Hello again and welcome to the final daily for the week! This has (surprisingly) been a very fun set of articles to do, while at the same time, getting my sense of urgency alive and kicking again. For this daily we’ll start with something a bit light-hearted: Penguins.
Penguins are simply the greatest Blue creature type that has not seen print (Yet). Olivier Ruel clearly saw the wonderful Penguins for what they were worth, but sadly he failed in his mission to give our new Penguin overlords a home. People clearly adore the little fellows, as can be seen from the profits brought in by “March Of The Penguins”. They fit the Blue theme of being small and fragile little creatures and their inert swimming ability creates a perfect excuse to use Islandwalk. Adding to the flavor is the fact that they’re flightless birds, which means all of those lousy Enchant Creature cards that give flying can, actually go to use! I implore Wizards to add this loveable creature type to Magic and finally give Pingu a home.
Now for the strategy portion of today’s article.
There’s a disturbing trend it seems… one I’ve simply dubbed “The Bandwagon Effect”, since it needs a cheesy name. What I’m referring too is players simply picking out decks because they’ve done well very recently, without having any clue of why they did well. Not only is it important to take specific metagames into the equation, but also why exactly the deck is a better choice than whatever you were previously interested in. Seriously, people need to get an understanding of why people play / make fun of certain decks.
More and more it seems that whenever a deck is successful at a Vintage tourney, it automatically is declared the new top tier deck. Or even worse, people over-react to a tourney’s results, then subsequently declare another deck that didn’t Top 8 to be dead. Here’s a little helpful advice for you, my friends. One tournament will not reveal a lot of information in the grand scheme of things. You’ll notice when people analyze PTQ seasons, they go over a week’s worth of data. This data typically includes multiple 100 people or more PTQs, as well as locations from a large variety of locations across the nation.
What do we have that people make assumptions off of? 100-150 man tourneys from one location that we see about once a month. Add in one or two smaller tourneys that actually get around 30-50 (European results clearly don’t count) and you have the total data pool people are making assessments off of. For example we’re now seeing the stage of, “OMG, Stax is clearly the best deck!!!11!”, due to the Chicago results. Is Stax a good deck? Yes. Is it very powerful and capable of winning large tournaments? Yes. Is it suddenly 4-Gush GAT good? No. Is the current hype around it almost as high? Yes.
People tend to put too much stock into a relatively small batch of data and make sweeping statements about what it represents. One need only see this thread: http://forums.starcitygames.com/viewtopic.php?t=280445 for a clear example of what I’m talking about.
For a popular example of the Bandwagon Effect at work, let’s take the example of a number of respectable players saying non-Dragon combo sucks and sucks hard. Does anyone understand why were saying that? Do people really try any of the combo decks we bash (and then as a follow up, try to fix them?) to see if they work? The sad truth is most of them do not. A lot of people simply parrot what a few people might say without putting effort in to figure it out. Sometimes this saves some time, but other times it causes people to be under prepared for “bad decks”. Fish for years was a great example of this philosophy. “Oh Fish is horrible, just look at the cards it runs. And those tiny little Faeries! Surely it couldn’t stand up to a real deck!” players would cry, as they were summarily dispatched by Merfolk, Faeries and Standstill of all things!
Meandeck Gifts is another example of the bandwagon effect at work. People leaped to it and spoke of its power and shininess, and how many games they had actually played with the deck weren’t the point. The point was Gifts Ungiven was simply too good! And God forbid you had anyone try to explain why the deck would win in some matches. It was always some Mana Drain into Gifts Ungiven into random win by turn 4. Sadly for many, decks adapted to Gifts and suddenly it wasn’t quite the monster people were saying it was.
Then Chicago took place and the masses confidence in the deck vanished. Now Stax was the new hotness!
Stax discussions caused a similar mockery to occur when all the Stax decks that were actually winning were running Goblin Welder again. Kevin Cron cut the little Goblin from his own Stax builds and a number of people blindly followed suit. Deferring to someone who is more experienced than you with something is an option when asking for an opinion. When you’re planning on playing the deck, you should be figuring out the reasoning why Goblin Welder shouldn’t be in the deck, not taking someone’s word for it.
In fact you shouldn’t be taking a lot of people’s word for things nowadays. Proper theory and testing work wonders – I just wish more people would use them.
-Joshua Silvestri
Team Reflection
Email me at: joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom