[Free Podcast] So Many Insane Plays Podcast Episode 46: Champs Preview

[CHA1N5]

http://mtgcast.com/mtgcast-podcast-shows/active-podcast-shows/so-many-insane-plays/so-many-insane-plays-podcast-episode-46-2015-vintage-championship-preview

Kevin Cron and Steve Menendian preview the 2015 Vintage Championship.

Contact us at @ManyInsanePlays on Twitter or e-mail us at SoManyInsanePlaysPodcast@gmail.com.

0:01:00: Dragons of Tarkir Report Card Corrections
0:02:35: Old School Tournament during Eternal Weekend
0:05:00: Recent Paper Tournament Results
0:17:00: Recent Online Tournament Results
0:30:00: Metagame Trends
1:02:00: Vintage Champs Predictions

[Varal]

Thanks for the podcast. This going to be awesome to listen while driving to the tournament even if it doesn't last 7 hours like the last podcast.

[ajfirecracker]

You guys are right to single out Montolio - he is a menace.
He has been playing Shops since Vintage came out online frequently and with great skill.
I know from playing and chatting with him that he has very high standards for his play and you see that in his results.

I think I have to add a slight correction - I don't think Thomas Dixon has played the Blue Dredge deck at all, although I do see some results from him with Cavern of Souls / Humans sideboards (primarily featuring Mayor of Avabruck).
I'm pretty sure you're talking about my results with the deck, which I've discussed here:
http://www.eternalcentral.com/the-dredge-of-glory-an-introduction-to-manaless-dredge-in-vintage/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1v-yw0E5oY
http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=46708.msg664639#msg664639

I know for sure I've had some number of Blue Dredge 4-0s that have been omitted due to the single-event-per-day thing.  I think I also had one without the pitch counterspells, but I'm back on those now. I also know for sure that Shops players have had results omitted - so it might actually be even worse than 50% Workshops.

The comparison to Modern was apropos. In that format, there are a huge number of powerful strategies that face very narrow answers. Spellskite is probably the broadest sideboard card in the format and it only hard counters a single plan from a single deck (Splinter Twin). I don't think a slow-ish Vintage control deck has the actual sideboard space to address Shops + Dredge + Dredge transformational sideboards. If we get to the point where normal "fair" decks have to pick and choose which matchups to forfeit, it may push typical blue decks back to the "broken" strategies or perhaps diminish their presence in the format entirely.

Edit: How many times did you say the word "Storm" in that whole podcast? I think one?

[yugular]

Great podcast as usual! I have been testing the Dredge deck with transformational sideboard in mtgo and its a fun deck to pilot, but requires some practice and skill.

[Flash_Hulk]

I to had a slew of 4-0's with Jeskai Mentor, MUD, and Dredge in this time frame that were not reported. It would be nice if all results were posted by WotC.

I would also put a little more value on the 3-1 performances of Vintage daily regulars, as there are a core group of very good players who put up results with multiple archetypes. I would also argue the 3-1 data is just as important, as there is no applicable top 8 metric.
(In addition, see below)

Another thing to keep in mind with MTGO results data is the preponderance of 3-0's "splitting" (one taking the majority of packs in exchange for a concession, the other getting the QP points). This is very common on MTGO.

I would also agree Montolio is a Shop's beast. Very experienced, tough, tough opponent.

[CHA1N5]

I really wish we could get all of the Daily results from WotC, so that we could give a maximally clear picture.  Thanks to those of you adding your own (missing) results to this thread.

[youhavenogame]

You guys are right to single out Montolio - he is a menace.
He has been playing Shops since Vintage came out online frequently and with great skill.
I know from playing and chatting with him that he has very high standards for his play and you see that in his results.

I would also agree Montolio is a Shop's beast. Very experienced, tough, tough opponent.

A competitive player, a smart deckbuilder, and, even more important, a good friend and awesome sports. I even have a video to prove my point! video removed -- TAL

[ajfirecracker]

Another thing to keep in mind with MTGO results data is the preponderance of 3-0's "splitting" (one taking the majority of packs in exchange for a concession, the other getting the QP points). This is very common on MTGO.

This is a great point as well. It seems like the data woes just do not end. I've both given my opponents the 4-0 and taken it myself in various MOCS seasons.

[Bluediamonds]

Montolio has been playing shops since 'Classic' MTGO format =)

[wappla]

great podcast that overcomes WoTC's self-inflicted data paucity. It's hard to say how well decks are performing in dailies if only the winning decks are reported and some of the winning decks at that.

[GrandpaBelcher]

great podcast that overcomes WoTC's self-inflicted data paucity. It's hard to say how well decks are performing in dailies if only the winning decks are reported and some of the winning decks at that.

That's what I keep thinking about too. It would be pretty easy for Wizards to manipulate the perception of the format by cherry-picking results. Not that they would do that. Right?

[Will]

This was well worth the listen, thanks for making this!

I think there's going to be 412 players this year for Vintage Champs.

Part of me feels like you focus too much on who won each individual tournament rather than the Top8 or Top 16 trend compared to the number of people playing a specific deck, but I don't think there's really anything wrong with this approach as the deck that won was the one that bested the other top finishers.

[The Atog Lord]

Verbal warning to youhavenogame for posting a video of over an hour of the same 5-second scene in order to insult someone.

[brianpk80]

Thanks for the podcast, Kevin and Stephen, and the clarifications on the successes of Dragon of Tarkir.  The predictions for the metagame and T8 breakdown sound reasonable.  There was an error on tcdecks itself regarding the 35 person event in July which listed the Top 8 in random order and misidentified the winner as Gush storm.  It was won by (Dragonlord) Oath. 

I wonder if this year we may see a RW hatebear deck do very well.  The archetype has had a revival with many successes by Josh Potucek and is a top candidate for budget decks.  From experience, these decks can be an absolute nightmare to play against and have only gotten more obnoxious with new printings. 

[diophan]

Thanks for the podcast Kevin and Steve.

This was well worth the listen, thanks for making this!

Part of me feels like you focus too much on who won each individual tournament rather than the Top8 or Top 16 trend compared to the number of people playing a specific deck, but I don't think there's really anything wrong with this approach as the deck that won was the one that bested the other top finishers.

I agree with you, but I'm almost sure the reason is that very few TOs post overall metagame numbers.

I will also echo that Wizards' policy of partial publishing and that a few very good players (Montolio, Rich, others) can skew the data so heavily makes the data less useful.

EDIT: As far as parts of your modo methodology that you can control, I think the 3-1's should count. I suspect it's accurate to say that for your paper results, most of the tournaments are <=5 rounds. In a 4 round tournament 3-1 should top 8 and 3-1-1 has a good shot in a 5 round tournament. Unfortunately the DE change makes this discussion irrelevant.

[Islandswamp]

Montolio has been nothing but nice to me. A few weeks ago, we met in the undefeated bracket, I was playing Rich Shay's build of Grixis Therapy and I was on a tear. I had to work in the morning and it was late, so I asked if he liked to split. He gave me the extra pack, and said he needed the QP. I don't play enough Events to bother trying to collect them, so that seemed fine. I kind of wish that I had tried for the 4-0 instead of splitting with him, as I would like to know if I could have won. Plus, 3-1 results aren't viewed as being worth much.

I beat two shops decks prior to facing him, and I wasn't exactly confident in winning three in a row though, because as I told him that night, he is actually good with the deck  

I know that 3-1's aren't that great, but it isn't like I get to play more than one a week most weeks. And losses can be attributed to a variety of things. Besides, I know that at least one recent 4-0 with Oath included the Oath pilot getting an "opponent didn't show up" bye round.

Anyway, I love what I've heard so far. I still need to finish the show.
All the talk of Eternal Weekend makes me so jealous!    It seems like a Vintage Woodstock of sorts. I wish so badly that I could enjoy this game with paper cards, it's a shame that I don't have that option. Especially since I can't seem to make myself want to even play in the 3 Round DE's with almost no prizes.

[Chubby Rain]

Good podcast. I appreciate that you (Steve and Kevin) revisited DTK and called attention to the Dragonlord duo. They do certainly have a role in a couple of Vintage decks and exemplify the diversity of the Vintage format.

Regarding the discussion about the increased "linearity" of the format, I think a better term is "polarity". Playing against Gush based decks incentivizes lower land counts, cantrips, and conditional counters whereas Shops incentivizes higher land counts, fewer cantrips, and obviously zero Missteps, Flusterstorms, and Pyroblasts. The presence of Oath leads many players to opt for Grafdigger's Cage and Containment Priest but Dredge is well prepared to dispatch these hate pieces or circumvent them with transformational sideboards. It's very difficult to take a balanced approach to this metagame and pairings seem more important than they have been previously.

[Smmenen]

Thanks for the podcast Kevin and Steve.

This was well worth the listen, thanks for making this!

Part of me feels like you focus too much on who won each individual tournament rather than the Top8 or Top 16 trend compared to the number of people playing a specific deck, but I don't think there's really anything wrong with this approach as the deck that won was the one that bested the other top finishers.

I agree with you, but I'm almost sure the reason is that very few TOs post overall metagame numbers.

I will also echo that Wizards' policy of partial publishing and that a few very good players (Montolio, Rich, others) can skew the data so heavily makes the data less useful.

EDIT: As far as parts of your modo methodology that you can control, I think the 3-1's should count. I suspect it's accurate to say that for your paper results, most of the tournaments are <=5 rounds. In a 4 round tournament 3-1 should top 8 and 3-1-1 has a good shot in a 5 round tournament. Unfortunately the DE change makes this discussion irrelevant.

In my previous metagame reports, I only included tournament data for tournaments with at least 6 swiss rounds, so that a deck had to have at least 4 wins to appear in the data.  That's why I really like 4-0 as the cut off - it's equivalent to making top 8 in a 36 player event. 

[oshkoshhaitsyosh]

Thanks for the podcast, Kevin and Stephen, and the clarifications on the successes of Dragon of Tarkir.  The predictions for the metagame and T8 breakdown sound reasonable.  There was an error on tcdecks itself regarding the 35 person event in July which listed the Top 8 in random order and misidentified the winner as Gush storm.  It was won by (Dragonlord) Oath. 

I wonder if this year we may see a RW hatebear deck do very well.  The archetype has had a revival with many successes by Josh Potucek and is a top candidate for budget decks.  From experience, these decks can be an absolute nightmare to play against and have only gotten more obnoxious with new printings. 

Aw hey, thanks for the name drop buddy

[brianpk80]

Aw hey, thanks for the name drop buddy

I didn't even think of it as that, just stating facts. 

[MtgVector]

Great podcast as always!

I thought your analysis on the mtgo metagame was interesting and I would like to add my own thoughts:

Through my years of playing online, I've noticed that the metagame tends to gravitate towards winning strategies more so than paper tournaments. This may be in part due to the sheer competitive nature of online players, but I think more importantly due to the flexibility and fluidity of online playing, one can easily switch from one deck to another with the touch of a button. This is a little bit more cumbersome on paper, which many times implies players tend to stick to one or two decks. This may be exacerbated in Vintage (and Legacy) by the fact that the paper version of the cards are so expensive. What all this means is that online players are less loyal to an specific deck, and more loyal to winning strategies. To further this notion, keep in mind that -again- the nature of the magic online allows for the secondary market to be quite fluid, and it's very easy to sell cards to acquire other cards, with minimal cost. Finally, to add to this point, online cards are way cheaper than paper, and so it is not uncommon for players to be able to play "any deck".

All the above points could translate into the conclusion that Workshop-based decks are simply the winning-est strategy, and a lot of it is reflected by the upward convergence from the proportion of 3-1s to 4-0s.

Regarding Kevin's point of 'normalizing' Montolio's results: I don't understand why his results warrant normalization, he just so happens to be a very proficient player; on the contrary, the fact that he has consistently done so well speaks of not only his personal skills, but also of the power of the deck to overcome the inherent variance within the game.

[Will]

Thanks for the podcast Kevin and Steve.

This was well worth the listen, thanks for making this!

Part of me feels like you focus too much on who won each individual tournament rather than the Top8 or Top 16 trend compared to the number of people playing a specific deck, but I don't think there's really anything wrong with this approach as the deck that won was the one that bested the other top finishers.

I agree with you, but I'm almost sure the reason is that very few TOs post overall metagame numbers.

I will also echo that Wizards' policy of partial publishing and that a few very good players (Montolio, Rich, others) can skew the data so heavily makes the data less useful.

EDIT: As far as parts of your modo methodology that you can control, I think the 3-1's should count. I suspect it's accurate to say that for your paper results, most of the tournaments are <=5 rounds. In a 4 round tournament 3-1 should top 8 and 3-1-1 has a good shot in a 5 round tournament. Unfortunately the DE change makes this discussion irrelevant.

In my previous metagame reports, I only included tournament data for tournaments with at least 6 swiss rounds, so that a deck had to have at least 4 wins to appear in the data.  That's why I really like 4-0 as the cut off - it's equivalent to making top 8 in a 36 player event. 

Some number of 3-1s would also make the Top8 of a 6 round tournament by winning their next 1-2 rounds, but I think you picked a good cutoff point.

[CHA1N5]

Thanks for your perspective, MtgVector.

Regarding Kevin's point of 'normalizing' Montolio's results: I don't understand why his results warrant normalization, he just so happens to be a very proficient player; on the contrary, the fact that he has consistently done so well speaks of not only his personal skills, but also of the power of the deck to overcome the inherent variance within the game.

I don't mean to invalidate Motolio's performance in any way, but simply to evaluate decks moreso than players.  The presence of a single player representing such a significant portion of the results suggests that the results may be biased and lead to an overrepresentation of the achetypes that player primarily succeeds with.  Consider it similar to using median rather than average.  The median players might more accurately represent the meta than the average, which is top-weighted by one individual.  For any single event, there is only one copy of Montolio, so he can't be ~50% of the meta   (EDIT: OTOH, if your plan is to WIN the event in question, there may be a ~50% chance that you'll face Montolio, so....)

[Islandswamp]

As far as I can tell, WotC has not released any data on the 3-round Daily Events since they started. I'm not sure why yet. Hopefully they start reporting these things soon, as I seem to believe we all like more data.

I made it to the part where Kevin and Stephen start talking about Mtgo players, experience, and how to defeat Workshops, and I was super happy to be hearing this information, but I was interrupted so I can't finish the show until later.

I'd love to read or listen to any additional information regarding how you guys approach a Shops match up, both from a game play standpoint and deck construction. I've become much better at defeating those decks, but there's always more to learn. Besides, I've noticed that beating certain people while they're playing Shops is much harder, they apparently have mastered proper sequencing.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that even in matches that I won against Shops, I made an error that a more experienced player such as yourselves would not have made.

It's been a real treat to have so much content produced in the last few weeks. I get a lot of very valuable info from the show.

[diophan]

As far as I can tell, WotC has not released any data on the 3-round Daily Events since they started. I'm not sure why yet. Hopefully they start reporting these things soon, as I seem to believe we all like more data.

You need to use Steve's trick of typing vintage into the search on http://magic.wizards.com/en/gameinfo/products/magiconline/decklists rather than selecting vintage from the dropdown. Surprising that the folks that brought us modo would have a suboptimal website...

I'd love to read or listen to any additional information regarding how you guys approach a Shops match up, both from a game play standpoint and deck construction. I've become much better at defeating those decks, but there's always more to learn. Besides, I've noticed that beating certain people while they're playing Shops is much harder, they apparently have mastered proper sequencing.

Although my response is slightly off topic, if you haven't already I'd suggest watching Rich's replays on twitch when he plays against shops. Pause the stream at the start of each turn/when you can possibly respond. Figure what you'd do and see if the line differs and if so figure out which is better. I personally learn the most from watching others play and explain along the way. The same would work for watching the VSL matches, etc.

[Islandswamp]

As far as I can tell, WotC has not released any data on the 3-round Daily Events since they started. I'm not sure why yet. Hopefully they start reporting these things soon, as I seem to believe we all like more data.

You need to use Steve's trick of typing vintage into the search on http://magic.wizards.com/en/gameinfo/products/magiconline/decklists rather than selecting vintage from the dropdown. Surprising that the folks that brought us modo would have a suboptimal website...

Oh, I simply thought that since MTGGoldfish hasn't reported on a single 3-round Daily Event for Vintage or Legacy that it meant that WotC wasn't releasing the data.
EDIT I see now, I just didn't bother looking at the actual archetype categories because they weren't visible on the front page of MTGGoldfish.

[brianpk80]

Finally, to add to this point, online cards are way cheaper than paper, and so it is not uncommon for players to be able to play "any deck".

That was a good post regarding how comparative ease of access to cards in MTGO v. paper attracts more players to the most competitive strategies cost aside.  The one note I would add is that not every deck is playable on MTGO because you cannot pragmatically combo out with Worldgorger Dragon or Auriok Salvagers and even the newly popular Splinter Twin deck is handicapped by the program's inability (rather unwillingness) to emulate infinite repetition.   As a result, there are some surprises in store for players overly acclimated to the MTGO metagame who come to compete in the Northeast.  

[MTGFan]

Finally, to add to this point, online cards are way cheaper than paper, and so it is not uncommon for players to be able to play "any deck".

That was a good post regarding how comparative ease of access to cards in MTGO v. paper attracts more players to the most competitive strategies cost aside.  The one note I would add is that not every deck is playable on MTGO because you cannot pragmatically combo out with Worldgorger Dragon or Auriok Salvagers and even the newly popular Splinter Twin deck is handicapped by the program's inability (rather unwillingness) to emulate infinite repetition.   As a result, there are some surprises in store for players overly acclimated to the MTGO metagame who come to compete in the Northeast.  

More than a few hapless MTGO grinders will fall victim this weekend to Brian Kelly recurring his AEther Spellbomb, all while wondering how the combo is even possible or whydidntIseeitinmylatestDE?

[fsecco]

Nice podcast as usual guys. I'm loving these sequence of podcasts released next to each other <3

I have an almost off-topic question, though: Steve mentions an article in a website I haven't heard of before. "vintage<something>.com". What is it?

[fow3]

Aside from the obvious ones, my personal pick to win the tournament is BUG Fish. It's maindeck is very well set up for the two bogeymen in the format, Shops and Dredge, and if it is true that Delver/Mentor decks are on the downswing, then I think BUG decks will be very successful because those two decks are predators of BUG.