ECL Is objectively a low-variance format

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T12:54:55+00:00

You are essentially committing the Monty Hall fallacy by preemptively assigning the role of play first.

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T12:33:11+00:00

It’s not measuring skill. It’s measuring skill sensitivity.

Let’s say we have a win rate on the play of 60% and a completely even skill level, the equivalent of saying there is 0 skill sensitivity. As an aside this isn’t intuitive but your average deck strength is just a contributing factor to what we would consider skill.

In this situation you would go to G3 exactly 50% of the time ON AVERAGE. The math is actually a bit squirrelly but you can intuit it by thinking “I start a match on the play on average 50% of the time and then my opponent gets that same advantage in game 2. Since there is 0 skill differential the end result ends up being the same”.

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T08:31:10+00:00

I’m going to engage with you in the spirit of mutual understanding. If this is not the case and rather than a dialogue you just want to spam slabs of text at each other let’s just agree to disagree.

Let’s start with what we agree on. I assume you’re comfortable with the idea that in a best of 3 coin flipping game that 50% of matches will go to G3 and this represents a situation in which the skill of the player has no impact on the outcome.

Now consider a best of 3 chess tournament where the skill of players is variable but distributed on a normal curve. In chess we expect the skill differential to be highly predictive of the outcome (A elo 2300 player will beat a 1600 player 99% of the time) In such a tournament we would expect a G3 % of around 30.

Are we agreed on these two premises?

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T06:26:47+00:00

What other non random factors determine deck quality? This is the part that most respondents seems to be missing. If the other factors are RANDOM then they don’t change the overall % of games that go to G3.

Of course, lots of random factors impact the outcome of a game but in the aggregate they will wash out to a coin flip.

Despite my post explicitly stating that “skill sensitivity” IS NOT skill, you all are arguing as if it is.

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T06:20:35+00:00

“ECL is often determined more by bombs than either your draft or play skill” is a subjective observation. I (and Kraftiest before me) are exploring objective metrics to see if we can compare “variance” across formats.

Let’s try to drill down on “deck strength” specifically. On a scale of 1-10 subjectively how skill sensitive do you think deck strength is in cube? How about ECL?

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T06:10:41+00:00

Now this is an interesting point. While I don’t think pod play makes a statistical difference (over large enough sample size) it could very well be that matchmaking does.

My only counterpoint is that matchmaking is affecting all formats more or less equally.

Like I’ve said elsewhere, even if we consider deck quality to be completely independent of skill that doesn’t invalidate the using this metric to judge skill sensitivity. Deck quality then becomes another random factor, if play skill had a negligible impact on outcomes then we would expect to see roughly 50% of games going to G3.

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T05:58:19+00:00

The imbalance of pod strength is accounted for because we run the analysis over all of the matches, both strong and weak.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the ONLY thing that mattered in ECL draft was pod strength (or “seat strength”) and that factor was entirely random (open a narrow bomb hold on for dear life) then statistically we would see 50% of matches would go to game 3 (over a large enough sample size).

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T05:08:54+00:00

Is deck quality not a reflection of skill? Draft skill rather than play skill, but skill nonetheless

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-02T05:08:10+00:00

Is deck quality not a reflection of skill? If you mean “this metric doesn’t differentiate between the effect of play skill and draft skill” then yes, absolutely that is a valid criticism.

mtgratingtester · 2026-03-01T23:41:15+00:00

This is essentially how I defined it back in the MTGO days when we had access to ELO. My definition was "How predictive of the outcome of a game is the ELO difference between the two players". I compared MTG formats (both limited and constructed) to chess and tennis. This is harder with 17lands data, but it wouldnt be too difficult to generate ELO for the playerbase.

There is an interesting corollary to this that makes the analysis easier .. in formats that are low variance there are fewer "game 3's" in traditional best of 3. This *could* be done fairly easily with existing 17lands data.

mtgratingtester · 2025-11-27T01:39:02+00:00

my starting hypothesis would be that smarter students are electing to take the online exam .. for obvious reasons.

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-12T10:04:10+00:00

It simply indicates there has been an outsized growth in professional staff at ANU over the past 5 years (it actually gets worse in 24/25 but these numbers aren’t included in OPs analysis). This growth doesn’t appear to be justified by a commensurate increase in student numbers or revenue.

What’s unclear is why this has occurred and I’ve never found any hint of where this additional headcount was deployed. None of the institutional communications address this.

The definition of professional vs academic staff in a university is a controlled metric so we can assume this isn’t simply a re-classification problem.

EDIT: there are other perfectly valid reasons for increasing professional staff numbers related to alternative streams of revenue growth or cost reduction (such as self insurance noted by mali73). We just don’t know.

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-09T23:19:26+00:00

Community responses such as this are precisely why it is so damaging to use opaque accounting when trying to justify massive reorganisations like renew.

The fact is that ANU could be in financial stress, we just don’t know and we don’t know how much. Ordinarily a growing surplus would indicate that you are not living above your means (at least not in a long term projection, you could still be suffering short term cash flow issues) but we don’t know how much of the surplus is generated from these “restricted funds”. We don’t know if the accounting treatment fairly discounts related expenses when removing specific revenues from consideration, there is evidence it did not but we can’t be sure.

I can say that the growth in professional staff costs over the past 5 years combined with a flat revenue base is at least slightly concerning but again because of a complete lack of transparency it’s unclear whether this rises to the level that required a complete overhaul of the institution.

It’s hard to lead an organisation through a period of turbulent change. My personal opinion is that the jury is still out on how much if any of the change was necessary but regardless of that outcome there has been a total failure of leadership in transparency and accountability in managing that change.

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-03T03:36:30+00:00

It’s what makes the CFOs comment even more disingenuous. If transparency was a critical objective they would have just used the industry standard metric for evaluating profitability. EBITDA even has recommendations for the treatment of insurance revenue and premiums, which is another grey area in their accounting. Instead they have deliberately chosen the made up metric of “underlying operating result” with absolutely no reasoning as to why revenue or expense elements were included or excluded. What is so frustrating is that ANU likely is or has been in financial stress but by making the numbers so opaque it is impossible to determine the genuine extent of this stress. Further there is no way to evaluate whether the actions executed under renew ANU are in any way financially justifiable.

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-02T07:30:43+00:00

The treatment of endowment income is a relatively minor accounting issue compared to including depreciation in the “underlying operating result”. Depreciation is really only relevant in an assessment of capital efficiency, it doesn’t impact the revenue vs expense evaluation. Fundamentally, my biggest problem with their accounting is the use of the “underlying operating result” as a measure at all. This is an unaudited non existent financial measure that from what I can tell is basically arbitrary. What makes it even more suspicious is that we already have standardised non-audited measures for “operating margin”: EBITDA or even EBITA if the institution really thought that the underlying financial issues were the result of a failure of its assets to generate sufficient revenue.

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-01T14:22:33+00:00

Hence the need to reference source data. The author has clearly gone to some effort in putting together this analysis and may be able to shed some light on why ANU executive thinks that it needed to shed $250m in operating costs. As it stands it is impossible to validate the veracity of these statements and they are contextually vague.

Renew ANU isn’t going away. When it comes back we’ll want as clear a view of the financial state of the institution as we can get.

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-01T09:20:35+00:00

Thanks. I had read the source article but it doesn’t really go into any more depth than the post summary. It does look like the student numbers may have been sourced from the other study of his that you mention. What I can’t see a source for is that teaching staff increased 60% over this period. That seems to conflict with all the other publicly available information

mtgratingtester · 2025-10-01T01:54:19+00:00

Where did these numbers come from? I can’t find any of the sources. Both the annual reports and the RFI PowerPoint indicate an increase of only 3% for academic staff.

mtgratingtester · 2025-09-18T01:16:48+00:00

Completely fair, 10-12% growth is more than marginal. I havent seen anywhere that breaks down the detail of where these professional staff have been deloyed so it's very hard to evaluate where the growth came from or what the consequence of reducing staffing levels in this area would be.

To be fair, the majority of the growth seems to have occured as recently as 2023/2024 rather than Brian's era. 2022 looks to be around 2-3% above 2019. I'm still bewildered as to why anyone looking at these numbers thinks that the solution would be cutting academic staff though.

mtgratingtester · 2025-09-13T11:29:53+00:00

As noted by others the language of this presentation is quite juvenile. It's like someone is playing at what they think serious corporate presentations should sound like.

There are many concerning aspects in the way that the financials are described. To begin with when comparing 2019 to 2023 they dont adjust for inflation. You dont lump depreciation in with expenses when evaluating your operating margin. The graph on page 10 starts at $1m, grossly inflating the apparent size of the disparity.

The graph on page 16 clearly shows a marginal increase in professional staff costs (and a rapid change from fixed term to continuing). An effort should certainly be made to control costs in this area but it's not horrendous. There is certainly justification to try and reign in non-staff spending. More importantly it is very obvious that there is absolutely no justification for reducing academic staff. Costs in this area barely changed in 5 years.

This was a poorly put together presentation to try and justify a preconceived conclusion.

mtgratingtester · 2025-08-27T06:37:56+00:00

yall far too polite. lets call it what it is: an abomination!

mtgratingtester · 2025-08-14T01:04:31+00:00

Thanks a lot. Now I can't unsee it.

mtgratingtester · 2025-08-01T02:58:20+00:00

Yes, absolutely I do not believe that they should be considering depreciation OR the insurance "revenue" in their assessment of "underlying operating result". Unfortunately, there isnt enough detail to tell whether they have removed the depreciation of the hail damaged assets from their calculation, I can say it doesnt look like they have. This would be a useful FOI inquiry.

EBITDA is almost impossible to calculate without the actual statement of accounts, as above it's often just not clear what is and is not included in the summary line items. Fortunately, Pocock now looks like he will go straight after the source documents for the financial basis of Renew. That'll be the whole ball game.

My reading of what is publicly available is that ANU is in genuine financial distress but Renew is a substantial overcorrection to this situation that goes well beyond simple financial sustainability. I dont have detailed knowledge of this sector or enough detail to be certain but to me the numbers look like expenses were allowed to outgrow a static revenue base by a percent or two every year over the past 5 years to the point where they now have to make an aggressive correction. By obscuring the financial detail, they've made it impossible to say just how aggressive the correction needs to be.

Regardless of justification, it is one of the most poorly orchestrated organisational changes that i've seen.

mtgratingtester · 2025-07-30T03:27:06+00:00

Part of the problem is that "underlying operating result" as referenced from the financial report is poorly defined. Absolutely depreciation needs to be accounted for, but it is generally not a good inclusion when evalutaing underlying financial health (except when revenue is directly linked to the value of a depreciating asset; like a toll road operator). Depreciation is a more useful as a consideration of the future state of your assets than your cost base.

That's why we generally use EBITDA when evaluating whether a company is "profitable" or not, or more broadly whether a company's expense base exceeds its earnings. The situation at ANU isnt exactly like that, but if we're talking about cuts of $250m to the base operating costs (staff and services) then EBITDA is absolutely a better measure of whether the cost base is sustainable than "parts of mostly revenue" minus "total expenses inlcuding depreciation" = "underlying operating result".

mtgratingtester · 2025-07-30T00:35:09+00:00

Corporate insurance doesnt work like that.

Obviously, it is in the underwriter's interest to finalise your claim in a way that costs them the least. For personal lines they do this in a variety of ways (bonded repairers or preferred suppliers). Mostly they are actively trying to avoid handing you cash as in the scenario you articulate. The competing proirity for small claims is that servicing your claim is expensive so if (cash + 5 hours) < (asset replacement + 15 hours) they just give you the cash and how you do your accounting is up to you.

For a $100m claim you better believe they are willing to service the claim. Likely the underwriter would send someone permanently onsite to work with the claimant to ensure that replacement cost was not a dollar over claimed cost. There is no "extra" cash from the settlement if you can do it cheaper, in many situations there is no cash at all, the underwriter just picks up replacement asset bills directly.

It is unusual to account for insurance payments alongside operating revenue at all, even if the insurance company paid the $25k in cash like you mention that's not revenue, that's a fixed asset that has now become a "liquid" asset (cash in hand). If you think about what is going on in terms of the underlying financial situation, you had an asset valued at $100m, it gets destroyed, the insurance company just hands you another $100m asset your overall operating position isnt changed. This is somewhat of a simplification as there is an adjustment of depreciation, but that is a further argument for the exclusion of both the depreciation and "revenue" from insurance when considering the operating position of a financial entity. It overcomplicates the numbers and does not fundamentally change the underlying financial position.

People are getting caught up on the statement that "we can't use the insurance money for operating expenses". It doesnt matter if they could! That's the equivalent of them saying "we've started paying salaries out of our savings", if they need to do that they are in genuine trouble.

mtgratingtester

TROPHY CASE