Interesting experiment

[mrieff]

A while back at an Extended premier touney (Pro Tour or GP, can't remember which one in particular) Wizards conducted an interesting experiment.
After each match, is was recorded whether the winner had also won the die role. This was to find out how much of an advantage it was to play first. The final conclusion was that playing first only increased your chanches of winning by a few percent (I believe that starting meant around 53% chanche of winning).

Vintage still has the reputation among ignorants as being very die role dependent. Playing first=winning, "cause everybody wins at turn 1 anyway".
To repeat the above experiment in a number of T1 tourneys would help to destroy or confirm this reputation. Moreover, I suggest to expand the experiment and to record for each game whether the player won who started the game or not.

The information we would recieve would be very valuable. When you add this up for several tourneys, You'd get quite a close estimate of how big of an advantage beginning really is in Vintage. It would provide insight in how large the luck factor really is.
If enough tournament organizers could do so within the next month(s) it would give us enough of a statistical sample to work with.

This will not be a lot of work for tournament organizers/judges. When players come to the PC to tell their final score, the judge askes how many games were won by the starting player. He has 2 sheets of paper in front of him, named: "games won by drawing player" and "games won by playing player". The judge scores the amount of games on the appropiate paper, and adds them up after the tourney. TMD could host a threat where everybody could communicate their scores. After enough tourneys have been entered, we add them up and see the result.

Interesting?

[Machinus]

At this point in time, the die roll seems to affect prison decks the most, and other decks not nearly as heavily. I would have liked to see this kind of data in the past, when decks like academy and long were dominant.

Any intelligent magic player that doesn't play type 1 realizes that the turn 1 myth is just something that is possible and happens occasionally, and not something we let run rampant (the dci helps somewhat).

[Tubebar]

WOTC should do this at Gencon, and post the results on their site. That way the info has the highest amount of credibility.

[Rico Suave]

Vintage still has the reputation among ignorants as being very die role dependent.

I find this statement very ironic.

Going first in Extended may not mean much, but going first in T1 is huge.  I think it would be unwise to call people ignorant just because they see the importance of winning the die-roll in a format with Mana Drain, Moxen, and other game-breaking cards.

[Dr. Sylvan]

I have suggested this in the recent past and I think it would be a very beneficial exercise. I strongly encourage tournament organizers to start doing this.