I enjoyed this a lot, especially the Metagame analysis and prediction.
This tournament has very unique attributes (Price, non-proxy, location, timing) which I was pleasantly surprised that you debated and came to a logical consensus on. For what it’s worth, I think there will be more Jeskai and less Shops which is more in line with Steve than Kevin’s predictions.
I may have missed this, but I would have liked for a prediction of attendance, because I think that will determine a lot of the Metagame. My thought is somewhere between 100 and 150 players and I think the expected metagame will be different at 100 vs 150 players. Vintage is a format with a lot of die hards who show up and play their deck regardless of what is at the top of the heap. I think that if this event got to 200 players the meta would more closely resemble NA EW 2017 than Waterbury.
One thing which is more a compliment to the work that Ryan Matt do than a criticism of your analysis is the limited value of just having Top8 data as compared to full MW% by archetype. I know you cannot control what data is published and available, but in your analysis I think it would be beneficial to spend less time stressing what deck won the event. It goes without saying, but there are a lot of factors other than what archetype someone played that contribute to whether someone makes Top8 or not let alone wins the event outright. I think more value could be drawn from looking at the non-stock cards in the lists rather than Workshops Top8%.
