Monday, April 24, 2017

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:

Image result

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?

Magma Spray  Forsake the Worldly
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.

4 comments:

  1. I would like to suggest born//lead, but it is not on the list.

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    1. Ok, I've added it. I didn't expect people to be very interested in creature combat tricks.

      If you've already submitted a survey you can go back and edit your entry as long as you stay logged in to the same google account. If it does end up making a Pro Tour deck, you'll probably rake in lots of points for being one of the few people to pick it...

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