of things like Dark Ritual/Deathrite Shaman/and Crop Rotation which are pretty good cards yet almost unplayable right now because of Misstep saturation. I feel like, in total, the deck that would be most hurt by restricting Misstep, ironically, would be Shops.
Full disclosure, I'm not saying that all should happen, only that if Misstep was restricted that I'm pretty confident those would be the effects.
@Topical_Island said in Vintage Championships 2016 - Decklists and Metagame Analysis:
@spook My pleasure. I really do love doing it, and props to these fellas one for doing the real work and making this possible.
As for Missteps, I'm not really sure what it says about how to play or build around Misstep yourself in the micro level. On the macro level, it certainly shows that Misstep makes for this odd prisoner's dilemma, since the more an opponent plays Misstep, the more valuable additional Missteps are for you as well. (Assuming there are any other CMC1 spells in either deck to begin with.)
I think on the micro, level you want to decide what you think your specific Missteps are trying to (mostly) do in your specific deck, amid this play environment where you know opposing Missteps are everywhere. I'm seeing a lot of these decks that are blue and run few or no Missteps (Brian Kelly for example isn't on the no-Misstep list, but he only ran 2) and they tend to be these super aggressive combo style things, ala Reid Duke.
For more defensive hard control deck, I would guess that more Missteps might be better?
A side thought I had is, if people really did want to restrict a card that would balance out Shops decks, I really think the card to restrict would be Misstep. It would make blue decks automatically spend fewer card slots fighting each other, and make the field of non-taxing effect decks have far fewer dead cards game one against Shops/Eldrazi/Hatebears type things. Plus you would see expanded use of things like Dark Ritual/Deathrite Shaman/and Crop Rotation which are pretty good cards yet almost unplayable right now because of Misstep saturation. I feel like, in total, the deck that would be most hurt by restricting Misstep, ironically, would be Shops.
Full disclosure, I'm not saying that all should happen, only that if Misstep was restricted that I'm pretty confident those would be the effects.
I'm torn. Out of principle I don't think that Misstep should be restricted (because it's clearly not overpowered), but on the other hand I think that it would be very good for Vintage if it was.
I also don't entirely agree with your assessment. From a theoretical point of view, the shorter the games go, the better Misstep is. Reid Duke's deck doesn't care too much about opposing Missteps, so that's why it's not needed in his build.
