http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/l...ianapolis.html
I am horrified to see sneak and show do so poorly against the field. It seems those that flocked to the deck can't play it very well. Edit: In fact, combo players seem to be non existent and terrible at SCG events, with the exceptions of Joey Manner/Ari Lax.
As always, thanks to Jesse and Alix Hatfield!
Matt Bevenour in real life
How is someone terrible at Sneak and Show?
I'm not sure. However, I have witnessed the difference between an average/not terrible Sneak and Show player vs a good/experienced/excellent Sneak and Show player. The difference is fairly significant, like many decks.
Also, I had a good chuckle cuz I crushed the quoted RUG list in the last round. It was pathetic :)
I think there are too many variations on BUG to lump them all together. It's not a well defined list, so there are a lot of ways to make it wrong or bad against Maverick.
What I find interesting is the very good Stoneblade results that came on the heels of Levin talking about how bad Stoneblade was for weeks. I played Stoneblade at the Invitational and did fairly well in Legacy: 5-2-1.
I find these type of articles based exclusively on statistical data collection to be pretty inaccurate and non-representative of the actual state of Legacy (matchups and dominance), since they're based on tournaments results which imply a lot of poor pilots and/or luck- this is especially true for SCG opens, where I see lots of misplays and punts on camera every single time.
Sneak and Show is a huge favorite preboard to RUG. All sneak has to do is wait until pierce is a non factor, and sneak will often have 2 pieces of protection by then.
The deck runs 5+ sol lands, has basics and a ton of counters. It is perfectly set up to beat soft disruption so long as you don't run headlong into everything. It should not be going 50% to RUG. It should NOT be going 46% historically. Therefore, people are not sequencing lands/spells correctly as a whole.
This isn't based on personal experience, although my testing with RUG has only made me sad about this matchup. This is mainly from Joey Manner/James higgenbottom who have been playing the deck non-stop for this reason to a ton of success at SCG invitational/Indy Opens and Jupiter Invitational/Qualifiers
Matt Bevenour in real life
BUG Thresh/Tempo: just a worse version of RUG tempo
Team America: seems well positioned, but not very popular right now, and can potentially struggle vs. Maverick
BUG Control (4 Snap/4 Goyf): good deck, decently positioned, should not struggle against Maverick as long as the SB isn't complete garbage
Full-On BUG Control (2-3 Snap, no other creatures): poorly positioned in my opinion, too many answers and not enough threats, seems like it loses to Maverick on occasion due to the one threat slipping through
Lumping these decks altogether seems short-sighted, because even though there is a fair amount of overlap in the card choices, each iteration has different strategic goals, weaknesses and strengths. Saying 'BUG did poorly' doesn't really say much of value.
The Data shows that all the "Griselbrand against the format" nonsense of SCG writers and the whining in the community was just based on a hype (happened last time with hive-mind).
As I wrote before often enough: Sneak/Show has a high power but low consistency cause you have to mull a lot and can draw a bunch of dudes and altough the decision tree for the deck is not as complex as in some other decks it makes of course a big difference if you are a good pilot or just someone getting a deck together to play in a big tournament.
Currently playing: Elves
I'm kind of curious what sort of munging the data had before it ended up in that spreadsheet. The numbers on the Worcester chart add up to 282 players. There were actually 308 legacy players at that tournament, and I know of several archetypes that were present that didn't make their list (I played Dream Halls, as did at least one other guy and that's not listed, and I played against an Armageddon Stax player and there's nothing like that on their list, plus you can't forget the one guy playing Battle of Wits!). It's one thing if you say "top 128 players" or something, but when you've fit almost the entire field and the lines at the bottom of the chart are for Hive Mind and U/B delver at 1 player each it sort of implies a thoroughness that doesn't seem to actually be present.
Unfortunately, I don't actually see the decklists, and I'm not the one who does the classification, so I can't definitively say what is and isn't included under "BUG." But in the context of what people have been playing lately, and given the fact that those doing the classification didn't feel the need to differentiate between multiple builds, I think it's safe to assume that most if not all of the BUG in these tournaments was BUG Control, not Team America or anything with Tarmogoyfs. The only "BUG" to make it into SCG's deck database was clearly BUG Control, and that's probably a reasonable example of what people were doing. We played Team America at the GP -- if it looked like that was the kind of BUG that was doing poorly in the Opens, we wouldn't have.
Well, it looks like the link to the actual spreadsheet for Worcester is broken (it mistakenly links to the previous article). I'll see what I can do about that. The spreadsheet should include the full data. The tables in the article, as you've noticed, don't list all decks. Traditionally, they contained all decks that were at least 1% of the field. That would be three people in Worcester, so no Dream Halls (two), Stax (one), or Battle of Wits (one). At some point I started including decks that were in at least 1% of the field in one of the tournaments examined in the article, so that if a deck was in one table, it would be in the others (unless there were zero in a particular event). Based on several comments like this, I'm now of the opinion that this is confusing and suboptimal. I'd love to hear suggestions -- more decks, or fewer? The idea was that things can get too cluttered if we list all the one-ofs, and they don't provide much data anyway.
Thanks for the comments!
I don't so much care if you're leaning towards more decks or fewer (in the end it's not particularly relevant if there was one guy playing some fringe archetype), I just think you should state what goes into the chart more clearly. If it's only archetypes that made up 1% of the field then say that. If it's that plus anything that was on one of the other charts then say that. If it's absolutely everything that the classifier could deduce a meaningful archetype for then say that.
Bardo, Site AdminNowhere do you see: Efficient Answers to Other Cards. Force and MMS will never be banned. Deal.
West side
Find me on MTGO as Koby or rukcus -- @MTGKoby on Twitter
* Maverick is dead. Long live Maverick!
My Legacy stream
My MTG Blog - Work in progress
I really like TMI articles, but I find it hard to make the connection between it and Dredge, with so low win %, beating tourneys every here and there.
I can only assume that the players are bad, way more than the deck itself.
If you fail to explain the reason behind your choice, technically, it's the wrong choice.
Zerk Thread -- Really, fun deck! ^^
The seven cardinal sins of Legacy:
1. Discuss the unbanning ofLand TaxEarthcraft.
2. Argue that banning Force of Will would make the format healthier.
3. Play Brainstorm without Fetchlands.
4. Stifle Standstill.
5. Think that Gaea's Blessing will make you Solidarity-proof.
6. Pass priority after playing Infernal Tutor.
7. Fail to playtest against Nourishing Lich (coZ iT wIlL gEt U!).
West side
Find me on MTGO as Koby or rukcus -- @MTGKoby on Twitter
* Maverick is dead. Long live Maverick!
My Legacy stream
My MTG Blog - Work in progress
Just to play devil's advocate here: can a deck really be "good" if no one can play it correctly? Decks like Dredge or Doomsday may be objectively powerful on paper, but if no one can get them across the finish line then they can't really be that broken, can they?
But yeah, I agree with Koby that there might have been more hate around. Most dredge players I know can handle game one but walk right into Crypts and Surgicals games two and three because they don't know how to plan around hate cards.
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