Topical Discussion of the Official Multiplayer Ban List

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Mookie
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Post by Mookie » 2 years ago

onering wrote:
2 years ago
I think that's a bit backwards. Wheels don't make people more likely to play things like Hullbreecher, things like Hullbreecher make people more likely to play wheels. I don't think people are starting off with decks running a bunch of wheels and then seeing Narset and Hullbreecher as great synergies and adding them, I think they're either starting with the intent on abusing that synergy or running Hullbreecher because its just really good and then deciding to run wheels because of the synergy with him.

Even in a deck with no wheels, Hullbreecher is a staple level card. Its an efficient creature you can flash in to shut down a big draw spell and make a ton of mana. Its on par with Dockside Extortionist as a mana generator just being played fairly, and on top of that it serves as one of the stronger hate bears in the format. At that point, it just makes sense to add a half dozen wheels to your deck to take full advantage of him, and then Narset and Notion Thief as backup to make the strat consistent. Hullbreecher is the nexus around which this %$#% rotates.
Eh, it's a bidirectional relationship. If you're running wheels, you're incentivized to run Hullbreacher and fast mana. If you're running Hullbreacher, you're incentivized to run wheels. It may be the case that one direction pulls stronger than the other - if you're running wheels, you'll only add Hullbreacher a small percentage of the time, but if you're running Hullbreacher, you'll add wheels a larger percentage of the time. However, I find it unlikely that adding one to the deck will make it less likely for someone to add the other.

....although I suppose there may be some amount of self-restraint that only acts in one direction. I could see adding a wheel to a casual deck and refusing to add Hullbreacher because it feels too cutthroat. On the other hand, if you're adding Hullbreacher, I don't think you would ever have any qualms with throwing in a wheel, because Hullbreacher is already a pretty cutthroat card.

Anyway, it feels like we're quibbling over technicalities here. :D I'll stand by my belief that wheels are capable of pushing things in an unhealthy direction, but I wouldn't say that they are the least healthy thing in the format - there are healthy uses for them. On the flip side, I'll agree that Hullbreacher effects tend to be significantly less healthy - I see them played alongside wheels much more often that I see them being used as an answer to Rhystic Study / Korvold, Fae-Cursed King / other card draw effects. (and on a tangentially related note, Alms Collector is a useless card because it doesn't answer those effects)

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Post by Vertain » 2 years ago

duducrash wrote:
2 years ago
Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned before it's release...
My point was about cards that actually were in the format, cards that we had to endure for months, if not years, while pretty much everyone knew they were bad. But yes, I have worded that poorly, my bad.

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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

onering wrote:
2 years ago
I disagree, wheels have fair uses that don't just randomize the game. Yes, making everyone toss their hand and draw a new one upends the balance of the game and can randomly give someone who was losing a great hand or screw over someone who had a good hand before the wheel, but on average the effect should be mostly neutral when it comes to card quality. Wheels also don't effect the board, so you can't just dismiss the importance of board state before a wheel.
I disagree that 3 mana is ever a fair price to pay for making 3 other players redraw. ( edit: though Day's Undoing is close to fair with its additional turn ending effect )

At 5 or 6 mana I could agree. Even then though, requiring a counterspell to interact with something that powerful is dubious in my opinion.

At 3 mana, wheels should all be opponent's choice whether they want to wheel or not.

You should not get a 50/50 shot of completely hosing each of 3 players for 3 mana.

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Post by RowanKeltizar » 2 years ago

Talking about banning wheels to me feel similar to talking about banning counterspells, stax, land destruction, or all infinite combos, or things like Strip Mine, or Sol Ring. There are so many ways to hose players in this game. So many degenerate synergies. Ever play against Strip Mine, Crucible of Worlds, and Azusa, Lost but Seeking?

I have A LOT of experience casting wheels. It does actually take some skill and timing to hose players. More often than not, it allows at least one or two opponents to draw into new gas. Removing all wheels or even the best ones I think would take away a lot build diversity from the format. There are also plenty of ways to combat Wheels or punish the player using them, one thing that's great about this format.

I might be able to find an alternative to Wheel of Fortune, but there just isn't a good replacement for Time Spiral. That fact that it can be an answer to graveyard strategies and mill strategies in mono blue is pretty unique. And you're right, it is the mana cost of these wheels that make them feel broken. Time Reversal is bad because it costs 5. Everyone else gets to use their new cards before you do.

It's worth noting that the red wheels are one of mono red's few draw effects. How long has Wheel of Fortune or Reforge the Soul been a staple for mono red?

Now, Winds of Change should be mentioned here as I think for just R. It has the potential to be the most devastating without support. If you cast it on turn one, I would consider that pretty unfair. But there are also some ways to just straight up win the game on turn 1 as well... sooooo

I purposefully haven't included Narset or Hullbreacher in my deck because I know how degenerate that is. I think both of these cards should be looked at for a ban LONG before wheels are. The main reason I think this is the case is that both of these cards don't require support to be degenerate. They aren't symetrical and hose players everytime they are cast. Wheels on the other hand need OTHER cards to be unfair or to be cast extremely early in the game.

I actually agree that there may not be a need for an official banlist. Each playgroup should probably just decide on their own list of cards nobody wants to play against. Our playgroup has more or less outlawed mass land destruction at this point and they also discourage tutorable 2 card infinite combos.
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Post by cryogen » 2 years ago

duducrash wrote:
2 years ago
Vertain wrote:
2 years ago
Leovold, Emissary of Trest has been legal for nine months while being the fastest ban in the last several years, so I highly doubt Hullbreacher will be going anywhere in 2021
Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned before it's release...
Just a point of order, Lutri was a special case where it was known in advance that it would be banned due its companion clause, so the correct thing was to pre-ban it before people started spending money on it thinking they would get to play with it.

Griselbrand and Worldfire were both banned in the very next announcement cycle, so there is precedent for acting quickly.
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Post by onering » 2 years ago

pokken wrote:
2 years ago
onering wrote:
2 years ago
I disagree, wheels have fair uses that don't just randomize the game. Yes, making everyone toss their hand and draw a new one upends the balance of the game and can randomly give someone who was losing a great hand or screw over someone who had a good hand before the wheel, but on average the effect should be mostly neutral when it comes to card quality. Wheels also don't effect the board, so you can't just dismiss the importance of board state before a wheel.
I disagree that 3 mana is ever a fair price to pay for making 3 other players redraw. ( edit: though Day's Undoing is close to fair with its additional turn ending effect )

At 5 or 6 mana I could agree. Even then though, requiring a counterspell to interact with something that powerful is dubious in my opinion.

At 3 mana, wheels should all be opponent's choice whether they want to wheel or not.

You should not get a 50/50 shot of completely hosing each of 3 players for 3 mana.
Well, you really don't have a 50/50 shot at that. That's pretty much only if you cast it ASAP, which is pretty much a troll move. In actually gameplay, unless all your opponents are able to maintain full grips your opponents are usually going to benefit slightly from a wheel, because they are usually going to net a couple of cards from it and sometimes more. Even when its just a straight up 7 for 7, its still not a 50/50 of hosing a player. It's a 50/50 of the player getting a worse hand, but that includes everything from losing a great hand and getting a crappy one to losing an ok hand and getting another ok hand that is just slightly worse. I'd say for most decks, hand quality follows a bell curve style distribution, with there being smaller numbers of really good or really bad hands and larger numbers of ok hands. As the game progresses, this changes, but it still doesn't mean you're 50/50 screwing someone over. People at that point might be sitting on carefully crafted hands or waiting to drop their combo or sitting on a huge pile of cards so they'll be drawing down to 7 rather than up, but their more likely to be holding hands that are smaller than 7 and made up of cards they haven't yet needed to cast/not yet been able to cast. More often than not, the hand an opponent discards is going to be about equal to the hand they draw, while the remainder will be split (perhaps evenly, perhaps not), between the new hand being better or worse enough than the discarded hand to matter.

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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

onering wrote:
2 years ago
More often than not, the hand an opponent discards is going to be about equal to the hand they draw, while the remainder will be split (perhaps evenly, perhaps not), between the new hand being better or worse enough than the discarded hand to matter.
This has not been my experience at all. For me roughly half the time my hand gets much worse. Because I've held those cards for a reason and I kept that hand for a reason. I might be peculiar but I tend to hold a lot of cards and a huge percentage of the time they're stripping the reactive cards I held.

I hate the sheer random power for 3 Mana. I'll have to start keeping track I guess :)

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Post by onering » 2 years ago

pokken wrote:
2 years ago
onering wrote:
2 years ago
More often than not, the hand an opponent discards is going to be about equal to the hand they draw, while the remainder will be split (perhaps evenly, perhaps not), between the new hand being better or worse enough than the discarded hand to matter.
This has not been my experience at all. For me roughly half the time my hand gets much worse. Because I've held those cards for a reason and I kept that hand for a reason. I might be peculiar but I tend to hold a lot of cards and a huge percentage of the time they're stripping the reactive cards I held.

I hate the sheer random power for 3 Mana. I'll have to start keeping track I guess :)
TBH it sounds like maybe you either have had bad luck, or your playing decks that have a tendency sculpt hands. From my own experience, I know that if I'm running certain control decks a wheel is more likely to hurt me than help me, because I'll have good reactive spells I'll want to hold back until they are needed, and they'll accrue in my hand, or I'll be drawing a lot and discarding down to my 7 best in hand, which means that any random seven is likely to be worse than my current hand. But then that's not much of a coin toss either, those decks are just likely to get screwed in the same way that other decks are usually going to be helped (like most aggro inclined decks, decks that can play out non reactive spells at instant speed, decks with a good amount of gy synergy, etc.).

Now if someone fires it off early, that's a different story. You did keep your hand for a reason, and the new 7 doesn't come with a mulligan, so it can really screw someone that gets wheeled a no lander turn 2. Of course, if you had to keep a crappy hand because you had to mull to 5 to get the two lands you already played, you're gonna welcome the wheel.

Moreover, I suspect that getting screwed by a wheel is going to stand out a lot more than getting a comparable hand from a wheel, or even than an opponent's wheel helping you out of a bad hand. I'm speaking generally, not just about you. The turn 1 Sol Ring paradox is like this, where people tend to remember the times someone got a Sol Ring turn 1 and blew out the table, but in reality your actually less likely to win if you get a turn 1 Sol Ring than if you don't. I'm not talking about why that is, I personally suspect its the archenemy effect, because in this conversation the why doesn't matter, only that there's a perception that turn 1 Sol Rings lead to blowouts when the reality is that they reduce the player's chances of winning (regardless of the reason). The blowouts caused by turn 1 Sol Ring simply loom larger, players are going to remember how crappy it was to get blown out because the turn 1 Sol Ring guy ran away with the game, they're less likely to remember the times it led to a risky play that backfired or he got dogpiled by the table or he just got answered early and then couldn't recover and durdled the rest of the game. Similarly, from my own experience the games where I've gotten screwed by a wheel used fairly (or especially some guy firing off Winds of Change turn 1) stick out a lot more than the times where someone wheeled and I got a comparable hand, or even came out ahead because I went back up to 7. Those blowouts where suddenly your screwed feel really bad, but the other results either don't elicit emotion or only feel a little good. When you get handed crap by a wheel, you don't have many options to consider and the only thing you have to think about is what you lost, while if you get a comparable hand or a better hand you have a lot of new options to process and don't have the time or bandwidth to dwell on the emotions it elicited, so even if you were stoked by the result that feeling will quickly pass as you evaluate your potential plays.

The other thing with a wheel turning a good hand into a bad one that makes it stick out more is that its a loss, and people tend to fixate on loss and assign more emotional weight to it compared to gains. This goes beyond just trading a good for a bad hand though, I think it even extends to hands that are comparable, as the loss of the cards you had, and had plans for, is felt more than the gain of the new cards (and the new cards bring with them the need for new assessments, which need to be made more quickly and tax brainpower, which means a player might not be able to utilize the new cards as effectively as the old even if the overall quality is the same, but that's probably something that has an effect on the margins). At this point I wonder if even a slightly better hand would actually feel slightly worse than the discarded hand, based solely on how we as a species are psychologically predisposed to overvalue loss and undervalue gain.

And I might as well continue this stream of consciousness musing and connect it to why Sheldon might think wheels are so bad. I'll note that the commander banlist isn't about balance, but about sending a message about what the format is supposed to be. The cards on the list are, for the most part, there because they ruin fun, subjective as that is. Another way to put it is that the kind of problems those cards cause just make people feel really bad, to the extent that it ruins their enjoyment of the game, and does so consistently enough and broadly enough to get banned. Sometimes these cards are also very powerful, consistent, and were heavily played, but some cards like Worldfire, Biorhythm, and Coalition Victory flat out suck. They aren't banned for their power or consistency or because they'd be format staples, but because they're bull %$#%. The reaction to a CV win, or getting killed by Biorhythm, or having Worldfire resolve, for too many people for the cards to be allowed, is "Come on with that bull %$#%." I'd say getting your mana screwed because some douche canoe fired off winds of change turn 1 is equal to that. So wheels absolutely have the capability to be that %$#%, but they are much less likely to be like that than the Worldfires of the world and can be played responsibly to minimize that risk. But I think Sheldon might be seeing the nonsense with Hullbreecher and then looking at other kind of cheesy synergies and how wheels can sometimes randomly screw hands and is thinking "these sure show up in a lot of bull %$#%." I also think that Sheldon is prone to sharing his initial takes with the expectation that we should receive them with a grain of salt, because Sheldon's hot takes don't translate into RC action. I like that he gives them because it shows transparency, and I think they reveal that he doesn't act based on his own early reactions, but rather takes the time to gather different perspectives, test things out, and arrive at thoughtful decisions down the line that might differ considerably from his initial takes.

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Post by Vertain » 2 years ago

cryogen wrote:
2 years ago
duducrash wrote:
2 years ago
Vertain wrote:
2 years ago
Leovold, Emissary of Trest has been legal for nine months while being the fastest ban in the last several years, so I highly doubt Hullbreacher will be going anywhere in 2021
Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned before it's release...
Just a point of order, Lutri was a special case where it was known in advance that it would be banned due its companion clause, so the correct thing was to pre-ban it before people started spending money on it thinking they would get to play with it.

Griselbrand and Worldfire were both banned in the very next announcement cycle, so there is precedent for acting quickly.
The most recent bans of cards that weren't already on the list as "banned as commander", however, indicates that they take very long:
Sylvan Primordial, released in February 2013, banned in February 2014, even though "games revolving around copying, stealing, tutoring the same creature over and over again" was already well established by the ban of Primeval Titan in September 2012. Still took them an entire year.
Prophet of Kruphix, released in September 2013, banned in January 2016, legal for more than two years.
Paradox Engine, released in January 2017, banned in July 2019, legal for two and a half years. Rather short, given their love for broken mana-producing artifacts.
Iona, Shield of Emeria, released in October 2009, banned in July 2019
Flash, I will disregard the time of its printing and instead look at the driving factor of it being undesirable: Protean Hulk's unban, which happened in April 2017. Flash was banned in April 2020, which makes a solid three years.

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Post by cryogen » 2 years ago

Vertain wrote:
2 years ago
cryogen wrote:
2 years ago
duducrash wrote:
2 years ago


Lutri, the Spellchaser was banned before it's release...
Just a point of order, Lutri was a special case where it was known in advance that it would be banned due its companion clause, so the correct thing was to pre-ban it before people started spending money on it thinking they would get to play with it.

Griselbrand and Worldfire were both banned in the very next announcement cycle, so there is precedent for acting quickly.
The most recent bans of cards that weren't already on the list as "banned as commander", however, indicates that they take very long:
Sylvan Primordial, released in February 2013, banned in February 2014, even though "games revolving around copying, stealing, tutoring the same creature over and over again" was already well established by the ban of Primeval Titan in September 2012. Still took them an entire year.
Prophet of Kruphix, released in September 2013, banned in January 2016, legal for more than two years.
Paradox Engine, released in January 2017, banned in July 2019, legal for two and a half years. Rather short, given their love for broken mana-producing artifacts.
Iona, Shield of Emeria, released in October 2009, banned in July 2019
Flash, I will disregard the time of its printing and instead look at the driving factor of it being undesirable: Protean Hulk's unban, which happened in April 2017. Flash was banned in April 2020, which makes a solid three years.
Oh, absolutely. Unless a card is quite obviously going to go against the philosophy document as were the two I brought up, the likelihood of banning something within a year of its release are quite low. It's worth noting that this past year has basically been limbo as far.as the banning are concerned. With in person play being nonexistent it is very hard to gage detrimental impact of a card. I would expect that nothing gets banned before the end of the year, to let the format settle into its new normal.
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Post by DirkGently » 2 years ago

onering wrote:
2 years ago
Moreover, I suspect that getting screwed by a wheel is going to stand out a lot more than getting a comparable hand from a wheel, or even than an opponent's wheel helping you out of a bad hand. I'm speaking generally, not just about you. The turn 1 Sol Ring paradox is like this, where people tend to remember the times someone got a Sol Ring turn 1 and blew out the table, but in reality your actually less likely to win if you get a turn 1 Sol Ring than if you don't. I'm not talking about why that is, I personally suspect its the archenemy effect, because in this conversation the why doesn't matter, only that there's a perception that turn 1 Sol Rings lead to blowouts when the reality is that they reduce the player's chances of winning (regardless of the reason). The blowouts caused by turn 1 Sol Ring simply loom larger, players are going to remember how crappy it was to get blown out because the turn 1 Sol Ring guy ran away with the game, they're less likely to remember the times it led to a risky play that backfired or he got dogpiled by the table or he just got answered early and then couldn't recover and durdled the rest of the game.
I more or less agree with the rest of what you've said, but I'm assuming you're pulling this sol ring information from the command zone "study" and I find it deeply flawed in its methodology. If there's more reliable information about such a pattern I'd love to see it, though.
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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

DirkGently wrote:
2 years ago
. If there's more reliable information about such a pattern I'd love to see it, though.
There is absolutely no way that turn 1 sol ring makes you less likely to win. In Ephara my win rate off a turn 1 sol ring is over 80%. I don't record my wins but I have played the deck a ton and have a pretty solid memory of when I win or lose. And I have not lost a game with a turn 1 sol ring in 2 years. :P

No way not in a million years. They just can't possibly track enough games to be statistically significant and across more than one power level bracket and even then I'd be extremely doubtful.

-------

Another reason I am so completely certain of that is that I have played a lot of CEDH and going first in CEDH has been tracked endlessly by the community -- and it is a *massive* advantage. If going first is a big advantage, it stands to reason that stealing two turns of mana by a lucky draw of Sol Ring will also be a large advantage.

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Post by DirkGently » 2 years ago

In theory you could speculate that playing a sol ring t1 is so politically suicidal that it counteracts the advantage, and that going first doesn't have that effect for some reason. Very hard to prove without a massive sample size, though, which the CZ data isn't imo. But the bigger issue is that they're using video from uploaded games, which are probably a lot less likely to bother with games where people steamroll from an early lead, or they might intentionally hold back overpowered plays to create better content. Uploaded games are a really biased sampling.
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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

DirkGently wrote:
2 years ago
In theory you could speculate that playing a sol ring t1 is so politically suicidal
Yeah one could speculate that, but I think over time people would naturally figure out ways to reduce their political threat with a sol ring opener.

It is also vaguely possible that t1 Sol Ring does very slightly reduce your winrate, but not as much as t2-5 Sol Ring helps it - or being able to t1 Enlightened Tutor for Sol Ring, or Trinket Mage for it, etc.

If having Sol Ring in your deck actually reduced your win rate people would have started cutting it by now.

(All I can say with certainty is I've played thousands of games of commander and across all of them my win rate with a t1 Sol Ring is well over the expected 25% -- with a slightly lower degree of certainty I would say that it's probably higher than my typical win rate of ~40% just based off Ephara games alone).

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Post by DirkGently » 2 years ago

pokken wrote:
2 years ago
If having Sol Ring in your deck actually reduced your win rate people would have started cutting it by now.
I wouldn't say that. If commander was a tournament format, sure, but the vast majority of commander players aren't actually looking at any kind of statistics. Hell, I'm not either. I think through the political implications of my decks more than most I'm sure, but that's still based primarily on my intuition and secondarily on my fallible perception of my limited experience. Not exactly a rock solid foundation of well-substantiated statistics, and I think I'm significantly more clear-headed than most commander players when it comes to justifying my card inclusions.
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Post by cryogen » 2 years ago

For me, it's less whether a T1 Sol Ring affects your win rate and more does it affect the game when one person gets that mana advantage early game.
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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

DirkGently wrote:
2 years ago
I wouldn't say that. If commander was a tournament format, sure, but the vast majority of commander players aren't actually looking at any kind of statistics.
Things don't work like "yeh I checked a spreadsheet and said I shouldn't play sol ring" but more like changes in play patterns lowly percolate through the commander metamind.

Back when I started playing commander the ramp portfolio was so much different. It's changed a lot over time through these subtle effects like "Oh so and so said you shouldn't run x."

There's no way people are still playing it in 98% of decks this far into the history of the format if it were really worse.

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Post by BeneTleilax » 2 years ago

I will say T1 Sol Ring tends to make people neglect further set-up and overextend. The temptation is certainly there to treat turn two as if it really was turn four, and start dropping threats rather than the slower value engines and protection pieces you'd normally play on early turns. This ends predictably.

If you can keep your head though, early Sol Ring is a tremendous advantage.

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Post by DirkGently » 2 years ago

pokken wrote:
2 years ago
Things don't work like "yeh I checked a spreadsheet and said I shouldn't play sol ring" but more like changes in play patterns lowly percolate through the commander metamind.

Back when I started playing commander the ramp portfolio was so much different. It's changed a lot over time through these subtle effects like "Oh so and so said you shouldn't run x."

There's no way people are still playing it in 98% of decks this far into the history of the format if it were really worse.
While I like the idea of viewing the metamind in a sort of evolutionary model, I don't think it really holds up in this (somewhat hypothetical) circumstance. Numerically and logically sol ring is obviously insanely strong, so the only reason to suspect it might have a poor win rate is from a political downside, which is largely invisible to most people. I don't think hardly anyone would cut a card that's so obviously superior based on such squishy justification, even if it happened to be right (which, ofc, it almost certainly isn't).

And then add to that we're only talking about sol ring in a particular circumstance, not overall. So even if it were true that t1 sol ring was a poison pill, it wouldn't necessarily follow that it's a bad card to run overall.

I'm basically just playing devil's advocate though - while I don't think it's impossible theoretically for t1sr to be winrate negative, my experience says pretty strongly otherwise, and I find the CZs evidence to be quite underwhelming.
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Post by onering » 2 years ago

DirkGently wrote:
2 years ago
onering wrote:
2 years ago
Moreover, I suspect that getting screwed by a wheel is going to stand out a lot more than getting a comparable hand from a wheel, or even than an opponent's wheel helping you out of a bad hand. I'm speaking generally, not just about you. The turn 1 Sol Ring paradox is like this, where people tend to remember the times someone got a Sol Ring turn 1 and blew out the table, but in reality your actually less likely to win if you get a turn 1 Sol Ring than if you don't. I'm not talking about why that is, I personally suspect its the archenemy effect, because in this conversation the why doesn't matter, only that there's a perception that turn 1 Sol Rings lead to blowouts when the reality is that they reduce the player's chances of winning (regardless of the reason). The blowouts caused by turn 1 Sol Ring simply loom larger, players are going to remember how crappy it was to get blown out because the turn 1 Sol Ring guy ran away with the game, they're less likely to remember the times it led to a risky play that backfired or he got dogpiled by the table or he just got answered early and then couldn't recover and durdled the rest of the game.
I more or less agree with the rest of what you've said, but I'm assuming you're pulling this sol ring information from the command zone "study" and I find it deeply flawed in its methodology. If there's more reliable information about such a pattern I'd love to see it, though.
Just anecdotal, but I started to notice it before the command zone article, and afterwards started making not of every time a sol ring got played turn 1 in a game I played and what happened. What I saw was that the turn 1 sol ring player tended to win about 1 out of 5 games, which is lower than they should in a 4 player game. Deck quality matters, but what I saw most was the turn 1 sol ring player got the tentative archenemy position. If the sol ring led to a signet, then they jumped to a much higher win rate of 1 out of every 2 (but a much smaller sample size here) even though the table always kicked into full archenemy mode at that point. If the turn 1 sol ring led to the player snowballing quickly, it was a huge boon, but if the player couldn't translate it into a dominant position by turn 3 it would either not be worth the immediate hate it generated or it would get answered and become irrelevant. I noticed a lot of people would just play it turn 1 and not have much to follow it up with. It would definitely put them ahead, but not by enough to deal with everyone pointing early answers at their stuff and they'd run out of gas or just be brought down to everyone else's level rather quickly. Sometimes this would happen even if they shouldn't have been the archenemy (like if their was a problem commander at the table). The spending of resources to keep the turn 1 sol ring guy under control would also give the rest of the table more room to operate without being answered, and so more likely to go off with something degenerate. Conversely, it seems like dropping sol ring turn 2 earns significantly less hate, and is less likely to eat a random nature's claim or other piece of removal. I think its primarily psychological, but other players are also more likely to have started advancing their own plans by turn 2 and so they have other things they need to pay attention to. I'll also say from a more limited amount of time playing and observing cEDH, the sol ring paradox doesn't exist there. Those decks are far more likely to be able to leverage it (and mana crypt) turn 1 into an early win.

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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

onering wrote:
2 years ago
What I saw was that the turn 1 sol ring player tended to win about 1 out of 5 games, which is lower than they should in a 4 player game.
My typical win rate in MTGO is about 75%, and in person it's 40-50% (though the last few nights I am on a tear, paper win rate of close to 80%, 10/13 games).

What I wonder is...what's your win rate? Because if your win rate is 50% (or like Dirk's, north of 60%) you're skewing the games that are played against you pretty hard.

The average player who plays against me probably has win rate in the vicinity of 20% if they're lucky and a sol ring is not going to help that a ton because my decks are great at cleaning up early turn explosions (plus I'm pretty good at rallying the table to archenemy :P).

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Post by onering » 2 years ago

pokken wrote:
2 years ago
onering wrote:
2 years ago
What I saw was that the turn 1 sol ring player tended to win about 1 out of 5 games, which is lower than they should in a 4 player game.
My typical win rate in MTGO is about 75%, and in person it's 40-50% (though the last few nights I am on a tear, paper win rate of close to 80%, 10/13 games).

What I wonder is...what's your win rate? Because if your win rate is 50% (or like Dirk's, north of 60%) you're skewing the games that are played against you pretty hard.

The average player who plays against me probably has win rate in the vicinity of 20% if they're lucky and a sol ring is not going to help that a ton because my decks are great at cleaning up early turn explosions (plus I'm pretty good at rallying the table to archenemy :P).
I play a wide variety of decks, a lot of which are lower power. When I'm playing something good*, my win rate is between 40 and 50%, but I also play a lot of goofy nonsense like ETB Dong Zhou and when I'm running that kind of stuff its closer to 25%. I don't think I'm really skewing things much.

*And by good, I mean anything from reasonable in a 75% meta to high power casual.

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Post by pokken » 2 years ago

onering wrote:
2 years ago
I play a wide variety of decks, a lot of which are lower power. When I'm playing something good*, my win rate is between 40 and 50%, but I also play a lot of goofy nonsense like ETB Dong Zhou and when I'm running that kind of stuff its closer to 25%. I don't think I'm really skewing things much.

*And by good, I mean anything from reasonable in a 75% meta to high power casual.
if your win rate is:
30% - your opponents' expected win rate is 23.33%
35% - your opponents expected win rate is 21.67%
40% - your opponents' expected win rate is 20%

It doesn't take much at all to skew it quite a lot.

Even with the regular expected percentage of 25%, the actual win rate expected is different per seat people are in. Someone in seat 4 probably has no more than a 15-20% chance to win most games.

Bottom line I think it's borderline impossible for you to eyeball a statistical difference on this scale while evaluating for the various confounding variables (your skill, your opponents' skill, seat position, etc.).

Even just the exact same people playing the exact same decks probably take *thousands* of games to achieve anything close to statistical significance.

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Post by onering » 2 years ago

That's why I said it's just anecdotal Pokken. I never claimed I did a statistical analysis.

But for all the variables you put out there as potentially skewing the turn 1 sol ring players natural win rate lower, they could also skew it higher just as easily. And further, you'd expect that if turn 1 Sol Ring were dominating play then the win rate should be significantly higher than a generic opponent win rate, not the same. Sol Ring is an obviously powerful card that accelerates your plays, if it resulted in no change in win rate then that would be evidence that playing it turn 1 isn't nearly as powerful as it seems, and that there are forces negating its effectiveness. Additionally, I wasn't only looking at opponents, but my own turn 1 sol ring games, which should further reduce the skew.

What IS easier to eyeball are the potential why's. What I've seen lead to the turn 1 Sol Ring player NOT winning are the table ganging up on them, the Sol Ring eating a nature's claim or something similar before it can be used or before the player can get much value out of it, or they over extend, someone draws an answer before they can win, and then they're out of gas. None of these point to Sol Ring being anything less than a great card. Two of them are play patterns, one probably has to do with player skill. It's possible that I've just run into more people who are willing to overextend, that I've played at more tables where the archenemy strategy is more effective, and people were just more likely to have an early answer for Sol Ring than should be expected, but it's also possible that your own experiences are equally skewed.

It's not enough to declare that playing a turn 1 Sol Ring will DEFINITELY make you lose more, but it's certainly enough to make me say there's something going on here, and to think about what I can learn from what I've seen. I also said I noticed that tables are less likely to go into archenemy mode when. Sol Ring hits turn 2, so the implication for me is that unless you can leverage the Mana turn 1 or your best turn 2 play requires sol ring, you should sandbag it until turn 2 as a political measure. I've noticed that a lot of times my best turn 2 play is 2 or 3 Mana and can best cast after a sol ring, so I lose nothing by waiting. If my best play requires two colored pips or is 4 Mana, that's a different story. Another lesson is that you need to be sure going all in off a turn 1 or turn 2 Sol Ring is actually going to win before doing so. It seems like the power of getting so far ahead masks the danger of overextending, and makes people less aware of the risk that someone might have an answer. That, or they feel like this is their chance at a quick win and throw everything at sealing the deal early without taking the time to assess it that actually gives them the best shot at winning. People just playing smarter would probably get the turn 1 Sol Ring win percent back up to the generic expected win percent. When it comes to early removal of the Sol Ring, there's just not much you can do about that. It's obvious how powerful a card it is, so bolt the bird is in effect. You can reduce the chance it eats it before you get to use it by sandbagging it until turn 2 if you can, but if you can utilize all the Mana you'd have available turn 2 if you cast it turn 1 it's probably worth the risk. Then, of course, I saw that certain turn 1 sol ring play patterns really were dominant, like turn 1 sol ring into signet. That just puts a player so far ahead that archenemy isn't as effective and even if the Sol ring is answered they still are ahead because of the signet.

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Post by Dunharrow » 2 years ago

So, obviously a lot has changed since the rules were first made for Commander. A LOT.
The format is obviously very successful, which to me means that they should avoid any major changes.
But as the format grows and grows, it also makes it harder to make any changes.

So my question to you all is : do you think there are any changes that should be made to the format now, rather than years down the road.

For example, if they want to ever make planeswalkers legal as commanders, they should rip off the bandaid now. (as an aside, I am personally not in favour of making them all legal as commanders).

Another example - the RL. If they plan to keep the expensive RL cards in the format forever, then they will. But if they ever foresee it reaching a point where it is no longer sustainable, they should cut the cord now.

This format will be played for decades to come, and if there is anything that will be bad it should be dealt with before our playerbase doubles and quadruples.
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