The lack of trading online is what really hurts. You might play in a few prereleases and come across a person with Legacy staples. That happened to me when I pulled 2x Koth of the Hammer (when he was 50 dollars) so I traded for some Aether Vials and lots of other stuff. You can't do that online. There are no spaces for honest people and- let's be honest- honesty is hard enough to find as it is. The top-down model of dealer to bot to player leaves players out in the cold. It's very hard to make a profit online, unless you're in it for the long haul. If you are, chances are good you've tooled up a number of decks for other formats and won't be looking to play Legacy anyway.
Since these are the same arguments I made for Classic over a year ago and got into with Whiffy about. Basic problem is too many people are using this GAME to try and support themselves financially. Present company excluded because the services offered by MTGO Traders FAR FAR exceed the necessary evil of having such a company. There are just too many small time speculators who try and hoard every card and wait in hopes they skyrocket in value and playability so they can dump them and make a quick buck. Magic is a game and should only cater to players, not investors, speculators, businesses, etc. Without players there is no game, so while I love MTGO Traders and the value they bring, I can't help but believe is WOTC started their own store and sold any Mythic for 3 tix, Rares for 1 tix, Uncommons 2 for a tix and commons 4 for a ticket or something like this, the player base and event participation would simply skyrocket. Or better yet, perhaps charge a nominal license fee to dealers, nothing outrageous, but something just to keep the free loading fly by night bots and dealers out of it
..and before anyone argues that Std is expensive too and pays out the same prizes remember this: You can play in 40+ events a week with your standard deck. So even with the same prize support, your expected return on investment is much higher if you want to actually play your cards i tournaments.
IMHO the reason people don't play eternal online when they do in paper is simple: it is not worth it to build decks online due to the craptastic prize support. Look at what happened in paper: Legacy got popular when SCG was holding duel for duals...the prize for which of a full set of 40 dual lands, that (even then) was over $500. The same was true for Vintage. Vintage took off when SCG started the Power 9 Series, the prize for winning which was (generally) a Black Lotus AND a Timetwister. People will invest in expensive decks only if that investment has the ability to give a decent return.
Why would anyone (enthusiasts like me aside) pay over $1,000 to build a deck online to play for EXACTLY THE SAME PRIZES as a $5 pauper deck pays out? That's insane, and no amount of reprinting FoW will change the fact that Eternal decks are expensive and offer prize support that is often not even worth the investment of time it takes to play a tournament. A promo FoW will just cause duals/fetches to skyrocket in value due to increased demand, and Legacy/Classic will still be an expensive format, will still pay out terribly, and will still not fire-- only now you have pissed off everyone who had bought a FoW for full price too. FoW is not the problem, FoW is the excuse. Prize support and low expected return on investment is the problem.
I played one of the MED sealed, and it actually wasn't bad. I had a reasonably agressive boros deck which had unexciting but playable creatures on the curve from CMC2-4, topping out at one 2/2 horsmanship guy, and then some hugely powerful artifact creatures from CMC4-6 (two of them had the clockwork mechanic. All of my games ended in a reaosnable amount of time, I went 2-1 losing to a super-removal GB deck and all of the games were interractive, with none of them stalling out particularly badly. I sold the 4 packs from winning to a bot for 12tix, so that wasn't too bad either for the chance of opening up some money cards (which I didn't, but c'est la vie).
I concur with this assessment. I'd certainly be interested in buying a playset if they were affordable, but I can't justify spending such an obscene amount on one card, much less four times that for a playset.
I planned on playing in as many of the MED events as I could. Once I found out you couldn't use packs to enter the sealed events I opted to do other fun things with my time. I like playing Magic for free. I spent all my waking hours playing in those events in the past when it was both fun and profitable for me. I didn't think it would be easy to sell packs quickly so I just didn't play. Did I miss out?
I ported my mono white commander deck over to 100cs to help some friends test for some tournament. I wonder if this was it..
They both had to make drastic changes when they found how rough white weenie could be.
After looking at the player list looks like they didn't attend this one.
Also noticed the green black grave deck didn't run buried alive/victimize
for the triskelion/mikeaus combo. Tooth and Nail works too though.
Fair enough -- I definitely understand the space constraints!
I am very curious as to what you think is going on with izzet and izzet splash white though. Your analysis about the reasons behind golgari's movement is very compelling, but I'm not sure if or why the same logic would apply to izzet.
It's particularly curious to me that Izzet and Izzet/w have moved in opposite directions in the data. Izzet has lost ~12% off it's win rate, performing quite well in your initial sample and plummeting to dead last in the new one. Izzet/W on the other hand gained about the same amount when compared to the first sample. So the two archetypes went from basically dead even to a massive ~24% spread between the two (last place and first place respectively). Assuming there are enough instances of Izzet/W to form a reasonably significant sample, I must wonder what is going on here! How is a white splash making such a massive difference?
He actually does have enough. Unless he's handcuffed to buying from just MTGOTraders prices. There's another big name bot chain out there selling them for 92 currently. The MED drafts have been a failure on increasing the stock on MED cards and are barely firing now. So it does sound like a pretty sound investment. Buy at 92, and in a few months it should be back in the 100-120 area. Again, this is assuming he can buy from nova bots.
As far as Feline. I don't really care if she was born a man or a woman. SHE knows how to play some high tide with a computer program like efficiency... that's what everyone should be focusing on!
I didn't comment on Izzet + W because I mostly covered Izzet in my last article, so I didn't think it was worth the word economy to discuss something I mostly covered already. The thing is, I'm already up to around 5000 words in these articles, and I simply cannot write everything that needs to be said. But that is also why we have comments, so that players can discuss the nuances of those kinds of details.
There's also Noble Hierarch that recently went (back) from 3 or so to 15 or so. You did have to pay something for those Huntmasters, but we can see a good case history there: Master of the Wild Hunt was yesterday's Huntmaster of the Fells, and I'm pretty sure once the Huntmaster rotates out of Standard it will cost even less than what the Master costs now (I never felt that craze for the Huntmaster honestly, an unanswered Master of the Wild Hunt is way scarier to me).
I suggest you invest in Force of wills.... On Tuesday night when they finish crashing... maybe some other MED cards... I suspect they will all rebound.
Dave, I have done the reverse. I'll just throw a commander in with my existing 100 card decks and play EDH if there are no games going. There has been an influx in 100 games going on, though, with the recent MTGO Academy PREs. You should think about playing!
Planet, I'm not sure I would call the Primal a mistake. I didn't look closely at your deck in your video to see what else you could get, but there's no way you could assume I had 19 coming your way in one turn and gaining 7 life plus nabbing a creature to help is obviously something you would want to do.
Sexism has ALWAYS been around with magic. It's so disgusting. Really, it's getting to the point where Wizards might want to add it to their CoC (if it's not there already). I could hardly ever talk about myself in mtgo without encountering some rude remark.
Wow I didn't think Id outprice Nemesis' deck. Go me? I think this shows how important it is to find cards when they are cheap and hold on to them (Aristocrats for example I got between 7 and 8 apiece and while they dropped for a bit they inevitably bounced back (and then some).)
I did join last minute on a whim because you talked me into it. I was tinkering with various Bloodbraid Elves builds and Kitchen Finks was also part of it because I woke up that Saturday morning with those cards in my head.
The deck is a ton of fun to play but I am suspecting that it could be better (despite the high cost). It felt like when I played against NP's deck vs Dirty Duck in the finals that it lacked something important.
Sometimes, I like my EDH deck enough that I just move the general from the sideboard to the main deck and play it as a 100CS (read: OG Highlander) deck. Anyone else do that?
Thanks for the article. 100CS is kind of a niche format that is severely underrated. I don't see hardly enough people playing it in the "just for fun" queues. Everybody *lllooovvveeesss* EDH/Commander. I do, too, but 100CS is where real diversity and deckbuilding happens.
Fantastic article. You provide really good data-driven analysis -- something the magic community needs more of. I've wanted to do this kind of work for a long time but haven't had the time or patience to accumulate the data.
I also find your explanations of the data to be quite compelling. Early on in RTR I found myself getting drawn into Golgari by early pick stab wounds quite frequently, and my results were poor. When I started to force myself to draft literally any other guild I did much better. Recently though I've been struggling a bit more and finding more success with Golgari. The changes in format speed seem like a compelling reason for that.
Anecdotally, I can also agree that Rakdos is being drafted much less aggressively than in the past. It might be reaching a point where it's seriously underdrafted. Last night I actually tabled a rix maadi guildmage in pack 3! Sadly I wasn't Rakdos, but I'm guessing nobody else at the table was either. It's just one example, of course, but perhaps it illustrates a trend.
So as great as the article is there is one point that I think needs some further attention. Maybe I am just missing where this is discussed in the article but I don't see anything unpacking the ridiculous results that Izzet splash White is putting up. It looks like that color combo is performing at over 10% better than the second place combination, and it's especially striking given that straight Izzet is in actual last place. Can you unpack this a bit? What do you think is going on there? It's a bit of a tease to throw that data point out there and not really analyze it!
Nice article and vids. Now everyone gets to see my play mistakes on multiple websites. :P (Looking for Primal Command with Mystical Tutor -- What was I thinking!?)
The lack of trading online is what really hurts. You might play in a few prereleases and come across a person with Legacy staples. That happened to me when I pulled 2x Koth of the Hammer (when he was 50 dollars) so I traded for some Aether Vials and lots of other stuff. You can't do that online. There are no spaces for honest people and- let's be honest- honesty is hard enough to find as it is. The top-down model of dealer to bot to player leaves players out in the cold. It's very hard to make a profit online, unless you're in it for the long haul. If you are, chances are good you've tooled up a number of decks for other formats and won't be looking to play Legacy anyway.
Since these are the same arguments I made for Classic over a year ago and got into with Whiffy about. Basic problem is too many people are using this GAME to try and support themselves financially. Present company excluded because the services offered by MTGO Traders FAR FAR exceed the necessary evil of having such a company. There are just too many small time speculators who try and hoard every card and wait in hopes they skyrocket in value and playability so they can dump them and make a quick buck. Magic is a game and should only cater to players, not investors, speculators, businesses, etc. Without players there is no game, so while I love MTGO Traders and the value they bring, I can't help but believe is WOTC started their own store and sold any Mythic for 3 tix, Rares for 1 tix, Uncommons 2 for a tix and commons 4 for a ticket or something like this, the player base and event participation would simply skyrocket. Or better yet, perhaps charge a nominal license fee to dealers, nothing outrageous, but something just to keep the free loading fly by night bots and dealers out of it
..and before anyone argues that Std is expensive too and pays out the same prizes remember this: You can play in 40+ events a week with your standard deck. So even with the same prize support, your expected return on investment is much higher if you want to actually play your cards i tournaments.
IMHO the reason people don't play eternal online when they do in paper is simple: it is not worth it to build decks online due to the craptastic prize support. Look at what happened in paper: Legacy got popular when SCG was holding duel for duals...the prize for which of a full set of 40 dual lands, that (even then) was over $500. The same was true for Vintage. Vintage took off when SCG started the Power 9 Series, the prize for winning which was (generally) a Black Lotus AND a Timetwister. People will invest in expensive decks only if that investment has the ability to give a decent return.
Why would anyone (enthusiasts like me aside) pay over $1,000 to build a deck online to play for EXACTLY THE SAME PRIZES as a $5 pauper deck pays out? That's insane, and no amount of reprinting FoW will change the fact that Eternal decks are expensive and offer prize support that is often not even worth the investment of time it takes to play a tournament. A promo FoW will just cause duals/fetches to skyrocket in value due to increased demand, and Legacy/Classic will still be an expensive format, will still pay out terribly, and will still not fire-- only now you have pissed off everyone who had bought a FoW for full price too. FoW is not the problem, FoW is the excuse. Prize support and low expected return on investment is the problem.
I played one of the MED sealed, and it actually wasn't bad. I had a reasonably agressive boros deck which had unexciting but playable creatures on the curve from CMC2-4, topping out at one 2/2 horsmanship guy, and then some hugely powerful artifact creatures from CMC4-6 (two of them had the clockwork mechanic. All of my games ended in a reaosnable amount of time, I went 2-1 losing to a super-removal GB deck and all of the games were interractive, with none of them stalling out particularly badly. I sold the 4 packs from winning to a bot for 12tix, so that wasn't too bad either for the chance of opening up some money cards (which I didn't, but c'est la vie).
i think legacy has crappy prize support, and most of the decks are kinda repetitive due to everyone net decking like there is no tomorrow
I concur with this assessment. I'd certainly be interested in buying a playset if they were affordable, but I can't justify spending such an obscene amount on one card, much less four times that for a playset.
I planned on playing in as many of the MED events as I could. Once I found out you couldn't use packs to enter the sealed events I opted to do other fun things with my time. I like playing Magic for free. I spent all my waking hours playing in those events in the past when it was both fun and profitable for me. I didn't think it would be easy to sell packs quickly so I just didn't play. Did I miss out?
I ported my mono white commander deck over to 100cs to help some friends test for some tournament. I wonder if this was it..
They both had to make drastic changes when they found how rough white weenie could be.
After looking at the player list looks like they didn't attend this one.
Also noticed the green black grave deck didn't run buried alive/victimize
for the triskelion/mikeaus combo. Tooth and Nail works too though.
Fair enough -- I definitely understand the space constraints!
I am very curious as to what you think is going on with izzet and izzet splash white though. Your analysis about the reasons behind golgari's movement is very compelling, but I'm not sure if or why the same logic would apply to izzet.
It's particularly curious to me that Izzet and Izzet/w have moved in opposite directions in the data. Izzet has lost ~12% off it's win rate, performing quite well in your initial sample and plummeting to dead last in the new one. Izzet/W on the other hand gained about the same amount when compared to the first sample. So the two archetypes went from basically dead even to a massive ~24% spread between the two (last place and first place respectively). Assuming there are enough instances of Izzet/W to form a reasonably significant sample, I must wonder what is going on here! How is a white splash making such a massive difference?
He actually does have enough. Unless he's handcuffed to buying from just MTGOTraders prices. There's another big name bot chain out there selling them for 92 currently. The MED drafts have been a failure on increasing the stock on MED cards and are barely firing now. So it does sound like a pretty sound investment. Buy at 92, and in a few months it should be back in the 100-120 area. Again, this is assuming he can buy from nova bots.
As far as Feline. I don't really care if she was born a man or a woman. SHE knows how to play some high tide with a computer program like efficiency... that's what everyone should be focusing on!
I didn't comment on Izzet + W because I mostly covered Izzet in my last article, so I didn't think it was worth the word economy to discuss something I mostly covered already. The thing is, I'm already up to around 5000 words in these articles, and I simply cannot write everything that needs to be said. But that is also why we have comments, so that players can discuss the nuances of those kinds of details.
There's also Noble Hierarch that recently went (back) from 3 or so to 15 or so. You did have to pay something for those Huntmasters, but we can see a good case history there: Master of the Wild Hunt was yesterday's Huntmaster of the Fells, and I'm pretty sure once the Huntmaster rotates out of Standard it will cost even less than what the Master costs now (I never felt that craze for the Huntmaster honestly, an unanswered Master of the Wild Hunt is way scarier to me).
Nice to see the perspective from the Red Deck player. Thanks!
Force is somewhere around 85 currently, maybe down to 75-80 when med events end. Duals could be a better investment though?
If you're talking about the Investment Project, he does not have enough tix for even 1 Force of Will...
I suggest you invest in Force of wills.... On Tuesday night when they finish crashing... maybe some other MED cards... I suspect they will all rebound.
Dave, I have done the reverse. I'll just throw a commander in with my existing 100 card decks and play EDH if there are no games going. There has been an influx in 100 games going on, though, with the recent MTGO Academy PREs. You should think about playing!
Planet, I'm not sure I would call the Primal a mistake. I didn't look closely at your deck in your video to see what else you could get, but there's no way you could assume I had 19 coming your way in one turn and gaining 7 life plus nabbing a creature to help is obviously something you would want to do.
Vengeful Dreams looks incredible! Think I'll buy one. :)
Iridescent Angel is really good when you put her with Wild Pair in a Scion deck.
Sexism has ALWAYS been around with magic. It's so disgusting. Really, it's getting to the point where Wizards might want to add it to their CoC (if it's not there already). I could hardly ever talk about myself in mtgo without encountering some rude remark.
Wow I didn't think Id outprice Nemesis' deck. Go me? I think this shows how important it is to find cards when they are cheap and hold on to them (Aristocrats for example I got between 7 and 8 apiece and while they dropped for a bit they inevitably bounced back (and then some).)
I did join last minute on a whim because you talked me into it. I was tinkering with various Bloodbraid Elves builds and Kitchen Finks was also part of it because I woke up that Saturday morning with those cards in my head.
The deck is a ton of fun to play but I am suspecting that it could be better (despite the high cost). It felt like when I played against NP's deck vs Dirty Duck in the finals that it lacked something important.
Sometimes, I like my EDH deck enough that I just move the general from the sideboard to the main deck and play it as a 100CS (read: OG Highlander) deck. Anyone else do that?
Thanks for the article. 100CS is kind of a niche format that is severely underrated. I don't see hardly enough people playing it in the "just for fun" queues. Everybody *lllooovvveeesss* EDH/Commander. I do, too, but 100CS is where real diversity and deckbuilding happens.
Fantastic article. You provide really good data-driven analysis -- something the magic community needs more of. I've wanted to do this kind of work for a long time but haven't had the time or patience to accumulate the data.
I also find your explanations of the data to be quite compelling. Early on in RTR I found myself getting drawn into Golgari by early pick stab wounds quite frequently, and my results were poor. When I started to force myself to draft literally any other guild I did much better. Recently though I've been struggling a bit more and finding more success with Golgari. The changes in format speed seem like a compelling reason for that.
Anecdotally, I can also agree that Rakdos is being drafted much less aggressively than in the past. It might be reaching a point where it's seriously underdrafted. Last night I actually tabled a rix maadi guildmage in pack 3! Sadly I wasn't Rakdos, but I'm guessing nobody else at the table was either. It's just one example, of course, but perhaps it illustrates a trend.
So as great as the article is there is one point that I think needs some further attention. Maybe I am just missing where this is discussed in the article but I don't see anything unpacking the ridiculous results that Izzet splash White is putting up. It looks like that color combo is performing at over 10% better than the second place combination, and it's especially striking given that straight Izzet is in actual last place. Can you unpack this a bit? What do you think is going on there? It's a bit of a tease to throw that data point out there and not really analyze it!
Nice article and vids. Now everyone gets to see my play mistakes on multiple websites. :P (Looking for Primal Command with Mystical Tutor -- What was I thinking!?)