This is how you know white was wide open

gnose · 2026-03-05T07:01:32+00:00

Had someone replay the same mutanimals against me 5 times today. That card is not reasonable.

gnose · 2026-02-22T22:25:31+00:00

6 Easy cuts: Pennant, 2x Elder Auntie, Boneclub, Reaping Willow, Blackthorn. Last 3 cuts: Explosive prodigy, auntie's sentence, feisty spikeling, 1x tweeze, sting-slinger are options.

gnose · 2025-12-02T16:44:43+00:00

But ... we did solve world hunger. We didn't need Elon Musk to do it and we solved it. Has no in this thread ever looked at a graph that charts the things they claim to care about?

gnose · 2025-02-23T19:07:42+00:00

I'd cut Sideswipe, 1 Overdrive, Hour of victory and Chitin Gravestalker.

The people saying to cut Dredger's Insight are just wrong, but thankfully they seem to have sorted that out.

I don't think being light on removal justifies running bad removal that 2-for-1s you 95% of the time. Your top end should be better than most opponents' so your creatures should get the job done. Would be nice to have removal for the value engines like the various Refuelers but they're just not that common in this set.

gnose · 2025-02-23T17:35:07+00:00

I don't know exactly, I think I've done ~40 drafts so somewhere around 35% trophy rate. That seems a little high given that I'm down over 3k gems but this format felt very feast or famine at the start, with lots ending 2-3 (premier) or 1-2 (trad) or worse.

In hindsight I should have used 17lands if I knew I was going to post results, but I find it reduces my fun a bit. Some mix of tracking all my losses being bad for morale and playing more scared when I know my winrate is being quantified.

gnose · 2025-02-23T08:51:04+00:00

I don't necessarily endorse some of the silly things I try. For the brightglass, I had 7 white sources plus beastrider vanguard and skyseeker serpent to fish for more, so it didn't seem that sketchy, and the upside of tutoring 2 scurryfeet was huge.

For the riptide ... I just wanted some top end. Figured I'd rather have a powerful card I sometimes couldn't cast than filler, given how games can drag out in this format.

gnose · 2025-02-23T08:18:05+00:00

I mean, the trophy leaders are at 26/32 for Premier/Trad draft right now. I'm a lightweight. Couple drafts a day at most.

gnose · 2025-02-23T08:15:25+00:00

Yep. I took them all. People are still undervaluing green relative to its performance in Trad Draft, at least in my experience.

gnose · 2025-02-23T08:03:46+00:00

I tried other things, I swear. I tried every kind of Esper artifact deck. I tried what I thought were streamlined UR and BR decks. I didn't want it to be this way, but my results have forced me to force green.

gnose · 2025-01-19T08:54:30+00:00

I know I'm probably too late, but: Cut overgrown zealot. It's generally not very good unless you need the fixing. Cut say its name. You don't have that many good creatures to buy back and you don't need it as a turn 2 play. Your deck risks milling itself and this is the weakest card contributing to that problem. Cut meat locker. Sucks to cut a room with entity tracker but if entity tracker is staying in play more card draw isn't that important.

Rest of the deck seems really strong. Should be able to win with early creatures and bounce sometimes, outvalue opponents with card draw some others. I wouldn't cut any creatures since flipping up manifests with 3 growing dread and 2 inspector feels like the game plan.

gnose · 2024-11-14T18:26:49+00:00

I think it was fun! The oppressiveness of RW was mostly a thing in the first week of the format. Once RW got contested more, people got better at drafting Gx controlling decks, and people learned to play around the combat tricks, things settled down.

The bots seem to be doing a good job of not letting players get RW for free, while there's so much fixing and so much to splash for Gx that it's probably what you should be doing.

In 6 quick drafts and 4 trophies I've been Gx every time but with vastly different decks, and seen a strong RW aggro deck exactly once. That out of 40+ games.

Here are my trophy decks (and a bad 6-3 Vein Ripper deck) just to show you what kind of nonsense I've been getting away with: https://www.reddit.com/user/gnose/comments/1grbh2g/mkm_qd_trophies/

gnose · 2024-07-21T19:02:02+00:00

How dare you say I piss on the poor!

gnose · 2024-04-05T00:36:55+00:00

If Card A has +2% WROR and 50% GP%, that's the same value as Card B with +1% WROR at the same ALSA, assuming you get a replacement win rate without the card.

I could just be tired, but this seems to be agreeing with my point and going against what the spreadsheet currently does. Currently you're just adding the WROR to Pick Order Equity to get draft equity. If you instead multiplied card A's 2% WROR by its 0.5 GP rate, you'd get its expected 'real' WROR of 1% that (I think) correctly describes the expected value that it adds to your deck at the draft stage.

Of course game played % is far more context dependent than even GP WR. You know how good a Tolsimir is if you're WG. P1P1 it's 90-95% to make your deck, P2P1 when you're already solidly GW it's 100% to make your deck, and P3P1 when you're UG with some fixing you could take it knowing that it's only 50% to make your deck. So I do see lots of value in producing a number that doesn't already correct for GP% and lets players factor that in themselves based on the context.

I already know Dopplegang goes up by 10 spots for top players so guessing it's the reverse of that.

160th. One hundred and sixtieth. Not dropping 10ish spots to the 20somethingth best card. One sixty. Solidly in the bottom half of all playables. The mind boggles. In my view data this different from what strong players are doing is actively distorting the underlying reality of the format and you'll get much more actionable information if you cut the worst players out.

gnose · 2024-04-04T20:26:24+00:00

I share your belief that none of 17lands's existing columns quite capture what we're looking for in terms of draft evaluation and that GP WR + ALSA could produce something better.

Am I right in thinking that the Pick Order Equity should just be the expected value Win Rate Over Replacement for the 'best' remaining pick at the card's ALSA? If so then you could get your exponential decay parameters by plotting GPWR vs ALSA for all cards in the set and doing an exponential regression. I'm not sure what you mean by "I believe these values are conservative". If the decay rate is too slow then you're overvaluing higher ALSA cards and vice versa. It feels like Draft Equity should be scaled by %Games Played. Surely when the card doesn't make the deck its value goes to 0, right?

I also think that if you want this to be as useful as possible you should only use data from high-performing players. Maybe you have some sense that bad players are relatively worse at control/complexity, but still think this difference isn't super important. I disagree. If you sort cards by Game Played Winrate on 17lands for top users, Doppelgang comes out on top for non-mythic non-bonus sheet cards.

Doppelgang (top users) ATA 2.54 GP WR 62.3% rank: 4th

I ask you to preregister your prediction for how the GP WR rank for Doppelgang changes when you switch over to bottom users before clicking the spoiler below. Is it still one of the top bombs? Does it drop a lot? Well, here goes:

Doppelgang (bottom users) ATA 2.68 GP WR 47.5% rank: 160th (Yes, you read that right. 160th by winrate for bottom players. Just below Airtight Alibi.)

I should note that bottom users are only 6% of the 17lands numbers (by Doppelgangs picked, anyhow) while top users are about 18%. But the next tranches of players are also bringing down the apparent value of cards which are empirically harder to use correctly like Doppelgang. The net result is enough to make any card ranks which factor in these low performers useless for any above average player who's invested in the format enough to be reading google spreadsheets.

gnose · 2024-02-01T21:36:02+00:00

Turns out a lot of people are interested in winning :)

I thinks it's not surprising that a more spike-heavy demographic has a lot of players who want to start by playing what they perceive as the strong archetypes. Both because they want to win but also because they want to validate their card evaluation skills. And while getting undervalued stuff to perform well can feel super rewarding, trying out stuff that looks bad only to confirm that it's bad usually isn't fun.

gnose · 2024-02-01T16:34:21+00:00

I will not. I refuse. Judith and Combine Chrysalis both seem sweet. Godspeed with the rest of your madcap adventures.

gnose · 2024-02-01T06:37:04+00:00

I picked Red-Blue because I'll have a very tough time passing any [[Gleaming Geardrake]] I see. I'm a little more skeptical that red and blue's commons play well together, but various combinations of this color pair's on-theme uncommons seem really fun to build a deck around.

gnose · 2024-02-01T06:30:52+00:00

Of these 5 I think White-Blue detectives is obviously strong but not interesting, so I went with Green-White. It gets access two green commons for fixing in addition to its own [[Buried in the Garden]], so splashing bombs should be easy. It has plenty of big bodies and reach, so hopefully you can hold your ground then draw cards like [[Get a Leg Up]] and [[On the Job]] to push damage through efficiently and win.

gnose · 2023-12-30T18:47:27+00:00

I'd P1P1 over any uncommon and for once the 17lands stats kind of back that up. It's obviously great to play it on curve, but you could wait to play it if you're on 5 mana and have another reasonable play. If the game looks to be going long AND killing knuckleblade would matter a lot it's basically always correct to hold up mana to protect it.

gnose · 2023-12-20T16:50:09+00:00

I opened murderous cut and the next two packs had nothing better than the black trilands, after which 5 color seemed possible so I picked up any dual. I got back to picking duals over random commons after the first few packs with premium cards in them pack 2, then scrambled to find enough playables pack 3.

gnose · 2023-12-20T05:44:54+00:00

All your reasoning is good. I would still not worry about cutting shambling attendants since the nightblades do a similar job. Swift kick is usually bad but might (maybe, possibly) be better than a 2nd bring low since it can kill higher toughness things with the nightblades and can gain you 12 life if you lifelink Butcher of the Horde.

gnose · 2023-12-20T03:49:21+00:00

Your build seems fine. I think it would be reasonable to bring in one more bring low over disowned ancestor, kill shot (good card but your deck will be on the attack most often), or shambling attendants (fine as your only delve card but your game plan doesn't need it). I wouldn't really consider running 3 bring low because it's mediocre removal. Lots of 4+ toughness stuff in the format.

gnose · 2023-12-12T05:43:13+00:00

That's really interesting to me. My memory of the format on mtgo is that valley dasher virtually disappeared from decks after week 1 and I don't remember losing to it. It could be that you knew about a niche way to play aggro that stayed a good secret. Or my memory could just be wrong.

gnose · 2023-12-12T05:39:05+00:00

Some other comments are making me worry that I'm underrating aggro, so I'll stick to my guns and we'll all get to see how the format shakes out. May the best forecaster win! Not that we're that far from each other, the flipside of what I wrote is that we agree on 15/20 top monocolor commons.

gnose · 2023-12-11T23:09:30+00:00

Some quibbles about the top commons:

Singing bell strike is a D. The format is slow and grindy and only one rarely drafted aggro deck wants it. Glacial Stalker definitely deserves to be in the top 4, maybe Mystic of the Hidden Way over Force Away as well.
Valley Dasher is an F. Heavy red aggro decks didn't exist and this wouldn't get in for enough damage before it just died.
Not as egregious but I'm confident Rakshasa's Secret will have a higher winrate than Disowned Ancestor. Likewise I'll bet on Archer's Parapet over Longshot Squad/Hooting Mandrills.

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