[Deck] Mr. Popular

[Cire]

Mr. Popular: An experiment

I was looking at the top cards from providence and I was struck with a stupid idea…why not simply make a deck out of the most popular cards and see if it’s any good. Instead of developing a deck based on strategies or synergies or any of that mumbo jumbo, why not make a deck out of the top cards as was decided by the legacy community. Only the best of the best could get in…regardless of any paltry matters like Mana curve, threat density or even color. First let me put in the top 10 non-land cards. In order:

4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Jace the mindsculpter
4 Path to exile
4 Lightning bolt

And what’s the top non-basic , non-dual, non-fetch land?

4 Wasteland

But that leaves us only 16 spots for real lands, and with the mana curve topping out at 4, we really want at least 24 total lands. Now I remember reading somewhere that ever 3 draw cards count for one land, and despite how ridiculous that sounds, I’ll go with that for now. So let’s see; 4 brainstorms, 4 Clique’s and 4 Jace…that’s 12 draw cards so apparently 20 lands is fine…yet Jace is what we want to play after 4 lands so we shouldn’t count it. Revised we have 8 draw cards meaning we can deal with around 22 lands, so we only need to remove 2 cards. Now what to remove? Well first of all let’s break down Mr. Popular and see what is has going for it:

Free Counters:
4 Mental Mistep
4 Force of Will
4 Daze

Removal:
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Path to exile
4 Lightning bolt

Win Con:
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Jace the mindsculpter

Wow… that actually looks pretty good number wise. You can 1-1 a lot of early threats with your removal + Daze & mental step, and with all the free counters and removal an early goyf looks scary. Against combo you have 12 MD free counters and against control you can stock up on removal, or play tempo I guess… not bad Mr. Popular. So what to remove? Personally to make the deck consistent the smart money would be lightning bolt to reduce dependency on 4 freaking colors, but I like the little guy. So instead I will remove 1 path to exile. Additionally Jace being 4 mana and with 8 draw spells I don’t think we really want 4 of him so -1 Jace as well.

So Mr. Popular looks like this now:

//Instants
4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Lightning bolt
3 Path to exile

//Creatures
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf

//Planeswalkers
3 Jace the mindsculpter

//Lands
4 Wasteland
18?

Time to tackle the ‘?’. Well we want the possibility of using blue, red or white first turn. Green second turn, and double blue third turn. Simple math (simple not correct) would show that I would need therefore around 9 source of red, 9 sources of white, 8 sources of green, and 14 sources of blue… ouch..ok let’s see what I can do

7 Blue Fetchs
4 Islands
1 Tropical island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Tundra
1 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Plains

Wow I was able to do it in 17… go me. So what should the last land card be… well Just in case I’ll make it a city of Brass. So the final deck would be;


//Instants
4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Lightning bolt
3 Path to exile

//Creatures
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf

//Planeswalkers
3 Jace the mindsculpter

//Lands
4 Wasteland
4 Islands
3 Misty Rainforest
2 Flooded strand
2 Scalding tarn
1 Tropical island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Tundra
1 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 City of Brass


And there you have it. {sideboard not included} Hopefully the deck looks fairly decent and not terrible, but how could it; after all it has the best community agreed upon cards lol :tongue:.

[Iare]

Mr. Popular: An experiment

I was looking at the top cards from providence and I was struck with a stupid idea…why not simply make a deck out of the most popular cards and see if it’s any good. Instead of developing a deck based on strategies or synergies or any of that mumbo jumbo, why not make a deck out of the top cards as was decided by the legacy community. Only the best of the best could get in…regardless of any paltry matters like Mana curve, threat density or even color. First let me put in the top 10 non-land cards. In order:

4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Jace the mindsculpter
4 Path to exile
4 Lightning bolt

And what’s the top non-basic , non-dual, non-fetch land?

4 Wasteland

But that leaves us only 16 spots for real lands, and with the mana curve topping out at 4, we really want at least 24 total lands. Now I remember reading somewhere that ever 3 draw cards count for one land, and despite how ridiculous that sounds, I’ll go with that for now. So let’s see; 4 brainstorms, 4 Clique’s and 4 Jace…that’s 12 draw cards so apparently 20 lands is fine…yet Jace is what we want to play after 4 lands so we shouldn’t count it. Revised we have 8 draw cards meaning we can deal with around 22 lands, so we only need to remove 2 cards. Now what to remove? Well first of all let’s break down Mr. Popular and see what is has going for it:

Free Counters:
4 Mental Mistep
4 Force of Will
4 Daze

Removal:
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Path to exile
4 Lightning bolt

Win Con:
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Jace the mindsculpter

Wow… that actually looks pretty good number wise. You can 1-1 a lot of early threats with your removal + Daze & mental step, and with all the free counters and removal an early goyf looks scary. Against combo you have 12 MD free counters and against control you can stock up on removal, or play tempo I guess… not bad Mr. Popular. So what to remove? Personally to make the deck consistent the smart money would be lightning bolt to reduce dependency on 4 freaking colors, but I like the little guy. So instead I will remove 1 path to exile. Additionally Jace being 4 mana and with 8 draw spells I don’t think we really want 4 of him so -1 Jace as well.

So Mr. Popular looks like this now:

//Instants
4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Lightning bolt
3 Path to exile

//Creatures
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf

//Planeswalkers
3 Jace the mindsculpter

//Lands
4 Wasteland
18?

Time to tackle the ‘?’. Well we want the possibility of using blue, red or white first turn. Green second turn, and double blue third turn. Simple math (simple not correct) would show that I would need therefore around 9 source of red, 9 sources of white, 8 sources of green, and 14 sources of blue… ouch..ok let’s see what I can do

7 Blue Fetchs
4 Islands
1 Tropical island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Tundra
1 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Plains

Wow I was able to do it in 17… go me. So what should the last land card be… well Just in case I’ll make it a city of Brass. So the final deck would be;


//Instants
4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Lightning bolt
3 Path to exile

//Creatures
4 Vendilion Clique
4 Tarmogoyf

//Planeswalkers
3 Jace the mindsculpter

//Lands
4 Wasteland
4 Islands
3 Misty Rainforest
2 Flooded strand
2 Scalding tarn
1 Tropical island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Tundra
1 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 City of Brass


And there you have it. {sideboard not included} Hopefully the deck looks fairly decent and not terrible, but how could it; after all it has the best community agreed upon cards lol :tongue:.

Hehe, I saw this being discussed on the format discussion thread. Since this is a good idea and obviously an instant deck to beat I would like to put in my two and a half cents. Running 4 clique is kinda dumb since they are legendary, other cliques kill yours and never being able to cast more than one makes them almost never a 4 of. Path to exile is pretty redundant with the swords, we need more beatsticks but which ones?

My vote is we drop the bolts, 2 paths and 2 Cliques for:
4x Noble Hierarch
4x Rhox War Monk

Edit: Of course this just makes a pretty standard aggro bant list. So grats aggro bant is the best deck in the format.

[Cire]

Hehe, I saw this being discussed on the format discussion thread. Since this is a good idea and obviously an instant deck to beat I would like to put in my two and a half cents. Running 4 clique is kinda dumb since they are legendary, other cliques kill yours and never being able to cast more than one makes them almost never a 4 of. Path to exile is pretty redundant with the swords, we need more beatsticks but which ones?

My vote is we drop the bolts, 2 paths and 2 Cliques for:
4x Noble Hierarch
4x Rhox War Monk

Hey, hey, no sarcasm allowed! :tongue:

Although in all seriousness, the deck could actually be good...i mean it is all good cards, it can play control and tempo pretty well. On the Clique I agree, we can afford to take 1 out with out really ruining the draw count, but I particularly like the redundancy of the plow effects. Although remember if we are going to replace cards they have to be popular!! The next card down the list would be spell snare another really good tempo counter. So

- 1 Vendilion Clique
+1 Spell Snare

Now the singleton spell snare makes the deck all cool and retro.

[yutang]

Actually made a fairly decent Bant Aggro list out of this:

4 Misty Rainforest
4 Flooded Strand
3 Tropical Island
2 Island
1 Forest
3 Wasteland
1 Savannah

2 Vendilion Clique
4 Goyf
4 Noble Hierarch
2 Rhox War Monk
3 Qasali Pridemage

4 MM
4 Daze
4 FoW
4 Swords
1 Path
2 Jace

Sideboard:
2 Krosan Grip
2 Gaddock Teeg
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Relic of Prog
3 Spell Pierce
2 Path
1 Serenity
2 EE

[DragoFireheart]

Your deck list is extremely bi-polar: Daze and Path and Wasteland and 4 colors? No, make a choice, so I did:

Dudes

4 Tarmogoyf
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Grim Lavamancer


Magics

4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Mental Misstep
4 Path to Exile
4 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares


Wizard dude of awesomeness

3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor


Dirt
3 Flooded Strand
2 Island
2 Misty Rainforest
3 Scalding Tarn
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
3 Volcanic Island

[Pich]

-4 Path To Exile
+4 Ponder

[Cire]

Actually made a fairly decent Bant Aggro list out of this:

4 Misty Rainforest
4 Flooded Strand
3 Tropical Island
2 Island
1 Forest
3 Wasteland
1 Savannah

2 Vendilion Clique
4 Goyf
4 Noble Hierarch
2 Rhox War Monk
3 Qasali Pridemage

4 MM
4 Daze
4 FoW
4 Swords
1 Path
2 Jace

Sideboard:
2 Krosan Grip
2 Gaddock Teeg
1 Wheel of Sun and Moon
1 Tormod's Crypt
1 Relic of Prog
3 Spell Pierce
2 Path
1 Serenity
2 EE

Yeah since the deck runs such popular cards it is pretty each to turn it into an already established list. Yet for the purposes of this thread I want to continue the expiriment and only run the very most popular cards as was recently revealed at providence (who know Mr. Popular will change with the fads). So that means no Rhox War Monk, luckily the rest of the cards are also very popular, but not nearly enough.


Your deck list is extremely bi-polar: Daze and Path and Wasteland and 4 colors? No, make a choice, so I did:

Dudes

4 Tarmogoyf
2 Vendilion Clique
2 Grim Lavamancer


Magics

4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Mental Misstep
4 Path to Exile
4 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares


Wizard dude of awesomeness

3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor


Dirt
3 Flooded Strand
2 Island
2 Misty Rainforest
3 Scalding Tarn
4 Tropical Island
4 Tundra
3 Volcanic Island


Grim is indead one the most popular creatures, but its not the most popular card. Yet your advice of picking what this deck wants to do has extreme merit. So lets break down all the dysynergies one by one:

1) My list has 4 colors (if were being serious about it its UW deck with a splash for G and R.) AND it runs waste land. Well according to my bad math...this isn't such a bad thing. We can hit all the colors we want when we want them with a fair amount of regularity. So I don't see this as a reason to take out wasteland; which both popular and good.

2) My list runs Path to exile and Wasteland. now this is a reason to remove one of the cards...they both try to accomplish two very distinct things; one tries to mana screw an opponent, the other tries to survive.

3) My list runs Daze and Path to exile. Again the problem is that daze gives me tempo advantage, and path makes me lose the advantage...not just lose it but fashion tempo into a paddle and hand it over to my opponent while making me bend over.

4) My list runs Daze and Wasteland. Same problem as above except not as viscious. Personally i think the two of these cards can survive together without too much hatred.

So the problem cards are pretty clear: Daze, Path and Wasteland: First let me look at their possible replacements on the popularity chart

Most popular instants
(i'm not going to settle for sorcries):
Spell Pierce
Intuition (Doesn't count as you need to build the deck with this card in mind)
Red Elemental Blast
Spell Snare

Most popular non-basic , non-dual, non-fetch land
We can't afford to replace the lads with non-land cards):
Mishra's Factory

Ok, well first off all we can see that by replacing wasteland with Mishra's factory we can get another beater and solve 3 of the above 4 problems...and it's only one step down in popularity so that's an A+

yet we still have to solve the the Daze vs Path dsynergy. Primo we have to figure out wether this is an issue we need to solve in the first place...i.e. does fixing this dsynergy improve the deck or in fact makes it worse by removing some of the best cards this deck has to offer. I would have to answer this with a Yes.

From my initial goldfishing of the deck the deck essentiall plays the control role by controlling the early game with counters and removal till it gets a win con into play and then...well keeps doing the same thing. this means Path is esential, while daze not so much. After the first two turns the card is useless. So out goes Daze.

Now what to replace daze with? Well spell peirce is next on the list, but unfortunatly it does the same thing as daze, except perhaps marginally better...still dsynergy with Path. Next we have REB...which is both removal and a counter. Personally i have no qualms putting four MD since blue is clearly the most popular and deadly color, although i'm not sure what others would think of this. Either way we have one spot remaining which i would use spell snare for. So here is the revised list:


//Instants
4 Mental Mistep
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Red Elemental Blast
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Lightning bolt
3 Path to exile
1 Spell Snare

//Creatures
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Vendilion Clique

//Planeswalkers
3 Jace the mindsculpter

//Lands
4 Mishra's Factory
4 Islands
3 Misty Rainforest
2 Flooded strand
2 Scalding tarn
1 Tropical island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Tundra
1 Forest
1 Mountain
1 Plains
1 City of Brass


*Note: How many creatures + manlands to safely run equipment? since Jitte is an insanely popular card that Mr. Popular would love to use.

[Tiago_B.]

Mr. Popular: An experiment

I was looking at the top cards from providence and I was struck with a stupid idea…why not simply make a deck out of the most popular cards and see if it’s any good.

Omg omg this is epic, im totally throwing one of my decks out the window, and then diving after it.

I'd go like, StP, PtE, Goyf, Knight of the Reliquary, and some blue (Fow/MM).

[Cire]

Omg omg this is epic, im totally throwing one of my decks out the window, and then diving after it.

I'd go like, StP, PtE, Goyf, Knight of the Reliquary, and some blue (Fow/MM).

Attack the deck based on it's merits and weaknesses not the stupidity of it's inception. Yeah I know the reasoning behind the deck was stupid... I said as much; but the deck itself turned out pretty strong. Yes i know it's a hodgepodge of really good cards with a lack of rhyme or reason; but now I gave it rhyme and reason (Control/ Tempo-control) . Not only that, while All these cards are popular and good, they have never been in the same exact deck... an idea which I think has some validity.

Also your imaginary deck of good cards...sounds like an exsisting deck: These cards are so good they can't help but make a deck.

Although KOTR doesn't belong in here....just not that popular :tongue:
--------

Also one more minor change after more play testing

-2 Red Elelmental Blast
+2 Spell Snare

[Tiago_B.]

Sorry, i didnt want to be offensive, i actually liked the idea behind the deck, but i felt i had to joke about it. Again, i apologize.
And ur right, KotR doesnt belong. Stoneforge Mystic + Batterskull then? I think there were a few of those at providence....Maybe ill spend some time making a list and testing it.....
I prefer dropping Lightning Bolt and ReB for other instants (blue for counters or white for removal). That might stray a little from the purpose of the deck.

[Cire]

Sorry, i didnt want to be offensive, i actually liked the idea behind the deck, but i felt i had to joke about it. Again, i apologize.
And ur right, KotR doesnt belong. Stoneforge Mystic + Batterskull then? I think there were a few of those at providence....Maybe ill spend some time making a list and testing it.....
I prefer dropping Lightning Bolt and ReB for other instants (blue for counters or white for removal). That might stray a little from the purpose of the deck.

No problem, it's just that your comment sounded like the type of sarcastic joke people would have made.

Anyway aside from my whole shtick with most popular cards this deck is really the combined forces of the best cards regardless of color (and then a mana base that allows you to use them)... if the best card isn't popular which one would this deck play? Well it should play the best. It only happens that the best cards are the most popular so from the original list a Mr. Popular list should include (and try not to think of strategy, synergy or color initially)

The 11-13 best Counters you can Find
The 10-12 best removal spells you can find
The 10-12 best Win conditions you can find
The 4 best Draw spells you can find
The 0-4 best non-basic , non-dual, non-fetch lands you can find
18-22 lands that let you cast them reliably

So if you fufill those requirments...then thats basically Mr. Popular. Even if there wasn't a list of popular cards the cards that people would place into those categories wouldn't change much. (There might be disagreement over lightning bolt versus a random black spell?)

The best part about having the best cards is that they double as each other... Clique is one of the best win cons and a good draw card, same deal with Jace. The counters double as early removal. The 4 non-basic, non-dual, non-fetch lands (that add mana! so no maze of ith) can double as a win con (Factory).

So if you want to replace the red cards you would still have to fill in this list with the best cards you can find...the problem then is finding better removal cards and better (current metagame) counters that arren't red

[Zork]

This is a brilliant idea.

As a mathematician and modeler I see the potential to automate this process based on aggregated tournament report statistics. I envision the following:

1. Parse data for color popularity
2. Calculate colors of deck by these stats
3. Filter card pool and decklists by color choice
4. Determine land vs nonland ratio by means
5. generate decklist by ratios

Even better is that two decks could be generated over time: one that relied solely on now - X amount of time stats and another that was generated by current stats and then updated using bayesian updating principles.

[Darkenslight]

IS it possible to replace the Wastes with Ghost Quarter? OR is that antithetical to the deck's design?

[Cire]

IS it possible to replace the Wastes with Ghost Quarter? OR is that antithetical to the deck's design?

I'm confused. Why would you want to put Qhost Quater into any deck instead of Wasteland?

If the question is instead "Is it possible to replace wasteland with better cards?"...then yes; as I have already stated in my last post


Anyway aside from my whole shtick with most popular cards this deck is really the combined forces of the best cards regardless of color (and then a mana base that allows you to use them)... if the best card isn't popular which one would this deck play? Well it should play the best. It only happens that the best cards are the most popular so from the original list a Mr. Popular list should include (and try not to think of strategy, synergy or color initially)

@Zork: Glad you like the concept. I would love to make an automatic spreadsheet that makes Mr.Popular in any given metagame, the only problem is I have no clue where to get the statistics of cards played on a large enough scale other than the few that are provided at every GP. If you can find them (and give me a correct formula since im not a mathematician) I would would be very much indepted.

------

Some notes from over the weekend.

1) REB's despite being popular are not very good MD... move the to the SB
2) Lightning Bolt and Go for the Throat are both very good removal spells that i'm having difficulty deciding between...but I am considering Vindicate as well since its the ultimate removal spell, and Oblivion Ring for its ability to target Emrakul.
3) I miss Daze's and Wastelands. Despite the dysnergy they randomly win games either through acting as a timewalk/combo ruiner or mana screw respectively
4) Spell Snare while good becomes useless late game, same as Spell Pierce. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but with mental misteps our late game becomes abysmal. The deck basically controls the early and mid game extreamly well, with a shit ton of counters and removal, making it very good against aggro-control, aggro (since the counters count as removal in this senario and you have almost as much removal as they do threats), tempo, and combo. But against mid range and dedicated control this deck is terrible. They just wait till our counters become dead cards.