Kamigawa Block As We Know It

“The deck database is coming.”

“The deck database? It’s coming.”

“THE DECK DATABASE IS COMING!”

We’ve been saying it for awhile, but really… the deck database is here, starting Tuesday. We still have some decks to clean up (the new system does not allow typos, leaving me to clean up three years’ worth of misspelled cards across three thousand-plus decks) and some user-friendliness issues to tuck away, but starting on Tuesday you’ll see the fruit of our hard work.

(Incidentally, this is what your Premium dollars went to pay for: paying me full-time to do this as opposed to instant revenue-generating projects like, say, shopping cart upgrades. See? You get the benefit! Cue warm and fuzzy feelings.)

But what does this deck database mean? Well, because we store the information in a vastly different format, we can now:

• Get the round-by-round matchup information from Wizards’ site.


• Match each round’s results with the deck each player was piloting, showing us what deck beat what deck.


• Come up with a full matrix, showing what each deck’s win percentage was against all other decks that each archetype faced in the entire tournament.

Needless to say, this is a good thing. But there are a few caveats and quid pro quos:

This Does Not Include The Top 8 Matchup Data.
Mostly because after a day of classifying entries, I’m too lazy to do it. Still, this is a good overview of the field.

Four Players Have No Decks.

Wizards did not list decks for Uri Peleg, Mark Zadjner, Joshua Ravitz, or Jorge Padilla Chinas. (That, or the name they put on their decklist was so radically different from the name on their DCI record that I could not match it up).

I’ve notified Wizards of the missing decks – okay, I emailed Ted, since he was covering the event, and I asked him to tell Wizards – but in the meantime, if someone was paired against that player in a given round, that round is not included in the results.

(And in other news, I have decided that I officially hate DCI software, and foreign players in particular. See, after I’ve entered the decks into our system, I then have to match up decks to pairing information. It’s not a problem figuring out that, say, Tim Aten is actually Timothy Aten – but when the name you write on your sheet is Jose Carreo and your DCI name is Felipe Carreno Osape, I will never figure out who you are. In addition, several Japanese players reverse their first and last names between sheet and DCI information, leaving me to dope out that Shuhei Tokohashi is actually Tokohashi Shuuhei. Gah!)

This Is Still In Beta.

While I’m reasonably sure the data is accurate, if you find anything that looks hinky let me know and I’ll take a look at it. This is the first time we’ve done this with an open tournament (we analyzed the Power Nine Tournament in Chicago, but didn’t post all the round-by-round pairings), so actually I’m looking forward to someone double-checking my work.

This is a work in progress. Do not bet your house, your baby, or your sex life on it.

Classifying Decks Was Hell, And They May Be Slightly Inaccurate.

Let’s be honest: Every damned deck in the format packs 4 Sakura-Tribe Elder, 4 Kodama’s Reach, 4 Tendo Ice Bridge. Thus, it is remarkably difficult to figure out whether this deck is G/B Control, a Gifts Ungiven Deck, a Snakes deck, a Myojin Flare deck, or a Sway of the Stars deck. I tried my damndest to make sure I classified them accurately, but if I misclassified a deck then obviously the entire pairing will be slightly inaccurate.

You can check my work on Tuesday, when the deck database goes live.

I Probably Classified Too Finely.

Normally, I’d just rank all Snakes decks as “Snakes” and be done with it, but since this is the first tournament of a new format, the question will invariably arise: Should you splash Red in the Snakes deck? Should you splash Blue? Should you splash both?

Thus, I broke all Snake decks down into individual colors to see how each sort of Snake deck performed… which may not present an accurate representation if you just want to see whether Snakes as a generic deck pounds the crap out of Deck X. If enough readers demand it, I may create a separate, simpler matchup that asks, “So how does B/G Control (splashing whatever) do against Snakes (splashing whatever)?”

Note, however, that that would be a huge pain in the butt.

Deck Archetypes, As I Define Them.

For the record:

• Generic Snakes are a B/G deck, splashing nothing else. Anything else is noted as an addition to (or an exclusion from) that color base.
• 
  Gifts Ungiven Control only counts decks that use Gifts Ungiven to set up some sort of nasty Hana Kami recursion. There were a (very) few decks that used Gifts Ungiven as a generic tutor, but those weren’t going for the lock.


• Hondens were not listed as an archetype by Wizards, but you knew that somebody would attempt to mash a bunch of Honden enchantments together. They did poorly, but they did show up.


• Color/Color Legends means they basically chose the best Legends out of their given colors. Color/Color Arcane or Spirit means they had a lot of trigger effects. The difference between Control and Toolbox is negligible, since they’re split out by colors anyway, and almost all of them ran Time of Need.


• A capital color letter (B/G) means that it’s a main color. A noncapitalized letter (B/G/u) means that it’s a splash.


• The rest of the archetypes are taken almost wholesale from Ted Knutson Archetype Round-Up article, written on-site.

The Summary.

If you want to know what performed significantly above the line without having to scroll through a lot of stuff, here they are:

• G/R/u Legends (6 decks, 49 matches, 63.27% win percentage)


• Gifted Myojin Flare (8 decks, 59 matches, 62.71% win percentage)


• Snakes splashing Blue (4 decks, 29 matches, 62.07% win percentage)


• G/W/u Legends (15 decks, 109 matches, 61.47% win percentage)


• Myojin Flare (8 decks, 58 matches, 58.62% win percentage)


• Sway of the Stars (10 decks, 67 matches, 58.21% win percentage)

The decks that underperformed are:

• Snakes splashing Red (19 decks, 100 matches, 43% win percentage)


• Snakes (18 decks, 85 matches, 41.18% win percentage)


• G/B Control (10 decks, 50 matches, 40% win percentage)


• G/B/r Control (15 decks, 72 matches, 37.5% win percentage)


• Hondens (5 decks, 21 matches, 28.57% win percentage – told ya!)

And the decks that did middle-of-the-road, most likely indicating that the field was ready for them, were Gifts Ungiven Control, White Weenie, Mono-Black Aggro, and W/R Legends.

I’m sure the field will adjust to Heartbeat of Spring, which fuelled the real breakout tech from this event, and there’s sure to be an answer lurking for Gifts Ungiven-based decks somewhere in Saviors. But for the meantime, what you see below is the field as we know it.