Lonk joins us once again to discuss the competitive side of Mythgard, going over some stats from the recent Bar Brawl tournament.
The last time I competed in a tournament, I ended up writing an article on how I was able to make the top 8. This time, well, let’s just say it’s a little more difficult to talk about this one. I played Laezar’s BY rainbow control and went just 1-3 with it. To be fair though, I just went with the deck I was having the most fun with and didn’t really try to play the meta game this time around.
But it occured to me that nobody has ever done any kind of data analysis of any of these tournaments. Even if I don’t have an article extolling my own accomplishments, I can at least give you some nice juicy numbers to sink your teeth into. So I’m going to break down the Bar Brawl Frank Karsten style for you all.
Keep in mind, tournament data is not necessarily the most accurate snapshot of the current metagame. Players are meta gaming for a smaller pool of decks. So the ones used in the tournament may not be reflective of the metagame as a whole. Instead, we can use the data to get a small sample of how the different matchups work and what builds pair well against the other, even if it is a pretty small sample size.
What did this field look like? Overall, there were 28 players who competed in this one, and the various decks included:
4 RO midrange
3 YP control
3 B valkyries
2 OG midrange
2 YO control
2 BO midrange
2 RY control
10 other 1-ofs
Overall it was a very diverse field. A lot of players seem so sure that these contests are dominated by RO midrange as well as the biggest most powerful decks out there, but that’s just not the case. Yes, there are 4 RO midrange decks but that’s still just 14% of the field. Overall, there was a lot of variety in a very healthy looking metagame.
So the Top 8 must be just as varied and awesome looking. Right?
Not gonna lie, it crushes my soul a little bit to be sharing this but in the top 8 looked like this:
4 RO midrange
2 OG midrange
1 Blue valkyries
1 YRG control
So yep, if you brought a RO midrange deck, you made the top 8. Even though it didn’t take up a huge chunk of the field, the ones that were there were extremely dominant, but we’ll get to that once we get into the data.
It should be noted that technically the YGP Fires deck qualified for the Top 8 after going 4-1 in its matches and 8-2 overall. But it's pilot, Rune42, was unable to compete on Sunday, so he dropped out after winning his final match paving the way for Juncoril’s OG midrange to make its way in.
Here is the table of how the decks fared against one another. Overall, there are 161 non-mirror matches from both days included in this table. If you go down the left column labeled “record by,” and read it left to right, that will tell you the deck’s overall record. If you go across the top row labeled “record against,” and read it top to bottom, that tells you the record other decks had against it. These are also a record for the individual games played, not the actual match results.
Here are some of the observations I made in looking at these results:
13 of the 17 decks played at least 10 non-mirror games. Only 5 had a winning record:
OG Midrange 18-14
OP Control 7-5
RG Midrange 7-6
RO Midrange 38-12
YGP FoC Control 8-2
RO Midrange utterly dominated the metagame. Despite having the largest sample size of all with 50 total games, it still won 76% of it’s matches. Rune42’s YGP Control bested it with an 80% win rate, but that was over just 10 matches.
Think yellow can keep RO in check? RO was 16-0 against decks with yellow as one of its colors. Wonder Drug and Misanthropia don’t even seem like reasonable answers at this point.
In fact, there were no clear answers to RO. Of its 12 losses, 6 of them were to OG, and most of that was against 2_faca’s build when he ran over a couple of them on the way to victory. OG Midrange was the only build that didn’t have a losing record against it, going 6-5. Valkyries managed to notch 3 wins against it, but was 3-5 against RO overall. BO mid, RG mid, and OP control were the other 3 that managed to notch a win against it.
A couple of decks had an otherwise good day ruined by RO. Ractazar’s OP control was 6-1 against non RO decks, but went just 1-4 against it. REG’s homebrewed YRG was also 6-1 against non-RO decks, but 0-6 against it including its first round Top 8 loss. Both BO decks started out strong, but collectively ended up going 1-4 against it, which prevented them from having an overall winning record.
GY control was a surprising no show in this one. Izzy17 was the only one who ran it, and their version is more of a reanimator deck than a traditional control deck. Between it and the lone GYo deck, GY/GYo only went 5-10 altogether.
The biggest disaster had to be YP control. There were 3 different builds, but it went just 15-23 overall. In 38 games, it had a winning record against just 2 builds, my underwhelming BY control (2-0) and GY reanimator (2-1). It was thoroughly dumpstered by both OG mid (0-4) and YO control (1-4). Take away those 2 matchups, and it was still just a mediocre 15-15 overall.
I was also surprised by how underperforming YO control was. The 2 builds went 9-13 overall. It did go 4-1 against YP, but also 0-4 against RO mid, and 1-2 vs valkyries. It was either 2-0 or 0-2 in all it’s other matches, so for the most part, it either won easily or went down hard and was just kind of all over the place.
The most surprisingly good build of the day OG mid. It managed to hold it’s own at 6-5 against RO mid, and went 4-0 against YP control. An 18-14 record is very solid, but it’s also impressive since both builds were very different from each other. 2_faca used a semi-reanimator build with Disc of Circadia, and Juncoril used Rainbow’s End. Yet both held their own in the matches that mattered the most, and both did well enough to make Top 8.
Rune42’s YGP Fires build proved to be a strong deck as well, going 8-2 overall. It’s only 2 losses were against eventual winner 2_faca’s OG mid range in the first round, then proceeded to go untouched for the rest of the day. It’s unfortunate he couldn’t stick around for day 2 in order to see just how well it would have fared against RO.
I think the biggest take away from all this is that RO badly needs to get nerfed. I’m usually one to air on the side of caution, but I think the results from the tournament show that RO has gotten way too efficient and there are no clear answers in the field to combat it.
True, it didn’t win the ultimate prize, but when looking at the data you can’t just look at the results, you have to look at the whole picture. 2_faca showed up with the one deck that had all the right answers for RO, and was able to win it all because his deck matched the most favorably with the most dominant deck in the field. Does that mean his OG build is more powerful than RO? Probably not. But it had a favorable matchup, and with some excellent piloting by 2_faca, especially in the finals, he earned a much deserved victory.