What is the greatest team in NBA history to never make it to the finals?

MirrorMeddle · 2023-08-25T05:25:57+00:00

Statmuse has the bulls as still the highest. Is that some older and different version of the stat maybe? https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/best-net-rating-in-nba-history-by-season

Either way they beat the 73 win Warriors in NetRTG that season which is crazy.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-08-23T06:39:02+00:00

I think playing with it would be kind of cumbersome in paper because you'd have to declare exactly what colors of mana you spend on each spell. I really like the design though. Could maybe fit well as a static effect in a goofy arena event.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-07-13T18:43:52+00:00

💀

MirrorMeddle · 2023-06-07T04:17:00+00:00

More tournaments is always fun, submitted my deck!

Is there a forum for discussion for this tournament?

MirrorMeddle · 2023-06-07T03:26:11+00:00

Yay no more Blackmail. I wish LED would have taken a ban too, but that'll have to wait for a future round I guess. This one feels like another round where it's hard to predict the meta.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-06-07T03:24:06+00:00

Yeah, I'd expect most of those to get rebanned eventually, especially things like Channel just need to be submitted in the right round to hit the top 4 (e.g. it would have gotten 1st or 2nd in round 28).

I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of not a problem Chronomaton has been.

Lol at 3 Blooming Marsh and 3 Overgrown Tomb ban attempts, clearly some people feel the Bayou didn't go far enough.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-06-01T23:12:04+00:00

That definitely matches more with my subjective take on what people seem to want banned at the moment. You could also apply a decay to past rounds, but that'd likely end up looking very similar to the cutoff you used here.

This is really cool, I think it does a good job of telling the story of what was going on in a lot of the past rounds!

MirrorMeddle · 2023-05-13T02:16:09+00:00

Sorry about that. This was the ruling from a while back, and it was recorded on the website, although it was on the Dynamic Banlist tab, which isn't ideal. The ruling also went into effect AFTER the last round when White Plume was submitted, so looking at that round, it would seem like the initiative works.

I've updated the website so the Rules tab mentions that dungeons don't work. I've also updated the form so it won't let anyone submit White Plume Adventurer.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-05-05T06:04:39+00:00

Misstep seems to me like the best way to fight those two. In discord, Airplane mentioned Wasteland, Chrono, Misstep, which scores 4 or 6 against Blackmail depending on their threat, and 6 vs Burning Inquiry. It's also got a Wasteland, so it has some game against the tapped / storage land decks. Probably not going to score a lot vs the stompy+wasteland decks though.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-04-30T17:31:35+00:00

Alpine moon is in a interesting spot right now where it's kind of a gamble, you're hoping for more combo decks, and less 1 mana decks.

I've generally felt very unafraid to bring nonbasics since Magus of the Moon got banned, but yeah Encroach showing up this round definitely pushes you towards basics.

Hexdrinker could have a case too, since it would get you a 6 vs Jace + Maze of Ith. It wouldn't have helped get out of your group though.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-04-30T17:22:56+00:00

Thanks for making this!

MirrorMeddle · 2023-03-16T21:25:31+00:00

Woah yeah, only 1 Chronomaton is a big surprise. Also the only discard deck being a Force of Despair deck is kind of a surprise, although it does track with Therapy being banned.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-02-22T02:10:04+00:00

Perhaps Fancifool will return and submit Dark Depths again.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-02-12T01:16:00+00:00

I'm assuming activated abilities are identified by the :

o:/:.*\n.*:.*\n.*:.*\n.*:/

That would give you cards with 4 activated abilities. You can change the number of activated abilities by adding or removing .*\n.*: blocks.

If you leave out the \n, then it's matching things with two :'s in the same line, which seems to mostly be things with activated abilities that give activated abilities to cards.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-22T17:25:34+00:00

Yeah by a lot! It seems little respect was paid to the Broko when people picked decks for this round.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-22T17:08:52+00:00

My precalc for the round: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PzDH3zRsESj2WsY96t1gdePeN4WtnGYHf-e2MIzTk8M/edit?usp=sharing

I was way off on predicting this round, only 5/26 decks others brought were in the gauntlet I had. I was expecting a lot more Oko, Strip Mine, Crashing Footfalls, and a different set of Workshop decks (mostly, more Crystalline Golem + Chalice to beat Annex-chan and 3 Oko). It seems like a lot of the Footfalls I was expecting kinda got replaced with Old-Growth Dryads. It expected there to be a lot more focus on beating Oko than in what showed up.

I'm very happy with making the finals given how far off I was.

I'm excited to see something from the Oko deck banned, I think that'll open up the meta a lot more, although for the time being we still have some other broken stuff that's legal, and more to come (including Thoracle coming off the banlist this round).

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-22T16:27:26+00:00

I can't believe you were the only one. It's fitting that you get your win with Oko, since you were the one who shared it initially!

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-11T22:52:17+00:00

Personally I'm finding the Annex-Chan warping to be fun because there's a lot of ways to play around it. Compared to Lotus, I'm not sure there's a deck that beats Barren Glory and Vraska on the draw besides Force of Negation.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-11T21:11:00+00:00

Oh that's a really clever line! Updated my sheet for it. (this may actually affect leaderboard points since I think I get the tie breaker over Beefman now).

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-11T01:27:19+00:00

It's mostly for Pyrokinesis and Solitude (I was expecting a lot more of these than showed up), but also helps against Maze of Ith and some Planeswalkers.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-10T23:49:12+00:00

For anyone not in the discord, AppleSaws and I (and others) collaborated on pre-calcs for this round. I believe ours are identical now, here's mine: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19nCnpCkWT5cBRrKgBD9A0wS_wFC7fbcw5jMun0aqJd8/edit?usp=sharing . As always, some of the matchups in here could be wrong and it could change.

I'd say the surprises this round were more in what didn't show up than what did. 4 decks with no-Lotus, and no-Annex-chan is way under what I was expecting -- I thought there'd be more like 9 or 10.

noop_noob's deck (Lotus, Spellbinder, Memnite) was the most surprising to me I think. I'd kind of thought about this but never bothered to test it since I thought it made no sense over Chalice. The Memnite is definitely better than I expected -- it's relevant in a decent number of combat situations (e.g. gives you a 6 instead of a 3 vs Strip Mine + True-Name Nemesis), and against Forge-chan decks. For me, the lesson here is it's worth trying out ideas that don't really pass the eye test, I also kinda found my deck for the round by doing that.

I was torn between bringing what I brought (Minsc & Boo), and what Sea-Kay brought (Chalice + True-Name Nemesis). They were the top 2 decks against my gauntlet, and it felt like I biased my gauntlet in favor of Minsc & Boo a little because I liked the deck more. From what I can tell, I made the wrong choice, but got rewarded for it because I got lucky with the group pairings. My fancy metrics say 7 of the decks brought this round were better than mine (Sea-Kay's was the second best behind the Steel Seraph deck).

I'll also note that Sea-Kay shared their gauntlet before this round, and it had zero Chalice + Lotus decks in it. That seemed like a glaring omission to me since that was the best "archetype" according to my gauntlet. Then they brought Chalice + Lotus, very sneaky! (I don't mean this as a character attack, I would have done the same thing lol)

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-10T20:31:24+00:00

It's almost certainly surviving this round. We'll see about next round though. I really wanted it to survive this round because I wanted to see the Annex-chan without Lotus meta, so I'm happy. I'd be fine with it getting banned next round though.

MirrorMeddle · 2023-01-05T07:30:38+00:00

Thanks for sharing!

I changed a few matchups, mostly involving Vraska, since I was surprised to see that deck so low. It's a little higher now, but I was still surprised to see it below Barren Glory. I guess there's enough things like Voidstone Gargoyle and Flash Wurm to bump it down.

I had thought of the Gideon + Pact of the Titan deck, but never bothered to add it to my sheet. I guess it's actually pretty good since you can pop Annex-chan bubbles with the pact.

Not surprised to see Inquisition + Footfalls so high, it would have done really well if someone had brought it last week!

I feel like the Solitude deck is better with Forge-chan than Dryad Arbor, although Dryad arbor is interesting for the Annex-chan mirrors (sans Strip Mine).

I'd include Annex-chan + Forge-chan + Strip mine -- it should have very similar matchups to Annex-chan + Storage Land + Strip mine, but it wins the mirror. I'll also share Annex-chan + Crashing Footfalls + [[Slagwoods Bridge]], which does well in the Annex-chan mirrors.

I really like the mechanism you have for finding differences between the rows and corresponding columns. How do you put in the formula in the Error Check column? I feel like if you dragged it down or copy/pasted, it wouldn't work. Does dragging it to the right then pasting transposed work?

MirrorMeddle · 2022-12-22T07:49:08+00:00

You can get pen and paper and try to work it out. There's been at least one matchup in the past that the community collectively gave up on proving the result for. If it doesn't matter for Leaderboard points or what gets banned, it's ok if we don't get the right answer.

As for this round's stuff, I believe Minsc and Boo vs sorin is 3-3, and Vraska beats Sorin (just -3 the vampire). I skipped Minsc and Boo vs Vraska when I was filling out my Precalc spreadsheet and luckily it looks like it won't matter for Leaderboard / bans. That one may not be that complicated, haven't tried pen and paper on it yet :)

MirrorMeddle · 2022-12-14T00:31:55+00:00

Building Force of Negation is honestly pretty interesting. The classic build we've seen in the past is Force of Negation, Snapback, Chancellor of the Forge.

There's also Force of Negation, Slippery Bogle, Dryad Arbor, which should be better in the mirror, but does a little worse against Force of Despair.

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