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.

i think this is probably bad but feel the need to mention street wraith and by extension death's shadow

@stormanimagus said in [MID] Augur of Autumn:

I guess the question is: Is this card good enough even when coven isn't active?

people have played courser of kruphix in vintage before, technically.
http://mtgtop8.com/compare?l=376454_329621

yet another qasali pridemage variant, this time with flash. i don't play bad (white) cards but some of you who do might be interested.

past in flames on a stick. just don't pass the turn with it in play or your opponent can do whatever they want, barring mindbreak trap.

Outland Liberator

1G
Human Werewolf
Daybound
1, Sacrifice Outland Liberator: Destroy target artifact or enchantment.

2/2

Frenzied Trapbreaker

Nighbound
1, Sacrifice Frenzied Trapbreaker: Destroy target artifact or enchantment.
Whenever Frenzied Trapbreaker attacks, destroy target artifact or enchantment defending player controls.

3/3

so this is a qasali pridemage that trades exalted for being easier to cast, of a relevant tribe (human), and being quite improved if it ever flips.

@stormanimagus for reference, looking at the most recent 25 lists with Tinker on mtgtop8, 10 have sphinx main and 10 have sphinx or blightsteel in the board.

Memory's Journey Variant. 1 mana up front and 2 on the backend instead of the other way round, can target cards from multiple graveyards, incidental lifegain, pitches green instead of blue. not sure if anyone is even playing Memory's Journey these days but seems worth noting.

one sided pyrostatic pillar now exists. doesn't even care about cmc.

@wagner heartless act is bad vs ravager/ballista, but so is all removal really.
power word kill failing to hit griselbrand doesn't matter much, as if griselbrand hit play the game is already over, but failing to hit sprite dragon does matter.

@protoaddict said in Initiative to help save Paper Vintage:

WOTC has printed cards in recent sets that literally don't work in EDH and said YOLO, Whatever,

wotc struggles to go a year without a standard-legal card needing day 0 errata because they forgot to put the word 'other' or 'may' on the printed card, or printed a card that makes 'angel tokens' without specifying that the tokens are creatures. This is a QC problem more than a design philosophy.

I have no issue with them preemptivley banning cards there and I doubt they do either.

Lutri shows us that wotc is willing to print cards that need a preemptive commander ban so the card can exist for other formats; I do not believe that vintage is a format wotc would do this for. Even lutri was a special case, really. wotc definitely isn't going to print 'swap meet of sadr' as a pseudo-bazaar and then ban the card they just printed intentionally (though decent chance that if they do so they judge the power level wrong and it gets the hammer in legacy/modern).

How many of the still legal money cards see play in EDH to an extent that matters anyway? Cradle and Wheel of Fortune are honestly the only ones that seems truly problematic to me.

cradle and wheel are good examples of RL edh cards below the 'I'm playing timetwister/tabernacle/workshop/bazaar' level, but the format is full of them: mox diamond, LED, intuition, gilded drake, survival of the fittest, copy artifact, power artifact, transmute artifact...
oh, and ABUR duals.
let's just look at duals.
wotc has a few options, just looking at edh as the format they care about (second order effects on vintage from each option should be obvious):
A : don't try to cheat the reserve list, just keep printing various mana fixing, including things like non-fetchable duals that enter untapped in multiplayer formats. this is what they're currently doing.
B : cheat the list, print your legendary snow duals or whatever, ban real duals in edh. edh/legacy/ (some) vintage demand exists aplenty for your new cards, people who own the old cards get pretty mad (especially if they are edh-primary and not legacy/vintage players first)
C : cheat the list, print legendary snow duals, but then ban them in edh. This makes legacy/vintage more affordable but is a horrible idea because it's just a middle finger to the much larger commander customer base.
D : cheat the list, leave both existing and new cards legal. edh, legacy, and vintage all get cheaper. it's not possible to play 8 copies of whatever instead of 4, or 2 instead of 1, depending.

D would be fine wrt duals, give or take reserve list concerns, when it comes to gameplay, mostly because fetches exist; people trying to play optimized 3-5 color edh get to replace shocks with extra duals but that's a minor thing. Gaea's cradle, LED, mox diamond having 'replacement' cards available just means that the optimal list now runs both versions, probably; this is at least the case with stuff like Wheel of Misfortune.
Overall I think directed actions at legacy/vintage are going to continue to be printing stuff like Collector Ouphe rather than stuff that has outsized effects on more mainstream formats (edh or modern, depending on the card).

I truly believe that if you restricted Bazaar not only would dredge still be a fine deck, it would be a perfectly viable one that only required a single 4 figure card which is much more reasonable.

as a dredge player, i'm pretty sure restricting bazaar makes dredge have to play colored mana sources and spells, at which point sapphire/lotus/ancestral make the deck far more expensive.