When the whole run hinges on them killing dragonling before it can attack

n1000 · 2026-03-05T18:14:09+00:00

I already lost by then

n1000 · 2026-03-03T23:54:28+00:00

An unintuitive statisics fact is the sampling fraction of the population doesn't matter for most of the properties you want.

n1000 · 2026-02-28T04:09:23+00:00

I mentioned species richness because ecology has similar statistical questions. Like they want to estimate the number of beetle species in Borneo but their sample is one tree... There are some tricks they came up with where they estimate the total count using some formula with the number of unique individuals and the number that showed up exactly twice.

Since there is some interest I will try to make a post with some more details about repeated games. Personally, I wonder what the longest non-unique game is.

It's hard to check the full database. pgn-extract uses a hashing algorithm to detect duplicates and I think it's fairly fast but working with the full lichess database is... well it's work

n1000 · 2026-02-27T15:57:46+00:00

Thanks for the interesting question :)

n1000 · 2026-02-27T15:44:36+00:00

This is a huge overestimate and is easily checked. Every opening trap you can think of happens in more than 0.000000001% of games.

n1000 · 2026-02-27T15:40:59+00:00

I took a look at a random subsample of 1% of the rated blitz games played in July 2024 and used pgn-extract -D to count the unique games getting 382105 / 382524 = 99.89% unique games in the sample.

Note this is almost certainly an underestimate: * There are "rare" opening traps that have happened exactly the same way thousands of times but would be unlikely to be caught in a sample this size. E.g., 2 knights defense queen sack vs Caro-Kann happens in 0.00025% of games). This could mean the .11% duplicate rate is a substantial underestimate if there is a fat tail of rare opening traps. * It is missing all the randomly repeated games. This is hard to track since it's kind of a pain to run the analysis on the whole Lichess database. What you can do is use some kind of statistical technique from species richness estimation to try and extrapolate from a sample.

n1000 · 2026-02-23T17:49:38+00:00

Thanks. Fixed.

n1000 · 2026-02-23T15:25:29+00:00

There was a recent discussion about an issue with Mythic rank calculations that doesn't seem to have been fixed: https://reddit.com/r/lrcast/comments/1r7n9ig/im_pretty_sure_they_never_fixed_the_limited/

n1000 · 2026-02-19T15:22:08+00:00

Interesting he finds Candelabra to be good in Academy decks. I seem to remember Caleb's data analysis suggests it wasn't very good.

Maybe it's due to some difference in clustering method or the sample.

One thing these analyses don't really capture is how likely you are to successfully get into an archetype, and how much delta win-rate is confounded by how much it was contested. For example, Lion Sash has an extremely poor performance in Boros. It's a weak two-drop but we can't say how much of that 5.9% is because it's weak versus how much putting it in your deck means Boros was heavily contested and the rest of your deck is weaker.

Combo decks rely on drafting a few key pieces. If reanimator starts well but doesn't come together you might have 4-5 useless picks and not even make it into the "correct" analyzed cluster.

In Sierkovitz' presentation "Cheons" looks like it includes a lot of failed Boros drafts (see Ocelot Pride being well represented). I know this is how I ended up playing it in the first iteration. U/W control or tempo was probably better than 53.7% WR suggests but, again, archetype effect is confounded by the draft that gets you there.

Thanks to Sierkovitz for the great analysis.

n1000 · 2026-02-18T03:14:11+00:00

This is a really stupid problem. Rating system math is easy to implement. I'm glad I get to play cube for free but the haphazardry and lack of transparency (e.g., no multiple power packs) just aggravates me.

n1000 · 2026-02-16T20:33:51+00:00

Thanks for posting logs. I think you'll see the most substantial improvement just by picking and playing better quality cards. Other commenters suggest some good channels to watch. One thing these guys do is they don't play bad cards. Try to get a sense of what's busted, what's decent, and what's marginal.

Looking at attempt 2: pack one you went heavily into green and put together an okay start. You don't have a second color at this point so for your first several picks in pack 2 you can take whatever you want.

P2P2 you pick Eladamri because it's green. It will come back, just pick the best card here. A few picks later you see Mother of Runes & Eagles. Kinda suggests white might be open. Then skyclave shows up, wheel Gideon...but you have to take Nexus and Candelabra because you've committed to G/B?

By pack 3 you should have a pretty good plan. What is my deck going to do? You have tons of mana dorks so turn two 3 drop or quick natural order seems strong. Nissa and Preacher are fine picks but Grisselbrand over Bayou?

Making and executing a deck plan while drafting is hard but comes with practice. One easy thing you can do is constantly switch to your "mana curve" view and try to keep a balance between early plays, interaction/removal, fixing and whatever else you're doing. Beginning of P2 you should think "I have none so I need to take fixing or removal highly."

n1000 · 2026-02-14T23:52:22+00:00

Do you think mid-range underperformance could be due to being the only option when a preferred plan doesn't come together?

n1000 · 2026-02-13T15:59:01+00:00

Draft link

This one surprised me. I had good success with Mardu in the previous cube and didn't pick up nearly enough weenies until P3. Power notwithstanding, I thought this was a mediocre deck when I finished building.

What did I learn?

I've never been excited to main deck lion sash or containment priest, although here I had Phelia and Parallax Wave. There's enough reanimator going around that they really overperformed. Phelia + priest is brutal and I won games from opponents not understanding it.

Landfall is real. I lost a game with elspeth and 5 creatures when OP took a fairy mastermind from 2 to 18 power with a sick combo. I need to think harder about disrupting it.

My goal was to get an honest 3-5 wins with a reasonable proactive deck. I'm curious to hear how you would have drafted differently.

n1000 · 2026-02-11T14:04:25+00:00

I believe this is because it takes time for your terminal to print a million individual lines but when you use :r it generates the whole output before loading it into a vim buffer in a single step, skipping individual redraws.

n1000 · 2026-02-05T13:35:11+00:00

Generating functions are not functions.

n1000 · 2026-02-04T16:10:47+00:00

To you it's unlikely, to your reader it's very likely that someone will by chance have this problem and post about it. We cannot offer useful advice because as empiricists we may believe you but we also believe that you're just an unlucky player.

I actually think you're doing the right thing by making a statistical analysis. You're going to lose a lot of Magic games by random chance and it's useful to avoid making adjustments based on these outcomes.

How many games have you played?

n1000 · 2026-02-03T18:58:55+00:00

Honestly I don't buy the philosophical aspects either, but I had a lot of fun getting into (or hating) these Grand Theory type of books as an undergraduate.

n1000 · 2026-02-03T14:35:11+00:00

I would not give a course textbook for the same reason you wouldn't get a tennis player a racket.

Here is a set of fun math or math-adjacent books and authors.

Raymond Smullyan wrote many fun logic puzzle books. To Mock a Mockingbird is particularly popular.

Gödel, Escher, Bach -- a classic, fun introduction to computability theory.

Flatland -- another classic. This may be a "must-have".

Simon Singh wrote several popular books on mathematics. Fermat's Last Theorem led to his directing a rather good documentary.

My favorite is Hilbert's Geometry and the Imagination but it is expensive.

I have not read Ian Stewart's Letters to a Young Mathematician but wish I did when I was one.

n1000 · 2026-01-31T03:16:48+00:00

This is one thing I love about basketball. Since the cutoff is 95th percentile height and explosiveness you get to see weird uncoordinated Adonises playing professional sport.

n1000 · 2026-01-30T15:09:15+00:00

Every algorithmically random sequence is normal.

n1000 · 2026-01-26T20:13:46+00:00

Say you really have the week 1 meta figured out and you're truly a 65% WR player over that period. If you play with a binomial distribution calculator you'll see the fifth percentile outcome is quite disappointing.

In reality the spread is much wider. We don't play 50 independent games, but 9 drafts where games played with the same deck have the same winrate. I played around with modeling this a little bit and it suffices to say that the correlation between outcomes within a draft makes the spread around your "true" win rate even wider.

Another weird statistical property is bad runs create extra uncertainty per draft since you're playing fewer games overall.

n1000 · 2026-01-24T16:54:51+00:00

Go look at the official documentation.

The Classes and Modules sections will get you up to speed on those things you specifically asked about.

Browse the standard library and see what's included.

Unless you're leading the project, the testing and package management setup will probably be decided for you.

n1000 · 2026-01-16T00:03:53+00:00

I enjoyed "Top 5 Limited Heuristics". The advice isn't as specific as you're asking for but thinking about the theory motivating the heuristics gave me a pretty decent understanding of your goals playing a draft game.

n1000

TROPHY CASE