All B/R update speculation.

[testing32]

I see Tezz, 12-Post, Goblins, Jund, Imperial Painter, Maverick, Slivers, Dragon Stompy, Meerfolk, Junk, Nic Fit, Foodchain, Lands.dec and Oops! All Spells! with top 8 Performances within the last two months.

And some people live to be 90 while smoking a pack a day. What is your point?

[wonderPreaux]

And some people live to be 90 while smoking a pack a day. What is your point?

I think his point is that none of those decks are elves, burn, dredge, or DnT, as the previous poster attested. the argument that these results are flukes feels pretty sketchy when Lem listed over a dozen examples...

[FoolofaTook]

I think that cards like Force of Will that punish game plans which heavily invest in a single spell are important to the diversity of the format, and that instead of banning it, it would be nice to see cards with a similar profile in other colors.

The problem with this approach is that Magic is not Chess and forcing players to play with a very limited defined set of spells doesn't change that fact. There's still a luck element involved and when you herd people towards reducing that luck element you make the game much blander than it ought to be. That's what the blue shell does.

There are dozens of viable archetypes that play off in a rock-paper-scissors format in which several lists are not all of rock-paper and scissors. That's what the best Delver lists are now. They're rock-paper-scissors all wrapped up in one. Their weaknesses only express themselves against other Delver lists and a few tier 1 non-Delver lists. That's because all of those lists are also rock-paper-scissors but skewed a bit off of the Delver list in question.

We'd be much better off back in the 2007 paradigm where there was a rock-paper-scissors list in Landstill but it could be beaten by several other things that were just faster than it or came at it from a tough angle. We'd be better off in the 2009 paradigm where there was a rock-paper-scissors list in Threshold CounterTop but it could be beat by very threat dense mid-range lists once they'd flipped it and it still had issues against things like Goblins.

What we have now is a much wider range of rock-paper-scissors lists but almost all of them are focused on the blue shell and as a group they heavily suppress the other archetypes that would prey on any one of them but can't match up well against the field of them.

That's just bad for Magic. It's not Chess. It's Magic.

[maharis]

I think his point is that none of those decks are elves, burn, dredge, or DnT, as the previous poster attested. the argument that these results are flukes feels pretty sketchy when Lem listed over a dozen examples...

http://tcdecks.net/metagame.php?form...&fecha=2014-10

68% of the decks are Brainstorm decks.

12% of the decks are Dredge, Burn, Elves, or D&T.

About 20 other archetypes are represented in the other 10%.

You were .3% likely to top an event with The Rock in October. You were 2.5% likely to do so with Dredge. That is 8 times more likely. You are 6.8 times more likely to top an event with a random Brainstorm deck than you are with a random non-Brainstorm, non-Elves/D&T/Burn/Dredge deck.

That is the difference between outliers and real data.

[Lemnear]

http://tcdecks.net/metagame.php?form...&fecha=2014-10

68% of the decks are Brainstorm decks.

12% of the decks are Dredge, Burn, Elves, or D&T.

About 20 other archetypes are represented in the other 10%.

You were .3% likely to top an event with The Rock in October. You were 2.5% likely to do so with Dredge. That is 8 times more likely. You are 6.8 times more likely to top an event with a random Brainstorm deck than you are with a random non-Brainstorm, non-Elves/D&T/Burn/Dredge deck.

That is the difference between outliers and real data.

Maybe you should learn to interpret numbers. You are NOT more likely to Top 8 just because of playing Brainstorm based on that numbers. In fact, all these numbers have absolutely ZERO effect on you being able to top 8 an event.

It's plain obvious that if 68% of the field play Brainstorm, the Chance that you see Brainstorm in a Top 8 is more likely than Golgari Gravetroll which is in only 2,5% of decks.


Edit: if more than 30% of decks in Top 8s don't run Brainstorm, I would step back from making bold statements a la "Play Brainstorm or loose"

[FoolofaTook]

Maybe you should learn to interpret numbers. You are NOT more likely to Top 8 just because of playing Brainstorm based on that numbers. In fact, all these numbers have absolutely ZERO effect on you being able to top 8 an event.

It's plain obvious that if 68% of the field play Brainstorm, the Chance that you see Brainstorm in a Top 8 is more likely than Golgari Gravetroll which is in only 2,5% of decks.

Yes, however if 68% of the field play Brainstorm then you have a meta warped by Brainstorm so it doesn't matter that they don't get into the top 8 at higher percentages than their play level. They certainly do suppress other lists that would otherwise be a bigger part of the field and likely cut into the dominance of Brainstorm lists in the top 8.

[Lemnear]

Yes, however if 68% of the field play Brainstorm then you have a meta warped by Brainstorm so it doesn't matter that they don't get into the top 8 at higher percentages than their play level. They certainly do suppress other lists that would otherwise be a bigger part of the field and likely cut into the dominance of Brainstorm lists in the top 8.

It would be helpful if you start realizing that it's not Brainstorm itself which wins games, warps the metagame or offends some players, but the whole shell, which is tuned to create a redundancy, which other colors can't mimic.

It doesn't matter if you chop Brainstorm, if Preordain could replace it in most lists. All you do is hurting decks which need to shuffle dead pieces away, which is most likely if you play combo.

[maharis]

What is the reason to play a deck without Brainstorm if 68% of top decks do, though? How is that not format-warping? Cards entering the format are judged by how well they interact with Brainstorm.

I highly suggest you test a Delver deck with 4 Preordain instead of 4 Brainstorm. It is far less consistent against fair decks, but it retains the exact same blue count and ability to dig for Force of Will in matchups where that is relevant (since your consistent argument against banning Brainstorm is that we would be overrun with glass-cannon combos).

Both Preordain and Brainstorm dig you three cards from the top of your library to find Force when the only thing that matters is that you have it in your hand. The only slight differences are the cases where you do not have a blue card besides the cantrip itself in your hand or if you are trying to do it at instant speed for some reason.

What you can't do with Preordain is replace the land and Spell Pierce in your hand with a Goyf and a removal spell when you are facing down an army of attackers. You still have to hold the dead cards and choose between a blocker or removal that turn.

[Lemnear]

What is the reason to play a deck without Brainstorm if 68% of top decks do, though? How is that not format-warping? Cards entering the format are judged by how well they interact with Brainstorm.

I highly suggest you test a Delver deck with 4 Preordain instead of 4 Brainstorm. It is far less consistent against fair decks, but it retains the exact same blue count and ability to dig for Force of Will in matchups where that is relevant (since your consistent argument against banning Brainstorm is that we would be overrun with glass-cannon combos).

Both Preordain and Brainstorm dig you three cards from the top of your library to find Force when the only thing that matters is that you have it in your hand. The only slight differences are the cases where you do not have a blue card besides the cantrip itself in your hand or if you are trying to do it at instant speed for some reason.

What you can't do with Preordain is replace the land and Spell Pierce in your hand with a Goyf and a removal spell when you are facing down an army of attackers. You still have to hold the dead cards and choose between a blocker or removal that turn.

If everyone would Judge cards simply because how well they play with Brainstorm, Punishing Fire and 12-Post would never have seen the Light of Day as engines. Thanks god, not everyone is that narrow minded.

You know that being less consistent overall in terms of Delver is a big difference to being unplayable if we talk about decks like S&T/Reanimator/etc.? In regards to glas-Cannon combo: The talk was primary about banning FoW. On a secondary Position within that topic, Glas-Cannon combo would increase as a result of traditional, resistant combo like S&T suffering. I doubt the overall number of combo decks would increase and I never said we would be "overrun" because of a Brainstorm-Ban.

It's pointless to throw in examples of current deckdesign which grounds on "Brainstorm can switch cards out if neccessary" and just switch Brainstorm with Preordain. I suspect, people would credit the fact that they can't shuffle dead cards away anymore with their deckbuilding and remove most of the conditional stuff we run today, especially if the whole metagame is changing and makes certain cards unnecessary for example. The idea that people switch 4 cards out and call it a day is stupid.

[Bed Decks Palyer]

If everyone would Judge cards simply because how well they play with Brainstorm, Punishing Fire and 12-Post would never have seen the Light of Day as engines. Thanks god, not everyone is that narrow minded.

Then there are lots of narrow-minded people out there in the lgs/scg scene, as I see far more DelverHerpGo decks than anything from above list. Which brings me back to the fact that I should honestly build the RUG PFire Vexing Sphinx Counterbalance deck...

[Ellomdian]

It's plain obvious that if 68% of the field play Brainstorm, the Chance that you see Brainstorm in a Top 8 is more likely than Golgari Gravetroll which is in only 2,5% of decks.

Honestly, this is the biggest issue with statistical analysis based on results - we don't get to tie an 'Expected to perform' value to a result. If you have a 100 person tournament, and 50 people play brainstorm, 25 people play Elves, 24 people play Storm, and 1 person plays Dredge, you should expect to see the top 8 have 4 Brainstorm, 2 Elves, and 2 Storm. If that Dredge player makes the Top 8 (and especially if they win) then the deck significantly over-performed.

Most of the analysis here seems to be done regardless of the composition of the field, and seems to discount a very crucial factor: 40-60% of the attendance at Legacy events either enjoy or choose to cast Brainstorm. The argument to ban Brainstorm has nothing to do with your individual likelihood to win a given tournament by playing or not playing a certain card, and everything to do with the perception that a vocal minority of active players seem to hold: That banning Brainstorm would somehow make Legacy "Better." And yet, we are sitting a week out from the largest Legacy GP in NA, and what could very well be the largest Legacy GP ever.

And guess what? It will likely be won by a deck playing Brainstorm. And that's OK.

[bruizar]

Without significance testing, those percentages don't say a whole lot. Especially for distinguishing rogue decks' lucky top 8's and valid new contestants of the meta, proper analysis should be conducted. Does anyone know if it's possible to obtain / crawl detailed data from MTGO? Offline magic is pretty much useless for proper analysis.

[bruizar]

If I had the data I'd use discriminant analysis or multinomial logit to predict upcoming meta games at the tournament / city level. You could even use time series analysis to fine tune choice modeling using assumptions that if player X plays sneak and show the last Y times, the odds that Sneak and Show is his only deck Z increases with some arbitrary amount.

That means you'd get a model that, over time, quiet literally maps all players / DCI numbers and the decks they own / deck choice evolution.

You could cluster (non-hierarchical clustering & k-means) DCI numbers using geographic distance / willingness to travel and identify which players will be most likely to attend, and which ones will be too far away from the tournament. You could then moderate that willingness to travel using tournament size (Bazaar of Moxen / Ovinogeddon) and event coverage (Chance of Camera time @ SCG / WOTC tournament).

and this is why




sucks


edit:

This is also why Hearthstone, in the end, will be the more successful game. Analysis > Intuition

[maharis]

Honestly, this is the biggest issue with statistical analysis based on results - we don't get to tie an 'Expected to perform' value to a result. If you have a 100 person tournament, and 50 people play brainstorm, 25 people play Elves, 24 people play Storm, and 1 person plays Dredge, you should expect to see the top 8 have 4 Brainstorm, 2 Elves, and 2 Storm. If that Dredge player makes the Top 8 (and especially if they win) then the deck significantly over-performed.

Most of the analysis here seems to be done regardless of the composition of the field, and seems to discount a very crucial factor: 40-60% of the attendance at Legacy events either enjoy or choose to cast Brainstorm. The argument to ban Brainstorm has nothing to do with your individual likelihood to win a given tournament by playing or not playing a certain card, and everything to do with the perception that a vocal minority of active players seem to hold: That banning Brainstorm would somehow make Legacy "Better." And yet, we are sitting a week out from what looks to be the largest Legacy GP in NA, and what could very well be the largest Legacy GP ever.

And guess what? It will likely be won by a deck playing Brainstorm. And that's OK.

It's almost impossible to get a full metagame report from any Legacy tournament, so your 40%-60% number isn't tied to anything at all other than your feeling. Of course, both values fall under the 68% actual reported penetration of the card in top 8s, which means that if it is as low as 40%-60% at an average tournament, then Brainstorm decks do outperform their expected results, sometimes significantly so. In fact, I would posit that the Elves, D&T, Burn, Dredge decks are outperforming their expected results because so much of the field is on a Brainstorm deck. Which goes back to what I said: You play Brainstorm, or you play one of a few non-Brainstorm meta-stalking decks, or you likely lose.

It's great that a lot of people like playing legacy. I am one of them. I'm not ranting about Brainstorm in new posts or anything, I'm doing it in the thread that's for ban list discussion specifically. And in this thread when people suggest that the currently most broken card in all of Legacy is a 1/1 that's a conditional 3/2 with no innate protection from removal... well, that just doesn't seem right. Powerful, out of flavor, sure. But I can't take seriously the concept that a french vanilla creature is the most broken card in a format where the threshold for banning is a card like Oath of Druids or Yawgmoth's Bargain.

Many of the non-Brainstorm cards that are discussed ITT impact the top of the library: Delver, Terminus, SDT, Counterbalance, even Treasure Cruise to an extent. Controlling what you draw is one of the most powerful effects in the game. The fact is that Brainstorm's effect is so unique that it is often one of the only ways to influence the way these cards work is why it is so powerful. Cards like Sylvan Library, SDT or Ponder don't let you put cards from your hand back to the top of the library, and certainly not for one mana at instant speed.

While I understand that this unique and powerful effect is attractive to many players, the same could be said about a lot of unique and powerful effects currently on the banned list for being too powerful. All available data and the eye test indicate that this card is warping the metagame in that you are playing it, overtuning to fight it, or losing. Banning Brainstorm rather than Delver would be right in line with Wizards' history of banning enablers in Legacy instead of kill conditions. That is why Mystical Tutor, Windfall, and Mind's Desire are banned instead of Tendrils of Agony.

[bruizar]

The intuition suggests that brainstorm is a problem card, but it MIGHT NOT be Brainstorm. Correlation is not causation. It could very well be that Force of Will or Lightning Bolt are the true culprits (FoW being a necessary evil to contain combo). As it stands, NO ONE knows how badly Brainstorm warps the meta in favor of blue decks because no one here has the empirical evidence with statistical rigor to prove that Brainstorm is the correct ban.

Inferring from the fact that Wizards doesn't even TEST for eternal, I DOUBT that they will have done anything more than look at mtgtop8.com for their ban decisions.

[Lord Seth]

I think one key point in regards to Force of Will vs. Brainstorm that should be noted: Force of Will is unimpressive or even flat-out bad in some matchups. It's often sided out for a reason. How many people have ever sided out a Brainstorm in Legacy?

[bruizar]

Basically, everybody is talking out of his ass here. Both camps, for and against Brainstorm, are grounded in anecdotal evidence, opinions and are equipped with weak empirical evidence. Top 8's mean nothing if you don't get the full meta breakdown. You guys aren't cardslingers, you're a bunch of tarot readers :)

[bruizar]

I think one key point in regards to Force of Will vs. Brainstorm that should be noted: Force of Will is unimpressive or even flat-out bad in some matchups. It's often sided out for a reason. How many people have ever sided out a Brainstorm in Legacy?

That's a valid observation. I think that if you want to ban Brainstorm, you'd need to take into account the 'tenure' of the card (it's been getting top 8's since the Y2K bug), and compare that to other cards' tenure while looking at the composition of the meta for every tournament (e.g. proportion of brainstorm decks in total, how many top8). This way you can see which cards are 'flavors of the months' and which ones are true staples you cannot do without. I wanted to build a brainstorm quotient before, but since tournament organizers are terrible data collectors there's not much that I can do.

No data = no insights. Guess work is a terrible basis for ban-decisions.

If we ever want to progress the eternal format, tournament organizers must work to collect the data so that we can do proper analysis on them. This means more elaborate result slips (note play or draw), reporting of all FULL deck lists NOT just top 8's and standings in between EACH round; as well as more camera event coverage to add context to findings (e.g. player cheats on camera, mark as an outlier in following datasets; but also to gain a better understanding as a community of the development of matches / fundamental turns / key spells.).

[menace13]

Basically, everybody is talking out of his ass here. Both camps, for and against Brainstorm, are grounded in anecdotal evidence, opinions and are equipped with weak empirical evidence. Top 8's mean nothing if you don't get the full meta breakdown. You guys aren't cardslingers, you're a bunch of tarot readers :)

Some of the most nonsensical bullshit I've ever heard on this forum. Sorry, but your Brainstorm quotient isn't even used by the DCI on any card nor will it ever be. They look at winning deck lists. Evidenced by every past banning.

[nedleeds]

I think that if you want to ban Brainstorm, you'd need to take into account the 'tenure' of the card

Why? 'True Staple' isn't a ban criteria. It's up there with 'Pillar of the Format', 'Skill Intensive', 'Skill Tester', 'Go play modern'.