Does anyone happen to have on hand, an link or breakdown of 2018 Modern GP Top 8s by deck? Also the number of Top 8's for Twin in 2015? I'm looking, but I seem to see these number referenced frequently, I thought asking the group might be faster
I don't have the numbers off hand (I think it was around 18%), but KCI is currently lower than twin was IIRC. That assumes it something from KCI is banned on a competitive diversity angle as opposed to something else. Twin established a new floor for T8 "dominance," but we don't truly know where that floor is (it was widely considered 20% pre-twin).
*edit*
To clarify, I think the 18% included the PT and there were no team events at the time. WotC cited the PT among other reasons in their various ban rational, so as problematic as the PT data is compared to a GP, it is still a factor.
I believe it includes the PT at a minimum, but even 15% is higher than KCI. Again fundamentally we don't know where the floor is on the competitive diversity metric. Splinter Twin set a new minimum, but perhaps KCI is within their range. And to reiterate once again, this would be based on the metagame diversity metric. IF KCI gets the axe, it could be for a combination of grievances and perhaps sets some new precedents (similar to GGT and the "battle of sideboards")
Does anyone happen to have on hand, an link or breakdown of 2018 Modern GP Top 8s by deck? Also the number of Top 8's for Twin in 2015? I'm looking, but I seem to see these number referenced frequently, I thought asking the group might be faster
I don't have the numbers off hand (I think it was around 18%), but KCI is currently lower than twin was IIRC. That assumes it something from KCI is banned on a competitive diversity angle as opposed to something else. Twin established a new floor for T8 "dominance," but we don't truly know where that floor is (it was widely considered 20% pre-twin).
*edit*
To clarify, I think the 18% included the PT and there were no team events at the time. WotC cited the PT among other reasons in their various ban rational, so as problematic as the PT data is compared to a GP, it is still a factor.
Since the stoneblade days based on the number of bans in standard. No idea if it was actually THAT bad, but those standard formats were pretty awful/stale and they had attendance numbers to back up the bans regardless. Applying standard ban rational to modern seems like a bit of a stretch though. I'm not aware of any ban in modern that was referenced to a ban decision in any other format (outside the initial ban list). I guess an additional exception would be nothing banned in legacy + restricted in vintage has ever come off the ban list in modern and likely will never (treasure cruise, dig through time, etc).
I'm having a hard time understanding where you are coming from since by design aggro is supposed to beat control. The fact that control often has to rely on board wipe or bust is a feature, not a bug.
Question since there seems to be decent Amulet Titan expertise in this thread. Why run Amulet Titan over something like Storm? In other words, what's the meta that encourages the former over the latter. Storm seems slightly faster, so is there added resilience or...?
I'm not an Amulet guy, but people who play amulet like the way that amulet plays. It has many complicated lines which helps keep the deck interesting as well. That being said, with dredge quickly causing a "sky is falling" reaction among many, Storm was probably not the deck to be on (increased graveyard hate). Can storm win through the hate? sure. Amulet doesn't really care about their graveyard and decks were probably ill-equipped to deal with Prime Time.
Wizards don't care about the secondary market. They want people to play their game because that just makes them more money.
They definitely care about it, but there's a balance to be had. They want people to play the game, but if they reprinted every card so they were all worthless, they would lose a ton of future equity and really hurt singles sellers, which is mostly LGSs. They have a vested interest in making Modern affordable to play, but not necessarily cheap. Remember, they make money off of reprint sets, and people only will buy those if the EV is good, which requires cards in the set to be high in value.
I want to highlight this. I don't think the average player realizes how razor thin the margins on singles are (nor do they care), but without some equity in the game, there wouldn't really be the support necessary for tournaments and fundamentally the game itself. Without a decent EV, product isn't going to move, so while WotC doesn't necessarily care about the secondary market, they kind of have to pay attention to some degree. Afterall the secondary market is primarily LGSs and LGSs are primarily WotC's ACTUAL customers. Again it is a balancing act, but it is very easy to tank prices and ruin confidence in the people who are primarily buying the product (the LGS).
"WotC, please ban Paper. Scissors is fine. Thanks."
-Rock
I will acknowledge that Tron is leading the # of top 8 appearances in GPs for 2018, but half of those are from one event (4 appearances in GP Lyon) which is an outlier. This trend could of course change, but I don't see anything alarming in the numbers from an objective standpoint (1.33 top 8 appearances per GP WITH GP Lyon, .8 without in 2018 so far).
So I must say Stitcher's Supplier looks like one hell of a card, and has already earned some success in Modern.
Jund-Vine decks I think are probably one of the deck archetypes that can use Supplier do it's greatest point, and oh boy do these 5-0 League Lists look sweet.
God I love Magic sometimes.
That's the type of card that makes me want to dust off Abzan Rally / Aristocrats (or esper... would have to test that again). Once again, standard sets showing they are weak and have no impact on modern
Speaking of which, we already know byes don't matter. They aren't included in the sense that 3 byes gives you 3 free wins, but they also don't matter as just placement factors. For instance, we aren't treating a Day 1 performance of 3 byes, 5 wins, 3 losses as an 8-3 win rate. That's just 5-3. And again, this is the same for both formats.
It's "the same" for both formats in terms of blind data, but those first three matches in Modern have vastly larger matchup variance possibilities than in Standard. Not only are there about tenfold more "competitively viable" decks in Modern than in Standard, but also a larger number of "stuff people might bring" compared to Standard. Those 3 byes bypass much more possible chaos and random losses in Modern than it would in Standard, simply because there are more possible bad/wonky/unprepared-for things you could see. Would a seasoned player with a strong deck likely be able to handle it? Maybe, maybe not. But admitting yourself that there are likely more lopsided matchups in Modern compared to Standard, those bye advantages are significantly more helpful in overcoming those matchups by dodging them in the early rounds.
I absolutely love your analysis, because it's deeper and more thorough than I could do. I just want to make sure we're not working with "square chickens on a frictionless plane in a vacuum" (IE, oversimplifying some things and ignoring key factors that could influence outcomes, even if a little).
Essentially, what if you applied this to players who receive no byes vs players who receive byes? Or perhaps comparing events in which the same player has byes vs not? There may not be enough data to draw meaningful conclusions for a single player, but it would be interesting to see a trend. Byes are monumentally advantageous in large events, and become increasingly more advantageous the more open a format is.
I mean I feel he already addressed this? Byes are important, however performance differences between 0-3 byes are the same for both formats. In other words, a player with 0 byes is disadvantaged compared to the player with 3 byes, BUT that disadvantage is regardless of format.
to quote KTK:
Players with N byes do just as well in Modern as players with N byes do in Standard. That's true for 0, 1, 2, and 3 byes. Do byes make it more likely that you do well? Absolutely! But again, that is true for both Standard and Modern, and true in the same degree. This might mean that byes are hugely important in competitive Magic, but it doesn't mean that byes are particularly impactful in Modern. Namely, byes do not benefit Modern players by dodging so-called high variance matchups. They benefit Modern and Standard players equally and at the same degree.
It has been a while since I attended a GP, but when I flunked out of the main event at the end of Day 1, I spent all of day 2 playing side events with my "secondary" decks. I salted out pretty hard over how my day 1 went and frankly wanted to play something completely different just to change it up. So yeah, you may run into a lot more "jank" in side events, but after spending months preparing and tuning for the event, I personally wanted to just have fun and try something completely oddball. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Speaking of SCG, after looking at the schedule slides, it reminded me Regionals was coming up. I go to check online because I don't remember seeing anything about it locally, and I guess that makes sense. I look online for locations and the entire west coast got shafted. We have had them here in San Diego numerous times. Is SCG trying even more to isolate themselves to just east coast/midwest?
More likely has to do with cost for TOs. It doesn't really make sense (or cents if you want to be punny) to run SCG events if your store can't benefit from the whole "SCG" competitive ecosystem. Sucks for the western region, especially since no one has attempted to fill that market niche since the Tour / in-store changes were announced for 2017 (not sure if there have been additional updates since, been a while since I looked at it / was relevant to me).
Manamorphose tends to be a "flex" spot. Some metas are better suited to running more copies than others. I ran 4 Leyline in various griselbrand lists including shoal, but overall I'm not a fan since it can encourage you to keep some fairly mediocre hands plus become a dead draw. If you are going to run Leyline and are worried about hardcasting it, I'd bump up to 2 manamorphose, but a turn 4 leyline seems... pretty miserable
I'm specifically referring to the numbers from this Modern Nexus Article
I believe it includes the PT at a minimum, but even 15% is higher than KCI. Again fundamentally we don't know where the floor is on the competitive diversity metric. Splinter Twin set a new minimum, but perhaps KCI is within their range. And to reiterate once again, this would be based on the metagame diversity metric. IF KCI gets the axe, it could be for a combination of grievances and perhaps sets some new precedents (similar to GGT and the "battle of sideboards")
I don't have the numbers off hand (I think it was around 18%), but KCI is currently lower than twin was IIRC. That assumes it something from KCI is banned on a competitive diversity angle as opposed to something else. Twin established a new floor for T8 "dominance," but we don't truly know where that floor is (it was widely considered 20% pre-twin).
*edit*
To clarify, I think the 18% included the PT and there were no team events at the time. WotC cited the PT among other reasons in their various ban rational, so as problematic as the PT data is compared to a GP, it is still a factor.
I'm not an Amulet guy, but people who play amulet like the way that amulet plays. It has many complicated lines which helps keep the deck interesting as well. That being said, with dredge quickly causing a "sky is falling" reaction among many, Storm was probably not the deck to be on (increased graveyard hate). Can storm win through the hate? sure. Amulet doesn't really care about their graveyard and decks were probably ill-equipped to deal with Prime Time.
I want to highlight this. I don't think the average player realizes how razor thin the margins on singles are (nor do they care), but without some equity in the game, there wouldn't really be the support necessary for tournaments and fundamentally the game itself. Without a decent EV, product isn't going to move, so while WotC doesn't necessarily care about the secondary market, they kind of have to pay attention to some degree. Afterall the secondary market is primarily LGSs and LGSs are primarily WotC's ACTUAL customers. Again it is a balancing act, but it is very easy to tank prices and ruin confidence in the people who are primarily buying the product (the LGS).
Do you similarly take 4 of those off of Tron’s GP tally due to 1 GP?
-Rock
I will acknowledge that Tron is leading the # of top 8 appearances in GPs for 2018, but half of those are from one event (4 appearances in GP Lyon) which is an outlier. This trend could of course change, but I don't see anything alarming in the numbers from an objective standpoint (1.33 top 8 appearances per GP WITH GP Lyon, .8 without in 2018 so far).
That's the type of card that makes me want to dust off Abzan Rally / Aristocrats (or esper... would have to test that again). Once again, standard sets showing they are weak and have no impact on modern
I mean I feel he already addressed this? Byes are important, however performance differences between 0-3 byes are the same for both formats. In other words, a player with 0 byes is disadvantaged compared to the player with 3 byes, BUT that disadvantage is regardless of format.
to quote KTK:
Well Jim did beat Carl during the tournament already, so I don't think it is quite as bad as it seems on paper.
More likely has to do with cost for TOs. It doesn't really make sense (or cents if you want to be punny) to run SCG events if your store can't benefit from the whole "SCG" competitive ecosystem. Sucks for the western region, especially since no one has attempted to fill that market niche since the Tour / in-store changes were announced for 2017 (not sure if there have been additional updates since, been a while since I looked at it / was relevant to me).