~The BO1 Meta is terrible~

[๋]

And I don't feel like committing to 1 hour matches.
Guess I'll go back to my 2 minute Mono Red Aggro deck.
Not sure if it's also the Algorithm or bad luck but I can't catch a break with Mono White or Black White today.

[ʍolɟ ǝɥʇ ǝsɹǝʌǝɹ]

I was that way with Azorius Soldiers. Renamed the deck to poopy disallowed soliders before deleting it.

[Soji]

Yea its terrible because they aren't bo3 like proper magic is played, but if you just want matches against a lot of different decks instead of proper magic you're gonna have to deal with that trash meta.

I say a lot of different decks but lets be real, its all just going to be mono red or mono white anyway

[Winter Wolf]

Ranked in general isn't a lot of fun. Standard only makes it worse.

[DontMisunderstand]

Annoyingly, the problem with the BO1 meta is literally the hand smoother implemented specifically to "improve" the BO1 experience.

[PlanB]

Originally posted by DontMisunderstand:

Annoyingly, the problem with the BO1 meta is literally the hand smoother implemented specifically to "improve" the BO1 experience.

What's so bad about it? Starting with a few less 0 or 7 land hands is pretty nice if you're just going to play one match against a person.

[DontMisunderstand]

Originally posted by PlanB:

Originally posted by DontMisunderstand:

Annoyingly, the problem with the BO1 meta is literally the hand smoother implemented specifically to "improve" the BO1 experience.

What's so bad about it? Starting with a few less 0 or 7 land hands is pretty nice if you're just going to play one match against a person.

It's easiest to visualize by breaking down the math. The way the smoother works is that it takes two different randomized starting hands, and chooses the one that's mathematically more likely to occur. So, we break down the odds of each outcome with and without the shuffler, and that lets us understand how to optimal decks would necessarily adjust to it, and by extension which archetypes benefit and which archetypes lose out as a result of this choice.

So, without the smoother, a 60 card deck with 24 lands. Starting hand probability, 2.1% for 0 lands, 12.1% for 1, 26.9% for 2, 30.8% for 3, 19.6% for 4, 6.9% for 5, 1.2% for 6, and 0.1% for 7 (Note: these are truncated to the thousandth, which is why they don't add up to exactly 100%). With the smoother, the math gets very complicated, but it's still easy to understand how the most and least likely outcomes change. In this case, the probability of a 7 land hand drops to 0.0001%, and the probability of a 3 land hand goes up to 52.2%. Broadly speaking, the smoother makes the less common hands even less likely, and the more common hands even more likely. 77.3% of hands without the smoother will have either 2, 3, or 4 lands. With the smoother, that jumps up to 94.9%

Now, to understand how this affects deckbuilding, we need to understand the underlying principles of deckbuilding. Broadly, the land:nonland ratio of your deck should be tuned to optimize the probability of a 3:4 land starting hand, with as few lands as possible total in order to minimize the probability of dead draws later in the match. This is how we reach the 40% land figure for general rule-of-thumb optimization. Because 3:4 is the goal, and because the hand smoother selects for the higher probability outcomes to such a powerful degree, finding the optimal number of lands in the deck then becomes about finding the point at which 2 becomes more common than 3 and then rounding up to get back to 3, instead of finding the general highest probability of NOT having a 0, 1, 5, 6, or 7 land hand (This is how we arrived at the number of 24 for a 60 card deck, it has the highest chance of starting hand. 25 and 23 both are lower total probability for that favorable outcome, and it only gets worse as you get farther from 24). For this 60 card deck, that pushes the optimal down to 22 for just generic deckbuilding purposes.

However, that's still not the full story. Different deck archetypes care a lot more about starting hand consistency than others, and select different targets for their optimal number of lands in the starting hand. Midrange decks want to hit every single land drop, because their strategy relies on literally spending more total mana than their opponent over the course of the game, and eventually steamrolling through value and efficiency. Control decks also want to hit their land drops consistently, because their eventual goal is to be able to hold up mana for counterspells/removal every turn while also advancing their board state against an opponent who simply can't keep up because of that removal. Aggro decks want as few lands as possible, the perfect aggro game has them draw 0 lands beyond their starting hand, they're hitting too fast and too hard to let the opponent start the game, the moment the opponent gets time to breathe is the moment aggro lost their advantage. As you can see from these basic descriptions, one of those cares a lot more about the starting hand than the others, and also cares a lot more about avoiding land draws too. So, we've got a meta skewed by the interference of the shuffler, massively favoring some decks over others, by literally making some decks mathematically superior to others, even two decks that would otherwise be on equal footing in a "fair" match.


It's a lot of information, I know. I hope this answers your question adequately.