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In this episode, I will talk about a few of the confirmed conflux spoilers from WOTC — only the tournament worthy ones — and try to predict which decks will be big once standard ptqs roll around. This will also be continued more in depth in another ‘cast. I then move on to GP:LA and the evolution of the extended format. LSV won…yet again, with TEPS. I break down how the emergence of elves allowed this to happen. Also, I look briefly over a new extended deck, bant aggro.
In the next ‘cast, I’ll be going over a PTQ that I’ll be attending with a martyr-proc deck.
Your Host(s): Noah Whinston
Show’s Email: mtgplayer@sbcglobal.net
Your math regarding opening hand probabilities is way off. Firstly, there is only a 44% chance that you have any 4 of in your opening 7. That probability goes down with less cards of course, and you cannot simply add the 2 probabilities together to figure out the total probability of getting a card in your 7 or 6 card hand. As far as your deck knows, your 6 card hand is just your 7 card hand minus 1… it does not realize that you did not get your hate yet. Therefore the probability is reset, and you end up with an overall probability closer to half of the second probability plus the first.
This is all put into very simple terms but I didn’t feel like actually doing this math lol.
Also, I was the person playing Nihilith (Blood Cloud)at LA, and Nyxathid really doesn’t serve the same purpose at all. Nihilith is actually insane in EXT due to fetchlands thirst for knowledge, life from the loam etc. Plus he survives a deathcloud while suspended and then comes in. Nyxathid either gets sacrificed or discarded and does nothing… then if it does someone get into play, due to the fact that your opponent is most likely not gonna rip lands off the top exclusively, your 7/7 gets dramatically smaller and has no evasion which is not something that I want.
Martyr of Ashes only hits ground guys. So it does nothing to Bitterblossom. The reason Martyr is run is to help against elves which is a horrible matchup.
1) opening hand, with 4 pieces of hate, is a 7/15 chance to draw hate, which is around 45% i admit. with a mulligan, you have a 6/15 chance, which is a 40% chance. then you multiply the two percentages together to find the percentage of not drawing hate opening hand, which is around 15% chance of not drawing hate opening hand. factoring in a two turn draw, the first of which is 4/53 to draw, the second is 1/13 to draw hate, each equivalent to 7.5% and 7.7% respectively, then you multiply the 85% percent chance of drawing hate opening hand by .75 and then .77, getting a 4% chance of not drawing hate in time to cast it by turn two. so 98% is a small bit off, but this is the first time i’ve done the math.
2) i wasn’t really saying that nyxathid fills the same purpose as nihilith (at least, i didn’t mean to), it was meant to just be a finisher. no matter what they top deck, even assuming it is a creature, when they play it, your nyxathid goes back up to a 7/7. unless they manage to draw a kill (not burn) spell or a 7/7 or bigger creature before they top deck land, they will be taking alot of damage.
3) yeah, looking back at martyr of ashes, i realize i messed that up, sorry about that.
Your still not correctly dissecting the math… the way your adding these together, you would be assured 100% of the time to have hate with a mull to 5… You cannot just add the 2 probabilities together. For example… if you flip a coin you have a 50% chance of heads, yet if you flip a coin twice, you do not have a 100% of flipping a heads, yet this is where your logic leads.
I also cannot figure out how 85% X .77 or .75 or both, is equal to 96, or 4… whichever you decided it was.
Also if you mulliganed a hand based on the fact that it had no hate in it, and then keep a 6 card hand with no hate it because you anticipate ripping it by turn 2, your logic becomes even more flawed. As if your plan was to rip the hate by turn 2… keeping the opening 7 has a higher chance of that occurring every single time. And if you aren’t planning on ripping the hate, then why are settling on a 6 card hand with no hate in it?
I kind of question a few of the comments made on the Conflux cards, like whether or not Razerunner is as useful as you think. It just seems really bad when your opponent in 5 color drops their fourth land drop and Wraths, or responds to your counter with Cryptic with a bounce, now you’ve two for oned yourself. They also have Bant Charm, Shriekmaw, and I’m assuming they will try out Path to Exile over Condemns if they run that. That’s also under the assumption that you haven’t lost it to one of their counters on T4. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have a place somewhere or that you can gauge a card’s usefulness only off of what cards kill it but I don’t think it’s going to do what you’re wanting it to do against those decks.
I also was kind of lost on your explanation of the mulligan off of an opening hand into a 100% chance of drawing your hate.
The cast is good and I really don’t want to bag on what you’re doing but I’d just have to suggest kind of researching some of the things that are said. I was really lost on some of the ideas you had for a lot of the cards you previewed. It seemed like you wanted to slot in the new cards in places they didn’t really seem to help out much, 5cc and Fusion Elemental, for example. Well either way, it’s appreciated what you’re working on for the community. Good luck with the casts.
My bad, I meant 95-98% chance.
I could fish the actual math out of a book but they are at work and I dont feel like googling probablity and finding a good site. My wife did get me a present last year that has the answer. Magic the Gathering Advanced Stratagy Guide by Mark Justice. It has tables in Apendix 1 that show the probability of drawing a card at certain intervals. drawing a four of within 10 cards is about 52%.
If you have a 45% of finding the hate in a 7 card hand and a 40% in a 6 card hand your probablity of finding within 1 mul for your opening hand not including other factors needed to keep the hate hand like enough mana and the right color mana is 45% + (55%*40%) = 45% + 22% = 67%. This is because the second draw of 6 cards is not an independent event it is dependent on not having the hate in the first 7.
Anyway 4 pieces of hate to pin your hopes on is not enough. Ask anyone who played against Drege without the proper sideboard last season.
Have not listened to this episode yet will tomorrow. I can’t wait. I’m glad that you are bringing about interesting discusion especialy about Math.
my math:
chance of drawing hate opening is 45%, then you MULTIPLY that by 40% to find the chance of not drawing hate in either opening hand or mulligan, which equals 85% of drawing hate withing one mulligan. THEN you multiply .85 (85%) by 7.5% (.075) and 7.7% (.077). these are the chances of drawing hate in your frst normal two draw steps. when you do that, you get 4%, which is the chance of NOT drawing hate=96% chance of drawing hate. also, mana is usually not an issue in extended with fetchlands, shock lands, etc. if my math is still flawed, could someone show me where? because i’m getting a little confused
also, razerunners was not meant to be dropped before you have 6 or so land. in RDW you need to have at least that many to consistently cast demigod+burn when you need to.
[quote]chance of drawing hate opening is 45%, then you MULTIPLY that by 40% to find the chance of not drawing hate in either opening hand or mulligan, which equals 85% of drawing hate withing one mulligan.[/quote]
No, I don’t think so… Try the following to prove your math:
http://www.implair.com/deckulator/deckulator.html
[quote]
the ratio between the number of different hands that include specific cards and the number of possible hands that can be drawn from the deck you describe. If half these possible hands have the card combination you want, there should be a .5 chance of drawing your combination.
Calculating this chance uses a branch of mathematics called combinatorics. The number of different ways to choose H elements from a set of D elements is written “D choose H”. This function is calculated using factorials (!). (Stirling’s factorial approximation is used to speed up the calculation.)
D choose H = D! / (H! (D – H)!)
The number of different hands of size H drawn from a deck of D cards is “D choose H”. A similar formula is used to calculate the number of ways to satisfy each part of your combination. If your deck has DX cards of type X and you need HX for your combination, then there are “DX choose HX” different ways to choose the type X cards you need. The number of hands with the cards you need is the product of all the different ways to choose each card. This is called a multivariate hypergeometric distribution (without replacement).
[/quote]
In effect, you have ~16% change to draw 1 of only 4 card hate cards in any hand of 7, out of a deck of 60 cards.
This site is useful as well:
http://www.kibble.net/magic/math.php
On top of that… (40%) * (45%) == (18%) …. not 85% … that would be adding, not multiplying.
i did my math wrong. but 18% is chance of drawing a hate card both opening hand and mulligan hand. i’ll have to check this out with my math teacher
okay, so the deck website said chance of drawing a 4 of hate card in the opener is 40%, and 35% if you take one mulligan. now i THINK that you divide 35% by 40% to find the chances of drawing a hate card opening hand. i know that adding and subtracting are useless, and multiplication is to find the chances of having a hate card in BOTH hands. so .35 divided by .4 is around 86%. then you factor in drawing an extra two cards off the mulligan. i think this works out to at least 90, but i’m still not sure.
in another way, to figure out the chances of drawing 1 or more hate cards out of 4 opening hand you do
4/60+4/59+4/58+4/57+4/56+4/55+4/54+4/53 to get aroun 47%.
im not sure if any of this is right. podcasters, please send out an appeal to magic playing math teachers who might be able to solve this
I majored in math and am at work now where my stats book resides. I will set up the equations tonight and post tonight or tommorow with the names of the rules that apply to the situation. You do need to use factorials to find the correct %’s.
Razerunner – If you drop it around 6 though, it just seems really bad against the 5cc or faeries matchup. It just seems like you shouldn’t expect it to stick. With 5cc, you may not even get the window to drop it if they run Mannequin or Thresher. In faeries, it seems like you’d have to worry about the Clique / Cryptic. Maybe I’m off on this, I don’t really see it working though.
I also wanted to just clarify with the whole researching thing, you may want to play around with these decks or some of the extended things before you begin disagreeing with the pro’s decklists(like Sam Black with Elves, which looked very similar to LSV’s, who took it down in Berlin). I don’t know if it was really that innovative.
I do have a question. I’ve heard several people mention this and maybe I’m missing something here as well but when you talked about Malfegor in 5cc, discarding your hand just seems terrible. If they kill it, top decking wins in a controlling deck with 26-27 lands seems meh. It doesn’t really matter if you kill all their creatures if they take out Malfegor because they have a grip and now you’re in top deck mode.
I’m going to throw my two cents in here, as I feel my opinion is pretty warranted since I’m an accountant and pretty much work with numbers all day long. Obviously a statistician’s opinion would count much more than mine, but for the most part I understand numbers, percentages, etc.
To begin with, since things are getting pretty specific, the actual changes of drawing a 4 of in your opening hand is 46.667%, but for the sake of argument we’ll call it 47%. This is simply calculated by (4/60) x 7 = .46667. The chances of seeing a 4 of after one mul was correctly calculated at 40%, though.
Now, if you end up sending an opener back and taking a mulligan, I do not understanding how the draw of 6 is not independent, as Mr. Suitcase eluded to. Every time you draw an opening hand or mul, it should be an independent event.
As for Otwell’s post, I’m not really following that equation too well. Is that an equation for drawing multiple parts of a combination, as the word combination was used?
I guess what I’m getting at is, as far as these posts go, I agree with Conley in this situation.
Noah, if you have a deck that you have a bad matchup against, and you truly want to base your sideboarding off percentages, bump your hate to 6 sideboard cards if you have to draw it early, as this will give you a 70% chance of pulling it in your opening hand. Every additional card added to or subtracted from the sideboard hate you side in will fluctuate the percentages of drawing it in your opener by approximately 11.5%.
it was really just trying to fnd a use for a huge creature. like fusion elemental, i don’t expect it to be played, but it’s possible. plus, in the mirror, malfegor is amazing, because you kill their lands, all their lands, as 5CC probably doesn’t have any other permanents out. with the innovation thing, it was just to fnd a slight difference, not to show how thi deck is radically different from others, but just interesting changes, or in the case of elves, uninteresting changes. i wasn’t disagreeing with his decklist, just saying that when using the regal force, it is alot more effective to run chord to fetch it rather than weird harvest.
i think we’re going to keep disagreeing on razerunners, i know i’m gonig to put 2 into my RDW. you can’t assume it will be countered. with that reasoning you shouldn’t run anything. but it is something that the control player will NEED to counter, and if they can’t, it dominates the board until they can deal with it.
Yeah I think we do end up kind of disagreeing about Razerunner. To me, it seems like there are just too many cards to kill one, more in 5cc but that’s fine.
How is Malfegor blowing up the lands?
oh crap its creatures? nvm, that card sucks! lol. i totally misread that. correction will be put on next show. is it normal for new casters to make sooo many mistakes?
also, finally did the math. the chance of drawing at least one hate card in your opening hand of 7 is around 45%
the chance of seeing at least one hate card either in opener or with mull to 6 is 74%, because you do 1-probability of NOT seeing one in openerxprobability of not seeing pne in mulligan. if you keep 6, you have an 80% chance of seeing one in first two draws.
mulling to 5, while not ideal, still gives you a chance to lay down hate early, and since if you do, the game is pretty much over, it might be worth it, as mulling to 5 gives you a 78% chance of seeing at least one piece of hate in your 7, 6, or 5, and 84% after 2 draws.
if this is game 3, where if you found your hate and beat them, you are on the draw, you have an even better chance to lay down hate on turn two.
unfortunately, i did my math wrong, off by about 11-9%, but again, this is assuming you have to lay hate down on turn 2 on the dot. if you run slice and dice, you have an extra turn to draw it, and if you run night of souls’ betrayal, you have an extra two turns (this is all from dad, an economics prof, although he doesn’t play magic)
a correction will be put in the next show…sigh. sorry to put you to all this trouble
Actually, I thought this through again regarding the percentages of drawing a 4 of in your opening hand. I believe if the math is done correctly, it is 49%.
There’s 60 cards in your deck. The chances of drawing a single card as your first card is 1/60. Then the chances of that being the second card is 1/59, and so on. If you take the chance of any single card being in your opening seven and then multiply that by 4 (because it’s a 4 of), you get approximately 49.2%.
I think it’s just getting used to it all and the fact that you have a larger audience of people that could notice mistakes that are made. I am still curious though if maybe others I talked to misread that or if I’m missing something. Keep up the casts and good luck at the PTQ.
thank you, always good to know you’re not completely screwing something up. also, ould anyone be interested in a small poker segment, as i could talk about how magic can hep you do well in online poker (i just won $2k online).
I like the cast. And I can say from personal experience that when you podcast you will make mistakes as with all thing that are new. Hang in there.
Incredible how many different answers we are getting to the simple question of drawing a card in your opening hand.
Here is an article on MTG Salvation that talks about probability on a pretty basic level but backs it up with calculations and sources: http://mtgsalvation.com/936-baghdad-bazaar-a-statistics-primer.html
From that article the odds of drawing at least 1 of 4 “hate” cards in your opening hand is 39.95%
Even with some research the discussion of that article pointed out flaws in his more complex calculations.
Decent cast, I enjoyed your commentary about the GP. I didn’t enjoy your review of conflux cards as much.
hope your PTQ goes well and you keep podcasting