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.

If you're interested in staying in touch and participating in future free games like this one, leave your email address. I'll only use email addresses collected this way to notify you when I create a Magic Pro Tour Prediction Game.

Community Predictions for the Magic Online Championships

Earlier this week, I invited the paper and online MtG communities to fill out a metagame prediction survey for the Magic Online Championship being held this weekend, with $50 in Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards credit on the line for the most accurate submissions. With over 200 submissions collected so far, let’s take a look at how the community predicts this event to go down.

(Update: some additional submissions came in after the post, but did not significantly affect the numbers below. You can scroll all the way down for a link to a live dashboard with the complete data set.)

Picking Winners

The MOC has an elite 16-player invitation list: the defending champion, the Magic World Champion, 2 players from each MOCS Quarterly Playoff, and 8 players from the MOCS points leaderboard. Note however that in 2016, Gold and Platinum level pros received significant edges in the form of invites to Monthly and Quarterly MOC Events. This system means that the field is a mix of 11 established pros and 5 comparatively unknown online players. The “tiebreaker” questions on the survey asked for predictions on the makeup of the Top 4 and the eventual winner.

Our survey respondents clearly considered strong pros to be favorites to win the tournament, with the 5 non-pro players together combining for less than 1/3rd of the responses compared to incumbent Player of the Year Owen Turtenwald. Brian Braun-Duin also gets a lot of love from the community. This makes a lot of sense as the structure of the MOC, with its small yet elite field, actually closely resembles the Worlds tournament which BBD took down just a few months ago. There was a little bit of drama in the Pro community both about the “legitimacy” of BBD’s invite to Worlds - he earned the “grinder’s invite” as Grand Prix Master - and whether or not BBD was truly the “best” player of the tournament or the beneficiary of some variance, but it appears that in the community’s eyes, at least, BBD is a legit powerhouse.

The position of Marcio Carvalho in the middle of the pack merits additional discussion. Carvalho has been on an absolute tear lately, being the runner-up at Worlds and the current leader in the 2017 Player of the Year race. Judging purely from his results we would expect Carvalho to be a more popular pick. Unfortunately, we need to acknowledge that Carvalho has long been under a cloud of suspicion for sketchy play. Although Marcio’s only serious past sanctions have been a 6-month ban a decade ago and a recent Worlds DQ, there are a number of Pros that continue to “call out” Marcio to this day and publicly accuse him of continuing to cheat.

Of course even his detractors will admit that Carvalho is very good at magic, so why the low ranking? Perhaps the community buys the unproven allegations and is discounting Carvalho’s recent performances, particularly as the Magic Online engine will completely negate any possible cheating. Or perhaps people just don’t feel right picking a suspected cheater to win it all. The sad truth is that Carvalho is either an honest player with some past indiscretions that is unfairly being maligned, or an unrepentant and continuing cheater that is actively stealing from his fellow competitors, and neither scenario is ideal.

Predicting the Standard Metagame

One of the more interesting questions to what extent is the current Standard metagame a “3-deck-meta” of Mardu, Black-Green, and Saheeli Combo as the best Aggro, Midrange, and Combo decks in the format. Here’s how many rogue, ie not-Mardu/BG/Saheeli decks the survey expected to show up:

With a median of 4 or 25% rogue decks, there were slightly less “Standard-Optimists” expecting greater than 4 rogue decks, than there were “Standard-Pessimists” expecting fewer than 4 rogue decks.

As for the decks themselves, people were very taken with Black-Green, with Mardu and Saheeli Combo the picks for 2nd and 3rd most popular:

Not only was BG Midrange the consensus pick to be the “most popular” deck in the tournament, it was also the majority choice for the “most successful” deck of the tournament. These are not at all synonymous, and often the “best” deck of the tournament is the one that “next-levels” and preys on the “most popular” deck. But here, many people thought that - for this weekend at least - the “best” and “most popular” would be one and the same.

That said, I think the survey respondents are at least a day or two behind the latest meta. The survey opened (and the bulk of the submissions came in) over the weekend while GP Ultrecht was still in progress, so they were largely informed by the results of the previous major event, GP Pittsburg. There, the Black-Green decks put up strong performances thanks to a favorable Mardu Vehicles matchup; the GB decks were just a little bigger than Mardu and so could keep up with the fast aggressive vehicles decks and then eventually turn the corner with more powerful spells. But the latest tech out of GP Ultrecht was “Mardu Ballista,” a vehicles variant that itself went slightly bigger still, including an anti-Black-Green sideboard plan of planeswalkers and Fumigate. The latest consensus, from what I can gather, is that this new tech even flips the matchup in Mardu’s favor.

At this point it’s worth reminding anyone who’s filled out the survey that you can go back and edit your submission as long as you log into your google account again. It’s very possible that these responses will change dramatically as people come to appreciate the implications of GP Ultrecht’s results.

We also see some interesting things when we narrow the charts to display only those responses from “Standard Optimists” and “Standard Pessimists,” as defined by their outlook on “number of rogue decks” as mentioned in our earlier chart. Here’s what the optimists think:

The makeup of the “most popular” decks doesn’t actually change all that much - the optimists are actually even more confident that Black-Green will be the most popular deck - but the standard optimists are more hopeful that a non-meta deck such as Dynavolt Tower, Emerge, or some other archetype will be able to attack the format and win.

What about how the pessimists think?

At least from what I see here, I must admit the pessimists appear savvier than the optimists in their metagame predictions. Mardu - which as we cover above is the latest tech - is still second but pessimists almost twice as likely to have picked it to be most popular, and slightly more likely to have picked it to be the winningest.

As for the moderates, no one cares what the moderates picked. Their picks were dull in how closely they matched the survey as a whole. Pick a side, moderates, you’re boring! (Ok, if you’re really interested in how the moderates picked you can scroll down and investigate the complete interactive dashboard for yourself.)

That’s what the community expects from the MOC at least. My personal prediction: the Mardu Vehicles’ “Ballista” tech is very real. I’ve actually seen it at work already in some quite high-level events, and the matchup against Black Green truly seems to be as good as advertised, while the matchup against slower combo and control decks remains quite good. I think it’s about to show up in a big way on one of Magic’s biggest stages. I'm less confident about which deck will actually be the most successful - it could be Mardu Ballista, but there are a lot of very talented players competing this weekend for a large prize pool. The rewards would be huge for any player who successfully identifies new tech. For the most winning Standard deck, I wouldn't be surprised to see some real innovations, either in the form of another novel re-tweaking of one of the big existing archetypes, or a rogue build.

Of course, we’ll need to watch the event itself to see what happens for real. Until then, fill out the survey if you haven’t already to be in the running for the prize, and check out the live dashboard if you want to do a deep dive into the survey data. I will update the dashboard with live data at least once or twice until the event begins and further entries are locked. Hope everyone has fun playing the MOC Metagame Prediction Game!

Predict the Magic Online Championships Metagame and Win $40 in Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards Credit!

The Magic Online Championship being held at WoTC HQ on March 3-5 is a unique event which invites 16 players - some top players from the Pro Tour and some successful online qualifiers - to 14 rounds of grueling Swiss play for a total prize pool $116,000. The select nature of the competition means that making the right metagame call for the 8 Standard rounds in this tournament will give you a huge advantage in taking down the first place prize of $40,000 and instant Platinum status.

Think you've got a read on the meta but somehow missed getting an invite to this 16-competitor tournament? Well, you might not be in the running for the 40 grand, but nail the questions in the FREE metagame prediction survey and you can still get bragging rights and earn $40 credit at Cardhoarder/Isle of Cards! Runner up gets $10 in credit.

Fill out the survey here. Good luck!

Lessons Learned about Running the Pro Tour Aether Revolt Metagame Prediction Game

The PT Aether Revolt Metagame Prediction Game has concluded and our winner has been identified. The response has been quite positive so it’s likely I’ll run a similar game again in the future (though I am running out of random unwanted sealed product to put up as prizes). So with that in mind, I’m going to take a moment to review how this game went from an operational perspective, to guide how I iterate and improve to deliver an even better experience for participants for PT Amonkhet.

1. Picking cards seems far more popular than picking players… why not both?

The prediction game for PT AER was actually the second such survey I ran; the first one was for PT EMN when I ran a fantasy draft of Pro Players. Now the PT EMN Fantasy Draft had a number of advantages over the PT AER Metagame Prediction Game—I put up a more valuable product as a prize for the winner, because the survey was picking players and not cards I could schedule it to be closer to the actual event and ride more of the PT hype, and my posts and content leading up the the game were much higher visibility than the ones for this PT (one of the interactive dashboards I made to provide context for people’s fantasy drafts got a shout-out from the mothership.) That’s a lot of people seeing my invitation to fill out the survey. Nevertheless, even with less visibility, being timed well before the Pro Tour, and a less valuable prize, the PT AER game ended up with over twice the participation of the PT EMN Fantasy Draft.

Ultimately I think the reason here is just that most of the Magic community has a stronger relationship to the cards than to the pro players. Sure, the biggest names on the PT have pretty broad name recognition - your Jon Finkels and Luis Scott Vargas’s. But something I heard many times from my personal friends that I invited to join the PT EMN Fantasy Draft, even ones who were quite into Magic, was this: “I’m not sure if I even know 8 Pros to pick for my fantasy roster!” The fact is, your average Magic player is probably not going to have a very strong opinion on how well some mid-tier Gold-level Pro is going to do in the next PT. On the other hand, everyone who plays Magic can have an opinion on whether or not that sweet card in the spoiler is going to be OP or not. Ultimately even with all its relative handicaps, especially in visibility, the PT AER prediction game it just more accessible to a bigger potential audience.

That said, I don’t want to completely stop running Pro Player Fantasy drafts, because personally I love them. I enjoy following the Pro scene and I still find it more emotionally engaging to root for a player than to root for specific cards. And another advantage of the player fantasy drafts is, unlike the metagame prediction game, it gives me something to run in the week immediately prior to the PT, so it doesn’t necessarily even need to conflict with the metagame prediction game. Honestly, I wanted to do it again this PT, and just couldn’t find the time to organize it.

Ideally for PT Amonkhet there will be two games. One, to be run immediately after set release, for contestants to predict the PT meta. The second, to be run the week prior to the PT, for contestants to predict Pro Player performance. This will be the best of both worlds and keep people engaged.

2. Scoring Structure Could be Tweaked to Reward Non-Obvious Picks

Unlike the PT EMN Fantasy Draft, scoring of the PT AER Metagame Prediction Game was done pretty much straight-up. There were no odds, no handicaps, not many limitations other than the segregation of colored/colorless/gold cards. I didn’t want to discourage people too much from making the “obvious” choices because remember, one of my objectives was to answer the question of just how “obvious” development’s “obvious” mistakes truly are if we don’t have the benefit of weeks and weeks of metagame iteration.

I think this did make the game a little less interesting as a consequence, because there was little incentive to deviate away from these obvious picks and no payoff for correctly identifying an under-hyped card. The way the scoring worked out, you still got enough points for picking Felidar Guardian—a hyped card that actually significantly underperformed its expectation—that it didn’t really hurt your chance of winning. I wish there were some way to reward the lone submission which correctly identified Release the Gremlins as a constructed-worthy card. Over 300 submissions, and only one person saw that Manic Vandal might be constructed-playable in an artifact set! Finding the hidden gem is an accomplishment and for future iterations of these games I’ll try to tweak the scoring to reflect the difficulty of that.

3. Getting Visibility/Accessibility Tricky.

Speaking of visibility and accessibility, both are key in letting people know about the game.

My primary avenue for advertising was just making posts on this blog, which I would then post links to on reddit. There were three posts that I made in all about the PT AER metagame prediction game: one post announcing the game, one post reviewing the entries so far after a few days, and one post after the PT was over wrapping everything up.

The funny thing is how the first two posts both struggled to get any traction at all, with 0 (!) and 6 net upvotes respectively. The most popular post, by far, was the wrap-up post after the PT, which shot straight to the top of the front page the Monday after the Pro Tour and is sitting up 350 net upvotes and counting. Of course, by this time it was too late for people to actually participate and join the game.

So what happened here? Shouldn’t the posts where people can actually, you know, play the game and win a free duel deck, be more popular than the post where I just throw up some charts about an event that has already concluded? Well I think a few things are at work here.

First, there’s just the element of luck. Just like in Magic, sometimes when it comes to social media things just break your way. If you get a few early upvotes that can give you enough momentum to get on the main page and grow from there. If you get a few early downvotes you never make it off the new tab and are buried. I do think there was a bit of a snowball effect here. The third post got a cluster of upvotes pretty much immediately after I submitted it, which definitely helped give it that nudge in the right direction to get things rolling.

Second, though, there’s definitely that element of accessibility again. It’s widely been observed that the Reddit model tends to reward easily digestible content that garners quick upvotes. My recap post was a bunch of charts you can scroll through, go “huh that’s interesting,” and then immediately upvote. This is much more accessible than the initial posts, which are entire surveys which you need to click through, consider your options, and then make selections. By the time you’ve done all that you might not be interested in going back to reddit to give me an upvote.

Here I may personally be somewhat to blame. You may notice that my post announcing the game doesn’t just announce the game - I have to first go on a rant wherein I disparage the collective card-evaluation prowess of the Magic community and defend WoTC RND. Now, this wasn’t a non-sequitor. The point of all that was to advance a thesis I do genuinely believe, and establish the concepts of prediction commitment and testing for which the prediction game could serve as a functional exercise. And I actually thought that framing the game this way would give it a “hook” that would encourage participation—let’s prove this random guy on the internet wrong and show him that I actually am smarter than Wizards RND! But still, this made the entire announcement more difficult to digest.

Third, timing was probably an issue. Because I wanted participants in the metagame prediction game to make their predictions without the benefit of any major tournament results, I needed to schedule it for the week immediately after prerelease, prior to any SCG Opens. At this point, the PT is on the horizon, but the Magic zeitgeist is still very much revolving around cool things that happened at prereleases and release events, not the PT. The recap post had the advantage of going up the Monday after the PT, when the conversation in the Magic community was all about… the PT. So the recap post was far more topical for its time than the game announcements posts.

Fourth, and I don’t want to over-emphasize this as a potential factor because I do believe it’s the least important of the four, there was perhaps a bit of gamesmanship from the game participants themselves seeking to prevent broader participation. Posters of giveaways in other subreddits have often observed how often early voting patterns seem to skew negative on posts where they are giving something away (ahem, like a free duel deck) because lurkers are trying to improve their own odds of winning by reducing the visibility of the giveaway and driving down participation. Magic players can be value fiends with a solid grasp of game theory, so this kind of behavior on /magictcg wouldn’t be inconceivable to me. This theory is made more convincing by the observation that my unpopular 6-point second blog post was actually very similar in content to the eventual popular 350-point recap post; both posts go through charts looking at survey results, but the recap post went up after there was no longer anything on the line.

Still on the whole I think the effect of this is minor, and comes only from a small minority of the community. If a post doesn’t get initial traction, though, that small minority could become the “vocal” minority as the more positive-minded broader community never gets a chance to see and appreciate a giveaway. And in any case, maybe my first post just got a bunch of downvotes because I was ranting about how stupid the community was - that’s not an unreasonable theory either.

TL;DR, My Plans for PT Amonkhet

1. Time permitting, run both a prediction game about picking cards and one about picking Pro players.
2. Tweak the scoring model to reward people who correctly identify non-obvious/under-hyped choices.
3. Keep the lessons learned about getting visibility in mind. Getting traction on reddit is never going to be an exact science, but I can emphasize accessibility and timing to try and do better. Also, maybe don’t announce the contest with an extended rant this time.

Well, I do hope to see everyone to participated this time back next time for PT Amonkhet prediction games. Now I can’t guarantee 100% that I will run them, as this is of course a hobby for all of us, and I just happened to have a lot of spare time at the appropriate periods this time around, but the positive response to the event this time definitely encourages me to continue doing this. (Shoutout to the random stranger who bought me reddit gold!)

As you've seen, it can be difficult to get the word out about these free prediction games. If you're interested in being 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.

Comparing the Community's Predictions with the Pro Tour Top Decks

A few weeks ago I asked the /magictcg and /spikes reddit communities to fill out a survey with their card predictions for Pro Tour Aether Revolt. The idea was to get a sense for just how good we are at identifying the broken cards in a standard format before any tournament results come in.

Well, the results are in. As per the contest rules, I scored each card according to how many top decks (7+ constructed wins) it appeared in, with sideboard-only appearances counting for 0.25. With over 300 entries, here's how things turned out.

The Colored Cards

I asked respondents to select 5 monocolored cards (in any distribution of colors). The chart below shows all the cards with >20 selections on the survey.

The story of Pro Tour Aether Revolt was the complete dismantling of Jeskai CopyCat decks, mostly by Mardu Vehicles, so it’s no surprise that Felidar Guardian is the biggest disappointment here, vastly underperforming its hype. On the other hand, solid answers such as Fatal Push and Shock were as good as advertised.

The biggest breakout card was Rishkar, Peema Renegade, whose value in the BG deck with +1/+1 counters synergy was underestimated by the survey respondents (keep in mind the survey was intentionally closed just prior to the first SCG opens.)

Also of note is the gap between Disallow and Metallic Rebuke. Many people picked the versatile hard counter, and while it did show up in a reasonable number of top decks, the overlooked Metallic Rebuke actually far surpassed Disallow in point value even though it appeared in 1 less maindeck. This is thanks to its frequent inclusion in the sideboard of the deck of the tournament, Mardu Vehicles.

Other notable misses on the survey’s part are Yahenni’s Expertise, Sram’s Expertise, and Herald of Anguish. All appeared to be solid constructed-worthy cards but in the end did not fit into any top decks. Also a miss, though in the other direction: Release the Gremlins. This card showed up in a few Mardu Vehicles lists as a mirror-breaker, but was completely ignored by survey respondents, and is left off the chart above as it garnered just 1 pick in the survey.

The Gold Cards

I asked respondents to select just one gold card. The chart below shows all selections.

No real surprises here. Winding Constrictor turned out to be as solid as it looked (though to be fair, it didn’t really have much competition in its category.)

The Colorless Cards

I asked respondents to select just one colorless card. The chart below shows all selections.

No real surprises here either, even though the community didn’t quite nail the relative prevalence of Walking Ballista, Heart of Kiran, and Aethersphere Harvester, significantly overvaluing the Ballista. All three are clearly solid cards and their relative performance at this Pro Tour likely says more about the particular meta at that event (Mardu Vehicles for days) than it does about the strength of the cards themselves.

So What Does it All Mean?

In my announcement for this contest, you’ll find that part of the motivation behind this particular experiment was to test my belief that “WoTC makes (almost) no obvious development mistakes.” The idea was that the community, with the benefit of hindsight bias and the crowdsourced testing resources of millions, vastly overestimates how “obvious” WoTC’s development mistakes are. With the survey I sought to discover if (1) The community picks would coalesce around some suspected broken cards, and (2) If those cards would truly turn out to be broken.

The answers to these questions appear to be (1) sort of, and (2) no. If any deck is broken in the current standard meta, it is the Mardu Vehicles deck. The predictions of the survey didn’t exactly reflect that, with respondents heavily favoring the more hyped Felidar Guardian and Walking Ballista over the Mardu Vehicles options in those respective categories.

That said… my assertion that WoTC development makes very few obvious mistakes was rather undermined by Sam Stoddard’s admission that development completely missed the Felidar Guardian/Saheeli Rai interaction. Yes, CopyCat fell flat at the Pro Tour so perhaps development dodged a bullet. Or perhaps, like the Aetherworks decks in previous standard, CopyCat will just go into hiding for a while, to burst back into a changed meta that won’t be quite so hostile to it. Either way, the power level of CopyCat is so high that Stoddard’s admission is truly very troubling for those of us, like myself, that are generally sanguine about WoTC RD’s capabilities.

So what does this all mean? Perhaps we need to wait and see. The single-deck-dominated Pro Tour meta is certainly troubling and created one of the worst Top 8 viewing experiences in recent memory. On the other hand, that dominant deck was not CopyCat, and it’s not impossible for a relatively stale Pro Tour metagame to eventually create a diverse standard metagame. Will Mardu Vehicles stay on top now that it’s public enemy number 1? And if it doesn’t, does that just mean that CopyCat is broken after all? I will be very interested to find out.

I hope everyone who participated had fun playing the prediction game and following the Pro Tour. Keep your eyes peeled for future events of this nature for Pro Tour Amonkhet. (Or leave your email address so I can let you know about the next one!)

But Wait, Who Won?

Oh yeah, there’s the little matter of the Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora I promised to send the winner. Congratulations to the winner of the Pro Tour Aether Revolt Metagame Prediction Game: “M” from New York. M had close to the theoretical maximum-scoring ballot. These were the picks of the winning ballot:

Pick 5 Monocolored Cards	Pick 1 Gold Card	Pick 1 Colorless Card
Felidar Guardian, Metallic Rebuke, Fatal Push, Shock, Rishkar, Peema Renegade	Winding Constrictor	Heart of Kiran

Looking at the top-scoring submissions, they all shared many of the same “probably strong” cards. There was a cluster of leaders that established an advantage by picking the undervalued Rishkar, and M opened a gap on the rest of the field by taking Metallic Rebuke over Disallow. As discussed above, the greater splashability of Metallic Rebuke led to its inclusion in many Mardu Vehicles sideboards, pushing it over the top in this Pro Tour.

The only way for M to have improved on the winning submission theoretically would have been to swap Felidar Guardian for Greenbelt Rampager, which would have marginally improved the score by just 1 point.

Here’s what M had to say about his picks:

1. Felidar Guardian. This one was pretty obvious. Give the masses a splinter twin and so shall they go forth and abuse.

2. Metallic Rebuke. Basically a mana leak in most decks, something standard has been clamoring for for quite some time. Probably just a strict upgrade to already played cards like spell shrivel or revolutionary rebuff.

3. Fatal Push. Many a nay-sayer advocated that this was made for modern and legacy, and wouldn't impact standard nearly as much. Well that was obviously wrong. The sheer power level of this card is off the charts, especially against the top tier decks of the current format. Nice spaceship you got there, its a shame if some spartan king shoved it into a pit.

4. Shock. Another obvious pick due to interaction with saheeli-cat combo, however this card overperformed further with double duty as additional fatal push copies in some matchups.

5. Rishkar, Peema Renegade. I'll be honest this is one of my favorite cards in the set. Obvious snake synergies aside, its pure value and mana ramp all in one bundled up package.

6. Winding Constrictor. What happens when you put a hardened scales effect on a 2/3 body for 2 mana? An entire deck archetype thats what. As previously mentioned, its best friends with Rishkar, and also finally gave verdurous gearhulk the spotlight it very much deserved.

7. Heart of Kiran. Ban smuggler's copter they said. Vehicles will be fair again they said. The format will be more diverse they said. I guess there's one downfall: dies to king leonidas?

Congrats to M on his win!

If you're interested in staying in touch and participating in future free games like this one, leave your email address. I'll only use email addresses collected this way to notify you when I create a Pro Tour Prediction Game.

The Community's Predictions (So Far) for Pro Tour AER

A few days ago I challenged the community to prove how good they were at identifying broken Magic cards by predicting the metagame of PT Aether Revolt, with a free duel deck up as a prize. After nearly 300 entries, let’s take a look at the results so far.

If you would like to play the prediction game before reading this summary of responses so far, go here. Entries will be open for about another day until StarCity begins broadcasting their Standard Open.

Top 8 Predictions

Let’s start by looking at the tiebreaker questions. These are questions I added to the survey to break any ties that could occur if there was a tie in the scoring on the card-by-card predictions. Unlike the main ballot, which asked about the best constructed decks (7+ wins), the tiebreaker section sought predictions about the Top 8 decks only. Also, these questions were optional, so some respondents left these questions blank.

The community predicts a mean of 4.48 unique archetypes in the top 8, with a mode of 5. This would make for a reasonably diverse top 8, but I think the community actually isn’t optimistic enough here. In the past, we’ve seen that even PTs which inaugurated relatively stale Standard seasons (such as PT SOI) had diverse top 8s, due to the early state of the metagame, the inclusion of limited rounds confounding the constructed results, and the sheer skill of certain top players. (Seriously, how many people built that middling Seasons Past deck because Jon Finkel is a beast?) My personal over/under on number of Top 8 archetypes would have been set at 5.5.

Here things get pretty interesting. White and Blue together combine for nearly 2/3rds of the responses here. This makes sense as those colors represent a number of archetypes (Various combos, Tempo/Flash, Control) that can be expected to put players into the Top 8.

I still remember how last year, everyone was all talking about how Magic was all about creatures now and Green with all the high value creatures was just too good and Blue is always going to suck. Or how the year before that people were wondering if maybe RDW was always just going to be the right deck to bring to Pro Tours because it seemed to always feast on the inchoate PT metagames. The lesson here is to remember that WoTC likes to constantly mix things up in Standard and that the pendulum swings around by design.

Mean here is 2.67, which seems reasonable to me just based on my gut impression of past Pro Tours. More and more, we are seeing “stacked PT T8s” reminding us that Magic is at the end of the day a game of skill. Yes, you always need a bit of luck to Top 8, but over and over again we’ve seen how the consistently good players are more likely to put themselves in a position to benefit from that luck.

I made a small mistake on this question and failed to include an option for 0 first time top 8s, which likely skews the results a little. If this question is needed to break a tie, I will be giving the win to the respondent with the answer closest to the true number.

Ok, now it’s time to look at some cards. On the survey I segregated the colorless cards, the monocolored cards, and the gold cards. This was so that cards that could go into any colored deck wouldn't be compared against cards that could only go into decks of specific colors.

Colorless Cards

Walking Ballista is the favorite here, but Heart of Kiran and Aethersphere Harvester aren’t far behind.

Metallic Mimic and Inspiring Statuary come in as dark horse picks among the colorless cards.

These picks are all fairly conventional. In fact, as of this writing, the ranking of the top 4 colorless rares in the survey perfectly correspond with their ranking by market price! (As a Mythic, Heart of Kiran’s greater scarcity of course throws off this pattern.)

Gold Cards

Winding constrictor’s combo potential made it by far the community pick. Oath of Ajani is a distant second.

Monocolored Cards

And finally, we have the biggest chunk of the survey, the monocolored cards. Each submission picked 5 cards, distributed as the respondent desired among the different colors (ie, it’s a valid strategy to stack up on a single color’s cards if you anticipate that color to truly be that strong in PT AER.) There are too many cards here to list, so the table below is all the cards with >20 selections.

The Copycat hype is real. Felidar Guardian was a clear top pick here and frankly, the only top pick that is potentially truly “broken.”

The next top 3 selections were strong answers that have a very good chance of being staples in the format, but aren’t going to be format-destroying cards anytime soon. Sure, we know that Shock is a good card that will probably see quite a bit of play. But we also know it’s probably not a development mistake.

Rounding out the top 5 is another card with some brokenness potential. As both a Cryptolith Rites and a Travel Preparations on a stick, the community thinks Rishkar is a card with some upside.

There’s a natural tension to prediction games like this - to some extent, you can use the conventional wisdom as a guide to your picks. But if you hew too closely to conventional wisdom, then your submission won’t stick out from the crowd in any way and your chance of winning is lower. There is a long tail of dark horse picks among the submissions so far: many cards with 5-20 picks that I haven’t included in the chart above.

What it All Means

As a reminder, one of the objectives of this whole game is to resolve the question of whether or not the community is actually able to identify development mistakes better than the people who design the game, or if complaints about RnD’s incompetence are just hindsight bias. Here’s what I had to say in my post announcing the contest:

If I’m wrong, and there is an obvious development mistake, the community’s picks should concentrate into a few (<3) cards, and those cards should turn out to be OP. If the community’s picks are spread out among a lot of cards, and some of them do turn out to be OP - then I’m right, and there were no obvious development mistakes. If the community’s picks are concentrated into a few cards, and those cards do not turn out to be OP, then I’m still right, and there were still no obvious development mistakes, because the ones we thought were “obviously too good” turned out not to be.

I’m pretty sure I’m right, but hey—maybe you guys will prove me wrong.

Looking at the results so far, I would say the only cards the community has pegged as potential development mistakes are Felidar Guardian and Winding Constrictor. If CopyCat turns out to be a truly degenerate combo, or Winding Constrictor turns out to be oppressive, I think it would be fair to conclude the RnD missed some pretty “obvious” mistakes in this set.

It’s not too late to prove me wrong and win a Japanese Elspeth vs Kiora Duel Deck! The FREE prediction game is open until Starcity begins streaming its first Standard content, which will likely occur sometime on Saturday morning!