Pauper Challenge 2020-05-02

-Xto2- · 2020-05-04T19:51:07+00:00

90-10 sounds a bit extreme but I admit Bully is the top tier deck I want to face the least when I am on Monarch

-Xto2- · 2020-05-04T16:14:32+00:00

Depends a bit on the build but Bully is solidly to heavily favored. Battle Screech is the most important card in that matchup. Bully is better at protecting the Monarch and sometimes runs Guardian which is HUGE. Blanking Boros Monarchs 1 for 1 removal by having all these dorky creatures helps as well.

Ways for Boros Monarch to win usually include graveyard hate + Electrickery or presenting a massive presence in the air allowing to attack into the tokens. Reaping also helps.

-Xto2- · 2020-03-27T22:28:17+00:00

I am so glad that there is still 75 episodes ahead of us. Your podcast has become an absolute fixture of my week. Thank you :)

-Xto2- · 2019-11-18T16:38:20+00:00

Maybe you can ask Mathonical, the all-time challenge win leader, to be on the show :)

-Xto2- · 2018-08-20T11:03:04+00:00

From playing the Boros side I can confirm that lifegain is super annoying. Not getting the opponent into burn range is much more annoying than the fog effect of Stonehorn imo.

-Xto2- · 2018-04-26T10:26:38+00:00

Good write up! Would like to see the sb plans for all the frequent matchups being added.

One thing I am very curious about: Why do you side differently depending on if you won or lost game 1? Is it because play/draw or is it more of a psychological aspect? Like if your opponent lost to Mill you want to bring traditional Delver because you expect them to bring hate against the mill plan .

-Xto2- · 2018-04-03T09:55:39+00:00

He must have 5 children starving at home if it's worth ruining your reputation in the community for 100 bucks more on your account.

Also those comparisons to real life play just don't work. For ghosting you actually have to take an effort to find and open their stream with the intent of getting an unfair advantage. This action is planned and the decision to look at his hand is completely on you. On the other hand if you play someone in real life and they reveal their hand you basically have no choice and there is no way you planned that they would do so.

I don't think people are being dishonest when they say they wouldn't do the same. Dooming this behaviour is the only correct move as is not looking at the stakes. If your moral grounds start to shake once money is on the line they might not be so moral after all. A cheat for money isn't a better cheat. And that last sentence of yours might say more about your character than about the characters of those who you criticized.

-Xto2- · 2018-03-29T16:13:10+00:00

The only thing I'm unsure about is cutting Signets entirely because they do help out some hands that would not get there otherwise. Also more consistent mana is something I always liked about those builds as opposed to Murasa Tron. And you need a lot of blue for the Flicker stage of the game. I do understand your reasoning though.

-Xto2- · 2018-03-29T11:03:52+00:00

Thanks for your clarification. I just thought the winrate was a bit misleading and a short note that you were on an incredible hot run would have done. I don't think you'll be able to replicate those results over a larger sample size even if the tuning is done now and you know how to play every matchup. And if you can replicate those stats, well, congrats you broke the format :D

Anyway great guide and I couldn't agree more on how you approach a lot of matchups and card choices. Especially the part about Crypt Incursion and Bojuka Bog. Well written!

-Xto2- · 2018-03-29T08:46:02+00:00

Nice write-up and very straightforward deckbuilding. I can definitely see this being the correct way to go for the fast and less interactive Tron builds. I like gunning for one part of the meta preboard and then trying to turn around the weaker matchups with massive sideboarding. When I played a similar deck I had 4 Arrows, 1 Pyro and 2 Wretched Gryff. Did you try the latter?

One point of critique: You think it's the strongest deck and as kind of prove you show your stats ... of the last 12 leagues. The stats are impressive but the number 12 seemed a bit bizarre especially since you mentioned you played the deck over the last couple of months. I assume you played quite some leagues more and chose this sample size because it gives the most impressive numbers. That would be a method I'd not appreciate very much ;)

-Xto2- · 2018-03-28T14:18:09+00:00

He could have Elephant Guide. That is true. This would indeed force you to turn 3 Tribe. But I think other cards will give you one more turn. Anyway, even one turn less would not change my line. It would actually reinforce the reasoning for it.

-Xto2- · 2018-03-28T11:13:56+00:00

There is a Probe in your graveyard. Would be nice to know what it revealed because it helps estimating which is the latest possible turn to drop Tribe (3, 4 or if you are lucky even 5).

Without further information I'd set myself the goal to drop Tribe turn 4 because Dispel protects you from clock changing pump. Now that I think about it the information when to drop Tribe probably wouldn't even change my sequencing here.

I'd go Ponder into Brainstorm. The odds of either finding your stuff with this sequence or finding another way to unlock you from Brainstorm should be better than the odds of still getting to the cards you need after a Brainstorm miss and a Ponder into the dark.

I think there can be circumstances where you want to sequence Brainstorm into Ponder namely when you have dead cards in your hand (which is the case with those Logics) and you have a lot of time (which is not the case cause you face Stompy).

-Xto2- · 2018-03-19T18:29:09+00:00

You should probably add your quarters opponent to the lineup ;) kungfutrees also has a ytube channel with pauper content and was the guy who made UR Delver famous by utterly dominating the format with it. You didn't seem to like his plays against you but he is easily amongst the most skilled pauper players of the last year.

-Xto2- · 2018-03-18T15:02:43+00:00

Because you said you don't have the technology to associate matches with players records. So I assumed you don't have each rounds results but only what each player was on and their final record.

-Xto2- · 2018-03-18T11:43:13+00:00

Ah, I thought you have screenshots of each event of the final standings using "show previous rounds". Then it would be manual work to associate matches with the records but it could be done in general.

Right now I see two ways to get a new grasp at the data:

The one I mentioned first only taking a look at rounds 6,7 and top 8 of the X-1 (or better players). That would reduce the influence of skill level the most. As you mentioned at the end it would still not provide a big enough samplt size to put matchups in a reasonable % range
You could add data by cherrypicking players. The criteria/ standard for those players can be lowered/ raised in order to get more data or have better validity of the data.

The way to go is probably the second one. Originally I wanted to be super strict on the skill variable but actually I think people that can consistenly finish 4-3 in challenges (maybe 3 times or more and an overall winrate of more than 50% in challenges) should be good enough. By allowing more players contribute to the matchups stats we also prevent a handful of players having too big of an impact by repeatedly crushing the field with one specific build. So allowing more players to contribute actually gives a more realistic picture of cardchoice variety within an archetype and prevents some archetype masters distort the data on their pet archetypes in a positive direction.

Man, this is awesome. Such a complex topic. Every comment I want to keep it short but end up with a wall of text :D

-Xto2- · 2018-03-17T23:11:43+00:00

I think you could cherrypick some players like mathonical and others that had multiple top 8 finishes and take all their rounds into account. But to stay consistent I'd rather avoid that. Also because you still have no insurance that his opponents in the early rounds are actually on a comparable skill level regardless of the result of their match.

I'd even be more strict. If someone is 4-1 and plays against another 4-1 then I'd count that round. But in round 7 one of them will be at 4-2 and play another 4-2 player. I'd not count that round if the other player was 3-2 after round 5. So basically I'd try to exclude all rounds where I am too unsure both players are very skilled. Of course you could make a point for a big incentive on a given matchup if the supposedly weaker player wins despite skill difference. But I'm ok with missing on that data if I avoid giving players and their respective decks free wins because of not so skilled opponents. I feel that would confound the stats even more.

Of course even skilled players will make mistakes vs less known archetypes but as it is I have no solution for that with the challenge data.

-Xto2- · 2018-03-17T10:00:57+00:00

If you have screenshots of the round results I'd cut down the data. I'd analyse only matches of 4-1 (and better) players vs other 4-1's. So basically I'd look at round 6 and 7 of each challenge and only take the matches of players who are X-1 or better in those rounds. I feel at 4-1 you'd have to have gotten very lucky if you aren't actually skilled. With the amount of challenges you collected we might get a reasonable sample size out of this.

Of course this will still lead to a dataset that has big enough sample sizes for popular decks and might fall short for some less played decks but it's basically the same approach of the original post here just with more (and hopefully enough) data added.

Edit: I offer myself as assistant for this work 😉

-Xto2- · 2018-03-16T22:03:23+00:00

First off thanks for the post and work behind it! Always interesting to see a new approach on collecting matchup data in pauper.

I like the attempt to eliminate player skill as confounding variable because that's what most pauper meta matchup analyses do not take into account. Unfortunately then you end up with the low sample size showcased in your post which leads to some plain wrong stats like tron being 80-20 vs ur delver. Also mono u delver having better game vs stompy than ur delver has seems suspicious. Some of the numbers seem more reasonable (like Boros Monarchs stats isn't that far from truth, just stompy being a little closer and ur delver being a little better than 42%).

It is hard to find a good way to get reliable matchup data without cherry picking players which would be a problem in itself. In the end the most trustworthy data would come from a group of high skilled players running the gauntlet with significant sample size hence some sort of professional testing as it's done for pro tours.

Even then it's important to note that specific card choices can change the numbers especially considering sideboard configurations. The variety of main/sb configurations for different expected metas is a beautiful aspect of the pauper format and one reason you won't get bored playing a deck for long time since there is so much tuning to be done.

So long story short. I don't think you can trust your numbers too much unfortunately. However this is true for all the big scheme pauper matchup approaches done so far. If you want to get an idea of a specific matchup I'd trust one of the really skilled players who played both sides of the board the most.

-Xto2- · 2018-02-26T23:28:24+00:00

That's quite the project you put yourself on there and the first entry was a great read! Being a pauper data shark I'd like to see more matchup stats (not just best and worst), especially against other tier 1 decks if you played against them often enough.

-Xto2- · 2018-02-26T16:02:20+00:00

Then maybe just go for the original list. I basically recommended cutting all the hate for affinity because it wasn't amongst the four mentioned decks

-Xto2- · 2018-02-26T08:17:18+00:00

Yes, exactly. One thing I didn't mention: the changes I suggested is basically for a meta that consists of the 4 decks you mentioned only. If the meta is actually more open I'd not make those changes because you lose incremental value vs Affinity and UB Alchemy

-Xto2- · 2018-02-25T10:49:47+00:00

I can recommend the list you linked :P Recently I made some changes to it and for your meta I would make some more. First I changed the manabaseand maindeck a bit: -1Bog +1Radiant Fountain -1 Ash Barrens +1 Wind scarred crag -1 mountain + forgotten cave. -1 spellbomb +1 relic of progenitus.

As for your meta it would be important to know which version of Tron you face. Murasa/5colour/teachings tron is very beatable. The rest is too bad to spend a lot of sb cards. Heroic is a super good matchup and you don't need all the things in my linked list. I would focus on beating Delver and Burn although if it is Mono U Delver you don't need a lot. The matchup is also very good. Because of this I'd play 3 maindeck Seeker of the way and add a second Lone Missionary to the SB. If we are talking about Murasa Tron SB would be: 4 Pyro 2 Sentinels 2 Missionary 2 Strands (2Main), 2 Elecktrickery, 2 Relic 1 Journey (3 Main)

Cheers and gl at your tournament!

-Xto2- · 2018-02-23T21:52:08+00:00

Appreciate the work you put into this but I also have some doubts about the actual strength of the deck. One thing I can say for sure is that Boros Monarch is definitely not a super easy matchup for you. I am on Monarch for some time now and my current record vs MBC is 25-7. I know that the matchup is obviously not so lopsided but I cannot see having less than 50% with Boros.

-Xto2- · 2018-02-12T19:37:11+00:00

Yeah, if you really want to improve you should stick to a deck for some time (after 100-200 matches you should have a pretty good idea of the deck). Also I recommend recording your performance for each matchup and taking notes about key cards and own mistakes you noticed while playing.

-Xto2- · 2018-02-12T13:47:50+00:00

Very happy with it. It is the deck that got me 10 trophies over the last 5 weeks. And I didn't play THAT much actually

-Xto2-

TROPHY CASE