Mr. Menendian,
Show me where I say that 33 player tournaments are 'large scale' lol. You are apparently confusing my statement regarding the fact that I aggregate only 33+ player tournaments in my tournament stats as a definition of what constitutes large-scale. That's a pretty bad misreading of what I wrote.
Show me where you define what a LARGE TOURNAMENT IS.
Until my previous post, I don't.
Nor should I have to define what "large scale" tournament is. You are conflating the need to strictly define what something IS with knowing what it is not. It's more than a little bit ridiculous. There is a tremendous gap between what something is definitely not and what something is. That's like looking at a brown ball and asking me to explain why it's not blue and define blue. there is no need. It's only in the grey area that stricter definitions are needed.
Look at how this thing started:
@Stephen- I am forced to agree with Matt. You need to be as expansive and all inclusive as possible or not at all. If a deck like Elves has placed at large events as a Tier 3 metagame deck then it has still placed at those events and has a necessary cast of characters to make it a playable deck. You must have Heritige Druid in there to make the deck work so that should be on the list.
I mean, you included Sword of Fire and Ice as a Vintage Staple? C'mon. I've only ever seen that card in MUD and MUD is hardly played anymore with the resurgence of Null Rod.
That, and many of your numbers are skewed. When would a player play 3 Rebuild? 4 Tezzeret the Seeker? Were these numbers meant to represent the maximum number you'd see in a given deck? If so, you need to explain that.
I think that this list is a great start, but certainly needs some revising to illustrate the layout of Vintage past/present that I think you're going for. You need to be clear in how you define your selection process and then stick to that process. Right now I have no clue as to how you selected some of these cards.
-Storm
See text in bold.
It's pretty clear that Storm is making alot of assertions without really knowing the tournament data that well. For example, SOFI. Another, Elves.
My response:
@Stephen- I am forced to agree with Matt. You need to be as expansive and all inclusive as possible or not at all. If a deck like Elves has placed at large events as a Tier 3 metagame deck then it has still placed at those events and has a necessary cast of characters to make it a playable deck. You must have Heritige Druid in there to make the deck work so that should be on the list.
To my knowledge, Elves has never top8ed at a large event.
I mean, you included Sword of Fire and Ice as a Vintage Staple? C'mon. I've only ever seen that card in MUD and MUD is hardly played anymore with the resurgence of Null Rod.
SOFI is run in Mono Red Workshop decks, like the one that made top 8 at the ICBM Open Day 1 by Michael Morhing. It's really good.
Storm's response:
teel City tournament is not a large scale Vintage tournament. Storm said that it placed well in a large Vintage event. It did not.
Then I have a fundamental disagreement on:
a) what makes for a "Large-Scale" Vintage event
and
b) If "Large-Scale" needs to be say, 100 or more people, then it is not the only significant source of statistics of Vintage deck-building data.
The heart and soul of Vintage deck-innovation lies in any tournament that is 30+ players IMO and you are clearly leaving that out if you don't acknowledge Elves as an archetype. Tier 2 and Tier 3 decks are very important to consider in a comprehensive list of Vintage Playables because the Staples should be more obvious and there should be a more general consensus on that list (and it should be a pretty small list I think revolving around Pillars and their support elements).
-Storm
EDIT:
I'm not 100% sure on this but I think the NYSE I event where Elves T8ed was 30 + players or at least very close to 30 players. I think it's the responsibility of TO's to report accurately and frequently when events like this happen (kudos to Nick for being so good about that), but it is also the responsibility of statisticians to recognize them as statistically relevant.
My response:
This is not that difficult.
A 31 player event is not -- by any definition -- a large scale event.
However, I never implied -- even remotely, that large scale tournaments have to me more than 100 players. Show me where I used the word "100."
You realize that I keep track of Vintage tournament results in bimonthly articles. However, you'll also remember that I only aggregate tournaments of 33 players or more because they play 6 rounds of swiss and play a top 8. if you go back and read my first bimonthy report, I explained why. I will not waste time reiterating that here.
There is no need to define-large scale. It's pretty obvious why. Elves only Top 8 in the last 8 months was a 44 player tournament at Blue Bell. Blue Bell is a regional tournament, and 44 players is not, by any definition, 'large-scale.' Therefore, there is no need to define what a large-scale event is, since we can establish that Storm's original claim is wrong without a precise definition.
Do you see what he tries to do here? It's the same thing you do. He tries to create a false dichotomy by suggesting that if I am suggesting that a tournament needs to be 100 players to qualify as large scale then my list is silly because smaller tournaments matter.
Yet, what I pointed out was that lots of cards get on the list from doing well in smaller tournaments. I wasn't saying that Elves shouldnt be on the list because it didn't do well in a large scale event. My point was far more technical, and narrow: it was simply that Elves hasn't top8ed in a large-scale event, and that Storm was wrong about that.
However, even on lesser claims, such as doing well in mid-sized touraments, it's claim to viability/playability is precarious. It was borderline, as was Goblins. Because Goblins had 2 Top 8s in March/April and is more disruptive, I chose Goblins to include, but not Elves.
Context, prize support, attendance, breadth of draw, prestige, etc., all of these factors affect whether a tournament is large scale. It would be impossible to define precisely what a large-scale tournament is. A tournament of 60, with insane prize support, that draws from all over the US and Canada, like an SCG, is probably a large-scale event. A tournament with a 100 players is definitely a large scale event However, we certainly know what it is not. A 31 player tournament is not a large scale tournament.
It's crazy that I have to go through all of this to explain something that a good read would have caught on the first page of this thread.
You say you took your data from large tournaments,
I do? Where do I say that?
What I say is that I look at 33+ player tournament for Vintage data. That's not the same thing.
then you go on to say that you aggregate data for your bimonthly reports from tournaments that have thirty three or more players. You never defined what attendance constitutes a large tournament. The burden of clarity belongs to the writer, not the reader.
I was perfectly clear: Elves has never made a top 8 in a large scale event. What's unclear about it? This fact has absolutely nothing to do with my bimonthly metagame statistics. That's what's confusing you.
First, a 44 player tournament is not a large scale vintage event. Waterburies, Ovinogeddon, Vintage Champs, ICBM P9 Opens, SCG P9 Opens -- those are 'large scale' Vintage events.
Ah. Here it is. Several posts later. Again, my mistake. I mistook your meaning, and I apologize for that.
Apparently you have trouble reading.
Inappropriate, demeaning, and sir, quite frankly unnecessary. YOU are the one who was not clear about what constitutes a "large scale" vintage event until just above. Thank you for being unclear, insulting me for misreading, and then fixing your mistake.
There was no mistake. There was no need to specifically define what constitutes large scale when its clear and obvious to everyone that a 31 player tournament is not large scale.
That's like looking at a brown ball and asking me to explain why it's not blue. It's just unnecessary. It's obvious.
As for my tone, your tone was sarcastic and trying to be funny. You get what you asked for.
Secondly, I acknowledged in THIS THREAD that Elves had ONE top 8 in the last 7 months:
You did, and I commended you on that. I was unaware on what constituted a "large-scale" event. If you did not classify 33+ as large scale events, why bother to aggregate the data if the impact on such a list is negligible? Or, because it's a smaller event, it takes several of them to show the kind of results that you're looking for? This is understandable.
And making one top 8 -- in April -- is not really enough to warrant inclusion on this list. There is no recent evidence that Elves is viable in competitive Vintage. If a couple of Elves decks were to show up in my next Vintage Stats metagame analysis, I would rethink that conclusion because there would be evidence that its viable. 'Til that day...
Why bother making this statement if your point is that it was the Top 8 of an event that is not "large scale" and therefore doesn't warrant attention on your list?
See above.
That's a rhetorical question--I'm not going to argue semantics. So a strong showing in several smaller events--which ELVES has not done yet--will raise the bar. Now that I understand the difference in your terminology, I see your point, and I'm slightly inclined to agree. Thank you.
Your welcome.
Stephen, it seems like you're trying too hard to get every card here instead of every card in a playable deck. You've ended up generating a weird mix of historical and relevant data.
I see virtue in trying hard. not sure what 'too hard' means.
And for good reason. It hasn't made a top 8 in a 33+ player tournament in 6 months. There were two Goblins decks and only 1 Elves deck in the March/April data, and with the rise in Stax, I felt that Goblins was an overall better deck, although both Goblins and Elves sit on the very edge of a list like this. Since they were both on the fence, and given Goblins 1) more recent slightly better performance, 2) the recent goblin printings that have made it a stronger choice in Eternal formats generally, and 3) its historically vastly superior performance to Elves, particulary since those historical moments resemble the current metagame, I ultimately made a judgment call to include Goblins, but not Elves.
You include Goblins and not Elves even though Elves has put up similar results to Goblins, merely because Goblins is historically stronger.
I gave three reasons why I included Goblins cards but not Elves. Only half of one of them is because Goblins is historically stronger. Notice the caveat, that that historical moment (where Stax was on the rise, as it is now, constituting over 20% of the field) was a metagame where Goblins did well.
Similar problems arise with things like Diminishing Returns and Academy Rector. You include them because you call them Vintage playable, and they've seen play five years ago.
Not exactly. Both cards have seen more recently play, just not that much. Retruns shows up in a bunch of 2007 Ritual decks, 1 maindeck and 1 sb. Rector shows up in the same time period. There were some Rector decks in 2007 when Flash was errated.
But the only reason these cards pop up and Dream Halls doesn't seems to be because Dream Halls hasn't been in any T8s, for virtue of being restricted for all that time.
Kevin, you use alot of words like: 'merely,' 'only,' etc. Be careful. Those words have powerful semantic meaning that can easily make a statement untrue, even when your meaning is on target. That's not the "only" reason Dream Halls doesn't show up. I, personally, happen to think that Dream Halls is a terrible card. It's a fun card, but I think, objectively bad because it makes your opponent's spells free as well, and for a host of other reasons.
I think if you make a list like this, you either have to put your foot down and say "Rector-Tendrils just isn't playable." Because if you don't, you inevitably get criticized for not including every pet deck.
Again, I could just data-mine Top 8s, but then there would be no need for this article. You could just look at Morphling.de and that would be the end of the story. The value of a list like this is being slightly broader by including deck bulding components that could be useable in the near future. For example: I included In The Eye of Chaos because of its historical power from time to time. Someone mentioned Teferi's Realm. Realm is an amazing anti-Workshop sideboard card for narrow decks, like Doomsday, etc., since it takes all of the artifacts off the table in a deck that doesn't play with full Moxen. It's a very narrow, but potentially critical design tool for decks that might be played in the future or that someone might be interested in playing. Similarly, see Serenity. I almost included Seeds of Innocence, but cut it. My goal is to give folks cards that they may want to use, not simply cards that have strictly top8ed, otherwise the list is pointless, as you could just look at morphling.de and build your Vintage checklist.
