someone in wizards R&D keeps losing to legacy lands on their mtgo alt

to start, I want to say that I'm using numbers from Frank Karsten and extrapolating from there, in addition to basic combinatorial work that anyone can do themself in excel.

The london mulligan has people discussing playing dredge without 4 serum powder, and even testing it during the mtgo test period and in paper events with the new rules. In my opinion, playing dredge without serum powder is a mistake. the following is an anecdote and then some numbers.

Anecdote: I played in TSI this weekend with dredge under london rules. List was similar to @ChubbyRain and others recent lists, with hogaak, force of vigor, and field/salvage as only nonbazaar lands main, playing ghast and ichorid over narcomoeba. I went 2-4 in games where I mulled to 4 or less and 8-0 in games where I kept 5 or more cards. I sleeved up a list with powders over the 4 worst cards for an eternal weekend trial the next day, but it ended up not firing.

Dredge probably has a better win rate when it keeps 2-4 card hands than any other deck in any format with such hands, but given how often we mull it leads to a significant portion of our game losses. But first, the math if all we care about is finding bazaar:
Vancouver Mulligan, no powder has an 86.5% chance of finding a bazaar if you're willing to mulligan to one card, discounting the scry. miss every 7 games.
Vancouver Mulligan, with powders has a 94.17% chance, a miss every 17 games, again discounting scry.
London Mulligan, no powders, has a 97.2% chance to find a bazaar, a miss every 36 games.
London Mulligan, with powders, has a 99.3% chance to find a bazaar, a miss every 143 games.
(As a refresher, the powder-London interaction is that you put back the number of cards as if you've kept the hand, exile the hand to powder, draw that many, then have the option to mulligan to another 7 if you don't like what you drew and keep going.)

of course, bazaar isn't actually everything, and mulling so low that you don't have the ability to keep counterspells, hollow one, unmask, cards to pitch to counterspells/unmask/FoV, or lands to trigger ghast in hand after you activate bazaar, or having cards to discard as you dig for these things. This is my primary point in favor of the continued use of serum powder- not the 2% increase in finding bazaar, which is significant, but the average hand size at which you find bazaar.

Playing serum powder increases the average hand size you keep by over half a card. The proportion of hands kept that are 5 or more cards goes up over 11%, from 78.2% to 89.6%.
By the mulligan to what will if kept be a hand of three Powder-London has a higher chance of finding bazaar than pure-London has if willing to go to one. London has to be willing to mulligan to 2 to have equivalent odds to Vancouver-Powder, while London-Powder only has to be mulliganing to 4 to have chances better than what dredge has had under the old rules. We are of course going all the way down, but I think these are useful comparisons.

This glosses over a few bits, such as assuming that what you powder from your deck is a cross-section of its components and thus doesn't change its strength, but this isn't the case. Powder exiling non-bazaar cards leads to a higher proportion of kept hands with double bazaar, for example, and there's some other changes once you've mulliganed and have some choice over what you're exiling(this probably also changes the powder math slightly as you can put excess powders back before powdering the hand). This is all hard to sim, as is figuring out exactly how much higher win rate you get with double bazaar over single and stuff like that, so maybe another time.

to sum up main points, powder is still worth playing in dredge, partially for the raw percentage chance of hitting bazaar but moreso for the larger portion of games in which it allows the player to keep a hand with enough cards to do something.

does anyone have a large dataset of dredge starting hand size vs game win rate?

@thecravenone the curse of the mana drain is that every thread is about B+R, except the B+R thread

@thewhitedragon69 those are pretty bad removal spells for anything other than this. most people don't build their 75 to beat doomsday

driving from chicago, picking up power on site. first i've owned since i sold the nyse lotus

this was a good event, well run, good people, glad to have artists at an event of this size, next time I won't get 9th on breakers.

at some point in the next 18 months brian kelly will win an event playing this in oath

@desolutionist all this time Misstep was protecting us from Hedron Crab and we didn't even know it

@brianpk80 i am glad oath exists because it makes people play suboptimal dredge hate.

this card pitches to force of will, it's likely playable.

@thewhitedragon69 said in [BRO} Phyrexian Fleshgorger:

@protoaddict I think this card is strong, but I hate that you need to run a 12-16 counterspell package to make almost any non-workshop deck work in Vintage right now.

I know it's not strictly on topic to this card, but what do you see running 12-16 counterspells?
BUG runs 7-9 (4 FoW, misstep, 2 fluster, 0-2 Fon)
Jeskai runs 7
Grixis Tinker runs 10-11, counting pyroblasts
Esper Tinker runs 10
Oath runs 13, counting 4 blasts
Squee runs up to 13.
if you count Vigor too, you can get squee and some BUG lists to 16, but i think you're exagerrating a fair bit. You're also discounting entirely the Thalia decks, which if mtgtop8 is to be trusted are 4% of the meta, about as popular as oath and just behind jeskai.

@protoaddict jester's cap is distinct from all the later black (and black multicolor) effects in not being able to hit the hand. this one hits the hand too. i think that's a meaningful distinction.

@protoaddict said in [BRO] Urza's Workshop:

I could imagine a workshops deck with 1 academy, 1 shops, 4 of these, 4 Sagas, and the usual wastes, strip, tomb, etc still being ok if 4x shops was not an option.

this is an interesting thought experiment, but i don't think the card is that good. it doesn't even reliably make 2 mana (never on turn 1), and half the time doing so requires you have played a saga as land drop 2 rather than a tomb/shop/academy/city that makes 2 mana. for this to make 2 mana on turn 2, you need to have played a land on turn 1 that only made one mana, and have played 3 artifacts before you tap the land for 2 mana on turn 2. sure, you play full SoLoMoxCrypt but a sol land that only works on the good draws is a poor-gets-poorer baseline.

@thewhitedragon69 a colored removal spell seems bad in rainbow humans, because you can't play it off any of your caverns and cavern knockoffs. you can't reliably expect your creatures to die - obviously plow doesn't put them in the yard, and in terms of walkers you'd want to remove, oko doesn't neatly do so either. a removal spell that's only playable after multiple exchanges of your creatures for the opponent's removal and counters is a card that's really only 'good' when you're behind.

reclamation sage isn't exactly playable, but this has extra lines of text and can be reused with karakas. also, she's human.

a midway point between young pyromancer and monastery mentor. interesting to have available, though much harder to cast than the former off of volc+random mox, it does give tokens off moxen like the latter.

@botvinik worse than this card from DMU. unless you really want to be rolling dice, i guess.

notably this is +5/+5 on inkmoth nexus.

this card can be cast off mishra's workshop. worse stonecoil serpent, probably. but it can be multiple permanents in one card.

interesting middle point between Gigapede and Phantasmagorian. i'd almost wonder if this has some kind of madness implications, but likely too slow. it is a pretty good rate as a reanimate target, but i don't think good enough to be a dedicated reanimate target, just something to reanimate in a pinch that you are already playing for the 2nd ability.