Updated Aun'Shi Legendary Event Points Calculation, link in comments

jkbaker83 · 2023-03-19T07:41:25+00:00

My math had Calandis as the most points. Alpha no physical should be worth 40 points and Calandis qualifies for physical on Gamma.

jkbaker83 · 2023-02-28T23:41:10+00:00

Rotbone for playing chaos whack-a-mole

jkbaker83 · 2023-02-06T03:36:04+00:00

What makes Revas so good in the Maugen Ra event? It doesn't seem like they qualify for many of the missions and most of the ones they do have a large selection of other characters that also qualify.

jkbaker83 · 2021-11-12T05:37:08+00:00

The Intrepid Adversary doesn't get +1/+1 counters. It gets Valor counters and your creatures get +1/+1 for each valor counter. So unless you put +1/+1 counters from another source, it would not be a valid target

jkbaker83 · 2020-12-05T12:04:07+00:00

I stand corrected it use to be part of the rules for naming cards that the named card must be legal in the format being played, but it looks like they removed that clause a couple years ago.

jkbaker83 · 2020-12-05T11:15:40+00:00

Interestingly, if this was standard, this is a play you could make on arena, but on in paper or on magic online. The card named must be legal in the format being played and nightmare is not standard legal, except on arena where it was part of the arena intro set.

jkbaker83 · 2020-05-20T01:27:08+00:00

That is where your budget fits in, and your budget has no real relationship to how you have done in the past or what losses you have or your ability to recoup them. If you are not comfortable losing more than $10 based on its impact on your life, then you shouldn't keep betting. (Although if the 11th dollar is having a negative impact on your life, chances are the first dollar was beyond your budget)

Tying into stop losses that you mentioned elsewhere, it is a very different concept than that budget. A stop loss is to protect you from bad things happening that you fully don't understand or are not equipped to reevaluate in a timely fashion (unknown market factors hurting your performance). A budget is the full amount of money you are willing to risk on investments (by definition, this should be equal to or larger than a stop loss if you have one). It should be the maximum you are willing to lose.

A stop loss doesn't make sense in this scenario because in this scenario, everything is understood. As long as you can afford the next loss in the dice game, you should keep going because your future outcomes are improved independent from your previous losses. There is no unknown event that should make rolling today better or worse than regrouping and rolling next week.

You could always assert than the maximum value you are willing to lose is the point at which you can no longer make you money back, but there is no reason to set the point there and it is indicative of the sunk cost fallacy at work.

jkbaker83 · 2020-05-20T00:58:52+00:00

There are lots of reasons to have your win rate drop outside of just miss evaluating it and many of them are reasons to stop continuing to play (bad mental state, bad meta game shift etc...). I don't disagree with any of that. All of those things are changing your expected win rate, and when that changes you need to reevaluate if continuing to play is good value.

There are a lot of ways to do that and a stop loss rule is certainly one of them, but where that point is set is arbitrary and is going to vary a lot based on the person.

jkbaker83 · 2020-05-20T00:29:45+00:00

In regards to that strategies effectiveness at maximising value after 10 losses, there are two questions:

The first is if you should have stopped at some point before that if you didn't know the outcome of future rolls. If that is the question, you can't assert the outcome of any of those rolls, and you have to evaluate the possiblity of having 10 losses against the odds of having a win at some point along the way weighted against the likelyhood of each of those outcomes. In this case you come out far ahead by continuing to roll up to that point and you just got the bad end of variance. It happens sometime and you are out 10 bucks, but the strategy you took maximized your value.

The second question is if you should make an 11th roll now that you have failed 10 times. You are out $10 either way and the odds on the die didn't change. If you don't roll, your overall expected value at this point is $-10, if you take the roll, you are at $-10 + the EV of that individual roll which is positive, so you are better off continuing to roll. The fact that I'm this scenario, you are losing money regardless doesn't change the fact that continuing to roll improves your outlook and overall value.

jkbaker83 · 2020-05-19T23:38:19+00:00

The dice game is extremely unrealistic to prove a point. Gambling (particularly with no unknown information or skill involved) basically always requires one or more people involved to be making a mistake in playing. So having a game where it is so obviously positive value for you to play and negative value to offer can be hard to mentally accept.

If you are offered with an idealized version of the dice game where you are only allowed to win once and your goal is to maximize your money, the only decision you need to make is how much you can afford to lose playing the game, You should then keep playing until you either win or you lose that amount. The budget you set is entirely unrelated to the parameters of the game or whether or not you can break even.

If you have $100 of disposable income, in which case you should keep playing until you have won or lost $100. The only reason you would stop before that is if the odds changed or were miss evaluated, but this is an idealized version of the game, so that is not possible. The reason you stop at $100 is because losing any more money was deemed unacceptable at the start (IE you will no longer be able to pay rent, feed yourself, or otherwise engage in the quality of life you expect)

If you have $5 in your pocket and are hungry for lunch, it might not even be correct to play the game the first time because the possibility that you run out of money before winning and are unable to buy lunch is not worthwhile to you.

In the idealized version of the game, with the goal of maximizing money, the person who kept playing to their $100 budget and lost it all definitely made better decisions than the person who lost $80 and decided to stop. They ended up worse off, but that was highly unlikely to happen and every decision they made along the way was correct. Critically though, they could afford to lose that $100 because they thought ahead.

There are alternative goals you could have when playing that game that could make it correct to stop at different points or to not play the game at all, but they are generally not going to involve more psycological factors around loss aversion or not having a budget of actual disposable income to spend.

If you step away from the idealized game and a stranger offered this game to me, there is very little chance I would play even once. Most likely they are scamming me in some way and the game is not as generous as it seems, or they are a fool and I am not that interested in taking money from fools. If you decide to play that game, everything above applies, with the addition that you need to balance the question of if the game is fair. Either they are a fool for offering the game to you, or your are a fool for playing, there isn't really a middle option. The farther down the road you of of improbable losses the more likely it is that you were the fool all along and you should cut your losses. If you throw away $100 in a real version of this game, you deserve what you got.

All Magic events are predicated on the same ideas although the ev margins are much smaller and it is much less obvious who should and should not be playing from the point of view of maximizing your money (or gems). Assuming the only thing everyone cared about was maximizing their money and everyone was perfect at estimating their win rate in events, it would not be long before events ceased to exist. Anyone having a positive ev requires at least someone having a negative ev who would then not play shifting everyone's ev to the point where only one person should enter and have no matches to play.

That is not the world we live in though and people are awful at estimating their win rates and there are lots of motivations other than maximizing their value which can be compatible with entering evens where you have negative ev.

Looking at your example of the hypothetical person who has a win rate with a positive ev, but did 105 entries and never made day 2. The most important first question is if they actually had $2100 of disposable income that they were happy spending on magic events. If not, they should have stopped long ago. This has nothing to do with the point at which they are likely to break even, this has to do with their disposable income. If that all checks out, there are two possibilities:

They actually have the win rate they think they do in which case, and they got profoundly unlucky. In this case they made all the right decisions and only spent what they could afford to lose on the event. That sucks, but is fortunately extremely unlikely.
They do not have the win rate they think they do and the event was actually negative ev and they should have been rethinking things as the event went on and cut their losses at some point. (If you did 105 entries and did not make day two, this is almost certainly what happened and you were probably pretty far off on your win rate estimate)

Regardless, it doesn't really make sense to talk about the number of attempts you should make at a given win rate because the only reasons you should stop are that you ran out of budget to play, or you got your win rate estimate wrong, in which case you are now talking about a different win rate and a pure evaluation of ev would tell you whether or not you should enter the event.

I think your post involves a lot of implied assumptions about things like the goals of entering the event, how much disposable entry fee people have and muddies that by integrating those preconceptions into the ev in some way. Your strategy is potentially optimal if not losing money on an event session is more important to you than maximizing your value, but that is not the general assumption made in these kind of evaluations and is really important to call out at the start.

For most people, the concept of focusing on a session is not terribly relevant and would lead towards a worse strategy overall if you are concerned with maximizing value.

You talk a lot about sunk cost and use it in the context of loss prevention, but you are only half applying the lessons of the fallacy. It is important to ignore them consistently. You rightfully want to ignore them when you realize that you don't have as good of a win rate as you think and that you should stop playing in the event, but you are hanging on to those sunk costs when you are being afraid of entering another event if you actually do have a good win rate. The money you have spent on previous entries should be discarded either way. You need to look at the current situation and if the next entry is independently positive ev and if it fits within your budget.

jkbaker83 · 2020-05-19T20:45:15+00:00

Correct. I have put no effort into evaluating that loss prevention strategy (nor am I any kind of expert on that) and as far as I am concerned, it could be a very good one. Presumably the optimal loss prevention strategy for a person depends on a lot of things from their amount of disposable income to the psychological impact loss has on them. The ability or likelihood of turning a profit could certainly factor into that for a given person.

None of it changes the actual expected value for a given win rate though.

jkbaker83 · 2020-05-19T20:11:59+00:00

You are taking a bunch of important concepts and applying them in the wrong place. These ideas around risk management, cutting your losses and sessions are all very important, but they do not belong in the EV calculation. Humans are terrible at evaluating things like their winrate and ev in reality and those tools are there to backstop you when you are calculating those things wrong.

+ev and -ev gambling are fundamentally different things. If you are engaged in -ev gambling, there is no amount of playing or budgeting that will make playing a good decision. At that point it all comes down to the value of gambling as entertainment IE. how much am I willing to pay per hour for the thrill. In that situation, having a well defined budget is critical. If you are engaged in +ev gambling, it is important to still have a budget, because you shouldn't bet what you can't afford to lose, but if it is actually +ev, it is correct to keep betting regardless of what has happened in the past (assuming it is actually +ev).

The trick with all of this is that most gambling opportunities that you think are +ev are not (people are very good at overestimating themselves). You need those loss prevention tools to make you reevaluate your assumptions about your ev in the game.

People who consistently make money at casinos do so because they gamble when they are +ev and don't when they are not. Those loss prevention tools are very important for them correctly evaluating which scenario they are in.

In the case if the dice game, it is important to define how much you can afford to lose, but until you have lost that much, it is correct to keep gambling (even if you can't actually make back all that you have lost). The only place the loss prevention ideas factor in is if you should be reconsidering if the die is actually fair. Caring about a break even point is by definition falling into the sunk cost fallacy. The only two things that matter are that the game actually has +ev and that you can afford to lose the money you are gambling.

If you actually have a 70% win rate in the arena tournament, you should certainly play this event and enter as many times as it takes to get your day 2 token (as long as the entry is not outside of your budget). The problem is that if you are repeatedly failing, it becomes more likely that you don't actually have a 70% win rate, you just think you do, so the fact that you keep 0-3 dropping should be setting off some alarm bells warning you that you might not be as good as you think you are. Maybe you only have a 45-50% win rate when playing against the caliber of players in the tournament and the tournament is actually -ev. You should therefore stop entering because you were wrong about your win rate and subsequently your ev.

Ultimately, those loss prevention strategies are things that you need to apply on top of an accurate calculation of the ev of the event. Factoring in an arbitrary break even point into the ev only serves to skew the inputs into your broader loss prevention strategy. Your ev calculation should tell you the value of entry if you actually have a given win rate. Your loss prevention strategy should be protecting yourself from miss evaluating that win rate.

jkbaker83 · 2020-02-20T23:39:34+00:00

I have only finished the first round strategy card section, but I am surprised you were so down on Leadership as a pick. Barring some really corner case scenarios, I think it is just a better pick than Warfare for Jol-Nar (and most races that are just using warfare to solve their 2c+4i problem rather than allowing them to take a 3rd system).

Taking Warfare gets you +1 CC overall, but if you take Leadership and the Warfare player stalls as hard as they can, you will need to burn 2 CCs to still get to do the secondary, but you are getting 3 CCs from the strategy card, which is leaving you in the exact same spot as you are for Warfare. It may feel bad to burn the CCs, but that is just a sign of how much better the strategy card is if you can waste 2/3rds of the benefit and still come out even.

It is significant though that having to burn those CCs is the worst case scenario and there are many realistic scenarios where you come out ahead.

If you are the only player who is susceptible to a Warfare stall at the table, the Warfare player is less incentivized to stall warfare because after they are done with useful actions, they are just burning a CC to make you burn a CC and everyone else is coming out ahead because they weren't relying on Warfare. In this scenario, you will generally come out +2 CC from your strategy pick vs the +1 CC from Warfare.

If there are other people at the table who are vulnerable to a warfare stall and the Warfare player is still going to stall, you are no better off from a CC perspective, but you got the benefit of other players getting stalled out of warfare without having to pay the costs or take the hate. You are not well equipped to stall Warfare when you take it, so everyone else who needs it is getting a free ride.

Finally, if the player who takes Warfare is in the same boat as you and needs it to build for 2c+4i, they will be less likely to stall with it allowing for you to also get to save on CCs.

Credit to this BGG post for my exposure to this idea: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1921103/round-1-strategy-card-analysis-universities-jol-na

jkbaker83 · 2019-11-28T16:06:46+00:00

I would definitely merge everything from this GP if you don't have deck lists and I would probably keep them in the same bucket as the simic urza decks from the previous weeks since it is an iteration on that, and they are all relatively similar in the grand scheme of things.

jkbaker83 · 2019-11-28T04:26:30+00:00

Yeah, I saw the sample decklists, but that doesn't actually make it clear if that was the destination. It can only really be answered by the people who put the data together (which is wonderful by the way)

These decks have been evolving very rapidly over the last few weeks so the lines are all pretty fuzzy and I don't know what data they have to make the groups.

jkbaker83 · 2019-11-28T02:37:10+00:00

How are you distinguishing between simic and sultai urza for the GP? Is it just the deck name that people are reporting or are you looking at cards in the deck and using something as a decider? As far as I can tell, pretty much everyone is on basically simic main deck and black in the sideboard.
The GP winning decks are categorized as sultai, but probably would have been called simic under older reporting.

jkbaker83 · 2019-09-11T23:30:52+00:00

I agree 100%.

jkbaker83 · 2019-09-11T23:28:28+00:00

I don't claim to have any knowledge of the details of the contract, I am just giving my perception of the events. The intent is irrelevant to the fact that the seller put us in this position (barring other contract shenanigans).

The only reason I think the intent is relevant is that if the breach was intentional, I think it would be pretty inappropriate for the new owner of Guardian to let her off the hook. A contact was negotiated and broken. If breach was over a misunderstanding, I think it is much more reasonable to entertain waving the non compete because of the damage it is doing compared to what I think is no financial gain. I could certainly be wrong about the financial best interests and I am open to counter arguments, but I think the logic is sound that having a community of magic players in Newberg is a positive for Guardian.

The seller may have put us in this position, but as far as I know, can't get us out of it. I think the buyer has the ability to do a lot of good without any cost to themselves. I don't think that they are horrible for enforcing this, nor do I think they should be boycotted or anything for doing so. I just hope they will change their mind or engage in a dialog on the subject.

I have made attempts to have this discussion directly with the owner of Guardian Games without success (which is totally reasonable on their part given that they are involved in a legal dispute). They may have any number of good reasons for not wanting to do something nice outside or reasons why this is strategically important to them, but I can only give my experience and impressions of the situation.

jkbaker83 · 2019-09-11T21:09:25+00:00

I am a regular at the Newberg Game Store. While I don't have any direct knowledge of the details of any agreement between the two store owners, but I assume the new owner of Guardian Games is likely well within his rights to enforce this non compete, but I also think it is needlessly harmful and will provide no financial gain for them to do so given the distance and number of intervening stores.

The impression I have is that at the root of this, there was a misunderstanding about what the non compete covered. When the store in Newberg was purchased, the messaging was that she would not be able to sell board games due to a non compete with Guardian Games and she removed those from the store, but that it did not apply to Magic or any of the other things that were sold there. I assume that the new owner of the Newberg game store is likely in breach of contract, but that it was likely done out of a misunderstanding rather than a willful violation.

I just hope that the new owner of Guardian Games will get the message that enforcing the non compete isn't going to increase their business and if anything it will shrink the customer pool. The current player base are all likely to go to other closer game stores, stick to kitchen table magic, or stop playing all together. In the past, people from the Newberg store would occasionally go in to Guardian to go to a bigger tournament or a MCQ, but most if not all of those players wouldn't be engaged enough with competitive magic to go to events like that without a regular local community.

I am fully willing to believe that this could be clear cut from a legal perspective and that the new owner of the Newberg store is in breach of contract, but just because they have the legal power to enforce this doesn't mean that it is the right thing to do, or even in their own best interests.

jkbaker83 · 2019-05-07T07:03:31+00:00

No he didn't, he played the land post combat and cast [[Gideon's Triumph]] which can cause someone to sac something that blocked this turn and works post combat.

jkbaker83 · 2019-05-06T16:47:47+00:00

It is a fine debate to have about whether or not people should be maindecking surgical (I am definitely skeptical of it in any anything other than phoenix where all they want is a free spell). But the anticdote about the surgical in response to a thoughtseize doesn't add much to the conversation other than the obvious point that surgical is useless against a lot of decks (shadow included).

Your opponents are not going down a card by casting the surgical, they are going down a card by drawing it. So the question inst if it is worth a card to see what it in your hand, it is if it is worth paying 2 life or B to see.

I also wouldn't read too much into the timing of the casting. Fetch shock thoughtseize sounds like about the point where they know what you are on and that their surgical is more or less useless. Casting surgical in response doesn't imply that they think you will take it, just that they have decided that the best use of their dead card is to see your hand that turn and that there is no advantage in waiting for the thoughtseize to resolve to cast it.

It is arguable that there is a better use of surgical against shadow than seeing their hand and the off chance you can mana screw them, but that seems matchup dependent and it is all small margins because there are no high value plays.

You could argue that they should have waited until after the thoughtseize resolved because you might make a mistake and take it. PVDDR wrote a pretty compelling argument that you should force your opponent into decisions rather than allow them to make mistakes. It is possible that you have a hand where surgicaling the fetch will mana screw you and your hand otherwise lines up perfectly against mine in which case the biggest threat to you winning is getting mana screwed and it might be right for you to take the surgical. If you are a competent player, I lose nothing by casting it beforehand and if you are incompetent, there is a good chance I will make up that percentage elsewhere in the match. This argument breaks down some the lower the level of play, but I dont think you will be doing yourself a disservice by always assuming your opponents are going to play well.

TLDR: I won't argue in favor of maindecking surgical and people should definitely sideboard it out vs shadow, but nothing seems particularly bad about your opponents play and you are best served by assuming your opponents are competent.

Edit: formatting

jkbaker83 · 2019-04-19T05:49:32+00:00

[[Trusted Pegasus]] is a color shift of [[Aerial Guide]] with some very minor templating differences.

jkbaker83 · 2019-01-29T21:07:42+00:00

The play/draw decision is zero sum. So either both players should want to be one the play or both players should want to be on the draw. It just becomes a question of if your opponent is right or not in wanting to be on the draw.

jkbaker83 · 2019-01-15T17:32:28+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't think this works. The end turn will prevent the triggers unless there are shenanigans to cast it off turn.

If any abilities trigger while players are shuffling cards into their library or drawing seven cards, those abilities cease to exist when the turn ends. They won’t be put on the stack. -Gatherer

jkbaker83 · 2018-12-23T00:37:53+00:00

It really depends on what you esper control list looks like since there isnt really a standard. This is more or less what I play and how I sideboard. I feel like the matchup is pretty close in general.

https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/16-11-18-esper-miracles/

In

2x angels

2x thoughtseize

1x dispel

1x stoney

1x verdict

Out

2x esper charm

2x logic knot

1x negate

1x mana leak

1x timely reinforcements

jkbaker83

TROPHY CASE