I can also attest to playing fewer vintage games in the past year or so.

For years I ran or took part in nearly every single vintage event in Australasia. I have the decklists for every non-league Vintage event in Australia since september 2010 .

There have been other factors such as long hospital stays and basically being homebound for two years but Vintage has lost some of its lustre for me.

I have lent my power out and played the rare tourney but most of the time my cards sit in my cube where they see more play.

Part of this is the homogenized nature of the format at the moment, partly the low power level, and partly the erosion of the old decks that can't compete. I recognise that the last point particularly is nostalgia speaking but the other points remain true.

The biggest issue we have here (Australia) is the proxy scare of late 15, early 16. Since then Vintage as a whole just died here. Suddenly no store was willing to run proxy/playtest events. Literally none. We had 2.5 stores that would run monthly/quarterly vintage and they all instantly stopped holding these events.

Some stores ran other events with playtest cards but wizards hit them all before the event fired and with a couple of weeks legacy in Melbourne and Vintage in Australia as a whole was dead. There has been a little revival lately but for the 12 or so months we had a (singular) GP side event and two annual events which were both smaller than previous years.

I really fear all my work from 2010-14 will have been for nothing if it doesn't change is direction soon.

This format needs to give is players a reason to play it again and the stale homogenous system is not doing that for many players.

Hey everybody.

I thought it would be a good thing to have a resource to have the info of which players in our community are streaming, at what times, and most importantly where it will be streamed.

Whether you are a regular streamer or you have an event coming up that is likely to be streamed feel free to add the info in this thread. I will regularly update the OP with the information given below for regular streamers etc.

Please note that this is not restricted to MTGO. If you have a paper event coming up add the info to get the address out there so more people can find your stream etc. Consider it more free advertising!

@Smmenen said:

Except, I was actually right, using the measure we were discussing.

The statistic we were discussing was % of DE/ month.

Using the daily event breakdown by week, your data obscures this trend:

Here is the percentage of Gush decks in the DE's during the time period you covered, but organized by month:

Gush was 61.66% of the April (post-restriction) metagame, but 41.4% of May, but declined to 38% in June. The declines are even more steep if you slice up the data in other ways, like focusing on 4-0s, etc.

I applaud this kind of detailed analysis, and really appreciate your hard work here - but it's not only tasteless (and rude) to throw digs at me (or anyone) like you did with your parenthetical jab, but it's embarrassing when what you are trying to critique me for isn't even accurate, using the metrics from the original context.

Suggestions: in the future, I recommend doing breakdowns both by week, but also by month. The second half of June had far fewer daily's fire. Also, dis-aggregating 4-0 and 3-1 decks is also worth doing, just to monitor the results, if nothing else.

You are actually hilarious.

@Brass-Man said:

Running Living Wish to get back creatures that might have been exiled by Swords feels a lot worse than just running redundant creatures. The advantage of Burning Wish is that it lets you play the same restricted card multiple times, possibly multiple times in a turn. Living Wish just isn't doing that for you.

Unless it's lodestone now

Better late than never but thank you so much for keeping these pages live. There is simply so much on those old pages that for them to go dark it would have been heartbreaking.

Here in Australia I have been following up with the the owners of many of the Local forums from the late 20's and early '10's which have gone dark and in most cases it seems like we have simply lost all the data from those times. This includes Vintage but it is especially hard in the case of Australian 7pt Highlander which is obviously not played anywhere else.

Thank you once again.

@ChubbyRain said:

My opinion is more data is always better BUT you must have the ability to accurately interpret it. How I generally handle it is,

1. Arguably, the most valuable information is still the top 8 or top 16 of a large event. These are the decks that are winning, either because they are good decks or good players thought they were good decks or otherwise someone was running hot that day. It's what most people look at and has the most influence on what people play (that and the VSL, though the VSL doesn't have the gauntlet of tournament play behind it).

2. The metagame breakdown is also very important in my opinion - what are people actually showing up to a tournament with? It influences my deck selection and deck construction greatly but also has more broad ramifications. Normally the top X is used as a proxy of the metagame but it needs validated and if there are incongruencies, I would look for reasons. For instance, the NYSE top 16 was all Gush, Eldrazi, and Dredge (with Belcher getting a scoop from Delver so make of that what you will). You don't know whether non-Gush Blue decks, Oath, and DPS were absent or there but none of the players did well. If absent, you might be tempted to look at these as potential solutions for the metagame. From the metagame breakdown, we see that Oath, DPS, and Blue Control were nearly 30% of the field - people were playing the decks but none did well enough to top X. Which leads you into asking why these decks didn't top X. Are the decks bad or are good/experienced players disproportionately not playing them? If the latter, why are they not playing them?

3. The least valuable piece of information by far is the matchup win percentages.

This is basically what I was saying. More data is always better but the rate at which TO's have picked this up spurred me to writing the OP. These MW% are not great indicators of anything, especially in such small sample sizes.

Hi everybody,

I was not sure if I wanted to post this within one of the SMIP announcement threads or within General Discussion. PLease forgive me if you have real training in stats as I am trying to keep things relatively simple.

This is a topic I have been thinking about quite a bit over the last few weeks, naturally kicked off by the new trend we have witnessed coming out of our community. Looking at Metagame data has always been a pet project for many of the most dedicated members of our community. With the coming of Magic Online we have been given access to a source of information which has only rarely been seen in the paper world, whole Metagame Data. That is, analysis of all decks which appeared at certain tournaments. A historical example of this can be found here: http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/retired-forums/retired-forums/vintage-news/event-reports/130714-results-melbourne-legends-decklists-50-player

This kind of reporting allowed sharp members of the community to piece apart the metagame to a greater degree than possible with more simple Top 8 only or similar styles of TO reports. It would allow people to look at metagame saturation of individual decks (how many copies of that deck were played) or other similar data points. With the arrival of MTGO and the ability to replay games it has become easier to look at more than just metagame saturation. More and more, we have seen various members of our community delving even deeper into the tournament data.

Working with MTGO (or WER for the more dedicated) and third party software (generally Excel) the trend has become for TO's (or the like to @ChubbyRain & Co for the Online events) to report not only the top performing decks but to also include a more detailed and incricate "matchup analysis". Where after rewatching enough of the tournament to get the copy down who was on what archetype and extrapolate that using the final results of each round to get a total matches played/matches won for each matchup.

There are so many places where you can find this information but for ease of communication I have attached a copy of the NYSE #4 breakdown below.

NYSE #4 is to my knowledge the largest of the recent events to have received this treatment so this is a great place to start.

As cool as the pretty colours and lots of fancy numbers look most of these numbers mean absolutely nothing.

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Thats's right. Most of this data is unusable for any real statistical analysis. There are simply too few data points to draw any conclusions from the data presented. Excel is a great program which I used every day for years and years but it is not a fantastic program for the kind of analysis we are trying to do here. Trying to put this kind of data into a more rigid program such as R-Tools really shows the deficiency in our data. For example, between the two largest groups (Gush & Shops) we have only 41 games. As you go down the list it gets worse and worse.

It is also quite poor as Vintage is not in the position it has been in the past with 60+ cards within archetypes being the same. By grouping decks like this we lose sight of any individual changes between the various decks. That being said, that has always been an issue with looking at tournaments as whole entities.

While 41 data points is enough for a binary Y/N kind of thing. Its hard to even ask something as simple as is deck X favoured in this matchup with any real certainty with so little information. As you may know, the higher the number of games you have the more accurate you can expect your data to be. Small sample sizes are more prone to variation from what you would expect. Take a look at the Oath of Druids vs Combo matchup in the NYSE #4 data above. If you were to take this as gospel and you expected your next event to have a lot of storm you might end up leaning toward Oath as a foil to that metagame.
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Let me know how that works out for you.

Now I am not asking people to not do this kind of analysis. As I said, I have taken part in this sort of analysis but PLEASE take all of this data with a grain of salt. I don't actually think anyone is seriously taking the above as Gospel but words from the SMIP Podcast had me worried. This kind of analysis should have little to no place in B&R discussion. We simply do not have the information to reliably draw conclusions with any sort of certainty from what we have. Especially if we keep the information restricted to individual tournaments.

I see a few options going forward regarding this kind of analysis.

1. Keep doing this analysis but for the love of God keep it away from any kind of B & R discussionin its current form. I fear that this kind of data, as restrictive as it is, changes the focus from winning decks and decks which have an unhealthy metagame saturation to decks which meet various other factors/requirements. The numbers for decks with larger metagame saturation using this kind of data will naturally fall, despite perhaps having a good performance at top tables simply due to the numbers that did not make top 8 (which will generally be more than those that do make it) We saw an example of this in a recent SMIP pocast where despite Gush being 4/8 its MW% was low. This would always have been expected as 30% of the metagame cannot make top 8 etc. I don't point this out to rag on Gush but simply to use it as an example of the possible unintended consequences of changing our policies RE: B & R

With the current set up we can expect to see decks see well metagamed decks that appear in small numbers to hit hit much harder through B&R policy than decks with higher metagame saturation.

2. Expand the analysis. Working together with the various TO's who have made this data available to smash them up together to get a much broader "Vintage Metagame over Time" analysis. This does have its own issues however as you would lose all sense of metagame changes over time. Even more so than the standard loss of deck individuality in individual tournaments. We would also lose any kind of trend data if we were to rely on this kind of analysis.

3. Ignore this data.

Now clearly we should not use any single form of analysis as our sole source of data for B&R discussion. We should be using everything that we have at our disposal and working out what is correct from there - not that we have any real power to affect change at the DCI level. I simply want to avoid bad data and bad analysis being used as a soap box for Vintage community outcry - or lack thereof- at various cards/decks etc. Without proper instruction etc, this new rage for 'big data' may do more harm than good in the long run if it is kept in its current form.

@Smmenen @CHA1N5

I don't actually know who dragon is but the event results are here:

http://www.themanadrain.com/topic/374/eternal-masters-7-results

Some similar tables to what has been done for various other events recently.

How did you guys deal with draws, especially non intentional draws e.g. going to time.

I am trying to do a similar table for our events. My initial though was for it to count as a loss for both parties but for completeness sake I thought I would defer to what you did.