So it’s summer break and I have some time on my hands.
Rather than spending every spare moment of it playing leagues on Magic: The
Gathering Online (MTGO), I have decided to start this small project and
allocate a few hours a day into it.
As written in the brief description, this blog is going to
be mainly about Magic: The Gathering, a game that needs no introduction, right?
It is, after all, the greatest collectible card game on the planet! Well, maybe
a little introduction is necessary for the uninitiated who may happen upon this
blog. So some useful links are shown below.
There are two main premises that I want to establish before
moving forward. The first is that MTG is a game of chance. That is, the result
of every game of magic is a product of randomness. Even with a tier 1 deck, the
most seasoned player can lose to an out-of-the-box preconstructed theme deck
piloted by your average Friday Night Magic (FNM) attendee.
However, the second premise is that random does not mean unpredictable.
A random event, by definition, is a set of outcomes in an activity, each of
which is assigned a probability. In a game of magic, there are many activities
that produce random events. But perhaps what is ultimately important, especially in relation to the first premise, is the activity of deciding the outcome of the game for a
player. This activity only has 2 outcomes on MTGO (win or lose) and 3 on paper
(win, lose, or draw). For simplicity, I will only deal with the outcomes on
MTGO for this entry (albeit drawing is a very important outcome on paper which
will be covered in future posts). As such, in every game of MTGO between
players A and B, the two outcomes for player A (and B) are winning with
probability p (1-p for B) and losing with probability 1-p (p for B). Thus, in the
given example, the seasoned player playing a tier 1 deck can have a probability
of winning that is say, 0.95 versus the average FNM player on a Nissa, Genesis
Mage deck. The chance that the Nissa pilot will win is pretty slim, but it is
certainly there and with enough games, it will certainly happen! However, the
main point is that if I was a betting man, I would certainly not bet on Nissa
winning the day. In fact, putting my money on the other guy is a pretty safe
bet. This is the second premise: the winner of a game of magic can be
predicted with some degree of accuracy, typically depending on how much about a
specific game is known. For example, if nothing is known except that a player piloting a mono green deck is up
against an equally skilled player on a UW Teferi deck, then the chance of Teferi crushing it is pretty good.
However, if the Teferi deck pilot mulligans twice and the mono green pilot opens with Llanowar
elf into Steel Leaf Champion, then the Teferi pilot is in pretty big trouble.
As such, the same thing can be said about decks. That is, the
activity of playing a deck in a match has the outcomes of winning with the deck
with probability p and losing with
probability 1-p. However, the actual value
of p is not known, and there is no practical
way of knowing it. Instead, we can approximate p with the use of Statistics, and this is the ultimate goal of this
blog. That is, my interest as the typical spike is in exploring the winnability of different decks, mainly in the
standard format and through the use of both my experience playing these decks
and other resources available online. Eventually, I am looking towards posting
videos of leagues that I play.
Overall, nothing new here. Just fan of the game writing about his experiences with it with the purpose of fleshing out the meta as it develops each season and hopefully, providing useful insights on what decks may be good to play on the next big event that you want to join.
Overall, nothing new here. Just fan of the game writing about his experiences with it with the purpose of fleshing out the meta as it develops each season and hopefully, providing useful insights on what decks may be good to play on the next big event that you want to join.
May the shuffler be with you!
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