Anything But: Gates of Change

Posted on November 1, 2012 by JustSin

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  1. w00t! Welcome to MTGO Academy! Glad to see you on board!

    As always, an excellent read.

  3. The problem with Pauper isn’t that there is no mid-range, the problem is that due to Cloudpost, there can never be mid-range decks.

    Or control decks without Cloudpost.

    And I don’t think Storm is especially healthy for the Format either, but it is easier to hate out than Cloudpost decks.

  4. I dont think there is place for a midrange-many-colors-deck. This deck would have to beat two of the three most played decks to be viable and not completly suck against the last one. Since counterspells are typically good against higher cmc-decks, one might focus on beating post and storm?

  6. thanks all for the welcomes!

    @ Ramela: I feel I’ve talked the point to death on posts, but we’ll get back to that eventually… Storm is easy to hate if its goblins, grapeshot is a bit more difficult… the quick answer to my opinion on posts is that glimmerpost is the problem, not cloudpost, but again I’m already planning another long discussion on posts at some point

    @ Stefan: I definitely agree, as I said there isn’t a midrange, but I’m not really sure that’s such a bad thing as I guess it makes things much more black-and-white

  7. @JustSin: Sure, Glimmerpost makes Cloudpost unfair at the moment, but I feel that Cloudpost would be just as oppressing against mid-range and control decks with any additional Locus in the format, not just Glimmerpost specifically.

    Meanwhile, if Cloudpost got banned in Pauper, they could print more Loci and they propably would not “Break” Glimmerpost.

    Are there ever Daily events for Standard Pauper?

  8. There are no Wizards run events for Std Pauper atm, that is entirely handled by the community through Player Run Events (PREs)

  9. First of all, great to see the column back and in a new home. Your meta analysis is great and you always write interesting stuff.

    On the guildgates though, I was a bit surprised to see you begin by saying “I’ve never been one for the speculation game” but then spend your entire analysis speculating and on one question, doing so incorrectly! Now, I realise that there may have been a timing issue for you here, but there’s now enough data in to show where and how guildgates are being used in actual pauper decks:

    If you look at the data (which is sadly limited due to WoTC’s new policy), it’s pretty clear that there are more UR cloudpost decks playing the guildgate than not. Check out these two searches for comparison (4 without vs 16 with):

    Some lists are only using one, but some are using the full four. the guy who wrote the primer on the deck at MTGS, BonSequiter, has a couple of long posts over there explaining why this is the case. While the deck does theoretically have a lot of mana, it is frequently colour mana constrained in the early turn and having a land that able to tap for either lightning bolt or prohibit can be really useful. So I’m sorry, but I think your conclusion on whether UR post should use these lands – “The benefit the deck would get from having those lands would be minimal in comparison to the ability to have access to the necessary colors the moment you put a land into play” – is incorrect, and is being disproved by the data. Yes, not all of the lists will want the full playeset, but at least a couple seem to be optimal.

  10. well I think you pretty well answered yourself there, when this was written and submitted it was during the RtR release and the only gates to have shown up around that time were in any version of the new enchant aggro/hexproof deck.. I guess you are right at a point however, I did actually do some speculating, but as I said I’m not big on it and tried my best to avoid it here in favor of talking about the reasoning behind people speculating one way or the other, but that becomes an argument of semantics between the two since its such a fine line

    with regards to the izzetpost discussion I have read BS’s response and you’ll see I disagreed with it as I kind of hinted at “I know this has been the point of a lot of debate”.. I don’t play izzetpost, but do play dimirpost and when we get that gate I won’t be running it in my list for the reasons listed, as with most card choices it comes down to player preference more than right vs. wrong (since it is never that simple) and opinion is opinion :) … I think that argument aside I’m almost more interested in the continued decline in dimir/izzet post in general

  11. Yeah, I thought I could see that discussion bleeding over to here, and I just thought that (for now at least) the data has shown that the Izzet Guildgate has a place. It could well be different from Dimir, I don’t know either of the decks so I’m not qualified to comment!

    As for Posts’ decline in popularity, which I agree is interesting, this quote might explain it – “Out of all the decks in Pauper, this is the one that I want to be matched against the most. ” That’s Grapplinfarang (whose name will be familiar I’m sure) commenting on the storm vs post matchup. Basically, I think that over the past couple of months storm has gotten better by figuring out that the grapeshot kill is the better way to go, as it’s way more difficult to hate out and can actually be just as reliable and almost as quick (turn 4 VERY reliably it seems). That’s lead storm to dominate the meta which is killing off UR post. At the same time, the people who don’t want to play storm are playing the fastest aggro deck (stompy) and the top tier deck with the best matchup against grixis storm (delver). Stompy just happens to have an awesome matchup against UR post too which isn’t helping things, so unlike when WW was a bit more more popular around the release of M13 UR post can’t even beat up on the aggro deck in the format.

    I’ve said it in may places, I think grixis grapeshot storm is really unhealthy for the meta, because the good answers to it just aren’t printed at common. I think more and more over the coming weeks we’ll start to see this unless a good answer is found.

  12. so I’ve always said removing grapeshot might be the way to handle that, but that can lead to the deck being completely eliminated if it has to rely only on warrens, what would you do about it? restrict grapeshot? ban it?

  13. afaik, as recently as two months ago most lists were relying almost purely on ETW for the kill, maybe running 1-2 grapeshot as backup. I think storm would still exist if grapeshot would banned, it would just be the more interractive ETW version. They might need to run some transmute spells for redundancy, but grapeshot grixis gets away with running only 4 kill conditions main deck so I’m sure they could work it out.

  14. Hey Justin, just wondering how you perform your Daily Pauper Metagame analysis? Seems like you put a lot of work into it. Hopefully you have a program or something to help you. But, if you don’t, I wanted to let you know that I created a bot that analyses the Daily Pauper Metagame.

    I call it DAV Bot (for Daily Average Bot). Basically it collects all the decks that went 3-1 or 4-0 and groups them together by card similarity. If two decks have at least 50 of 75 cards in common (60 maindeck cards and 15 sideboard), then it groups them together. Once the groupings are all completed, it averages all the same decks together. Finally it outputs a report that shows how many decks made each group, and the frequency of each card in the deck average.

    This bot has been running since February 2011. You can view reports both weekly and monthly for anytime since this date. Just thought it would be useful to someone like you or some of your readers to go check out. I find it an invaluable resource while I am deck building and trying to understand the meta.

    Anyway, let me know if that is at all useful to you. As well, anyone who is interested in understanding and using this type of analysis, Frank Karsten wrote a great article on it back in 2009 which can be found here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/65

  17. thanks for the comments guys

    @Dabil: yep I actually did all the meta work by hand as taken from the DE listings as I’ve been doing for almost a year now lol, which now means nothing thanks to the change in DE listing policy…. do I assume your info is also affected by the decrease in DE listings? most “stat” sites I know rely entirely on the DE postings and since they are gone it leaves us all in the same boat… I don’t have the time/energy/patience/motivation to sit down in client and actually look at all the DE personally to grab that same data that was provided once by Wizards so that just leads to being SoL