- Trumpeting Dinosaur
- at first glance, this is the same as any other cascader, but in terms of mulligans, it is a lot weaker than a boarding party (due to its weakness to counter magic).
- I'd like to know the probability of finding a better hand when looking at a hand that only casts the dino on T3, in game 1.
- Call forth the Tempest
- extra copies of wanderer, that might be easier to cast. In particular, I'd like to investigate how likely it is, that boarding party + sweet-gum can assemble a winning board state without ever hitting a wanderer/emrakul.
- most people run only 1 copy of this, but maybe something extreme like 4 wanderer, 4 tempest has actual legs.
- Balrog of Moria
- List with this guy have been popping up on mtgtop8 recently.
- I thought this to be a meme at first, but the more I tested it, I started to realize that hitting a sweet-gum > CT > boarding party > CT > balrog is still a lot of hasty damage. (he also sits at 7cmc, such that wanderer can hit it)
- I assume when you just demonstrate always, some numbers of this card make wanderer/tempest more castable.
- I won't be looking into how much more likely you are to cast the 8 mana spells, but I will look into how much this decreases your winrate.
- Or differently put, how much more you need to demonstrate, such that you maintain the same winrate
- Etali, Primal Conqueror
- My first thought was that this is just a win-more card and that this deck does not want non-cascaders.
- However, playing with Trumpeting Carnosaur made me realize that in practice, people fight over the first copy of CT, meaning that if you ever CT into an Etali, it might as well be uncounterable.
- I've demonstrated people into removal that suddenly had a legal target when playing with the dinos, but I will not look into this downside for this analysis.
- Instead, what I want to see is, how Etali being just under the 8cmc restriction of Wanderer/Tempest changes the math, as now you have CT and Etali that can 'go up the chain'.
- Maybe this turns out to be useless, maybe it means that we can get away with demonstrating less while having more backup starters in a pinch.
- As said before, I can't look into anything that you could hit with it from your opponent, so for all analysis, the opponents' deck will be considered empty
- In previous analysis, I always assumed that we demo every CT we hit.
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I now try to Demo n times where n is [0, 1, 2, 4, 999]
- Why those numbers?
- 0: happens when you play against stax and don't want to demonstrate them at all.
It also happens when you demo once into an opposing force deck, and they have 1 force, then CT resolves and you don't demo any longer from there.
- 1: I assume that in the dark you always demo the first copy just to play around force. sometimes they don't have a force and now you get to have a copy.
- 4: This is the most common 'demo all' case.
- 2: I ran some isolated simulations with 2 and 3 and noticed that a lot of the time, 2,3,4 are very close, while 0 and 1 are noticeably worse.
I opted to save some time here by not running with 3, but kept the 2 just to validate that it will be close to 4 in most cases.
- 999: With enough Emrakuls, you can start to shuffle your GY over and over. I want to see how relevant that is in practice.
I want to see how reliable it is to get enough extra turns such that you can draw into an otawara and bounce that ensnaring bridge that your painter opponent has been hiding behind.
- Assume you know what your opponent is doing: Which SB strat maximizes your winrate?
- I'll consider the following scenarios:
- Force of Will
- Force decks tend to bring in more elemental blasts and Force of Negations. We want to take out dino's here. What configuration gives the best winrate?
- If they are a Daze deck, we probably want to win on T4, meaning either a 6cmc cascader + extra mana for daze, or an 8cmc double cascader.
- How does the math change if we consider 8cmc cascaders as plausible starters?
- Discard
- This are decks like reanimator or mono black scam. All I want here is a throes of chaos and as many lands as possible to retrace it.
- Which sb configuration maximizes the winrate, assuming I hard mull for a T2 throes? e.g., are we supposed to take out all/most cmc6 cascaders?
- Force + Discard (e.g., UB Scam or Doomsday)
- I pair these decks because they run a reason to bring trickery in either a fast combo or heavy discard, but are not all in on that plan and sometimes you need to go through more than 1 force.
- This is a group of decks where I bring in Throes/Trickery but don't hard mull for it, i.e., keep a hand that wins on T3 while sometimes you get to do it on T2 already.
- What configuration maximizes this win, assuming that I want either Throes, or a T3 starter that is not Dino?
- Hatebears
- Assume no Force/Discard, we just need 1 starter fast, how to sb such that we can make room for utility lands like karakas/ottawara/gemstone caverns?
- Deafening Silence
- If the main thing you have to play through is Deafening Silence, we
a) take out Let the Galaxy Burns and Call forth the Tempest, but
b) maximize our creature count. > Does this also mean that I am supposed to trim a CT or two? How would that change the math?
- SB
- opponent has a hatebear I need to remove via X, e.g., a gaddock that can be removed with karakas, ottawara, carnosaur, ...
- Manabase
- I still assume every land is Ancient Tomb. This is arguably the biggest Achilles heel of this whole analysis.
- With proper mana base, I could look into the odds of casting Wanderer or casting 2 starters in consecutive turns.
- I could assess how likely we are to play around daze.
- There would be more hands that can't be kept because they don't cast a relevant spell or have only 3 tapped lands.
- I also don't look into sequencing, e.g., if the draw for your third turn contains the 3rd land you need, I don't consider it to come into play tapped. I just assume you always have an untapped land#3 if you have 3 lands at all.
- I could see how likely we are to cast an interaction spell, e.g., discarding dino or channeling a land, while also doing the combo on T3.
- I could check the odds of casting spells in the face of a Wasteland or how likely we are to cast non-red spells for different manabase configurations. Since 2/3 or our deck are lands, this seems very relevant to me.
- In general this skews the mulligains toward only caring about the right spells and I fear that it leads to a bias in the analysis that I can't account for.
