[Article] Speed, Inevitability, and Futility

[Happy Gilmore]

Another theory article by Mike Flores.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/mf174

This gave me a lot of things to think about for deck building.

[MattH]

I didn't really see anything here that wasn't already known. I guess he gave names to some preexisting concepts.

[Bardo]

Waiting for my car to get its oil-changed yesterday, I read Flores "How to Build a Sideboard that Isn't Embarrassing (http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/14587.html)."

It recently became un-premium'd and was fucking great.

I love the PChapin quote in the discussion thread:


this is the type of article i am going to have my grand kids read.

[Illissius]

The sideboarding article was interesting. I wonder if getting all of your matchups favorable is the goal to aim for, though (even excluding those cases where you can't realistically do it, so it's not worth trying). It's not necessarily equivalent to maximizing your chances of winning the tournament, which is your actual goal. If, using four of your sideboard slots, you could get one matchup from 41% to 51%, and another from 60% to 80%, mightn't the latter be the superior choice (assuming you're equally likely to face either one)? Going for the highest impact option, in other words. I mean, it's easy to conjecture about a given deck having some given level of popularity, meaning that you'll face it and have to beat it to win the tournament, and to do that, you need a favorable matchup, but that's quite an approximation (rounding to either 0 or 100% probability all the time, both for your chances of facing it and your chances of beating it), and I suspect the raw statistics don't actually work out that way.

[etrigan]

When you get to the top 8, and it becomes single elimination, you want good matchups against every single deck, not good matchups on average vs. the field. You need to shore up your bad match ups, because that's what will put you out the majority of the times. If you're favored, just rely on the match up and playing well to get the victory.

[Nihil Credo]

When you get to the top 8, and it becomes single elimination, you want good matchups against every single deck, not good matchups on average vs. the field.
Mathematically, that doesn't hold up. Your chances of winning a Top 8 match are still (chance of beating deck X)*(chance of facing deck X), so assuming decks A and B are equally likely to be present, going from 60 to 80% against deck A is still a better move than going from 20 to 30% against deck B. On an extreme level, having seven auto-wins and one auto-loss is better than having eight ~50% matchups, although I concede it's more psychologically frustrating and less helpful to improve your skills.

You should also consider that some decks will make up a large percentage of the field, but probably a small percentage of elimination rounds. In these cases, you have to take a look at the prizes and consider how much you care about making top 8 but then not winning the whole thing.

[Tacosnape]

The sideboarding article was interesting. I wonder if getting all of your matchups favorable is the goal to aim for, though (even excluding those cases where you can't realistically do it, so it's not worth trying). It's not necessarily equivalent to maximizing your chances of winning the tournament, which is your actual goal. If, using four of your sideboard slots, you could get one matchup from 41% to 51%, and another from 60% to 80%, mightn't the latter be the superior choice (assuming you're equally likely to face either one)? Going for the highest impact option, in other words. I mean, it's easy to conjecture about a given deck having some given level of popularity, meaning that you'll face it and have to beat it to win the tournament, and to do that, you need a favorable matchup, but that's quite an approximation (rounding to either 0 or 100% probability all the time, both for your chances of facing it and your chances of beating it), and I suspect the raw statistics don't actually work out that way.

I actually agree with you here.

Generally when I take a deck into a decent-sized tournament where I don't know the metagame, I take my worst matchup and throw it out the window. With Goblins, I don't worry about storm combo, because even with 5-8 hate pieces I'm still barely even at best. With Solidarity, I'll either prepare for Threshold or Storm Combo and say the hell with the other one. With Landstill, it's usually the mirror. With my current Deadguy Ale build, it's Goblins. My exceptions are Survival, which is versatile enough that I try to get a slight edge on everything and ride it to victory (I won a tournament last night with BGW and never dropped a game) and Ichorid, to where I just make everyone else prove they can stop me.


When you get to the top 8, and it becomes single elimination, you want good matchups against every single deck, not good matchups on average vs. the field. You need to shore up your bad match ups, because that's what will put you out the majority of the times. If you're favored, just rely on the match up and playing well to get the victory.

The problem with this is that if you play seven rounds of all 60% matchups, chances are you're going to go about 4-3 or 5-2, because those 40% exist for a reason.

Winning once you're in the top eight is as much about mental focus and sometimes just the luck of the draw as it is about preparing for a field.

[Anusien]

Generally when I take a deck into a decent-sized tournament where I don't know the metagame, I take my worst matchup and throw it out the window... With Landstill, it's usually the mirror.
How is the mirror your worst matchup? Or are you talking psuedo mirrors like UB versus UBgw?

[Phantom]

How is the mirror your worst matchup? Or are you talking psuedo mirrors like UB versus UBgw?

Man, if the actual mirror were a decks worst matchup, that would be one goddamn good deck. I wonder if that was true with Flash?

Anyway, yeah I'm sure he's referring to the psuedo mirror. I know particularly UW Still is a pain in the ass for 4c.

As for the sideboard article, very nice stuff. Not too obscure, but not too obvious. The OP article seems a bit more on the nose but Flores writes pretty damn well.