Feyd_Ruin wrote: ↑4 years ago
I don't disagree with what you said, but I still absolutely find them helpful at times. Used properly, they are a very powerful resource — it's when they're used improperly that you run into the issues you said.
In broad questions like "is 15 lands enough?" or "can I reasonably expect to draw a combo with 2 pieces and no tutors by turn 3?" sure. To get more precise answers - like "should I be running 35 or 36 lands?" I think you'd need to know a lot more than anyone will reasonably be able to know. Granted, such answers are fairly impossible to get a definitive answer with or without a table.
As far as land count goes, I don't think a table can tell you anything an experienced player doesn't already intuitively know in a general sense, and it can't tell you anything useful in a more precise sense.
Figuring out the exact percentage that you can drop a first turn
Delver of Secrets that flips on 2nd turn — and figure out how much adding
Brainstorm increases it can be very important. Especially if you're wanting to know the impact Brainstorm will have on that when you're running monoblue and don't have shuffle effects for Brainstorm to be most effective. I've done this exact problem, and when you factor in all the variables, it's actually quite amazing how much Brainstorm increases it by. I love math, and I'm great at probabilities, but sometimes seeing the raw numbers is still surprising.
This is a totally different question, though. For more specific questions probabilities can totally be useful, no question. I also use them when determining how useful a card within the deck. Assuming you're taking into account the probability that brainstorm can put instants/sorceries on top of your deck, it's probably a huge increase in your % to flip, which could easily make delver not worth it without, and worth it with, brainstorm.
When you're talking about lands, you're either talking is 2 different cases: the broad sense of "should I be running 30 lands or 40 lands" and the more specific "should I be running 35 or 36 lands".
The former is pretty similar to your delver example, you're going to see some big differences in probability and it's probably going to be pretty obvious which of those two choices is superior for your deck. But also anyone who's played the game for any length of time shouldn't need a chart to know what sort of deck they're playing.
For the latter, you can see "ok, I have a 49% chance of hitting 4 lands on turn 4 with 35 lands, and 50% chance with 36 lands" (or whatever) but that doesn't really tell you anything particularly useful. The minor percentage effect is going to be dwarfed by the particulars of what your deck wants to do, which can't be easily accounted for.
If you're trying to figure out how reliably you can draw into your combo without running search, the math could easily tell you that search is/isn't necessary, etc. A 4&4 combo only has a 35% change at natural draw by 5th turn, while an 8&8 has a 72%. The rate of natural draw directly impacts the slots used for dig/search, and again — sometimes seeing the numbers helps.
ok again, we're talking about things with a huge impact, not tiny 1% increments like with specific land count.
For lands, your starting count is always a rough guess. Math can make that guess more educated. You should absolutely always playtest over and over to see how the deck plays and adjust the land count, color ratios, etc. But having a good shot from the hip can save you alot of time instead of a random stab in the dark.
If you're brand new to magic, sure.
For anyone who has the slightest idea what they're doing, I can't see a chart like that being at all helpful. And I'd assume most people on here have built enough decks and played enough games to be able to ballpark the correct number of lands within a reasonable margin of error, beyond which the chart will not be useful.
Poker is a game of bluffs, reads, and tells. That's 99% of the game, but only because everyone at the higher levels already knows the mathematical probabilities. If you don't know the odds of the flop being in your favor, you're not playing a game, you're just gambling on luck. Magic has infinitely more interaction, but familiarizing yourself with odds and chances is still just as important. And sometimes you need to do the math or consult a table to realize things into actual numbers.
I'm constantly calculating odds of hitting a land/nonland in limited. Or trying to calculate how many winning topdecks I have, and how hard I should try to have one more turn in a game of commander, etc. I'm afraid I don't see how that relates to fine-tuning within deck construction, though. I know I probably don't want to draw a land on turn 10. Do you want a 35% or 37% chance to topdeck a land T1? Yeah, idk either.
pokken wrote: ↑4 years ago
Umm...the history of magic disagrees with this statement pretty emphatically. Not only can the things that cards do be reduced to math pretty easily (e.g. 1-for-1, 2-for-1, tempo, etc) the very first good decks exploited the hypergeometric probability concepts in the extreme.
I have no idea what 2-for-1s have to do with what we're talking about.
The original decks to use the concept of a mana curve, which as I recall was the original sligh deck, were (1) in the hands a professional, which I explicitly called out in my post, and (2) a much simpler deck than virtually any commander deck. If you want to make a 1-drop, 2-drop, 3-drop, 4-drop, aggro deck in commander - and you really knew what you were doing - then yeah, you could probably use math to maximize your chances of doing that.
Is that a thing you're trying to do very often?
It takes *hundreds* of games to get a significant sample size. You need to apply the math first to have any prayer of coming to something worth testing.
"A prayer"? I've never done any probability math when it comes to lands and it hasn't hurt me a bit.
To perfectly fine tune a single deck would be nearly impossible, whether you're using math or experience or anything else - though I would argue only experience could give you the correct answer, unless you can create some sort of program to run a bunch of games for you.
You're unlikely to ever test a single deck enough to have a definitive answer on the correct number of lands, but every deck you build and play gives you more data points which can build your general knowledge and help you make more precise estimates in the future.
My guess is you are applying the mathematical principles of how many of something you need to see intuitively, but it doesn't change that those principles are there and critical.
A lion doesn't need to know the equation for gravity to pounce on a gazelle. Nor would it even be helpful. If you were trying to write a computer program to do it, that didn't know anything about gazelles or pouncing, sure, gravity would be useful, but we're not trying to figure out the number of lands from nothing here. Most people know roughly what they're doing. We're already lions. What we need isn't the equation for gravity, what we need is field experience getting out there and grabbing gazelle's.