Established decks and Matchup Percentages

[Admiral_Arzar]

Figured I'd write up actual percentages for your example for the hell of it.

High Tide vs.

Sneak Attack - 40%
GW/x Maverick - 80%
Miracle Control - 35%
Blade Control - 55%
Jund - 60%
The Rock - 60%
Canadian Thresh - 55%
Goblins - 80%
ANT - 60%

1. Counterbalance <----hardest card for High tide to deal with

[EpicLevelCommoner]

I agree with Matt. I cringe whenever I see match-up percentages--they're totally meaningless. What's really going on when somebody says "deck X has a 70% match-up against deck Y" is they're attaching an arbitrary value to their assessment that a match-up is favorable. The problem is that it tricks people without critical thinking skills into believing that those numbers actually mean something beyond the qualitative descriptor they're implying. (They don't.)

The only way you could ever have such a number actually mean something is if you took two expert pilots of two given decks and recorded results based on some reasonably large sample size. (Note that it's important for both pilots to actually be experts, as misplays would ruin the sample--assuming we're trying to figure out which deck is actually "better.") You would also need an even division of being on the play or on the draw. And of course you'd have to have separate samples for pre-board and post-board. It would probably also be useful to factor mulligans in somehow. But even then, after this autistic mess of data, you'd only really be testing a given 75 against a given 75, as sometimes a couple sideboard cards can make a big difference in increasing win percentages post-board.

In other words: this thread is not a useful project. If the OP wants to go ahead and try anyway, more power to him, but it should (hopefully) be pretty obvious pretty quickly that nothing of value can be achieved here in terms of his stated goals.

Feel good about that? Using autistic to describe such a "mess"? That's great: it's not like there is any possibility of someone with Autism or Asperger's trying to get into competitive Legacy . . . oh wait.

Anyhow while I do believe that taking into account all the variables would indeed create a clusterfuck of data, I believe straight-up "unfavorable", "slightly favorable", "even post-board", etc. descriptors are even more useless by themselves. That's why I suggested a confirmation of match-up percentages for consistency, difficulty, G1 and G2 outs and clocks, etc. Even though the 87% meme in the Moon Palace MU numbers is, well, nothing but a meme, the actual descriptors are quite useful in confirming (or in this instance, denying) the MU%.

[apple713]

I honestly think qualitative descriptors for matchups are better then "statistical" matchup percentages, since it really depends on pilot, playstyle, builds, etc.

"Even," "I'm slightly favoured probably," and "I'm probably disfavoured" are much better descriptions of what's happening in this silly game of variance.

-Matt

The thing about statistical descriptors is that they can be interpreted in qualitative ways. Lets say that qualitative descriptors are
probably disfavored, slightly disfavored, evenly matched, slightly favored, probably favored

their statistical equivalents could be 20%, 40%, 50%, 60%, and 80% respectively.

Im not looking to get exact numbers because that would be next to impossible with all the play styles and variations and player errors to take into account. I really just want to get something along the lines of this example i gave for all the decks. This would be a good starting point.

I think a combination of both is most helpful. If I where to consult a metagame chart to decide what deck to play at an event, I use relative match up %s and and decks a % of the field to make a general decision about a deck or two, then use qualitative data to tune the deck.

This is what i want to use the data for and how I would use it.


Anyone know how to contact Jesse and Alix Hatfield to see if they can help with this project?

[Parcher]

Jesse is in a full-time graduate program, with a concurrent TA job. Alix has a new girlfriend. Neither have much time for Magic right now. Though if they were fed all the available data by Jared at SCG, et al, Jesse has formulas set up to process it pretty handily. And Alix could turn that into an article just regarding data pretty easily if all the rest was done for him.

[apple713]

Jesse is in a full-time graduate program, with a concurrent TA job. Alix has a new girlfriend. Neither have much time for Magic right now. Though if they were fed all the available data by Jared at SCG, et al, Jesse has formulas set up to process it pretty handily. And Alix could turn that into an article just regarding data pretty easily if all the rest was done for him.

So what your saying is we should ask "Jared" from scg for the data? I can write a formula and sort data.... It's what I do for work. And we can write the article here.

So who is "Jared" from scg, and how do we contact him?

[apple713]

Anyone know who Jared from scg is that might have this info. Maybe how to contact him

[Tammit67]

Anyone know who Jared from scg is that might have this info. Maybe how to contact him

I assume Parcher means Jared Silva.

[apple713]

I assume Parcher means Jared Silva.

Anyone have an email for Jared silva?

[Tammit67]

Anyone have an email for Jared silva?

I think your best bet would try him through Facebook or starcity's site

[pavlaugh]

I've tested RUG and Sneak & Show quite a bit (50 games), both with other competent pilots and just playing against myself. Loser played first, normal mulligans except for a couple of free 5-card mulls, and no sideboarding. After the first 20 games, I changed the decklist for Sneak & Show to remove petals, adding land and more search/counters.

Decks were close to even with Sneak & Show slightly favored, winning 11/20 (55%) and 17/30 (57%).