I have found your Investment Project very interesting, especially the March 16th one about looking for price differences between bots (price arbitrage).
Since I have a little programming knowledge, I decided to test this idea by creating a program to do the work for me. Using another bot's publicly available price list and comparing it against MTGO's hotlist, I checked for any cards that would yield a profit.
Out of the 4736 cards the other bot tracks(they only deal in rare cards), only 7 would yield any profit. Out of those 7 the highest profit to be had is $0.25 per card. Given that type of return, you are not looking to make much if you are planning on going this route.
Granted, there are better deals to be had than this but there is too little information available(not many bots make their price lists freely available), and transactions are too slow to make this a truly worthwhile endeavor.
They are actually usually pretty good about card fixes in general (though their checkered past shows they weren't back in the day). The thing is it might not be the highest priority so it could take a month or two.
As someone who has played Modern quite a bit at a high level, I can tell that from my own personal experience, Tron is the deck everyone hates to play against. I have a feeling that the ban list will have to change one or the other because not everyone can afford to play this deck, and it's very powerful.
This would be a perfectly reasonable study to do. The main problem is that you need close to 200 matches to get a decent sample size for this study. That means you need to watch twice as many events. There are only so many 64-man drafts that fire in a weekend. I watched every one that I could in the above study.
But it would be a reasonable follow up study to the one that I did here. You would also need to do them close enough together that the data from your first study isn't completely obsolete by the time you do your second study, so the window has probably passed for me to do one like that for AVR.
The benefits are that you'd have a much better idea of what kind of decks are winning in the later rounds. That kind of data is really useful to have alongside the first set of data.
Besides that, an article like this takes a lot of friggin' work.
If Wizards isn't in any rush to fix this bug, then Essence of the Wild might be a card to keep an eye on. While the card isn't broken, the bug is definitely exploitable. The deck I played is a much stronger deck while this bug exists. Right now Essence isn't played much in Tribal Apocalypse. If people start to abuse the fact that you can get cheap copies of Essence even when the original gets removed from play, then there might be a problem.
I think Delver of Secrets is much more likely than Snappy to get the ban.
He's very random, he meets Wild Nacatl's ban criteria of being 3 power for 1 mana, and he makes blue aggro way too good. And he really only goes in one deck type, and always plays out the same way.
There's no way they're going to let him stay in std for the next 15 months. He's had his time in the sun in std.
Snappy's good too, but he's more usable in a number of different decks, and is more interesting in what he does. I don't think people around here hate him as much as Delver.
Great, I was wondering if it was from just round 1, and think that was the best way to go about this study. There is just too much data to sift through to get that full picture from round 2 and 3, and while I'd love to see this further analysis, it is probably too much for one researcher to do on their own in a weekend. Great article, I hope to read similar articles from you in the future, and maybe I should just go out and collect my own data sometime, I'd enjoy seeing how you set up your data set.
Right because MTGO is programmed to only trigger it when a creature is cast. I recieved a response to my bug reports thanking me for alerting them and informing me that there is currently no way to predict when they will fix this.
I've now noticed that if a creature comes into play any way other than being cast, it doesn't come in as a copy of Essence. I've tried it with Green Sun's Zenith, Chord of Calling, Tooth and Nail, Birthing Pod, Verdant Force and living weapons - all of those creatures came into play as themselves.
I have added Counterspell to Legality List under the clause of Highest Rarity/Lowest Price. If there are any other cards that should be legal due to this please let me know and I will add them ti the list as well.
At the bottom of the google docs spreadsheet for each event, you will see 3 tabs, labeled "Event", "DECKS", and "Links". The "Links" tab has links to Kuma's tribal article archive, and all the spreadsheets you mentioned.
Speaking of the google spreadsheets, is there any way that the links to vantar's tribal popularity, card popularity, and other stat pages could be put into each article? I keep having to scour old articles to find links to them. No big deal, just something you might be able to slip in as some boilerplate to each article at the end or somesuch thing.
BTW, I *totally* get the urge to run that kind of graveyard recursion stuff all the time, and since I bought Lily's for Modern Jund (had to find something to pay with my Goyfs!) I am tempted to shoehorn Liliana into anything. I have a little dryad deck on the backburner I may bust out this year, takes good advantage of all that, we'll see. The way you describe (in last week's article maybe?) buying some power card and trying to make something work with it is exactly the way I feel. My purchase of the Intuitions earlier this year spawned that Advisor deck :) I also wasted a couple hours of my life brewing a Mirage block constructed deck to run Strands of Night that I'll probably never get to play-- if anybody out there loves some Mirage block constructed, lmk!
I missed out on like 13 years of magic, so I'm always trying to re-live the best moments of all the mechanics and cards I missed, using this PRE as my playground when I get the fancy for remaking a "classic deck" from my missing years.
Hmm, not sure on that one. I guess you'll have to ask Chris on that one.
As far as I can see none of the Counterspells are legal at the rarity they have been printed but I'm not sure what the ruling is on cards that have been printed at multiple rarities.
I hadn't logged into MTGO for a few days. I did a quick couple of test runs just to make sure it still happened how I remembered it. Then I asked an ORC how he thought it should happen and he said my Kobold should have entered as a Kobold - so I reported it.
I've been monopolising the virgin slot in recent weeks. Dropping allowed me to watch the Eurovision song contest together with my wife, and to spread out the prizes more.
Not sure if I'll bother with Singleton. Maybe rehash Angels. Breaks my endangered virgin streak.
Your post convinced me to get 4 essences so I could test and find the bug. But the deck I built (GW tokens) seems to be unable to get essense to work at all. I play an essence and then tokens (or producers of tokens) and nothing. Pretty sure thats a general glitch in the client. So yay for finding a bug while investigating another?
And I also found that playing creature cards does work as expected except as you noted that they seem to copy it before they are on the stack so the essence dying has no effect on the outcome. Did you report this?
I plan to report both as a single bug since they are related.
You can see all the lists in the googlesheet of each event (after the event is ended). The link to the sheet is in the forum but I've put it in the article too, you just need to click on the number of the event in the opening info.
Anyway, my deck was just a way to find a different shell for my beloved Liliana/Recurring/Buried Alive strategy. With Spirit is strong, but I wanted to play it with a different, less played tribe. Insect is strange in that it's a big tribe (110 members, it's one of the Top 20 largest), yet nobody ever plays them. There's interesting members for sure, but not very sinergistic, and a lot of crap.
My star for Recurring purpose is Hornet Queen, but I'd need more reliable early turns blockers. In a past week (Week 63) I had Vorapede, but that was too slow. Here I had Acridian, which is good in general, but testing (which I do during the tournament!) proved that I can't pay the echo cost on turn 3, since I have a lot of stuff to do at 3cc (Liliana, Buried, Maelstrom Pulse). Broodhatch Nantuko is good, especially with Swarmyard, but it's often not enough. Necropede is very good for this strategy.
My latest version, which I'll play again at some point, replaced Acridian with Scute Mob. I was overlooking it because it wouldn't live enough to see 5 lands in play, but I wasn't thinking in the right way: in a Recurring deck, Scute Mob comes turn 1, frightens the opponent, calls for a removal, or if needed chump blocks, then it comes back in later turns, ready to grow immediately. So I'm now oriented on full sets of Scute Mob, Necropede, and Broodhatch Nantuko, plus 3 Nantuko Elder (the deck is mana hungry), 3 Hornet Queen and 2 Ant Queen.
Anyway, when the deck fires on all cylinders, it's amazing: you really overwhelm the opponent with tons of tiny, deadly insects (both from Hornet Queen, Ant Queen and Broodhatch), which is cool and flavorful (Recurring Nightmare expresses well the menace of swarms of bugs, and they comes from underground). So maybe it's just a Timmy/Johnny/Vorthos deck that way, no need to hope for consistency. But one can always try and better it.
WOTC may not be happy with Snapcaster, but they won't ban it this quickly. The real issue with Jace/SFM was the price of Jace, if he had been a 5 ticket card there would have been much less outrage. People have begged WOTC to ban a card in every set I can remember, be it Bitterblossom, BB Elf, Jace, Valakut, Primeval Titan or Snapcaster.
So many of the cards Mage Blade relies on are from NPH I doubt it can survive past M13. Dismember, G-Probe, Gut Shot and Vapor Snag. The swords will also rotate, and possible Ponder.
I think Delver is just as likely to get the axe. Banning an invitational card just seems terrible.
In a strange way Mihiltlor points out a very real problem with Changelings (at least in my mind) where the dominant changelings are almost more important than the tribe they are inserted into. I have seen all 3 (mauler, chameleon and entity) win many games on their own strength as they are a bit more OP than most creatures.
Additionally we aren't considering a ban on them. Simply changing how they affect the bonus prizes which imho isn't a terrible thing to do once in a while. Go ahead and top 8/4/win with them but don't expect a "coolness" prize is my thinking.
Then again I am not a regular any more so maybe my thinking doesn't matter.
I believe (not being an authority on rules) that "coming into play" doesn't use a trigger, or better, it uses the same stack instance used by the creature. You either counter the creature, or the creature comes into play. So when the creature was put into the stack, if Essence was in play, the creature is already become an Essence. It doesn't need to "meet" him on the board. So there's no real way to prevent that effect. To put it in a simple way, it's like the card you casted as a Kobold WAS already an Essence of the Wild in the very moment you cast it. After it went to the stack, the original Essence has no more role to it.
Ok, I'm convinced. I was just seeking a simpler way to deal with the Changeling rule (I'm often confused myself how I'm alloed to play them).
Still think a 3-member tribe (which therefore covers more than half the tribal base) should be eligible for Endangered Prize, since it's an accomplishment of the same kind. So at least have the rules allow that.
I have found your Investment Project very interesting, especially the March 16th one about looking for price differences between bots (price arbitrage).
Since I have a little programming knowledge, I decided to test this idea by creating a program to do the work for me. Using another bot's publicly available price list and comparing it against MTGO's hotlist, I checked for any cards that would yield a profit.
Out of the 4736 cards the other bot tracks(they only deal in rare cards), only 7 would yield any profit. Out of those 7 the highest profit to be had is $0.25 per card. Given that type of return, you are not looking to make much if you are planning on going this route.
Granted, there are better deals to be had than this but there is too little information available(not many bots make their price lists freely available), and transactions are too slow to make this a truly worthwhile endeavor.
They are actually usually pretty good about card fixes in general (though their checkered past shows they weren't back in the day). The thing is it might not be the highest priority so it could take a month or two.
As someone who has played Modern quite a bit at a high level, I can tell that from my own personal experience, Tron is the deck everyone hates to play against. I have a feeling that the ban list will have to change one or the other because not everyone can afford to play this deck, and it's very powerful.
This would be a perfectly reasonable study to do. The main problem is that you need close to 200 matches to get a decent sample size for this study. That means you need to watch twice as many events. There are only so many 64-man drafts that fire in a weekend. I watched every one that I could in the above study.
But it would be a reasonable follow up study to the one that I did here. You would also need to do them close enough together that the data from your first study isn't completely obsolete by the time you do your second study, so the window has probably passed for me to do one like that for AVR.
The benefits are that you'd have a much better idea of what kind of decks are winning in the later rounds. That kind of data is really useful to have alongside the first set of data.
Besides that, an article like this takes a lot of friggin' work.
If Wizards isn't in any rush to fix this bug, then Essence of the Wild might be a card to keep an eye on. While the card isn't broken, the bug is definitely exploitable. The deck I played is a much stronger deck while this bug exists. Right now Essence isn't played much in Tribal Apocalypse. If people start to abuse the fact that you can get cheap copies of Essence even when the original gets removed from play, then there might be a problem.
I think Delver of Secrets is much more likely than Snappy to get the ban.
He's very random, he meets Wild Nacatl's ban criteria of being 3 power for 1 mana, and he makes blue aggro way too good. And he really only goes in one deck type, and always plays out the same way.
There's no way they're going to let him stay in std for the next 15 months. He's had his time in the sun in std.
Snappy's good too, but he's more usable in a number of different decks, and is more interesting in what he does. I don't think people around here hate him as much as Delver.
wonder what would happen if you did a study of just round 2+?
Awesome analysis :)
Great, I was wondering if it was from just round 1, and think that was the best way to go about this study. There is just too much data to sift through to get that full picture from round 2 and 3, and while I'd love to see this further analysis, it is probably too much for one researcher to do on their own in a weekend. Great article, I hope to read similar articles from you in the future, and maybe I should just go out and collect my own data sometime, I'd enjoy seeing how you set up your data set.
Right because MTGO is programmed to only trigger it when a creature is cast. I recieved a response to my bug reports thanking me for alerting them and informing me that there is currently no way to predict when they will fix this.
I've now noticed that if a creature comes into play any way other than being cast, it doesn't come in as a copy of Essence. I've tried it with Green Sun's Zenith, Chord of Calling, Tooth and Nail, Birthing Pod, Verdant Force and living weapons - all of those creatures came into play as themselves.
I have added Counterspell to Legality List under the clause of Highest Rarity/Lowest Price. If there are any other cards that should be legal due to this please let me know and I will add them ti the list as well.
At the bottom of the google docs spreadsheet for each event, you will see 3 tabs, labeled "Event", "DECKS", and "Links". The "Links" tab has links to Kuma's tribal article archive, and all the spreadsheets you mentioned.
Hey Kuma,
Speaking of the google spreadsheets, is there any way that the links to vantar's tribal popularity, card popularity, and other stat pages could be put into each article? I keep having to scour old articles to find links to them. No big deal, just something you might be able to slip in as some boilerplate to each article at the end or somesuch thing.
BTW, I *totally* get the urge to run that kind of graveyard recursion stuff all the time, and since I bought Lily's for Modern Jund (had to find something to pay with my Goyfs!) I am tempted to shoehorn Liliana into anything. I have a little dryad deck on the backburner I may bust out this year, takes good advantage of all that, we'll see. The way you describe (in last week's article maybe?) buying some power card and trying to make something work with it is exactly the way I feel. My purchase of the Intuitions earlier this year spawned that Advisor deck :) I also wasted a couple hours of my life brewing a Mirage block constructed deck to run Strands of Night that I'll probably never get to play-- if anybody out there loves some Mirage block constructed, lmk!
I missed out on like 13 years of magic, so I'm always trying to re-live the best moments of all the mechanics and cards I missed, using this PRE as my playground when I get the fancy for remaking a "classic deck" from my missing years.
Hmm, not sure on that one. I guess you'll have to ask Chris on that one.
As far as I can see none of the Counterspells are legal at the rarity they have been printed but I'm not sure what the ruling is on cards that have been printed at multiple rarities.
Yeah I reported both as I mentioned above. No response back yet. I assume they will put it on the fix eventually pile.
I hadn't logged into MTGO for a few days. I did a quick couple of test runs just to make sure it still happened how I remembered it. Then I asked an ORC how he thought it should happen and he said my Kobold should have entered as a Kobold - so I reported it.
I've been monopolising the virgin slot in recent weeks. Dropping allowed me to watch the Eurovision song contest together with my wife, and to spread out the prizes more.
Not sure if I'll bother with Singleton. Maybe rehash Angels. Breaks my endangered virgin streak.
Your post convinced me to get 4 essences so I could test and find the bug. But the deck I built (GW tokens) seems to be unable to get essense to work at all. I play an essence and then tokens (or producers of tokens) and nothing. Pretty sure thats a general glitch in the client. So yay for finding a bug while investigating another?
And I also found that playing creature cards does work as expected except as you noted that they seem to copy it before they are on the stack so the essence dying has no effect on the outcome. Did you report this?
I plan to report both as a single bug since they are related.
Sword of $$$ AND $$$$$ is fairly high up there though not wallet sculptor range.
You can see all the lists in the googlesheet of each event (after the event is ended). The link to the sheet is in the forum but I've put it in the article too, you just need to click on the number of the event in the opening info.
Anyway, my deck was just a way to find a different shell for my beloved Liliana/Recurring/Buried Alive strategy. With Spirit is strong, but I wanted to play it with a different, less played tribe. Insect is strange in that it's a big tribe (110 members, it's one of the Top 20 largest), yet nobody ever plays them. There's interesting members for sure, but not very sinergistic, and a lot of crap.
My star for Recurring purpose is Hornet Queen, but I'd need more reliable early turns blockers. In a past week (Week 63) I had Vorapede, but that was too slow. Here I had Acridian, which is good in general, but testing (which I do during the tournament!) proved that I can't pay the echo cost on turn 3, since I have a lot of stuff to do at 3cc (Liliana, Buried, Maelstrom Pulse). Broodhatch Nantuko is good, especially with Swarmyard, but it's often not enough. Necropede is very good for this strategy.
My latest version, which I'll play again at some point, replaced Acridian with Scute Mob. I was overlooking it because it wouldn't live enough to see 5 lands in play, but I wasn't thinking in the right way: in a Recurring deck, Scute Mob comes turn 1, frightens the opponent, calls for a removal, or if needed chump blocks, then it comes back in later turns, ready to grow immediately. So I'm now oriented on full sets of Scute Mob, Necropede, and Broodhatch Nantuko, plus 3 Nantuko Elder (the deck is mana hungry), 3 Hornet Queen and 2 Ant Queen.
Anyway, when the deck fires on all cylinders, it's amazing: you really overwhelm the opponent with tons of tiny, deadly insects (both from Hornet Queen, Ant Queen and Broodhatch), which is cool and flavorful (Recurring Nightmare expresses well the menace of swarms of bugs, and they comes from underground). So maybe it's just a Timmy/Johnny/Vorthos deck that way, no need to hope for consistency. But one can always try and better it.
WOTC may not be happy with Snapcaster, but they won't ban it this quickly. The real issue with Jace/SFM was the price of Jace, if he had been a 5 ticket card there would have been much less outrage. People have begged WOTC to ban a card in every set I can remember, be it Bitterblossom, BB Elf, Jace, Valakut, Primeval Titan or Snapcaster.
So many of the cards Mage Blade relies on are from NPH I doubt it can survive past M13. Dismember, G-Probe, Gut Shot and Vapor Snag. The swords will also rotate, and possible Ponder.
I think Delver is just as likely to get the axe. Banning an invitational card just seems terrible.
In a strange way Mihiltlor points out a very real problem with Changelings (at least in my mind) where the dominant changelings are almost more important than the tribe they are inserted into. I have seen all 3 (mauler, chameleon and entity) win many games on their own strength as they are a bit more OP than most creatures.
Additionally we aren't considering a ban on them. Simply changing how they affect the bonus prizes which imho isn't a terrible thing to do once in a while. Go ahead and top 8/4/win with them but don't expect a "coolness" prize is my thinking.
Then again I am not a regular any more so maybe my thinking doesn't matter.
I believe (not being an authority on rules) that "coming into play" doesn't use a trigger, or better, it uses the same stack instance used by the creature. You either counter the creature, or the creature comes into play. So when the creature was put into the stack, if Essence was in play, the creature is already become an Essence. It doesn't need to "meet" him on the board. So there's no real way to prevent that effect. To put it in a simple way, it's like the card you casted as a Kobold WAS already an Essence of the Wild in the very moment you cast it. After it went to the stack, the original Essence has no more role to it.
Ok, I'm convinced. I was just seeking a simpler way to deal with the Changeling rule (I'm often confused myself how I'm alloed to play them).
Still think a 3-member tribe (which therefore covers more than half the tribal base) should be eligible for Endangered Prize, since it's an accomplishment of the same kind. So at least have the rules allow that.