The turn count for all of my 339 playtested (or tournament played) wins is as follows:
Turn 1: 43 out of 339, or 13%
Turn 2: 115 out of 339, or 34%
Turn 3: 119 out of 339, or 35%
Turn 4: 40 out of 339, or 12%
Turn Five+: 19 out of 339, or 6%
Overall win vs. loss: 339 wins out of 559 games, or 61%. If this seems a little high, it’s because it is. Once you incorporate the other players’ results, it seems a little more even. Between all 10 players, Twiddle Desire was run through 5009 playtesting games. (Keep in mind that the ten players were not playing against each other, each person was supposed to do 500 games. I did 550, and one other guy, who works 50+ hours a week, only managed 450).
Final turn count for all wins:
Turn 1: 332 out of 2739, or 12%
Turn 2: 904 out of 2739, or 33%
Turn 3: 1004 out of 2739, or 37%
Turn 4: 379 out of 2739, or 14%
Turn Five+: 120 out of 2739, or 4%
Final overall win vs loss: 2739 out of 5009 games, or 55%.
Those are just the statistics, I’m not going to analyze the numbers. To me, it seems like the deck wins 55% of the time against the field, which is not unreasonable. (Nor is it really overwhelming evidence to take this to your PTQ.) In addition, when you win, you win on turn 1 about 1/10th of the time, on turn 2 about a third of the time. You win on turn 3 a little more than a third of the time, and you win on turn 4 about one sixth of the time. Finally, the numbers seem to show that you rarely win if the game makes it past turn 4.
You’ve read more than nine thousand words. In writing this article, I went through hours of playtesting, hours more compiling results from other players, and a few hours left over to pull everything together into a readable form. Was it worth it? The short answer is yes. To me, at least, all the effort has paid off.
I know what deck I’ll be playing until January. Am I going to make thirty thousand dollars as a result of all this research? Probably not. What Twiddle Desire has taught me is the importance of knowing the intricacies of your deck, it has given me an appreciation for the luck factor inherent in all Magic games, and it has (hopefully) earned me back some of the respect as a writer that I’d lost in writing a fairly horrid article a little over a month ago.
The human interest story isn’t what you’re interested in, though, is it? You want to know the answer to the question, should I play Twiddle Desire in my PTQs? The answer is: how bad do you want to? If you are willing to work to learn the deck, and are willing to take some bad beats, I don’t think it would be wrong of me to say that Twiddle Desire is the strongest and fastest deck in the format.
Where The Clock is considered good when it has a 40% Turn 3 win, Twiddle Desire must be twice as good when we’ve found it has around a 33% Turn 2 win. The problem is, most of the deck is ripe for banning, so you aren’t going to be playing this past January.
So surprise your opponents on turn 1, or frustrate them by consistently winning on turn 2. Either way, at the end of the day, no one can deny this deck’s speed, any more then they can deny its sheer power.
If you have any questions or comments, as always, I can be reached at [email protected].
Thanks to everyone who helped me write this, or at least to all the crazy people who liked Twiddle Desire enough to play it until our fingers bled – it’s been one hell of a month, huh? Thanks to the casual playing group who let me take on three of them at a time with this beast. Thanks to any one who played near the end of this writing in Dubuque (especially Jordan and Steve). Congratulations to Dan on getting your first top 8 during the Mirrodin Sealed season. And yes, Tidal Kraken is tech! I swear… not really, I’m kidding… hmm, let’s just move on…