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.

@schmakt lotus bloom is unplayable. what's your environment where you can't proxy power/duals? most vintage players are fine with it.

@protoaddict I don't think this card/intuition is likely to be playable, but it is a very different card than salvagers, and artificer's intuition does actually find a win condition, while salvagers can strand you with infinite mana without a card to spend it on.

@botvinik said in [NEO] Containment Construct:

especially with the waning popularity of blightsteel and JTMS.

you will also still lose to brain freeze, or doomsday.

@botvinik force of negation can stop the loop at any point, but ballista is probably just a more playable card in general.
other options in that role include pyrite spellbomb, or simply getting altar of the brood once and triggering it off the LED/elixir loop to mill the opponent out.

@macdeath said in Un-restricting cards:

Urza's Saga is a much more contentious matter, seeing as it's the most played unrestricted card in the format (aside from FoW and Flusterstorm).

to clarify slightly, it is the third most played (aside from FoW/fluster), by % of decks playing it. 1st and 2nd are misty rainforest and scalding tarn, but decks playing them on average play 1.9 and 2.5 copies respectively, while the average deck with saga plays 3.7 copies. could read this either way on whether or not it's the most played; there are of course more total blue fetches in any given tournament than there are sagas. saga is in 48.7% of decks on mtgtop8; Underground Sea is in 48.4%. for comparison, wasteland is in 41.9%.

@joshuabrooks they're on the wotc site as 'vintage premier event'

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2021-11-28-0
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2021-11-28
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2021-11-29

I top8ed the first event with hollowvine. I'm 'Vizzerdrix' on mtgo. not sure if anyone else frequents this site; I recognize LSV, twitch streamers doomwake and yamakiller, and it looks like doomsday prodigy DiscoverN top 8ed two of the three events.

yeah, follow up confirms

https://twitter.com/maro254/status/1465426149656252420

@protoaddict said in [UNF] Water Gun Ballon Game:

Not sure why you say that

MaRo said it's an acorn card. either they printed the card wrong or issued an incorrect preview render. I think the latter is more likely, as it did just happen in the crimson vow commander decks with Kamber, The Plunderer.
https://twitter.com/maro254/status/1465362571729403908

magic continues to only have 5 colors.

this is a bad preview render, like the commander card that was previewed as 'when a creature dies' rather than 'when a creature an opponent controls dies'. all the actual printed copies will have the little foil acorn that differentiates the eternal-legal parts of the set from the purely un-cards.

i managed to play in 2 of these. top 8ed one, feel that i played way too sloppy in a lot of games, some of which i won and some of which i lost. i might be getting into mtgo more.