February 24 Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame

I wish I had something new to say. Burn had another good week at the February 24 Pauper Challenge. LightningBolt.dek took three slots in the Top 8 and another 4 in the Top 16. Here's the part of our story where people mockingly ask for a Lightning Bolt ban.

Got that out of your system?

Good.

Burn did have a great week. The size of the challenge also meant that four players made the Top 32 with a losing record, indicated with a '~' in the chart. 

This brings me to an interesting fork in the road. Up until now I've been counting these decks as they have appeared in the Top 32, and rarely more than once per challenge. How important is it to count them if they appear more frequently? If we are concerning ourselves with the winner's metagame is it accurate to consider decks that did not end up with a winning record?

I do not have an answer to this and until I am convinced otherwise I will keep counting them since I have done so to this point.

So why is Burn having such a breakout?  Burn is one of the few decks in the format that really does not care what its opponent is doing. While many of the top decks try their best to limit interaction in some ways, Burn just attacks from a completely different angle. Moment's Peace is useless against it and you can only trade three cards for three damage so many times before you're out of cards (while Burn still has more Bolts). Unlike other combo decks - Elves, Tribe, Hexproof - removal is basically dead against the deck. 

Skewer the Critics has also been a huge addition. People have been leaning on Dispel as a piece of cheap interaction and Skewer conveniently avoids the counter. Spell Pierce should see more play but decks can be slow to adjust.

I am not going top spend a ton of time on the season stats this week. The cutoff to be considered was 4 appearances (with some Top 8s appearing at the bottom just to be visible).

Dimir Delver is performing five Top 8s better than expectation. 

Okay but what does that mean? 

Given how often a Win+ 1 deck makes the Top 8, Dimir Delver should have close to 8 appearances in the elimination round this season. 

It has 13.

There may be a correlation between how often the deck is played and how often it makes the Top 8 but just because a deck is heavily played doesn't mean it is going to make Top 8 more often. Boros Monarch has made the Top 32 the same number of times as Dimir Delver and yet has performed worse. It is averaging two fewer X-2 finishes - that is two more Dimir Delver decks have appeared in the Top 16 compared to Boros Monarch. 

There could be numerous reasons for this discrepancy. Early in the season Boros Bully far outnumbered Boros Monarch in appearances. Yet given its popularity, Bully has dropped significantly in its ability to finish strong - it has a similar number of X-2 finishes as it does X-3 finishes. 

Let's look at the top three decks of the moment: Dimir, Monarch, and Burn. Burn is arguably performing better than Dimir Delver when comparing Win+ to Volume. Yet it still is performing closer to expectation than the Delver deck. That is, Burn is just as good as it should be when it comes to making Top 8.

What can we infer from this?

Burn is a far easier deck to hate out than Dimir Delver. Life gain is easy to come by and a shift to Lone Missionary and Seeker of the Way could make it far harder for Burn to gain a foothold. Dimir Delver, however, can be seen as a more powerful deck that has fewer weaknesses. Despite being the top dog for the better part of three months it is still out performing most other decks in the winner's bracket.

This weekend the Pauper Mythic Qualifier is taking place at MagicFest LA. As of this writing there are over 70 people registered and my guess is that number is only going to go up in the next few days. The information gleaned from this event will be of huge importance - for the first time there's an incentive with massive implications for winning - going to London to play in the second Mythic Championship. People are going to bring their best.

And cream rises to the top.

What happens in LA is going to do a lot to inform us all about the true state of format health. I hope it's healthier than the challenge metagame.

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!

February 17 Pauper Challenge Winner's Metagame

Hmm?

What's that?

A title change?

After the brewhaha surrounding last week's discussion, I've decided to take another look at how I present these data. To call what I do a complete metagame breakdown is disingenuous. Instead I break down the winner's metagame in an effort to help people approach Pauper. 

Why do I do this? Because if someone is just looking to get into Pauper they aren't going to worry about facing the incredibly sweet Call to the Netherworld deck that finished at 3-4 in 32nd place. Rather they want to know what's doing well so they can either brew something to beat the top decks or join in the fun.

Let's talk about how this approach works using the February 17 Challenge Results for context.

Usually I set up Win+ to be based on the record of the 32nd place list. This time around both 31 and 31 had more losses than wins (Hexproof and Rakdos Madness), so instead it was set against 30th place - the lowest record with three losses. Every deck that had two losses got a Win+ score of 1, 1 loss had a Win+ of 2.

Win+ is supposed to measure the relative strength of a finish in a given event. Over time more popular decks are going to have a higher Win+ score simply by virtue of being heavily represented. This isn't a flaw since the entire goal of the measure is to look at a finish in the context of an event and eventually, a season.

Using Sunday as an example, Dimir Delver did very well. It had five total Top 32 appearances and averaged better than a 5-2 finish. Looking at the actual results, it had three 6-1 records and two 4-3 records in the Top 32. For this one tournament, Dimir Delver averaged a Top 16 finish. The same can be said for Boros Monarch and Flicker Tron.

So then why do I look at seasonal statistics? There is a tendency to look at a singular tournament as evidence that there's been a course correction in the Pauper metagame. One only needs to look to February 3 where Burn had three Top 8s and took the win to see a discussion about how healthy everything looked. Since then Burn has continued to do well but has not had the same success. This follows a trend that has been repeated often in the history of the Pauper metagame.

Seasonal stats help to take a discrete card pool - that is one defined by the most current Pauper legal release - and try to understand what decks consistently performed better than others over the course of a season.

The cutoff for this week's postings is three appearances (but I did make an exception for the two decks that have a Top 8 without the volume minimum). There have been five events thus far this season for 40 total Top 8 slots. Dimir Delver has 27.5% of all Top 8s while Boros Monarch variants have 25%. 

Looking at Dimir Delver in isolation, it has 26 total Top 32 appearances and averages a 0.85 Win+ across those finishes. The closer the average is to 1 the more likely the deck will be to Top 16. Only Burn (0.87) and Flicker Tron (0.86) are in the same realm as Dimir Delver and Boros Monarch [Metalcraft] (0.79).

All of this is to say that Dimir Delver is a good deck and one of the best decks for the given season. But how much better is it than everything else? This is where the expected Top 8 comes in. Dimir Delver has 11 Top 8s but given how often a Win+ 1 deck makes Top 8 (approximately 2.5 times per tournament), it should have close to 7 Top 8s. What does this delta then tell us?

It let's us know that Dimir Delver has a high number of Win+ 2 finishes or better. The higher the delta, the more X-1 finishes (or better) a deck has in a season. Now the chart above is still a snapshot in time - Week 5 to be exact - and I don't expect Orzhov Monarch to continue to occupy such a high slot with so few Top 32 appearances. 

In part, that's why I present a full chart in each of these summaries. It would be easy for me to say that as of this week Orzhov Monarch is the second best deck on the metric of T8 Delta, but that means nothing without also considering it has five total finishes. So with that in mind I want to know - what do these charts tell you?

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!

February 10 Pauper Challenge Breakdown

The other week I described the Pauper metagame as a game of ping-pong between Dimir Delver and Boros Monarch variants while the rest of the decks play musical chairs for third place. The February 10 Challenge did not do much to dispel that notion.

Just looking at these results, things look fine. The most popular Top 32 deck - Boros Monarch - didn't crack the Top 16 while Burn, Delver, and Dimir Delver all had the same Win+ score.

Win+ is a metric I use to help measure relative strength. It measures a deck's performance against the 32nd place list (or the final .500 or winning list in the case of a small challenge). Thus far, every Pauper Challenge has set the Win+ baseline, that is 0, at a X-3 record. One win above this is usually good enough for a Top 16 finish. 

In this particular challenge, five of the decks in the Top 8 went 6-1, meaning they had a Win+ of 2. In a discrete event this is important. However when looking at the format in aggregate those sorts of stats matter less. Instead we can look at how a deck is performing over a longer span of time. Burn has been very strong the past two weeks while Boros Monarch was also on the rise (until Sunday). Again, these are short term trends and help to inform ideas of metagame health.

In the micro, this Top 8 looks fairly diverse. Six distinct archetypes including two - Affinity and Orzhov Monarch - that cracked the elimination rounds for the first time this season. We see no Boros and no Tron, and last week's hot deck (Burn) continue to perform. How do things look when we talk about the four weeks of Ravnica Allegiance season?

Before diving too deep, there are a few things to know. The threshold for being included in this chart was a volume of 3 (2% of the total metagame comes out to roughly 2.56 appearances and for his purpose I round up). Both Izzet Control and Stompy made the Top 8 once but neither appeared enough times to make the cut. 

This chart is sorted by the last column - Delta Top 8. How the heck is this calculated? Remember what I said before about a Win+ of 1 being roughly equivalent to a Top 16? Some number of times a Win+ 1 deck will make the Top 8. Over the past two years it comes out to somewhere between twice a tournament and three times a tournament. Using this rough estimate (0.3125), you can estimate how many times a deck is expected to make Top 8 given it's cumulative Win+ score. On this metric, over four weeks Dimir Delver has three more Top 8s than it should all things being equal.

So what does this chart tell us? Only so much. I don't think anyone would dispute that Dimir Delver is one of the best decks this season and the same can be said for both Boros Monarch and Boros Bully. Yet Monarch, which just had a fairly down week, is outperforming its newer cousin. What gives?

Small sample size. That's the crux of the issue. These charts are great for identifying trends but less so for predictive. If they were stronger on the prognostication front, then we should have seen the rise of Tron weeks ago. Rather these charts all look back and try to make sense of what has happened. 

Well then, what happened at the end of last season? Dimir Delver and Boros Bully finished with 1.5 Top 8s over expectation. And the one before that? Dimir Delver had 4.13 Top 8s over expectation while Boros Bully had 1.63 (Tribe Combo finished between the two with 2.06). That takes us back to the start of October. That's a sustained success of two of the same macro archetypes for four months.

The Mythic Qualifier is three weeks away. Prepare for a format dominated by Dimir Delver and Boros decks. Have a plan for Elves, Tron, and Burn. Beyond that, pick something you know well. And maybe, just maybe, a week after someone makes it to the Mythic Championship on the back of Pauper, we will see something change. 

February 3 Pauper Challenge Breakdown

The headline of the February 3 Pauper Challenge is that Burn took three of the Top 8 spots and had seven Top 32 appearances, with six of those being 4-2 or better. In a world dominated by Boros Monarch and Dimir Delver that's a pretty good headline.

That's what we call burying the lede. This was a small challenge - that Top 32 represented more than half of the field. Considering that it was also the day of the Big Game for the National Football League and you have a recipe for an outlier if I ever saw one. But we can get to that later.

Burn did have a great day and there's something nice about seeing variety in the builds. Every deck in the Top 8 opted for Thermo-Alchemist and Ghitu Lavarunner; one ignored Skewer the Critics entirely; one shaved Needle Drop while another cut copies of Lava Spike. Burn is a great Level One deck right now as it attacks the format quickly in a way that gets around Dispel. More than that, it also has a low enough curve to play around Daze and with Seeker of the Way Boros decks on the decline, it can win before Prismatic Strands can do its business. Burn is also very easy to hate out. Much like Affinity in Pauper and Dredge in other formats, if enough people pack appropriate answers then the deck loses its punch.

There are some other interesting notes from Sunday. Pilgrim Prison - an enchantment based control deck finished in the Top 16. Hexproof had its best finish this season. Izzet Delver came back from the dead to make Top 8. And Boros Monarch continues to keep the crown away from Bully.

Boros Monarch and Boros Bully both use a similar shell but operate along slightly different axes. Bully wants to eke out advantage in the form of tokens, using the force multiplier of Rally the Peasants to shrink the window of opportunity for a comeback. Monarch on the other hand is built for the long game. In the past few weeks Monarch has proven to be the superior build, potentially due to its more robust creatures.

Let's look at the seasonal stats. The cutoff for 2% of total volume this week is around 2 appearances.

That's a stark difference between Monarch and Bully. In a similar number of appearances this season Monarch has five more Top 8s. Monarch also has 11 X-2 or better finishes to Bully's 6. Of course there's still Dimir Delver - six Top 8s and a whopping 2.25 Top 8s over expectation - sitting at the top of the heap.

Moving forward I'd prepare for Burn. Whether that means extra copies of Lone Missionary or Martyr of Sands you have to have a plan to protect your life total. Beyond that, more of the same: know how to handle Monarch and Dimir.

2019 is going to be a banner year for Pauper. I want to continue to be at the forefront of the metagame. If you like the work I do, please consider becoming a Patron. Thank you!