Fair enough, this is not a scientific posit, it's my own qualitative take.Originally Posted by kombatkiwi
Well, I do disagree that Legacy "has no intrinsic quality that provides less opportunity to leverage skill" because I do think that they higher the power-level of cards available, there is less opportunity to leverage the skill of "optimal" play, that is, less opportunity to capitalize on sub-optimal play. Because, when single top-decks, for example, have a chance of simply just winning the game, even your optimal play could end up in a loss.
To use made up numbers to illustrate what I am thinking of, let us say that, perhaps, "optimal play" might win you 70% of your Standard matches. Now, in Legacy, it would be my hypothesis that "optimal play" might only win you 60% of your matches, because the chance, in a higher-power format, that your opponent simply "gets lucky," that is, plays something from a disadvantaged position that is powerful enough to just win the game despite what you did.
Consider a case where you are playing a Delver deck vs. something like ANT. You have "optimally played" so far, stopped all their plays, leveraged any and all card advantage you can and applied consistent pressure. Lets say this has loaded their graveyard and exhausted your hand of useful cards (let's pretend this is a game 1). They have one currently useless card in hand, Past In Flames and will die the next turn to your clock. They draw for turn, it's LED and this enables them to make enough mana, discard the PiF, cast a bevy of rituals and win on the spot. Even if the ANT player there had played sub-optimally and your Delver pilot played optimally, the end result in a loss for "optimal play."
Now, my hypothesis is that a format where cards as "powerful" cards, like LED in the above example, exist, I think it is reasonable to surmise that their effect could be to, in these sorts of cases, invalidate some of the benefit to "optimal play." That does not mean that "optimal play" is somehow not "optimal" or that "optimal play" does not yield consistently "better" results than sub-optimal play. Again, we can quibble about numbers and degrees in perpetuity, but my point is that in "low power" formats, the likelihood of outlier events dramatically (that is, making a loss into a win) changing game results is just smaller. 1%, 5%, 10%, again we can disagree on the exactly quantitative effect forever, my only point is that "higher power" formats can have greater "variance" because the in-game effect of single cards can be greater, therefor the net effect of "optimal play" is somewhat lower there. Again, "somewhat lower" not being equal to or synonymous with "nothing at all."
Not to mention, that this "outlier effect," even if we surmise that it only result in a .5% "change" in the net win percent of "optimal play," likely would still have a greater psychological net effect, just based on how people perceive things. I'd point to many people's notions of Vintage as an example, there many people have a perception of it being predicated on broken, crazy things being commonplace and consistent. Again, even just the academic notion of the effect gives rise to psychological valence toward it's possibility, not it's probability.
I'd actually surmise this is a subtle part of why some don't like Modern, aside some other obvious problems there, but the net-effect would be much smaller, since Modern is a lower-power format than Legacy.
"The Ancients teach us that if we can but last, we shall prevail."
—Kaysa, Elder Druid of the Juniper Order
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