Metagame Snapshot

[Gekoratel]

Now that all of the results from Waterbury have been entered into the SCG database I thought I would take a chance to see how different decks faired.  The following is a list of the more popular decks and how well they performed.  I didn't take any decks that had less than 6 people playing them between day 1 and 2.  I tried to use the table feature but I couldn't figure it out, if someone cares to explain it I'll put the data in a table so its easier to read.

Deck              Played     Mean    Median       Highest Finish (D1/D2)
Gifts                  20         46         38.5                  1/4
Bomberman       17         70          71                  19/14
Pitch                 16          61         52.5                12/10
CS                    13         53          47                  11/1
UW Fish            12          53         47                   8/13
TMWA              12          88        87.5                 67/12
Oath                10           57        52.5                  5/26
TPS                 10           50        59.5                 39/2
Stax                  9           67         58                   21/17
BUW Fish           8           81        96.5                 92/23
T1T                  7           38          28                    9/11
Dry Slaver          7           24         30                    4/7
Manaless Ichorid 6          61          57                   26/31
Mana Ichorid      6           81         81                   24/22

I tried to post something similar to how Frank Karsten does his metagame shots on wizards because I find them to be very usefull.  Personally I was surprised by how many players choose Bomberman because in that past few major events it wasn't that popular.  The top three finishing decks were Gifts, T1T, and Dry Slaver.  The worst three were TMWA, UBW Fish, and Mana Ichorid.

[EDIT] I added best finish between both Day 1 and Day 2 because I think its useful to see what decks were able to Top 8 along with having decent average finishes.  As a sidenote the only players to take down top finish both days with the same deck were; Jeremiah Rudolph - Dry Slaver and Joe Davis - T1T.

[wethepeople]

Before several tournaments, I review various different tournament reports from nearby events, and find out a rough estimate of how much of what deck is being played. Seeing as I generally play Fish, this sort of scouting is crucial in deckbuilding, for me atleast.

I like that you made a table to display the data, it sure saved me a good amount of time from scrolling through the SCG pages. Just wondering, did you combine both day 1 and 2 together, or is this one of the two specific days?

I wonder why there were so few Ichorid players, only six for each build (one mana-less, one with mana). Maybe I can run less Tormod's Crypts now.

[Elric]

I like that you made a table to display the data, it sure saved me a good amount of time from scrolling through the SCG pages. Just wondering, did you combine both day 1 and 2 together, or is this one of the two specific days?

He has (if my mental math is right) 153 decks listed, the exact number of decks that were played on day 1, but since he specifically mentions excluding decks that were played by less than 6 people between day 1 and day 2, he must be excluding a number of decks.  That means that he must have used the results from both days.

I'm not sure if using day 1 and day 2 standings in the same table is going to be accurate since the days had different number of players.  Day 2 had 90 players while day 1 had 153 players, so any deck that was disproportionately played on day 2 will look better, and any deck that was disproportionately played on day 1 will look worse.  If you have totals for the number of decks played on each day, does the proportion of each deck played on each day look similar?

[Gekoratel]

I like that you made a table to display the data, it sure saved me a good amount of time from scrolling through the SCG pages. Just wondering, did you combine both day 1 and 2 together, or is this one of the two specific days?

I combined the two days together only taking decks that had at least 6 people playing them, theres a chance I may have missed a few decks that had 6-8 people playing them but I think I got them all.  The naming conventions are from SCG so if you were playing Cross Long it's TPS or Bill Cosby is T1T.

I'm not sure if using day 1 and day 2 standings in the same table is going to be accurate since the days had different number of players.  Day 2 had 90 players while day 1 had 153 players, so any deck that was disproportionately played on day 2 will look better, and any deck that was disproportionately played on day 1 will look worse.  If you have totals for the number of decks played on each day, does the proportion of each deck played on each day look similar?

Your correct that it will favor decks that had a lot more people playing them day 2 but for most of the decks there seemed to be a very even mix between both days with more being played day 1 because it was a larger tourny.

[wethepeople]

I like that you made a table to display the data, it sure saved me a good amount of time from scrolling through the SCG pages. Just wondering, did you combine both day 1 and 2 together, or is this one of the two specific days?

I combined the two days together only taking decks that had at least 6 people playing them, theres a chance I may have missed a few decks that had 6-8 people playing them but I think I got them all.

I personally think it would have been better if you did two different tables. I understand that, that would require a little more work, but to make things more accurate, it seems best that you should treat the two days as two entirely different tournaments. Reason being is that there were a lot of new players day two set aside from day one, as well as ones that did not participate in the second day. More importantly, there were several who appeared on both days, making it seem like there were twice the amount of decks in one tournament, simply because that particular person played the same list both days.

Regardless of that little nitpick, I still appreciate that you did this.

[Gekoratel]

I was really considering doing two different tables but I was afriad that the number of decks on the list would be pretty small so people who were interested in decks other than Gifts - Stax wouldn't get to see how they all did.  Maybe I could do something where I take the Median finish of the deck in both days and add them up then divide it by 2.  I'm trying to think of a way to have a 14th place finish day 1 be equivalent to an 8th place day 2, etc.  The one idea that I have is to take all of the D2 finishes and mulitple them by 1.7 before adding it to the mean and median values because this will stretch the finish to match the Day 1 but since its not a function there will be some amount of error doing it this way.  I'm not a math major so if anyone has any ideas I'd be more than happy to listen.  If someone can think up a good way I'll add an extra row to my original post.

[desolutionist]

Uh so you listed numberOfPlayed and the MeanOfFinalPlace?

[Gekoratel]

Played = Number of times the deck was played between the two days
Mean = Mean finish of the deck between both days
Median = Median finish of the deck between both days

[LotusHead]

I don't know that any of these stats mean anything!

Except the # of deck archetypes played.

[OfficeShredder]

I don't know that any of these stats mean anything!

Except the # of deck archetypes played.

Look at gifts, then look at bomberman, then tell me it doesn't show you anything about how well the decks do in the field that showed up at waterbury

[Engine_number_9]

I don't know that any of these stats mean anything!

Except the # of deck archetypes played.

Look at gifts, then look at bomberman, then tell me it doesn't show you anything about how well the decks do in the field that showed up at waterbury

I'm in the LotusHead-camp on this one. It's very hard to conclude anything from these numbers. The large difference in mean finish between Gifts and Bomberman can be explained by many things like for example Gifts being a better deck (which may or may not be true), better players choosing to play Gifts more often than Bomberman (which may or may not be true) etc. Even if one figures out a plausible explanation to why Gifts is making a better showing the numbers available are so small that you can't really conclude anything from them.

[sa17dk]

What the heck happened to SS?

[Vegeta2711]

What the heck happened to SS?

Metagame deck that nobody has bothered to update for a new / different metagame. That really is the easiest explanation for it.

[Gekoratel]

SS was one of the many decks that did not have a total of 6 people playing it between both Day 1 and Day2.  I was a little surprised to see that there weren't 6 Dragon players because in my local scene there is usually 2-3 people running it out of 25.