I Introduce My Cousin Timmy to Magic: An Anecdote about Disruption

“Disruptive technologies typically enable new markets to emerge.”
-Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

The below account is anonymized but substantively true. I have introduced many of my younger cousins to Magic.

I have a kid cousin named Timmy. Timmy’s the baby in our extended family, and his family often visits mine over summer break so I get lots of chances to hang out with him when they’re around. Timmy’s birthday is also in the summer so I’m often celebrating his birthday with his family.

A few years ago, Timmy’s family was in town during his 11th birthday. He mentioned he wanted to learn how to play Magic like some of the older kids he knew at school. At this point I actually hadn’t touched paper Magic cards in around 10 years, but I went to a LGS and picked up a box of draft bulk—at the time, these were all from Theros block. For his birthday party, I built some “tier one draft decks” and taught him how to play. He had a blast stacking up +1/+1 counters on his heroic creatures or discovering the joys of removal recursion with Mnemonic Wall.

Then, he REALLY started having fun: I let him loose on the rest of the box. Because Magic is at its core a very well-designed game, Timmy’s imagination immediately went wild. He began finding his own cool combos and synergies, even out of a box of bulk discards from what is usually considered one of Magic’s weaker sets.

“Hey Dash! I found this card that says I scry every time it attacks. And THIS card says it gets +2/+0 every time I scry. Does it happen in time to hurt you if I attack with both at once?”

“Yeah Timmy, it does.”

“That’s awesome! What if I also scry using this starfish here? Does the bonus double?”

“Yeah, then it would get +2/+0 multiple times.”

This combo blew my kid cousin’s mind.

“WHOA THAT IS SO COOL. I am going to build a deck that scrys a bunch and attack you for SO MUCH DAMAGE every turn!”

Timmy built that deck, and attacked me for a bunch of damage in one turn, and had a great birthday.

And that’s when I told him: “Hey Timmy, that box of cards wasn’t actually your birthday present. Those were just to teach you how to play the game. THIS is your birthday present.” Then, honest to God, I took out the intro deck I had also picked up at the LGS - themed around scrying.

I was the BEST COUSIN EVER that day.

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“Good management itself was the root cause [of falling to disruption]. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies: listening carefully to customers; tracking competitors’ actions carefully; and investing resources to design and build higher-performance, higher-quality products that will yield greater profit.”
-Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

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It’s a year later and Timmy’s family is in town again for his 12th birthday. Over the past year Timmy’s played Magic some with his friends at school, and picked up draft chaff from his own nieghborhood LGS. I’ve actually been building casual decks to potentially play with Timmy. I take one out and we jam some games. It’s a blast, but Timmy is starting to want more out of Magic. He’s a year older and wants to make the leap to some competitive play.

Lucky coincidence: Origins Game Day is the same weekend as his birthday! For his 12th birthday present I tell Timmy I’ll take him to the tournament. Funny thing, but teaching Timmy to play Magic last year gave me the itch to start going to paper events myself. From drafting and playing prereleases I have most of the pieces of Joel Larssen’s Red Aggro from the latest PT. I lend him the deck, proxy together some other net decks, and we play some practice matches to prepare. Timmy’s ready for his first Game Day.

Before we leave for the LGS, Timmy’s dad takes him aside. You see, my uncle has actually heard a few things about Magic players.

“Timmy, don’t let it bother you if some of the other players are mean or rude,” he says. “Just have fun and play the game.”

We go to Game Day. Turns out Timmy’s dad shouldn’t have worried, as my LGS was awesome that day. All his opponents are friendly and patient. One opponent reminds him when he forgets to pump an unblocked Lightning Berserker. Another one explains why Timmy might want to hold up removal to be able to respond to a potential Nissa, Vastwood Seer flip. Timmy goes 1-4 in matches - with a bye - but he had a blast.

“I won a game Dash! He cast his Siege Rhino to block my guy but only went up to 7 life, so at the end of his turn I cast Lightning Strike, and then I untapped, and I drew Abbot of Keral Keep, and then I played it, and then it got Exquisite Firecraft, and I killed him! That was so fun! I wish there were more rounds to play.”

“Well, the store across town is running their Game Day tomorrow…”

As soon as we got home Timmy asked his parents for permission to go to the next Game Day. Seeing his excitement, they agree.

The next day, I need to run some errands in the neighborhood so I take him to the shop and Timmy keeps me updated by text. He starts slow. He drops Round 1 to Abzan. “Siege Rhino is too OP, Dash! It’s a 4/5 with TRAMPLE, oh AND they get to gain 3 life? It’s so unfair!”

Siege Rhino memes soon became a regular feature of my correspondence with my kid cousin.

Meanwhile my aunt thinks it's great that Timmy has "a non-parental adult influence in his life."

Timmy drops Round 2 to Green Nyxthos Ramp. “Why does Courser of Kruphix get to play extra cards AND gain life AND is two devotion AND can’t be killed with lightning strike? And it only costs 3 mana to play!?!? It’s so broken!” But Timmy is getting better at piloting RDW. He doesn’t need to be reminded to pump his unblocked creatures any more. He’s learned how to navigate the lines to victory when his opponents are low on life.

Round 3 Timmy smashes in someone’s Ensoul Artifact brew. “I was just too fast! And after sideboard I used Smash to Smithereens just like in our practice games, and it worked! I killed him by using Smash on his indestructible land just for the 3 damage!”

Round 4 Timmy races by a control deck. “I knew he might have Languish, so I cast the berserker with dash instead!” Timmy is 2-2 and has surprisingly good TBs so he’s actually alive for top 8.

Round 5 Timmy plays the mirror… and wins! “He cast an Eidolon, but I had more life, and I knew he would take damage from it too, so I let it live! He took so much damage from his own spells! Man, I hope I Top 8. The foil Languish looks so cool!”

Standings go up. Timmy just misses top 8 on breakers. Bad beats, Timmy.

But wait: the LGS announces that there’s a consolation prize for 9th place! Timmy gets a sweet Chandra deckbox.

Timmy's prize for just missing the cut to T8: a pyromancer deckbox for the red burn deck he's piloting. 

Funny, I don’t remember reading about a 9th-place consolation prize in the store’s event description for this Game Day...

“It goes perfect with red burn decks, Dash!” Timmy gets his participation prize booster. He cracks it and opens… an Exquisite Firecraft.

“Wow Timmy, so lucky! That card is like almost $10 right now,” I tell him. “You can use it to build your own red burn deck.”

“Yeah…”

On the ride home Timmy looks thoughtfully at the $9 piece of cardboard in his hand.

“I just need to convince my mom to let me spend money on Magic. You put four copies of Firecraft in the deck. With all the other cards, how much did it cost you to buy this burn deck, Dash?”

“Well, I already had some of the cards, but… I guess maybe it was like $100 in value. I didn’t get the complete Pro Tour sideboard because Eidolon of the Great Revel is really expensive.”

“Oh. What about those devotion decks some people were playing? I think it’s cool when you can build up to a lot of mana and then do something huge.”

“Well, devotion is about to rotate, but afterwards there will probably still be a ramp deck. You could build a pretty budget one for $50 probably, but usually the best big mana cards are expensive so the pro tour versions will be like $200 or more.”

We get home and Timmy proudly shares his 9th place tournament experience with everyone and shows off his cool prizes. I am once again BEST COUSIN EVER.

He doesn’t ask his mom about spending money on Magic, though.

I let Timmy keep the deck for the rest of the week and he takes it to FNM. He has a great time, but then it’s time to go home. He knows my aunt and uncle would never let me just give him something worth that much money. He texts me and tells me he left my cards at my parents’ house.

When I go to pick it up I notice there’s a fifth copy of Exquisite Firecraft in the pile.

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“First, disruptive products are simpler and cheaper; they generally promise lower margins, not greater profits. Second, disruptive technologies typically are first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets. And third, leading firms’ most profitable customers generally don’t want… products based on disruptive technologies.”
-Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

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It’s a year later and Timmy’s family is in town again for his 13th birthday. Funny thing is, taking Timmy to Game Day gave me the itch to play constructed Magic, so in the past year I’ve actually been playing a ton of Standard competitively. After a year of serious competitive grinding in which I scored my first RPTQ invites, I have a complete suite of highly tuned $500 meta decks Timmy and I could use to take down FNM.

But Timmy doesn’t ask me for Magic cards or to go to Magic tournaments. He’s been playing Hearthstone and actually just hit Legend rank after grinding a bunch at the start of summer break.

I do have a little-used Hearthstone account. We play a bit and he crushes me.

It’s OK, I’m still the best cousin ever. I get him some Hearthstone gold. Timmy’s pretty good at the game, so $20 will go a long way in Hearthstone.

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“Hearthstone is not a competitor to Magic.”
-Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner, 2014 quarterly earnings call

Predict the Post-Unban Modern Metagame at the Magic Online Championships!

Update: the contest has closed and winners have been notified. Check out the breakdown of submissions here, and go here if you want to be notified about future metagame prediction contests.

So, you may have heard about this: Jace, The Mind Sculptor and Bloodbraid Elf are both unbanned in Modern.

Many people have speculated about how this might impact the format, but talk is cheap and there haven't been any premier tournaments in the post-unban environment with which to actually test these speculations... until now.

The Magic Online Championships (MOC) on March 2 will be a high-level event with an elite field of top pros and MTGO grinders - and the 14 rounds of Swiss will include 8 rounds of Modern, for our first glimpse at the new post-Jace, post-Bloodbraid world of Modern.

Think you know how the newly unleashed cards will affect the format? Commit to your prediction in the MOC prediction game and you could $40 in MTGO bot credit from Cardhoarder, or a foil Bloodbraid Elf - your choice. Go to this survey link to submit your ballot: https://goo.gl/forms/iIbqvY6rTXQfrhn22

And keep an eye on this space for a breakdown of community submissions next week!

No One Saw Zombies Coming: Community Meta Predictions vs Pro Tour AKH Top Decks

About a month ago I asked the Magic community to join a survey contest to predict the top cards from Amonkhet to show up in Pro Tour. $50 in credit from Cardhoarder was on the line. Notably, the survey rules specified that the more people picked a card, the fewer points it would be worth, so there was strong incentive to speculate on fringe overlooked cards - even if those cards weren't huge at the PT, by being one of the few to pick it you could still rake in points.

(The contest is obviously now closed, but you can review the contest rules here)

I asked everyone to choose 5 monocolored cards. After over 450 submissions, how did the community do? Pretty much a massive punt:

Underperformers

None of the most popular cards - Glorybringer, Cast Out, Censor, Manglehorn, Gideon, or Rhonas - saw enough PT play to justify their popularity on the survey. We need to go down all the way to Magma Spray to find a card that actually overperformed its survey expectations. To be fair we should point out that many survey results came in before the surprise banning of Felidar Guardian, which certainly shook up the expected metagame.

Overperformers

What did overperform? Zombies massively overperformed early expectations at the PT, as the most popular Zombie on the survey, Dread Wanderer, barely had 1/3rd the number of picks of Rhonas. Note that I excluded cards with fewer than 30 survey picks unless they showed up at the PT, so there was an extremely long tail of cards with the same level of popularity as something like Lord of the Accursed.



In fact, only TWO (!!!!!) participants predicted Liliana's Mastery would show up at the PT. As one of the core cards in Zombies decks the card did put up results in a big way. So basically winning the contest came down to whether or not you were one of the only two people who correctly identified that Liliana's Mastery is a constructed-playable card.

I should also mention that the survey closed before the SCG Open on launch weekend began. That tournament showed us that Zombies might actually be a real deck, but prior to that tournament Zombies wasn't really hyped at all.

So if someone tells you that they totally saw the Zombies deck coming... there's a good chance that's just hindsight bias. Very few people actually thought that this casual tribal deck would be pushed to tier 1 with Amonkhet cards - or at least, not enough of them to place a marker and pick up some free store credit from Cardhoarder!

 

Dissenter's Deliverance and Dispossess were other solid playable cards that the survey completely missed, with only ONE participant identifying that Dispossess is actually a pretty solid sideboard option. Even with SB-only appearances being worth only 25% according to contest rules, Dispossess was a ubiquitous enough SB card that it was worth a lot of points to the lone participant who picked it.



Another notable overperformer is Never//Return, considering how down people were on Aftermath cards when it was first spoiled - to the extent that MtGGoldfish published an article panning the mechanic before the complete spoiler was even out! Granted, at least some of that criticism was directed at the visual aesthetic, but aftermath is definitely the sort of design that is stronger than it looks.

I also asked everyone to pick one gold card. Cut//Ribbons performed almost exactly to expectation here, but the notable overperfomers are Wayward Servant, from the WB variant of the Zombies deck, and Bounty of the Luxa, which showed up in some of the successful Marvel builds as a card advantage and ramp engine. Nissa is completely overhyped, but again to be fair the late banning may have impacted the survey here.

What did we learn?

It's easy to feel smug from the peanut gallery, watching the community survey whiff once again on meaningfully predicting the PT metagame. While it is amusing to repeatedly observe just how poorly the community is at evaluating cards and card sets on first impressions, if you are feeling smug, or if you do detect any condescension in my own tone, I assure you that's not my point at all. After all, I can hardly claim to have identified the Zombies deck back when the survey was open either - the ballot I filled out myself for fun was itself full of over-hyped cards like Glorybringer.

Rather my point is this: we should all have more epistemic humility when it comes to initial card impressions. Instead of bashing new sets or cards as under- or over-powered before even playing with them, moderate your evaluations a little bit. Because as we've seen, evaluating cards based on pure theorycrafting, with zero empirical playtesting or tournament results, is really hard! No one is very good at this - not WoTC R&D, sure, but not their critics or the Pros either.

One of the most revealing moments of the PT broadcast for me was the brief interview with Dave Williams, who was in the testing house with eventual PT AKH winner Gerry Thompson, about how their team landed on the Zombies deck. As Dave tells it, they dismissed the deck at first. It was only over the course of their week of testing together that people were gradually "infected" with the knowledge that hey, this deck full of casual tribal rares is actually pretty good!

So if you totally missed on the Zombies deck and bought into the Glorybringer and Gideon hype instead, don't feel too bad. On first impression, the best players in the game were just as ignorant about Liliana's Mastery as you were. But the successful Pros knew not to trust their first impressions, but to subject their assumptions to rigorous testing.

Just something to keep in mind before bashing a card as OP or weak the next time you see a spoiler. Unless you're one of the two people who picked Liliana's Mastery. In that case you can trash talk as much as you want! =P

Wrap-up

Well, that's it for the PT AKH metagame prediction game. I hope everyone who participated had fun. The winners have been identified and contacted by email to collect their prizes.

If you'd like to sign up for future Pro Tour survey contests, leave your email address here!

Pro Tour Amonkhet Fantasy Draft is Live. Up to $80 Credit from Cardhoarder in Prizes!

UPDATE: This contest is now closed and the winner will be contacted soon. If you missed out and want to be notified about the next Pro Tour prediction game, leave your email address. I'll only use email addresses collected this way to notify you about new Pro Tour Prediction Games.

Pro Tour Amonkhet is almost here, and in addition to the usual individual prizes, this year the established pros have the added incentive of playing for team prizes in the Pro Tour Team Series.

In this Pro Tour Fantasy Draft, you will build your own roster of 6 players, each of whom will earn points for winning matches at the Pro Tour. But pay attention - high-ranked players will earn fewer points per win than those who haven't been playing as well lately. Owen Turtenwald may be safe pick, but the rewards would be far greater if a relative unknown - such as first-time PT competitor and 15-year-old Team Cardhoarder associate Jack Kiefer - puts up a breakout performance.

The highest-scoring fantasy roster wins $40 in credit from Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards, and the runner-up will win $10. But thanks to our amazing sponsors at Cardhoarder, there's a bonus! If Team Cardhoarder puts a player in the Top 8, Cardhoarder's going to celebrate by potentially DOUBLING the prize pool!

Read the complete rules and join the contest here!

Game Theory Explains Why WoTC Hasn’t Banned Anything (Yet)

Update the morning after: Well, would you look at that, they went and did it. The community mystification now seems centered around "Why would R&D not ban something only to ban it two days later? Why does 'Look at me, I'm the DCI' seem more and more like an accurate representation of R&D's ban process?" 

And all of the analysis below is just as applicable to explaining why WoTC would not ban on Monday and then ban on Wednesday as it is to explaining why WoTC would not ban on Monday. The key factor, then and now, comes down to their certainty in their read on the metagame, in this case coming from MtGO data. As long as the metagame is uncertain, WoTC acts in fear of landing in the bottom right quadrant. With some certainty that the format would improve from bannings, WoTC can balance the cost-benefit ratio of banning cards against improving the format.

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Despite being on record as an apologist for WoTC R&D (though my faith was recently shaken by their admitted failure to catch the Saheeli-Cat Combo), I must acknowledge what pretty much everybody knows: Standard is really bad right now. So bad, that people seem can’t seem to comprehend how WoTC could fail to remove some of the problem cards from Standard in Monday’s B+R announcement.

Reddit and social media are filling up with commentary from Pros and average players alike wondering the same thing: what is WoTC thinking? After all, standard is definitely in a worse place today than it was preceding the last Standard banning in January. What gives?

In fact WoTC’s behavior makes perfect sense if we just game out some of the scenarios they’re faced with. Here’s the approximate payoff matrix:

		Would Hypothetical Bannings Create a Healthy Format?
		Yes	No
WOTC ACTION	Don’t Ban	Customers can play with all their cards. Format isn’t as good as it could be. Poor outcome	Customers can play with all their cards. Format is good. Best outcome
	Ban	Customers feel bad about their cards being taken away. Format becomes good. Poor outcome	Customers feel bad about their cards being taken away. Format stays bad. Worst outcome

Granted this is a simplification of the forces at play here, and format health/customer confidence are dimensions that are more of a spectrum and can’t be reduced to binary good/bad. But it still expresses the essential insight: the “Ban” row has a lot of red in it. The absolute worst outcome, from WoTC’s perspective, is to end up in the bottom right quadrant - to incur the very real costs of banning cards while not even getting an improved format out of it. In fact, given sufficient uncertainty about whether or not a format will improve post-bannings, the dominant strategy is to not ban. 

In order for WoTC to be able to ban cards, they need to be confident in their predictions of how the format will change, else they risk ending up in the worst-case scenario. If WoTC has strong belief that hypothetical bannings would create a healthy format, then they will be willing to do calculus of figuring out if the non-ideal outcome of creating a better format while shaking customer confidence is preferable to the non-ideal outcome of tolerating a bad format and preserving customer confidence. Absent this strong belief, the clear choice is to not ban.

Under this model, we can predict that WoTC will be more ban-happy in those formats wherein they can confidently project the future. Non-rotating formats where the format grows by 2% or less with each set are far more stable and predictable than standard, which grows by ~15% per set, and so just as the model predicts, we do see that WoTC is far more assertive with bans in non-rotating formats.

Worst-Case Scenario Realized: The Pre-PT Aether Revolt Ban Announcement

Which brings us to WoTC’s most recent standard banning, the consequences of which we are probably still feeling today: the January announcement that removed Emrakul, Smuggler’s Copter, and Reflector Mage from Standard prior to PT AER.
  
In retrospect, this banning was an unmitigated disaster. Yes, the banned cards were problematic. But WoTC took on the significant cost of banning cards, and then the metagame that followed the banning was somehow worse than the one before it. After Sam Stoddard polled Twitter to rate standard this past winter, it became fashionable to deride KLD as the “4/10 standard.” How fondly we look back now at a standard mediocre enough to be a 4!

While a bad format definitely hurts WoTC’s bottom line, it’s important to emphasize that banning cards has a similar impact, especially in the gateway format of Standard. People who spent their budget for Magic for the next few months on a playset of Emrakuls are just not going to play Magic for a while. Not all of those players will come back. If this were offset by the format becoming more fun and attractive for players, that would be acceptable. But that didn’t happen, and Wizards was stuck with a scenario where they lost both the customer that was turned off by an un-fun format and the one that was turned off by the bannings. At least if they didn't touch the format they'd still be making money from one of those two. This experience has certainly made WoTC more gun-shy about future bans.

What to Expect from Standard B+R Announcements Going Forward

With all of this in mind, we can make some predictions about WoTC’s ban behavior in the future:

1) WoTC will continue to only ban when there is low uncertainty about how the format will evolve. Which means we can expect there to be fewer bannings in standard than in non-rotating formats.
2) WoTC will be more likely to ban cards from standard after there is a clear picture of what the metagame looks like. This means they’re much more likely to ban Standard cards after the the Pro Tour than before it.
3) When it comes to the present situation specifically, I predict a ban will occur in two months if the new metagame remains as clearly unhealthy as it is today. But if it's at all plausible for the format to be interpreted as healthy, WoTC will continue to err on the side of not banning.
4) This last one’s not really a prediction, but I’d bet Goyfs to Seances that MtG’s designers and developers are consumed with jealousy when they look at how digital games can just patch in their latest balance tweaks every week.

Think you can predict what's going to happen in the metagame? If you're right, you could win $40 in Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards credit by filling out the Amonkhet metagame prediction survey.

Picking Against the Crowd - Win the Free Amonkhet Metagame Prediction Game for $40 in Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards Credit

UPDATE: This contest is now closed and the winner will be contacted soon. If you missed out and want to be notified about the next Pro Tour prediction game, leave your email address. I'll only use email addresses collected this way to notify you about new Pro Tour Prediction Games.

Another new set is out and that means it's time for another metagame prediction game. Once again, we are being sponsored by the great team over at Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards, who will be handing out $40 in credit to the person who best predicts which new cards will be seen in top Pro Tour Amonkhet decks, and $10 to the runner up.

This time, I'm adding a wrinkle to the game - instead of simply being rewarded for picking the most popular cards, participants will be rewarding for picking the most undervalued cards. Perhaps the best way to explain this concept will be to take a quick look at the most popular picks in the PT Aether Revolt metagame prediction game.

PT AER - The "Obvious" Picks

Aether Revolt had a lot of hyped cards that seemed obviously good, but as we see in the chart below, the community's card evaluations didn't line up that well with the PT.



Still, the clearly powerful and hyped cards such as Felidar Guardian, Fatal Push, and Shock all did reasonably well, even if in some cases the community overvalued them. The result of that contest was a funny situation wherein the "popular" picks all turned out to be somewhat overvalued by the survey but still did quite well points-wise. Meanwhile, let's consider a less-hyped card:



That Release the Gremlins is a powerful sideboard card in an artifact-heavy metagame seems obvious now with the benefit of hindsight bias, but prior to the PT this card had no hype. In fact, only one person in the entire survey picked it to do well at the PT so it doesn't even appear in the graph above.

Finding the Undervalued Cards

Which brings us to the PT AKH Metagame Prediction game, and how we're going to score it. This time, the points each card is worth will be divided among everyone who picks that card. This means that if you're the only one to identify an unhyped constructed playable card - such as Release the Gremlins - you will reap the rewards. Here's the nitty gritty:

• Amonkhet cards will earn points for appearing in top-performing PT AKH decks (defined as 7 wins/21 points or higher)
• Every deck in which that card appears maindeck is worth 1,000 points.
• Every deck in which that card appears in the sideboard only is worth 250 points.
• To capture the impact of cards that may be format-defining despite not being 4-ofs in their decks (such as Emrakul), a card will receive the same point value whether it is a 1-of, 2-of, 3-of, or 4-of in its decks.
• The points each Amonkhet card earns will then be DIVIDED by all the players who picked that card.
• At the end of the survey you can REVIEW THE SURVEY RESULTS and then GO BACK AND EDIT YOUR ENTRY if you think you've found undervalued cards.
• You can always come back to the survey later to revisit your entry (anytime before it closes at the end on April 29)

This scoring structure means you will need to consider just how strong the "obviously good" cards will be. Sure, Magma Spray is probably going to be a popular card at PT AKH... but just how much more popular will it be than, say, Forsake the Wordly?

  
Think you'll be able to value the cards of Amonkhet better than the collected wisdom of the Magic community? Prove it! =D

UPDATE: This contest is now closed and the winner will be contacted soon. If you missed out and want to be notified about the next Pro Tour prediction game, leave your email address. I'll only use email addresses collected this way to notify you about new Pro Tour Prediction Games.

The Speed of the Metagame - Tracking the Fall of BG Via Metagame Prediction Survey

The Magic Online Championships is in the books, and so is the Prediction Game. How well did the community predict the metagame at the Magic Online Championships when $50 in Cardhoarder bot credit was on the line? Um… not so well.

You can check out an in-depth breakdown of the submissions in my previous blog post, but in short, the community overwhelming picked the BG decks to both be most popular and to win the tournament. Mardu Vehicles came in second, and Saheeli a distant third. And at the actual tournament? The full decklists are available on the mothership, but here’s the archetype breakdown:

Ouch. BG was actually a distant third, at 2 decks split between 2 archetypes, coming behind a solid showing from 4-color Saheeli and an even more solid showing from Mardu Vehicles, which comprised fully half of the field. Mardu was also the choice of all three of the players tied for best standard record: Lee Shi Tian, Marcio Carvalho, and Piotr Glogowski, all at 6-2.

All in all a pretty poor showing from our community prediction survey. It would be one thing if the numbers were close and BG was just barely edged out by Mardu. But Mardu was fully half the field, and even second-most-common Saheeli had double the metagame share of BG. So what happened? Well, let’s look at the breakdown of predicted metagame share of each of the top decks by date of survey submission. Note that this is a 100% stacked column chart, so even though the vast majority of submissions came in over the weekend I’ve normalized the subsequent days to show how the proportions compare over time.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it does appear as if the community was just a step behind the metagame. Most of the submissions came in over the weekend, when GP Utrecht was still in progress and the results from the GP Pittsburgh, at which BG did dominate, were fresh on people’s minds. However, once the results from Utrecht became public on Monday, there was an immediate metagame shift: the “Mardu Ballista” or “Big Mardu” technology demonstrated that Mardu had fresh legs. BG previously was popular because it feasted on a favorable matchup against the “best deck” coming out of the Pro Tour, Mardu. But if Mardu Ballista tech could reverse that matchup - and it appeared from the Utrecht results that it did - then that would leave BG without a place in the metagame, and room for Saheeli to rise to number 2.

As the community digested the results from GP Utrecht, there were quite a few articles publicly available that spelled out the metagame implications. For example, at Channel Fireball, Josh Silvestri wrote an article headlined “B/G is Out, Saheeli is In.” A slightly less high-profile example is my aforementioned blog post, in which I expressed my belief that the survey was a few days behind the metagame’s shift away from B/G and towards bigger Mardu.

The submissions over time graph seems to confirm that it took time for people to recognize the shift. Granted, the sample sizes on some of the later days of the survey are quite small, as we only got a trickle of submissions later in the week. Even so, for what it’s worth we do see a trend towards greater predicted metagame share from Mardu, and decreasing predicted metagame share from BG.

Honestly, dynamics like this hammer home just how quickly the competitive metagame can shift. If you’re still jamming the same BG deck you built after the Pro Tour and GP Pittsburg because it seemed strong then, at this point I think we can safely say you’re a step behind the field. This constant churn even intra-rotation is what makes Standard so interesting from a pure gameplay point of view - but we must admit that this grind can become exhausting or cost-prohibitive for more casual players.

Since this is the MTGO Championships though, I think it’s worth pointing out that the ability to quickly switch decks is one reason why, for all its flaws, MTGO is nevertheless the most cost- and time-efficient outlet for a competitive-oriented player hoping to hone their skills. Swapping cards in real life is process that carries high transaction costs. Either you sell to your local store at half price (to be fair, they need these margins in order to pay the rent), or you binder-grind constantly to recoup as much value as you can from trade partners. In contrast, the online economy makes transactions far less painful as the vendors (such as our contest sponsor, the all-around cool dudes at Cardhoarder) can be far more efficient in their operations. If you wanted to audible from one tier 1 deck to another the day before the PTQ, you can totally do this online and lose just 10% of your deck’s equity just by conveniently selling and buying cards from a vendor. That's setting aside the fact that decks are typically a flat 25% cheaper online to begin with.

I hope everyone enjoyed taking part in the Magic Online Prediction Game, and that the results were instructive. The winners of the contest have been contacted by email.

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