Of course not. I only paid attention to the numbers when they were 0 and it was a card I thought should see play. The actual non-zero numbers have no actual meaning to the typical listener, but I didn't criticize them because it was your show and I was grateful for the content. I assumed it was some game you and Kevin played for entertainment purposes. If you want to take it seriously, I recommend dividing the number of "appearances (number of copies or simply being in a deck?)" by the number of events. And it still tells you nothing about what a card is doing, because if I remember correctly, you are basically talking about a fringe playable card in Brian Kelly's Oath deck. A literal one of in the SB. The lowest possible impact imaginable. It passed the "Brian Kelly will play this card" test.

Believe it or not, this wasn't about you being right but I have been comparing this card to Damping Sphere since it was first printed and people were complaining about it for some time. There is a pervasive belief that hate cards such as this are anti-Vintage and going to have a profound or event warping effect on the format. It overestimates the effect on those cards - Damping Sphere is a key example:

This card, in theory, should stop all the whining about our favorite repeatable lotus land and its call for restriction. . . But it won’t. Mark my words. facepalm.

I love this card so much. This is the most potent hate card we've seen since Grafdiggers' Cage! I don't know that it stops Shops in Vintage exactly, since mana rocks can pretty much cover the spread after turn 2, but it seems absolutely brutal, BRUTAL in Legacy.

I suspect this is going to rock the sideboards forever now.

If this card sees any decent amount of play, it will certainly undermine the case for restricting Mental Misstep

It can't be Misstepped, and makes Misstep wars much more difficult to sustain.

It's clear that this card has lots of Vintage potential, given that it directly affects the three most prevalent strategic approaches in the format, Shops, PO, and Xerox decks, which are spell dense.

But, I'm also not particularly thrilled with cards designed in this manner. Like Grafdigger's Cage, I feel that cards of this type or class may inadvertently have too much influence on the format, and tend to bend the format away from powerful strategies and tactics that make Vintage appealing and fun. Making Vintage "fair" does not necessarily make it better.

Damping Sphere may well live up to it's name, and be a big party pooper.

Replaying to this above

Well said, pretty much sums up my fears about this card. I have the same opinion regarding Grafdigger's Cage. It was ultimately too successful in influencing Vintage and changed it irrevocably.

I don't want to attach names, because it's not about putting players on blast. My point is that I've seen this before and I don't think it's very different. The card is better than Damping Sphere was but has narrow applications and it best used in the SB where you have more control over the matchups and situations in which it can be good. And unlike Collector Ouphe, this card exerts absolutely no pressure on the opponent. I checked MTGGoldfish and both Null Rod and Stony Silence have not cracked the top 50 spells. Ouphe is hanging out at #11 with the Dredge creatures. The pressure is a huge component especially as a top deck and late in the game.

And if anyone was curious, the Damping Sphere thread also had Storm talking about his Knight of the Reliquary Humans deck.

Some things change, others stay the same.

Number of top 8 performances for a sideboard card has to be one of the worst stats I’ve ever seen. I mean, I don’t even know where to start on how irrelevant that number is.

@chubbyrain said in [ELD] Deafening Silence:

Of course not. I only paid attention to the numbers when they were 0 and it was a card I thought should see play. The actual non-zero numbers have no actual meaning to the typical listener, but I didn't criticize them because it was your show and I was grateful for the content. I assumed it was some game you and Kevin played for entertainment purposes. If you want to take it seriously, I recommend dividing the number of "appearances (number of copies or simply being in a deck?)" by the number of events.

It's whether a card appears in a deck that makes Top 8. Not the number of copies per top 8.

We used to track number of events, but the number of events that fit the criteria, in the long run, averages out to be pretty even for any slice of time, and any changes are basically static changes for comparison purposes: advent of Challenges, etc.

And it still tells you nothing about what a card is doing, because if I remember correctly, you are basically talking about a fringe playable card in Brian Kelly's Oath deck. A literal one of in the SB. The lowest possible impact imaginable. It passed the "Brian Kelly will play this card" test.

I disagree. There is a big difference between a card that has 80 top 8 appearances, a card that has 30 top 8 appearances and a card that has 12 and a card that has 1. A card that has 80 top 8 appearances is a broadly used format staple, a card that has 30 top 8 appearances is basically a narrowly used Vintage staple, or nearly so. A card that has 12 appearances is a role player. And a card that has just a few appearances is a fringe card. It's not science, but it is helpful.

Believe it or not, this wasn't about you being right but I have been comparing this card to Damping Sphere since it was first printed and people were complaining about it for some time. There is a pervasive belief that hate cards such as this are anti-Vintage and going to have a profound or event warping effect on the format. It overestimates the effect on those cards - Damping Sphere is a key example:

This card, in theory, should stop all the whining about our favorite repeatable lotus land and its call for restriction. . . But it won’t. Mark my words. facepalm.

I love this card so much. This is the most potent hate card we've seen since Grafdiggers' Cage! I don't know that it stops Shops in Vintage exactly, since mana rocks can pretty much cover the spread after turn 2, but it seems absolutely brutal, BRUTAL in Legacy.

I suspect this is going to rock the sideboards forever now.

If this card sees any decent amount of play, it will certainly undermine the case for restricting Mental Misstep

It can't be Misstepped, and makes Misstep wars much more difficult to sustain.

It's clear that this card has lots of Vintage potential, given that it directly affects the three most prevalent strategic approaches in the format, Shops, PO, and Xerox decks, which are spell dense.

But, I'm also not particularly thrilled with cards designed in this manner. Like Grafdigger's Cage, I feel that cards of this type or class may inadvertently have too much influence on the format, and tend to bend the format away from powerful strategies and tactics that make Vintage appealing and fun. Making Vintage "fair" does not necessarily make it better.

Damping Sphere may well live up to it's name, and be a big party pooper.

Replaying to this above

Well said, pretty much sums up my fears about this card. I have the same opinion regarding Grafdigger's Cage. It was ultimately too successful in influencing Vintage and changed it irrevocably.

I don't want to attach names, because it's not about putting players on blast. My point is that I've seen this before and I don't think it's very different. The card is better than Damping Sphere was but has narrow applications and it best used in the SB where you have more control over the matchups and situations in which it can be good. And unlike Collector Ouphe, this card exerts absolutely no pressure on the opponent. I checked MTGGoldfish and both Null Rod and Stony Silence have not cracked the top 50 spells. Ouphe is hanging out at #11 with the Dredge creatures. The pressure is a huge component especially as a top deck and late in the game.

And if anyone was curious, the Damping Sphere thread also had Storm talking about his Knight of the Reliquary Humans deck.

Some things change, others stay the same.

Was this a TMD post?

There are lots of problems with Damping Sphere. The main one is finding a good home for it. Defeaning Silence has obvious, high level applications (WEldrazi, Survival, etc.)

@vaughnbros said in [ELD] Deafening Silence:

Number of top 8 performances for a sideboard card has to be one of the worst stats I’ve ever seen. I mean, I don’t even know where to start on how irrelevant that number is.

Leyline of the Void in 2008 was the second most played card in the entirety of Vintage, and second only to Force of Will. And almost all of it's play was in sideboards.

To say that's irrellevant as a statistic is just dumb. It's hugely significant in terms of what it says about the composition and structureof the metagame and the value of the tactic in that metagame.

Moreover, it's not always clear what's a "sideboard" card and what's not. Is Force of Vigor a sideboard card? Is Collector's Ouphe? Pyroblast?

Force of Vigor is almost evenly split between maindeck and sideboards. What matters is whether a card is good or not. That is, whether it sees play or not.

Edit: My intent isn't to make this into a thread about SMIP. Like most people in the Vintage community, I am looking forward to the content.

My view on Deafening Silence is that it is a role-player. It is limited in its application due to its two sideness against many decks and it's lack of impact as a draw. It's not a hatebear and that reduces the threat potential of the decks that would run it. What makes Thalia, Lavinia, Narset, Teferi, and similar cards great is they aren't just the hate effect. I think this card is a perfectly reasonable anti-storm card. I think people are going to try it in more matchups and will be disappointed. That might not be reflected in top 8's but we'll see in the long term viability of the card (similar to Damping Sphere).

@chubbyrain

I disagree with that. I think it will be better off the bat, and more enduring than Damping Sphere. Damping Sphere only had 10 top 8 appearances, and tapered off significantly since.

I think Defeaning Silence will be better than that.

The main reasons are:

1. It only costs 1 mana, and is basically a silver bullet first turn play against PO, and not bad against Xerox either. It significantly slows Xerox strategies.

More broadly, I think this is good against big blue decks that players like you gravitate towards.

2. It easily fits into Survival and White Eldrazi, as well as the various Fastbond decks emergent. Both Survival and White Eldrazi, in the three weeks since the restriction, have consistently Top 8ed Vintage Challenges.

Those two facts put together mean that this will see more play, in my estimation, than Damping Sphere. I don't know if it will be significantly or modestly more, but I am confident it will be more.

Damping Sphere was pricier, easier to remove, and much more difficult to break symmetry on. This is easy to break symmetry on. That also makes it more promising than Sphere.

@mike-noble said in [ELD] Deafening Silence:

I wish Deafening Silence existed during the Noble Fish days.

I wish this card existed 15 years ago.

I would 100% play this over Icatian Javelineer's.

@ChubbyRain I agree wholeheartedly with Stephen's point about this being a different animal than Damping Sphere and I actually think the correct number of this card to run maindeck will end up being 4. I don't think many decks will do this, but I do think the RIGHT one will. This card is fundamentally different than other cards we've seen printed over the last couple years precisely because it costs 1 mana. This allows decks that actively do NOT want to run moxen (i.e some sort of Ouphe Prison list) to have relevant turn 1 plays. When it comes down to it, Vintage is a format of making relevant turn 1 plays that curve out into a relevant turn 2, turn 3 and then hopefully the establishing of some sort of dominance that cannot be overcome. "Fair" hatebear decks have teetered on the edge of playability for a long time and a card like this is just another potential brick in the foundation of a monster. I certainly am trying to brew one as we speak.

-Storm

Stephen, there is an important concept when interpreting numbers: Correlation is not causation. What this phrase requires is that you add the context and assumptions to all numbers when attempting to infer things from them.

Top 8 numbers on sideboard cards are highly irrelevant because they are very often not the reason the deck is performing well. This is a classic correlated by not caused reasoning.

Especially when we look at Dredge hate, where nearly every deck has 4-10 hate pieces. You are guaranteed to find something like 32+ Dredge hate cards in every random top 8.

On top of that, we have the top 8 cut point bias. You needed approximately 3 wins to reach a top 8 at NE events for a long time. That means you could often completely tank the Dredge matchup (usually only around 5% of the meta) and still make it to top 8. You chances of dodging Dredge in those 3 critical matchups was .95^3 = .86. That’s on average 86% of those top 8s that didn’t even win a match against a Dredge opponent making their choice of Leyline/Cage/Crypt irrelevant outside of marginal effects on other MUs.

To bring this back to this card, this card could get some top 8s. That won’t suddenly make this card better or more impactful. We can read it and realize it does not hurt near 50% of the metagame. People can put it in their Flusterstorm/MB trap/Pyroblast slots, but let’s not pretend that these other cards you are playing it over aren’t also very powerful.

Storm, this has the same limitations that Cage has that made Cage unplayable in the MD of hate near decks. I’m not sure what your plan is to overcome the lack of pressure on your opponents life total.

Yeah, I hate comparisons in card evaluations. For the record, I was comparing the reactions. Look at how similar...

• Comparisons to Cage
• Would have kept Karn from being restricted (compared to Misstep and Workshop). Did someone mention Forge too?
• Overpowered/Anti-Vintage

@chubbyrain

All deck and card choices are relative to choosing another deck or card so card comparisons are incredibly important.

@mike-noble said in [ELD] Deafening Silence:

Anyone that thinks that a top 8 performance in 7 round events is a solid metric for card/deck playability should know about the time I made top 8 of a 65 player event with 4 Shardless Agent, 4 Daze, and 0 ways to manipulate the top card(s) of my library in my maindeck. That deck was trash despite this result and the win I got at a 20 person Mox Pearl event.

That reminds me a deck that I saw. When broodbraid elf was released, a person played a 4 BBE, lands and singletons.

He won the tourney.

@vaughnbros Thank you for making my point. Comparisons are useful within a narrow context such as talking about cards in a 75 or when evaluating functionally equivalent cards. Yet people expand this and ignore context because they think comparisons are “incredibly important ” or something. It causes threads to become more about the card being compared to the spoiled card than the spoiled card itself.

@chubbyrain

Your complaints about what and how we discuss are a much bigger derailment than discussing this card in the context of other Vintage cards and Vintage data as now we aren’t even discussing magic or Vintage at all.

You are welcome to ignore posts that you don’t think are on topic/relevant. I do it all the time.

@smmenen said in [ELD] Deafening Silence:

More broadly, I think this is good against big blue decks that players like you gravitate towards.

I just saw this and honestly started laughing. I gravitate to literally anything that is not a tier 1 which has honestly included hatebears at various junctions, and decks that would play this card.

Perhaps I need to get better at self promotion? You gave credit to Ryan for Karndrazi after all... Well, just so you know, the new Shops Fastbond list originated on my stream, including the buried ruin interaction. Zias and Mike Noble deserve a ton of credit for the work they put into the deck, but I feel I have to defend my reputation lest I be thought to “gravitate” to a specific archetype.

@vaughnbros yeah I have at several points ignored this section only to come back. Most of the time, it’s because i’ve actually tested the card in question and wanted to share my experience while asking others if they’ve had similar results. I get few responses if any. Ironically, people are most opinionated when there is the least amount of data available.

The low quality of card evaluation threads has caused many people to ignore them. I don’t think even Brassman follows these. Forgive me for trying to change what I consider a contributor. I’ll just join the others and ignore the SCD.

@vaughnbros said in [ELD] Deafening Silence:

Stephen, there is an important concept when interpreting numbers: Correlation is not causation. What this phrase requires is that you add the context and assumptions to all numbers when attempting to infer things from them.

Top 8 numbers on sideboard cards are highly irrelevant because they are very often not the reason the deck is performing well. This is a classic correlated by not caused reasoning.

That principle - a generally acknowledged statistical and scientific principle - has no relevance here.

If you are saying that Top 8 appearances is just correlation, and doesn't reveal anything about a format, I disagree.

If there are literally dozens of top 8 appearances for a particular card, it suggests quite a bit.

First and foremost, if a card is appearing in sideboards, but not maindecks, then that is an important signal in and of itself. It means that the card is quite important at certain matchups, but the structure of the metagame is such that that card isn't good enough against most matchups.

Thus, take 2008: If Leylines are in 90% of sideboards, but 0% of maindecks, then that signals that a the card is tremendously important (and the reason it was important was primarily Flash, and secondarily Dredge), but it's not of broad enough utility to employ maindeck.

Top 8 appearances of particular cards are a signal about the structure of the overall metagame. Evaluators and format analysts must then use judgment to assess what that information means. But to say that it is 'irrelevant,' as I said, is dumb.

Especially when we look at Dredge hate, where nearly every deck has 4-10 hate pieces. You are guaranteed to find something like 32+ Dredge hate cards in every random top 8.

On top of that, we have the top 8 cut point bias. You needed approximately 3 wins to reach a top 8 at NE events for a long time.

Our Top 8 methodology excludes tournaments of 32 or fewer players, so the cut-off point is usually 4 wins. And, in any case, the vast, vast majority of data points in our data set are Vintage Challenges, which are mostly 7 rounds now.

To bring this back to this card, this card could get some top 8s. That won’t suddenly make this card better or more impactful. We can read it and realize it does not hurt near 50% of the metagame. People can put it in their Flusterstorm/MB trap/Pyroblast slots, but let’s not pretend that these other cards you are playing it over aren’t also very powerful.

It's not about "power" in the abstract. It's about how a card interfaces strategies in the metagame. The existence of a card - maindeck or sideboard - over time signals a structure. Lots of Pyroblasts signals strategically significant blue spells.

Similarly, lots of Stony Silences or Hurkyl's Recalls in winning decklists signal something about the metagame. You can extrapolate that further.

It doesn't matter whether a card appears in a maindeck or sideboard - when you see patterns in deck construction, those are signals about what's happening the metagame, not "irrellevant" information or noise. It's a signal about the structure and leverage points in the complex system that is the Vintage metagame.

I think this card will see more play than Damping Sphere because:

1. it is great against big blue decks, and basically a silver bullet against PO

2. it is frustrating for cantrip-based Xerox decks

3. It slots easily into Survival and WhiteEldrazi, two upper tier strategies and can be used easily by lots of marginal strategies, like Landstill, emergent combo decks, etc.

4. it's hyper-efficient, and a reliable first turn play

5. it can just steal wins in a Mox format, the same way that Chalice used to. Even against matchups where it's supposedly "bad," it can steal wins, like when Shops keeps Mox, Mox, Sol Ring, Factory.

Damping Sphere only had 10 top 8 appearances. I think this will have more, but also be a Vintage playable for a long time.