Dear Sideboard Staff,
While I would like to commend you for solid coverage of Pro Tour Chicago 2003, I cannot do that because the Draft decklists were once again missing. I have asked nicely in the past, both in e-mail and article form – but based on the coverage from this weekend, no one was listening.
My complaint in the past was centered around the lack of decklists posted for the Draft portions of the various National Championships. My desire was to do a simple breakdown of color combinations and find out how each one fared in the tournament as a whole in order to determine which colors were the strongest in the fill Odyssey Draft format. Since then, we have had numerous Limited Grand Prixs and a Limited Pro Tour – and still, the complete decklistings for any tournament have not been posted. (Okay, you did post all 32 decks for the Houston Masters, so you deserve a little credit there.)
As always, you posted full decklists for the 29 Feature Matches that were covered this weekend – but that information doesn’t provide any real basis for statistical analysis of trends for the tournament. Is Red/Blue really the best color combination? We don’t know because the full set of information isn’t available. In a format where White is considered almost unplayable by some, did White players really do that much worse than the field? Once again, there’s very little information here to analyze, and therefore the question cannot be answered.
For Constructed events, all decklists are posted. This allows the community to dissect the results from a tournament and figure out which deck did the best statistically against the field, which matchups proved to be particularly difficult for certain decks, and which decks were just bad. Arguably, more people Draft than play Constructed tournaments – and yet they never get the sort of analysis that Constructed gets because you don’t provide us with the decklists. Therefore we don’t know what the statistical best color combination is, we don’t have any matchup analysis, and we can’t tell which color combinations just suck (witness Eugene Harvey’s making the Top 8 while drafting a W/G/b deck for non-intuitive proof).
If you think that players do not want this information, just remember that there are players out there who memorize print runs of the cards in a pack in order to maximize their chances of winning. Getting information about which color combinations are the best/worst would be like a big fat hot fudge sundae with a hot chick on top to those people, and the regular fan would appreciate it too.
Now that I’ve done coverage at a Premiere Event, I know what a madhouse it can be. I know about the time constraints you have to provide information quickly and accurately, and I also know how much time entering all those decklists would take (since there would be 750 different decks on Day 1, and 250 or so decks on Day 2). That doesn’t change the fact that you are the only possible source for this information, and you are depriving the fans of the game this information by not providing it.
Therefore I propose a compromise – only post the entire decklists from Day 2. That way we (the analysts and fans) can at least have a large number of decks to do analysis against, while you cut the workload necessary to post those decks by 75%. Alternately, you could post the entire tournament worth of decks in the week following the event, after all the madness of the tournament has completed. That way you don’t have any additional burden during the period when time is most critical, but you still provide the vital information that I’ve been requesting.
If you do post the information, please do it right, and make sure the lists are broken down by seating in each pod. That way we can analyze the politics of the draft along with the card picks themselves.
In the meantime, keep up the good work, and expect to hear from me again at the next Limited Premiere Event if this information is not present.
Thank you,
Ted Knutson
[email protected]
P.S. – If you need somebody to actually do the grunt work here, I’m volunteering. Pay for my airfare and my hotel room, and I’ll be there with bows on.
P.P.S. – If you actually do post the decklists for Chicago sometime after the event, I take back all the mean things I didn’t say about you in this article.