MTGO March 2016 Power 9 Challenge

diophan

Here is the meta breakdown for the March MTGO Power 9 Challenge, for which Matt Murray (chubbyrain) and I once again collected data. Decklists for the top16 (with navigation in what I believe is Spanish because WOTC is great at designing websites) are available here: http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2016-03-27

Congratulations to Montolio for winning the tournament.

Total Number of Players 74

Shops (ravager, aggro, tiny robots, dark depths, uba stax)
Number of Players 15
Win Percentage 52.6%

Gush (mentor, delver, grixis pyromancer)
Number of Players 18
Win Percentage 55.2%

"Blue Control" (landstill, grixis, painter, thoughtcast, etc.)
Number of Players 14
Win Percentage 40.9%

Dredge (traditional, pitch)
Number of Players 8
Win Percentage 50.9%

Oath (odd, omni)
Number of Players 3
Win Percentage 77.8%

Combo (DPS, doomsday, gush tendrils)
Number of Players 6
Win Percentage 48.6%

Other (white trash, BUG fish, miscellaneous singleton decks)
Number of Players 9
Win Percentage 38.6%

No Show
Number of Players 1

Here are the archetype vs. archetype winrates:
alt text
And the sample sizes:

Blue Control is a large, not very coherent grouping, but for the sake of not having too many categories we lumped all the large'ish and/or controlling blue decks together. A notable breakout from this category was UW Landstill, which had 3 pilots with a 50% win percentage.

The obvious big takeaway here is shops coming down to earth from the last month. I built my delver deck with shops in mind, and I suspect many others were gunning for this deck. Oath's win percentage was obviously very high, but given it only had 3 pilots, and one was the winner of the entire tournament, I think we can chalk this up to a small sample size and people being woefully underprepared for it.

Gush and shops appear to be a notch above the other archetypes. This does not surprise me, but note that the dominance of gush in January (58.2%) and shops in February (61.2%) were brought closer to 50%. It's quite possible next month we'll again see shops and gush swap positions as people move their crossairs.

There are a ton of interesting things to say about the archetype vs. archetype numbers. Rather than making a huge post, I will just point out what I think is the most interesting feature: how well gush did versus shops versus how well blue control did against shops. Note that calculating these took a long time, so I would not be surprised if those aren't going to happen every month.

EDIT: Numbers were adjusted slightly from last night since we had Deibler's (spicy) deck misclassified .

Thanks for doing the write up Ryan and congrats on the Top 8 finish.

bschl

Grats to Andrew Markiton (montolio), Ryan and the rest of the top8!

Klep

Thanks for taking the trouble to make this analysis @diophan and @ChubbyRain. That breakdown looks like a pretty healthy metagame, with a few fortunate people making the apparently correct decision to play Oath.

The Atog Lord

Thanks so much for writing this up. And huge congratulations to Montolio!

Kasparadi

Thanks for the data! Grats to top8!
It's good to have such a tournament around. It's always fun to follow results.. Even if I can't play it(7+ hours play starting at night don't work well for me).

Samoht

Clearly, since Randy lost to Shops we should restrict LSG.

Seriously, awesome job to Montolio and the numbers look great.

CHA1N5

Thanks, again, and keep it up!

sodoyouwearacape

Really awesome info, thanks guys for compiling this, especially so quickly. And really stoked for Montolio taking down the whole thing - a true MTGO Vintage warrior!

I hope results like this are actually something R&D cast a glance at when considering the B/R list. I hope....

Look forward to the next, even if I was roundly trounced this time round. Happy easter y'all.

Islandswamp

Oath has won two of the Power Nine Challenges. I think that people writing that deck off are making a mistake.
Oath has a ton of crazy draws, turn one Orchard Mox Oath is relatively common. Add to that the fact that the deck has a positive match up against the most popular deck online, and it makes sense that it can occasionally spike an event.
I was trying to run one Omniscience as a way to play a bomb through Containment Priest, but I didn't have much luck with it and abandoned it. Looks like that's what won the event though. Nice work

joshuabrooks

Great report @diophan @ChubbyRain . I find your recaps always interesting,

Way to audible to Oath Andy and keep the DCI off the scent of shops ;). Grats.

Dayton

Thanks @diophan @ChubbyRain Great work!

Leoj

I had considered an audible to Oath but had signed up in the morning and got back right at 2. Instead I got to contribute a 1-4 performance to the Shops record.

I did inspire a "restrict LSG" tweet from Randy so that's something I guess.

seguin19

Thanks for putting all this together guys!

spook

Interesting to see the gradual decline in number of players month to month.

Brass Man

@spook That's not super surprising, the first few were always going to be a novelty with high turnouts, and this event was Easter weekend with a few big paper events, too. I expect to see the next few plateau or decline a little, but then the numbers to slowly go up over time, as more and more vintage players start realizing how awesome mtgo is

stsung

Thank you @diophan @ChubbyRain for the work you've done for us.
Do you mind if I use the data in my report? (I would credit you of course).

Fisken

Glad to see Managorger making an appearance on modo

@stsung I don't mind at all. It's meant to be a benefit to the community as this type of data is really hard to get in Vintage.

i_b_TRUE

Good stuff guys and congrats to the Top 8 players!
Cant wait until April!