[Premium Article] Stax Dissected

[Smmenen]

http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/10983.html

From July through October, Stax did pretty well in Vintage. Not only was it the most predominant deck in Top 8s, it was by far the most successful. Although Stax was only a fifth of Top 8s, it comprised 40% of all tournament winning decks. Therefore, I decided it was time to dissect this archetype and see just what makes them tick.

Enjoy. 

[Moxlotus]

Are your articles on Gifts and Oath going to be written in a similar style?

[Vegeta2711]

Terrible article. I blame the premise for this one though. Nothing new, nothing intresting and nothing funny = the lose..

As a piece of data, it's nice for a once-through. But that's all it is.

[pyr0ma5ta]

Don't listen to Veggie.  He's just bitter.  I bet the article is amazing.  I don't have premium, so I wouldn't know, but it's a Smmenen article, it's bound to be insightful.  Sigh, time to shell out for a premium I guess...

[unknown.root]

All i can say is Information overload .. .  there is so much to read and re-read. thanks steve as a stax player the stats will be very useful. i'm just thankful college is over for the semister so i have the free time to study this article.

[benthetenor]

I kinda agree with Vegeta, but it's certainly not Smemmen's fault. An article based on the dissection of data points is always going to be interesting, but not groin-grabbingly interesting, if you follow me. Phil did a pretty good job, and Steve's doing admirably, as well, but in the end it's a lot of numbers without enough funny words in between. It's a service that has to be offered, and many thanks to Steve for biting the bullet and doing it for us.

I did find it interesting that the median Uba Stax deck was Vroman's initial (winning) offering.

[sean1i0]

Personally, I really enjoyed it.  Of course, I am a math major, so the fact that an article so full of numbers would appeal to me isn't that surprising.  Mathematical analysis of a situation is almost always the most inciteful.  Anyway, steve, thanks for the good read and the information!

[Dozer]

As a piece of data, it's nice for a once-through.

I like these composite lists a lot as a starting point for deck analysis. They give a very condensed view on one single deck, which makes it clear what the majority of players thinks makes the deck tick. It's not very interesting to read by itself, mainly numbers, but the data is important to me. If something like this is compiled regularly (say, every six months or every year, even), it is much easier to identify trends and changes. That's the use I get out of this analysis.

I'd love to see one for Gifts. I think the split will be even bigger, and the composite list even weirder.

Dozer

[Smmenen]

Are your articles on Gifts and Oath going to be written in a similar style?

Is that a good or a bad thing?  I'm amenable to changing the style.  But I did this exactly like Phil's articles on TPS and Oath. 

As for the criticism that there is nothing new or interesting, I beg to differ.

I found the Composite Traditional Stax SB to be very interesting - and the traditional STax composite deck to be surprising as well in that Thirst and Tangle Wire were found in most of the winning lists. 

However, and I think this is important, Vintage suffers from a lack of vital information at the moment.

There may be nothing ground breaking in these dissecting the archetype articles, but they do show us trends, and more  importantly, they consolidate lots and lots of information in one place so that we can all agree on basic assumptions.

That whole 5 color stax thread can be greatly aided by this article in showing what has worked and what doesn't.

Remember I started the thread: does vintage suffer from a disensus on basic propositions?  These articles provide a much needed foundation for rebuilding consensus on basic propositions.

Look at the number of Vintage articles in the last month - I have written over half of them and pretty soon, I will be the sole Vintage writer. 

I want to stimulate interest in Vintage again and get peopole thinking about it.  These articles aren't written for the expert player per se - but they are designed to be read by everyone - esp. people who aren't experts on Vintage.

The hope is that experts will take away some nuggest of information, as I did when I was analyzing the data, but that beginners and intermediate players will learn alot. 

[Klep]

This may not tell us anything particularly new, but you have to know where you are before you can move forward.  It's a good article to have available for people intent on further developing Stax.

[ChemEng]

On average, the average is wrong.

This truism applies to decklists as well. That aside, it would be interesting to see how individual cards are correlated in the data sets you used. That is, in archetype A if Card A is played, then there is a positive/no/negative relationship with Card B. This could be a much stronger tool for determining a representative framework for an archetype than the arbitrary "number of card" analysis. It could also be useful for examining the "free" slots in a deck that are currently available...

Something to think about...

[Smmenen]

How would I do that? 

I need feedback people! 

I'm going to do an article like this on Oath and Gifts.  I need practical feedback that I can apply. 

[rvs]

I haven't read this one (yet), but I know I always liked your matchup analysis best, and how certain hands play out, and why. If anything, you should include that, or devote entire articles to it.

[Smmenen]

The problem is that, frankly, there are fewer and fewer archetypes and each archetype has like 5 variations now.  That's why I said that "rogue" in vintage means playing a variant of a major archetype.  Instead of innovating new decks, people are tweaking old ones.  Which Oath?  Which Slaver?  Which Gifts?  Which Stax?  Uba Stax?  mono colored? two colored?  Five colored?  REBS sb?  How many rings? 

If I were to play Control Slaver versus Stax, it would be useless because a few changes to either deck could swing the matchup - changes that many players will implement. 

[Vegeta2711]

Are your articles on Gifts and Oath going to be written in a similar style?

Is that a good or a bad thing?  I'm amenable to changing the style.  But I did this exactly like Phil's articles on TPS and Oath. 

As for the criticism that there is nothing new or interesting, I beg to differ.

I found the Composite Traditional Stax SB to be very interesting - and the traditional STax composite deck to be surprising as well in that Thirst and Tangle Wire were found in most of the winning lists. 

Look at the number of Vintage articles in the last month - I have written over half of them and pretty soon, I will be the sole Vintage writer. 

You know why[/]i?

[Smmenen]

No tell me

[Moxlotus]

Is that a good or a bad thing?  I'm amenable to changing the style.  But I did this exactly like Phil's articles on TPS and Oath. 
 

Oh, I don't mind what style.  I was kinda shocked at first because I thought it would be closer to one of your primer or miniprimer articles, like Meandeck Gifts-I forgot entirely that Phil wrote these before.  Just wasn't expecting the style change.

I'd like to see the articles on Gifts especially, because that seems like it would come up with a pretty interesting composite list.  I'm gonna guess Oath will be kinda like Stax-with 2 distinct variations.

[vroman]

the composite list concept was new to me. interesting

data is better than theory.

[Vegeta2711]

No tell me

Wasn't a rethorical question.  I only know why I stopped. Heh.

[Smmenen]

I'm not complaining mind you.  I'm comfortable with that as long as I put out a steady stream of good content.

Looking at the Oath data, it may be a waste of time to do a piece like this on Oath.  I'll run the data and see if anything useful is revealed, otherwise I may just talk about Trends in Oath generally instead of doing a composite data analysis. 

I think the Gifts data will be revealing though. 

Any other requests/Recommendations? 

I will continue to do my big primer type of articles, but the decks of that sort that I would write about are still in development. 

[Marton]

it was fairly predictible that the uba stax composite list looked very close to 'the original' because the variations of uba stax were all based on the same decklist.

[xrizzo]

I want to stimulate interest in Vintage again and get peopole thinking about it.  These articles aren't written for the expert player per se - but they are designed to be read by everyone - esp. people who aren't experts on Vintage.

I support this 100%.  I think the article is valuable, and at this point, I haven't seen anyone else step up to the plate and put ideas out there.  I applaud you for picking up the slack others left behind.

As someone more familiar with Oath, I would be very interested to read an article after you took a 2nd hard look at the archtype, formed some conclusions with data, (what worked, what didn't summary) and generally provide your insight on the deck.  I guess only you, after your investigation, will know if there is enough content to warrant a full article.

Thanks again.

[Kasuras]

The problem is that, frankly, there are fewer and fewer archetypes and each archetype has like 5 variations now.  That's why I said that "rogue" in vintage means playing a variant of a major archetype.  Instead of innovating new decks, people are tweaking old ones.  Which Oath?  Which Slaver?  Which Gifts?  Which Stax?  Uba Stax?  mono colored? two colored?  Five colored?  REBS sb?  How many rings? 

If I were to play Control Slaver versus Stax, it would be useless because a few changes to either deck could swing the matchup - changes that many players will implement. 

I did not read the article, but I still would like to respond to the bolded line; I hope that quoting this out of the article's context is fine.


The first note I would like to place at the line is that I doubt whether it is 100% true; I do believe that the data from our own little Europe and Canada would say otherwise. All the new decks we see are certainly not variants of established decks: the Loam decks, Koen's Confidant deck, aggro-based dragon, to name a few.

On the other hand, I do think that the trend you describe is happening indeed up to a certain level and that we are seeing more and more different versions of the mentioned decks, yet dismissing new deck ideas in t8s due to that would be wrong. I don't know whether you were implicating that though.


As said however, I do agree with you that there is a trend going on. I wonder how this has or should have impact on the discussion going on though; if all new card choices in established decks are metagame calls or "teamtech" and the same holds true for new deck ideas, what do we have left to discuss? Go back to the HulkSmash era when the most important topic was the 3 Cunning Wish vs. 2 Pernicious Deed debate?

[Smmenen]

Name me one new major archetype in the last 6 months. 

Dutch Oath?  GWS Oath?  Gifts-Oath?  All new Oath variants - one is a gift variant too.

Koen's confident deck?  That's a straight up regular Ritual combo deck with 4 Confidents instead of some other cards, like say Grim Tutors.  Grim Long?  My deck is just new Long.  I have no idea what you are talking about when you say Aggro Dragon.  But Cerebral Assassin decks with Dragon combo included are not new. 

Most of the Loam decks are old decks too: using Madness, Oath, or some other well established archetype. 

There hasn't been a new archtype since Gifts, really, that I know of. 

[Machinus]

There hasn't been a new archtype since Gifts, really, that I know of. 

Perhaps we shouldn't expect to find these regularly. Before Mirrodin the incidence of new archetypes was very low. Mirrodin happened, and then we got lucky by receiving orchard and gift out of champions. Type 1 is still interesting and fun without two new decks a year. Right?