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Hello, everybody. And welcome in to today's episode of the Top Cut Yugyo podcast. My name is Sonny and you are listening on Tuesday, September 28th. We are moments away from the new format.
But before we get there, we have one last episode, our season finale, if you will. Oh, yeah, we got like one more week from recording until, you know, October 1st, and list the actual light it takes place. Yes. Yeah, exciting stuff.
I'm excited. I think it's I think it'll be a good place for the format to be. I think it's a good transition. But before we start getting too deep and before we start talking about all that, I do want to take a moment to shout out our patrons.
Thank you so much to Anthony Leila. Oh, and Alvarado, Mountain Man, Aaron Gardner, myth, Oceanis, Ace, Micah, Pig, Scott's Daddy, Adiel, Said, Jeremy, Dryso, Ray Powell, and Austin Johnson. Thank you so much, everybody. We couldn't do without you.
So thank you so much for that. And I also want to take a moment to read our latest review on Apple Podcast. Woo! Super helpful from that random guy on your couch.
Wait a minute. Kale, was this you? I'm not random. That's fair.
I know you. OK, so this invited me. Fair enough. All right.
So the review is I've been playing Yugyo for one month now, and this podcast has been a lifesaver. All of the news they provide and just general info is great. PS came over from Spotify to give this awesome podcast a review. Thank you so much, random man from my couch.
I really appreciate it. I'm sure Kale does too. Oh, absolutely. Especially on the extra effort you went into going to a different platform.
Exactly. So all of you listening on Spotify that are not listening to Apple iTunes, you have no excuses. You have no excuses. Just make the leap and just create your little iTunes account, hop on and just make a quick review, quick rating.
So thank you so much for that. But going into it, man, I almost forgot about the last thing I'm going to do. So on our Twitter account, we started something new. We started doing the podcast question of the day.
Today's podcast question was what deck slash archetype are you most looking forward to from burst of death thing? We had a bunch of replies. So we have several people talking about despia. I don't know why.
We're not. I don't want to talk about that. It'll gross. But a couple of despia replies, a couple of borrel or rocket support replies, sword, soul, hero, magic key.
Oh, yeah, the new magic key of main deck monster. Ooh, and they have a new season of synchro coming to. So yeah, but that main deck monster though. Spicy.
Yeah. What are you looking at? What are you musking forward to? Personally, sort of.
I just like the con. I just like, you know, getting some more warm support and just the concept of these dragon and wielding claymores. I think it's not even just claymores. I think they're supposed to be like it's random legendary swords from Chinese lore.
Yeah. But because they're size, I'm just like the claymores. There's what there's why there's white handles. There's no way you're one handed one of those.
Yeah. Um, I think what I'm most looking forward to is. I'm really looking forward to hero being really relevant again. Um, and more than just a hero package.
You know, I'm looking forward to more than just a Swiffian X and Forcer. Yeah. Just hero in general being playable. Yeah.
Um, hopefully for under $500 for two cards, honestly, honestly, come on. Give us that. A dust of gold and malicious pain reprints. We need them desperately.
God. So are you planning on picking up any of the decks out of boat? Um, straight out of boat, I'm considering I'm actually considering a sword soul, depending upon how expensive that might end up becoming fair. Um, you know, if it's like, if it's actually like within, I'd say maybe $200 to get up the core of the deck, I'd probably just go and pick up.
Yeah. I think sort soul is probably going to be, um, post January 17th, man list. I think it'll probably just be the best deck after that. Yeah.
Either that or it's, yeah, it's most likely it's either going to be that or something that we're just not, we just don't have the five head to look ahead into the future to see. Right. Right. I'm looking forward to, I'm probably most looking forward to the hero stuff, honestly.
And if not that, then the beach would support. Okay. I'm really, I said, I said, yeah, it's probably the beach. I'm not thinking about it.
I'm probably mostly for the beach with support. But I mean, I mean, I mean, you play heroes back in the day. Yeah. Yeah.
I used to play a skill drain beat heroes like with the shining. Yeah. Yeah. The shining Esquardo.
That was my like bubble beat heroes because I think we already had the blade armor ninjas. Yeah. Yeah. So it lets you like, you could like special on my bubble man and then like, you could like overlay into the blade arm ninja and push for big damage.
And then you could also, you're also capable of still playing the, um, what's the package with the, uh, the skill drains and stuff. Oh, it was like skill drain, Beast King, Barbara Rose. Yeah. Yeah.
You just move on to 3000 meter. Yeah. And the dual mode dragon. Um, if you, if you saw our.
No, I don't think it was a few silly or the dual mode dragon. Although it might have been, I think he was part of it. It was just any monster you could hold up, whose effect was you can normal some of this card that should be, but if you do, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
But the thing was you were only running like you were pretty much just running Barbara as far as I remember yourself. I remember we're only running Barbara. I think they're going to ran like eight monsters. Yeah.
Something like that. It was like a bunch of fusions and yeah, like miracle fusions, super polys return from a different dimension. I think it was part of it too. No, that was banned.
Are you? Yeah. That was banned by that. Okay.
Yeah. So, but that was 11 years ago. Give or take. Yeah.
About that long. Yeah. 10, 11 years ago, something like that. Yeah.
That was before I had made the switch to switch off of Black Wings. No, that was after you switched off of Black Wings. What does it want to do then? I don't remember cash right.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I remember now. Yeah. Yeah. So, but so be sure to check out our Twitter account at top.
Podcast to get all the latest info for our podcast question of the day. You can have your answers read here on the podcast. Oh, yeah. Um, past that, I think the next thing to talk about is probably get right on into our next main segment, which would be the Chalice I'm monthly.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Which ended a couple hours ago.
Yeah, it did not end long ago at all. Oh, yeah. Uh, so first off, we have the list for the entire tournament. Uh, we don't have like numbers, I think just the percentages.
So of the entire tournament, nine percent of all the entire player base were on Tri-Pregade of some kind. Right. Uh, seven percent Phantom, uh, we're Phantom Knight, five percent Drey Tron, five percent virtual world, five percent in vote Dogmatico, uh, four percent salad, uh, sound man, great, four percent, Grandma, do three percent outlet, three percent dragon links, three percent prank kids, 57 percent. Other.
Yeah. The thing you guys remember the Chalice I'm monthly and I could be way off base saying this is that this Chalice I'm monthly, it's like a lot of really kind of rogue entries. Yeah. Um, keep in mind that I think this is, there's a 128, uh, man tournament.
So, um, a 128 man tournament for there to be nine percent representation. You probably need around a dozen decks. So I like that. Yeah.
So as you were probably around a dozen Tri-Pregades around 10 Phantom nights around eight Dry Trons virtual world and vote Dogma, probably like seven salad and Grandma, two six, Elitch, dragon link, prank kids, and then everything else was two or less probably. If I did, yeah, something along those lines. Yeah. Something like that.
That sounds right to me, but I'm not good at math. Yeah. Keep in mind that this event was held post ban list. Uh, this was new format with the 10 promos legal.
Yep. So, um, it's interesting. Oh, yeah. Uh, very, very fascinating.
So, and then top 16 was three Tribragate, two Phantom Knight, two Atagnister, one prank kids, one Dry Tron, one Eldritch, one Grandma, one B Trooper, one amazement, one True Draco, one Mechanite and one ABC. Huh. That's a lot of different decks. It really is.
Um, three Tribragate, I, you know, I hate to say this, but I feel like everybody kind of knew that coming out of the ban list, Tribragate might still just be the best decker format. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely.
It's so good. And now being able to use Crossout to protect yourself from, uh, effect valor and the, and Ash, uh, and perm. Yeah. That's so good.
Oh, yeah. And I know that they, they definitely got more of a bump, uh, coming up on a Topo first when the tents come out and the new ban list, uh, gets, uh, applies. Yeah, for sure. Uh, so being able to, I don't know, being able to navigate all that is crazy.
ABC being here is wild to me. Yeah. I don't know what his deck list is. Honestly.
And I want to say Beach grouper made it almost all the way to the finals here. We don't have the finals right in front of us. Yeah. I want to say Beach grouper made it like really fun.
Yeah, which is still, which is really good, which is really good. We also have it on a really good authority that one of the Tribragate, I don't know which one was a, uh, what was it? It was a generator, a, a generator or a Tribragate. Wow.
One of those lists that's wild. Yeah. Definitely interesting. I have no idea what generators do.
Oh, may you produce electricity? No, not quite. I don't remember what they do to be completely honest with you. I just know that this is not something that you would expect.
Yeah. Oh, most definitely. I'm pretty sure that a good chunk of the, if I'm pretty sure a good chunk of their wins probably came from the fact that I know it's what they're doing. Yeah.
Yeah. Which to be, which to be, which to be fair is a major, uh, which is a major thing. If you can just do your thing, you're pulling up. No idea what's going on.
So it looks like finals here. And I could be wrong with this was prank kids and Phantom Knights. Ooh, interesting matchup. Yeah.
I literally just clicked on the finals. I clicked on the, uh, what you call it? The, uh, yeah. I just clicked to the vaud.
Yeah. So, and if I'm guessing what it looks like here, yeah, it looks like prank kids win the whole thing. Okay. Then interesting new list prank kids winning the event.
Yeah. With only one yam yamoo, that's crazy. And I gotta be honest, I wrote off this deck entirely. Oh, I did.
And I knew it was still going to be around. I mean, around sure, but like good. Oh, and he's playing the Vertature Green package. Of course.
Of course. So he probably used, he probably didn't use it very often. Well, he either use it every round or he didn't use it at all. Yeah.
I find with a package like that is one or the other. And it's usually the opposite one of what you think it would be. Yeah. My personal experience.
Anyway, well, it's interesting to say the least. Oh, no, no, no. We're definitely looking at if this has anything to say about that. Okay, matter.
We're looking at a very, very open. Oh, it's going to seem to be a super wide open format going for it. Oh, yeah. No, no, definitely.
What else interest you here looking at this top cut representation? Well, yeah. Well, you got the ABC. You have the amazement.
I want to know if it's like pure amazement or is it like or is it the amazement trap tricks that's been going around? That's a great question. Yeah. Because it just has amazement.
Um, with the B troopers, is it your standard B trooper? Is it a more generalized B trooper deck? Is it the B trooper trap tricks deck we've seen going around? I hope not.
Because a lot of the B troopers, a lot of the chapter sponsors are insects and therefore kind of fits in. I, I, you know, I hope not. Cause I think pure B trooper with like retaliating seas, look, generic. There's something bad.
There you go. Listen, generic insect extenders, coca pollen, so on, so forth, such with. Yeah. Dude, speaking of, I'm so glad, you know, we talked about in the last episode, but I seriously, I cannot tell you enough how happy I am that they, uh, that they reprinted residents insect.
I know, right. And it's a hollow. Honestly, honestly, super nice, super, super nice. I'm looking forward to OTS pack 17.
I really am too. So, um, what do you, you weren't on the last episode. So you didn't get to talk about it. What were you upset about missing the last, um, the OTS 17?
Ah, part of me wishes we got an access code to your brand, but part of me is also glad that didn't. That's not coming in 17 OTS. Yeah. But like part of me is God, it didn't because it would have been an ulti.
And at that point, what's the point? Fair. Um, like anytime they reprints something that's only ever been a secret and it's like an $80 secret that they're like, yeah, I should be a real parent. I regret it.
I'm like, I'm like, why even bother? Yeah. It's also going to be more expensive than the original secret. Yeah.
Yeah. Um, you know, like pretty much everything else. Like, yeah, this is cool. This is cool.
Um, I'm glad that that, uh, Portugal is finally getting its caught, finally getting its first, probably its first printing. So PUNY PING 1 and, uh, and I warn it. No, I'm not at their first printing. But it's crazy that Portugal always has an extra like 10 cards in their OTS packs.
Well, yes, I don't think Portugal, I don't think Portugal start getting packs until like, I think they've had it from the beginning. Yeah. Yeah. They've made, they've made, they've never gotten any of the sites or something.
And they're trying to make up for that. I don't think that's it. I really think that they just get more than we do. So in addition to the, um, in addition to the Child Slime Monthly, we also have some interesting stuff as far as an OCG meta game breakdown.
Now this is some post format stuff, but it's not entirely indicative. Um, because obviously not all tournaments over there are running already on the most recent band list. Yeah, it's, it's very much case of the discretion of the local, of the local scene, whether or not they go ahead and shift over immediately or wait. Yeah.
The other thing that's to consider here is that, um, this is not coming from road to the king.com, which is where we normally get our OCG meta game breakdown information. This is all coming from a Twitter post that I found. So take that for what you will. Take it with a salt shaker.
Yeah, grand salt. No, salt shaker, the whole shaker. The whole shaker. Yep.
So, um, uh, looking at this here though, um, some interesting stuff. Um, some interesting stand out. No, you're looking at 14% Fandonites for 13% Brave prank kids, 12% driver game, 10% sword, soul, 6% out of mantia, 5% Oelich, which is just out of mensipator by the way, 5% Oelich, 4% Phoenix brave. Um, which I, which I think is Phoenix enforcer brave token and then a bunch of random stuff.
Probably just a bunch of hand traps. Good stuff. Dot deck. Yeah.
Uh, then drytron orcas and 4% each and then 27% others. So what's the exciting idea? Um, probably orcas, but keep in mind that they have our poor. Fair.
So, you know, um, what this does seem to pop up on a lot of these, I guess that's why. And they also have that grasses green or something. But it's awesome for the orcas. Yeah.
Um, animatopator being a thing also surprised me, but I'm not sure on, I'm almost positive it's band over there. Okay. Yeah. I don't care so much they're doing that, uh, animatopator and the TCG aren't doing.
I don't know, man. It's the OCG. I don't take too much into it. I don't read too much into it.
I don't mean fair enough. I mean, it's also probably just goes to meta is so much slower comparatively. True. It might give them that, that little, you know, that extra time they need to set up.
Exactly. Like if they have, like if they get stopped, then they can have, they have the next turn to try again. Exactly. Yeah.
Yeah. They have, they have the knowledge of, okay, I'm probably not going to get out of the arcade, set up a couple of, uh, drop, you know, set a couple of cards, pass turn. Right. Right.
Yeah. I guess that I'm not about that, but yeah, that's one of those things. Yeah. Um, I think that the interesting thing is, oh, and if you look at, um, the Phantom Knights, 60% are running the Phoenix and Forcer package.
But you have to remember when you're talking about all these decks running the Phoenix and Forcer, Dragoon is banned. So this is their, right is their version of Dragoon. Right. So, you know, so that, so they're never going to get a meta where they're going to get, where they get to play with both Dragoon and Phoenix and Forcer.
Like we'll have here in a month. Yeah, which is, which is the insanity that we're going to have, we're going to have to deal with. But I really think it'll, it'll just ultimately come down to pick one or the other. Okay.
You're, you're not going to have room for both. You're going to have those people who are going to do both. I mean, yeah, and some like war crime, gravekeeper deck. Yeah, but it's going to happen.
But most people are probably just going to stick with the dream, just because they already have it. I would think so. I'm going to say this though. Um, I do believe that if, um, if it's below, if like the Short Phoenix and Forcer is less than like 30, um, oh yeah, you're going to see a lot more Phoenix and Forcer just because it's cheaper.
The whole package is cheaper. Well, it's not just that. I think you should pick them up, especially if it's like an ultra or a secret. You should definitely pick it up.
Oh yeah. Um, so I, okay. So live updates from the large, even individual giant skyhog. Um, we do have some information.
The top four was prank kids, Drytron, Melphy, Tribergade and PK for the Child's High Monthly. And we know that top eight involved a beach grouper deck and an amazement deck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're definitely looking, as we said, we're definitely looking at a very wide open meta, uh, starting on October 1st because, you know, people are scrambling, trying on new things, trying to figure out the new decks.
I mean, when you look at things like prank kids and Phantom Knights, Tribergade, competing with decks like Sword Soul, I mean, think about Elditch over there. They, you know, Elditch is a more competitive deck over there because of the way that meta is shaped. Yeah. Um, having cards like Maxie allows those decks to be competitive.
Um, but regardless, you're still looking at things like Phantom Knights. You're still looking at things like prank kids. You're still looking at things like Tribergade, just dominating the meta. So yeah, even, even Maxie can't slow the meta down that much.
Yeah, which is kind of impressive actually. Um, it honestly is. You know, these decks may help just kind of go, yeah, sure, Maxie, sure, whatever. I'll do it again next turn.
I dare, I dare me. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, you'll draw, yeah, you'll draw half your tech. I dare you to Maxie me again. Do it.
Do it. And I'll tech you out. Do it. Yeah, for real.
It's like that goofy meme. Mm hmm. I'll do it again. Yeah, I'll do it again.
But yeah. Oh, my lord. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, like even just Armetta pre-boat post-banless pre-versus-sneigh, it's going to be wilds. And I'm just trying to figure out what works now. Yeah, exactly.
You know, you have the people who as soon as there are techs on a banless team, you drop the whole deck and pick up something else. Then you also have the people who are trying to make the decks work the same way they'd work before with more limited resources. And you're going to have all these people trying to figure stuff out. So it's going to be interesting.
It's going to be real interesting. Yeah. There's a lot to consider with all of it. So.
Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Um, so looking forward though, there was something else that we wanted to talk about.
And we will absolutely do it after this segue to talk about ETB games in Alexander, Louisiana. Yes. Our local ETB games. I, you know, you can go there for whatever D&D, magic.
We actually went, actually one time we went there, they were just for funsies. They were having a magic gathering pre-release thing, which was really cool to get to watch as we did our UGL thing off in the corner. They have D&D stuff. They have rooms in the back and go into the playing D&D in.
You can actually reserve. I actually bought a book there. It was really cool, really cool, really cool people. Check them out.
Yeah, definitely check out ETB games in Alexander, Louisiana. Like Caleb said, it is a spectacular, um, is it really is a spectacular place to just get anything you need. And the link to that is in the description down below as always, TBgames.com. Now, the second segment that we wanted to talk about, our second third piece, um, so when we went to road to the king looking for some OCG meta game breakdowns, what we found was something that we actually think is a lot more interesting, which is an article by Akira, an article by Akira published here called the science of metagaming.
So we have not read this article all the way through. From what we can tell, it dives pretty deep into some analytics and some, um, and some numbers. So be prepared. And there will be a link to this article in the description below.
But we wanted to re-throw it here with our listeners and give our thoughts on it as we go. So it starts out metagaming, so it starts out with a definition. Metagaming is an approach to determine the tournament environment by examining past tournament results. A hypothesis proposes that tournaments, having the same participant composition would produce different results.
Testing are conducted by generating mock tournaments to examine and investigate the hypothesis. So essentially what this is saying is, if you have a tournament that has all of these different results and you go back through, you analyze the results and you have another tournament with the exact same participant pool running the exact same people, the exact same deck. No, no, the whole point is that it'll be different decks because if you let everybody go back through and that with the knowledge that they have, they'll do it differently. So the participant composition would be the same, but the composition of the decks is always going to be different because it's the meta game is always evolving.
So one is the introduction. In preparation for an upcoming tournament, players would predict the meta game in order to fine tune their decks against their opponents. Analyzing past tournament results is a sound method to determine what decks, cards, and strategies are popular in the current meta game. So something similar to this might be we can go in and we're going into a tournament.
Perfect example, this weekend, we're going to tournament. We can look at past results of the format and past results of other, maybe OCG meta game results, whatever. And we can look at the, we can look at other tournament results, kind of get a feel for, okay, this deck's very popular because this reason, right, and that is a sound method of determining the decks, cards, and strategies that are popular. Therefore we can pick our counters to it reasonably.
So due to the limitations of the Swiss and single elimination tournament system, though, the tournament results may deviate due to the pairings. The hypothesis proposes that tournament that tournaments comprising of the same participant composition with a significant amount of participants and that's a reasonably sufficient amount of tournament round being played would produce different results from each other. So two ICS is a month apart with this exact same 1500 people would produce extremely different results. Even if you were to somehow create this tiny, whiny event where the same term is getting played out in two different timelines, you probably have completely different results by the end.
Yeah, because it's impossible in any event of this size to replicate everything exactly. Yeah. Number two is the methodology. So this is all the methods about how they got to all these hypotheses and how they got to their conclusion.
The meta game is made up of rock, paper, and scissors decks. Rock will always win against scissors, scissors will always win against paper and paper always wins against rock standard stuff in the mirror match, such as rock against rock, paper against paper, scissors against scissors. Yeah, yeah. The winner will be randomly assigned.
Therefore, each deck has a 50% win rate. I like how in the example they're given using Obel's Cypher and Raw, it is rather nice. So the meta game breakdown is 33% each of rock, paper, and scissors. Yeah.
So each tournament is made up of 600 participants comprising of 200 rock, 200 paper, and 200 scissors. The tournament format will be eight rounds of Swiss, followed by a top cut. Hey, where the top 64 players advanced to single limb players are randomly paired using Konami tournament software. So three tournaments will be run.
Here's the results. Tournament one, you have the top 64 is 16 rock, 21 paper, 27 scissors. But then when you get to tournament two, you have 28 rock, 12 paper, and 24 scissors, drastically different. And then the next one, you have 26 rock versus 14 paper versus 24 scissors.
So each tournament started off with an even distribution of rock, paper, and scissors decks, but this distribution is not carried out over top cut. So champion tournament one, champion, scissors, tournament two, champion, paper, tournament three, champion, as a rock. And then the first is played against three different winners. The champion of each tournament played against an uneven spread of opponents.
So the first is played against two rock, nine, paper, three scissors, the second champion, paper, play against five rock, eight paper, and one scissors. And the third champion played against four rock, which is, so this is rock. He played against four rock, zero paper, and 10 scissors. So let's discuss with this a little bit.
The three decks have the same 50% win rate. Each has a 33% point, 3% distribution in the tournament. So hence the expected value of top cut would be 21.3 for each deck. In all three tournaments, there are decks that underperformed and decks that overperformed.
This is caused by the variance in the tournament pairings. In a 600 player tournament, the champion would only face up to 14 different opponents and not all of the other 599 players. So essentially you can compare this to you going to a tournament and even if it's a tier zero format, right, where I think pure Zodiac format, if you went into a pure Zodiac tournament, you could met a game it and you could predict that you're going to see a lot of Zodiac, but you could not guarantee that it was the only deck you would see, even if it represents a third of the field, even if it represents 80% of it. There's no guarantee that you won't go up against the deck that you just had no idea was going to be there.
Yeah. So variance in pairings meant that each player would face an unequal amount of good matchups and bad matchups. The champions break down revealed that each of them faced very minimal bad matchups. In particular, the tournament 3 champion rock did not face a single paper opponent and had zero bad matchups for all 14 rounds.
So this can be extremely comparable to a format like the one we reference all the time, which is the In-Zector wind up diner. Yup, that was a rock, paper, scissor format in a sense. Yes. So looking back now, if you play the format some more, really dive deeply into it, you can change the decks to where maybe one deck becomes the best deck of the format.
But if you look at it at that time, it was generally considered that going first, Dino Rabbit had a good matchup against In-Zector. In-Zector had a good matchup against Wind Up and Wind Up had a good matchup against Dino Rabbit. Sure, this is not guaranteed. Oh, nothing's guaranteed.
Right. But you could kind of have an idea. So, but in a format like that, when you start looking at it, think about it like this. In that format, In-Zector never won a YCS.
Even though it's probably the most popular deck, it never won it because it was low rare games cheap. Yeah. It was never won a YCS. It didn't even win nationals.
It won Worlds that year, but that's because Worlds had Wind Up and Dino Rabbit were not playable decks. Yeah, because Wind Up Rabbit and Shark were both TCU-cluses, not loud. And so was the rest of your rabbit and four-eyed. Yeah, both TCU-cluses, not a lot of worlds.
I think Zen-Mains was also a TCU-cluses. I don't think, it doesn't matter. It really does. It was.
Yeah, it totally was. It doesn't really matter though. But those two decks, not existing, let In-Zector win. Exactly.
In-Zector was tier zero in the OCC for a long time. So it's something to think about though, is that was In-Zector actually just, oh, the worst deck of those? Not really. It just had a worst luck in tournaments results.
Like in actual tournaments, it was just unlucky. Yeah, it had a more, it was kind of a weird thing where if you were a Pernigant Zector, you were probably going to see a lot of time rabbit. Right. So.
So. So deck, power level, and their meta game share are not explicitly correlated. In a format where one or two decks have a significantly higher win rate than the rest, they would show up more consistently in the top cut and thus take up a bigger share in the meta game breakdown. But in a format where the win rate across decks are fairly even, the meta game breakdown across the tournaments would be quite varied.
To objectively determine the power level of a deck, the deck has to be pitted against other top decks in the meta game to calculate its actual win rate. According to Frank Carson's calculations, a sample size of approximately 400 games is required to achieve a margin of error of plus or minus 5%, so like 95% confidence interval. In a balanced and diverse meta game, the win rate difference between the top decks is usually no more than a few percent. A 5% margin of error is too wide to differentiate the power level accurately.
To reduce the margin of error to 2%, a sample size of approximately 2,500 games is required. Assuming that we pick just the top five decks for our play test. Wow. 10,000, about 102,000 to 25,000.
That's a big number. A lot of games required to calculate the win rates between these decks. In 25,000 games is a well-known possible test, especially with the rapidly shifting meta game. So this may also explain the difference in the meta game trend and preferences across different regions in a balanced meta game.
Paper underperformed in tournament 2 and 3, and that would lead to players in those regions to lean towards rock. Whereas rock underperformed in tournament 1, and players in that region would lean towards scissors instead. The truth is, all three of these decks have the exact same power level at exactly a 50% win rate. So in conclusion, the hypothesis that tournaments have the same participant composition would produce different results stands correctly.
By increasing the amount of mock tournaments used in the experiment, the averaged data is likely to converge towards an even 33.3% spread across each other three decks. However, in practice, major tournaments with high participant counts are only held once a month on average. The meta game would have shifted in the period between two major tournaments, such as when you have two high impact booster sets, such as burst of destiny and deck build pack gram creators that were released six weeks apart in the MCG. In this case, it might be more accurate to analyze data from local tournaments held just a week or two before the major top tournament.
Rather than presenting a power level of the decks, the meta game breakdown is more about gauging the popular decks, cards, and strategies based on players, preference, and performance in various tournaments. So essentially what this is talking about is that a lot of the times when they post these deck lists on or they post these breakdowns on the road to the king meta game site, it's all talking about a lot of smaller local tournaments, a lot of 50 man, 60 man, 70 man, 100 man tournaments as opposed to like a 2500 person YCS. Yeah. So but they'll compile all of the results from a week's worth of those tournaments.
It might be 10 tournaments. It might be, you know, when you compile all that and put it all together really quickly and really tightly within a week's results, it gives you a much, much better idea of what the format actually looks like. So that's why if you look at it, going into a YCS, you don't want to look at the meta game and the results from the last YCS. That was six weeks ago.
Yeah. That was a bit of banless between then and now right or a whole new set or new product or just shifting mindsets of the players. You don't want to look at something that happened six weeks ago or four weeks ago or three weeks ago, even or even two weeks ago and say, well, this is what the format looks like. This is what it is.
I think that players can very easily fall into that mindset of, well, the format is solved. This is what the format is. Yeah. When we both know that the meta game is constantly shifting.
Oh, don't know it. Even to this exact day, we're still, I mean, we have almost a week left of this format. This format is still moving. This format is still shifting.
I am constantly changing on my side deck and my main deck, non like engine cards. Yeah. Constantly changing. All the cards sometimes depending on what the format looks like.
Yeah. Like me back when I had back when I was playing shit, alls and genius came out. It constantly bounced in and out of my main deck. Right.
And that's not even because of genius. That's because of everything else in the format. I might run in tri-bregate. I might run two carats sometimes and sometimes I might run three carats, just depending on the format, you know, it sometimes depending on the format.
I might run a zodiac package and sometimes I might run a rescue cat package with Zephyrim Gammas. Maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's time to bust out that old bird up. Honestly, I mean, even engine pieces can change depending what's happening in the format. That's why it's so, so critical to always be cognizant and aware.
When the regional circuit opens back up, I recommend everybody checking out the regional circuit. Keep an eye out for all the YouTube videos every single Saturday. They have probably five or six or 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 regionals. All over the US.
Yeah. There's always regionals happening somewhere. And so it's always worth watching and finding what the most recent regional results are. So, because you're also going to definitely have people who, whatever the last regional level going up in the next region, there's going to net deck, whatever one.
It's set to keep that in mind. Yeah. I mean, if, okay, let's say we're in a deck, we're in a tournament format. We just came out of a format.
It was dry-dry and travrogate, prankets, right? More or less. Where you look at it, the YCS, pack one with prankets, right? And Raphael Nevin, one with travrogate.
And then the South American one, I'm so glad about this. I don't remember his name, but the South American was one also by travrogate. And then the next weekend, there was a tournament coming up. And I was there was a case tournament or locals.
I said, dude, I know for a fact. Everybody and their mother is going to be playing travrogate and prankets. Yep. And sure enough, everybody and their mother played travrogate and prankets.
Prankets won the event. But you know what was two and three after Swiss? Dry-tron. Not because dry-tron was a bad deck, just because they didn't win one of the other two YCS, it doesn't make it a bad deck.
No, not at all. But because it didn't win that YCS, it was a great meta game choice because people were less prepared for it. People like, ah, it's falling out of the format. People are not deciding for it.
So I'm not even going to bring my drools for this tournament because I don't expect I'll be getting dry-tron. Right. Exactly. And just go, oh, no.
Right. So that's when you have to make sure that the trolls are included. That's when you have to make double sure. Okay.
So let's take it one step ahead. So let's say prank kids in tri-brage when those three tournaments. Okay. Well, let's look at what people are going to play as a result.
So, you know, the smarter, better players are going to be prepared for and playing dry-tron. So as a result, to meta game for that meta game shift, to like out meta game them, we want to make sure that we have stuff cited for dry-tron. We want to make sure that we have some drools cited. Just one random card.
Yeah. So I always thought that it was really interesting kind of taking it like that and playing it like that. Oh, yeah. I know.
Cause then it helps you to identify when it's a meta call to not play the meta. Not play whatever is the number one and most popular tech right now. There's a time and a place to play it and time and place to not play it. Right.
I agree. So. But I actually have a very good example of a time when not to play the meta. This was several years ago.
Back during Pokemon Sun and Pokemon Moon. I'd actually gone to a VGC regional. That's also a card game regional. It was me and a group of friends all went.
Yeah. Two of my friends decided it was me and I'm not going to say names here. It was me and one of these friends were both in VGC and then the other two were in the card game tournament. Right.
Well, one of our friends decided that he was going to play against the meta and not play what the number one deck during that time was. I think it was like say-bel-eye turbo or something. I don't remember. Sure.
And he decided to play Jolteon, which was not only one of his favorite Pokemon, also had a fantastic matchup against that specific deck. And the other friend said no, no, no, no, this is the deck to play at this tournament. Because the deck also has a good matchup against itself. It becomes a 50-50 who's better at managing resources.
Right. So this is the time to play this deck. Well, the friend who decided to play the Jolteon deck made day two. The person who played meta, well, it did not go well.
He went round three, he was X2 and dropped. He goes to show you that sometimes just because something is the best deck does not always make it the correct choice. So I have here so we're actually, we're probably going to wrap up here soon. But I do have a few more of the top 16 results for the monthly for the Johnson and Lavey want.
Yeah, let's go. Yeah, sure. So giant Starhawk was gracious enough to send us these lists. What a lovely man.
Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven. So I got a dozen. Actually, I think that's, well, no, I think actually he got all of them. Okay, so let's go with, we have a top eight amazement list.
Shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo, shoo. Ooh, is it pure amazement or was it like amazement because it makes it something else? No, this is pure amazement. I have to know.
This deck is running ten monsters, nine monsters. What is it? Three, Arlenkino, three, two, two, two, Arlenkino, three of the sultra, two, Arlenkino, three ash, one each of two other monsters, which I'm guessing are the other two amazement main deck monsters. I mean, there's three.
There's three total main deck monsters. There's four total. One of them doesn't get run at all. Well, then he's probably not running any of that one.
Yeah, it's a bit full of the teddy bear. And that's seven and then the other two main deck monsters. No, this is definitely one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Okay, yeah.
The other two main deck monsters are Red Eyes and Org Magician. He's running three Red Eyes fusion. One of a main deck spucker that I don't recognize, three extravigants, two it look like Red Eyes Insight. I'm going to call it by the grave, three cross-eyed designator, which is very interesting considering the sheer lack of hand traps here.
Three of the amazement spell, the re-tarantral tribute, two cyclocoster, two each of the other two ones, one of them, two their Camille and one, three Somme Dresmen, three M and Permanence. He's running three Dragoons, two last warrior from another planet. Oh, these two right here, those are waking the dragon. Oh, gross.
Hey, what did he man? Two Verdantacondas. Oh man, Psy deck. Oh, no, the three waking the dragons on the Psy deck, those are teekaboos.
Those are teekaboos. Three waking the dragon on the Psy deck, three even, these two starlight road with this three star dragon on the extra deck. Two Lancia's, one lightning storm, three dark rulers on the other side. It's work on that deck.
Yeah, that's still interesting though. It's an interesting work on. A direct time is running three diviners, three herald. It looks like two Delta, three Gamma, three Beta, three Alpha, one Eva, one Dragonids, one Herald of Ultimateness, one Benton, one E to 10, one Natasha.
Then it's one instant fusion, three Cyber Emergency, one Foolish burial, three Pot of Prosperity, three Drytron Nova, one Preparation of Rights, two Medionis Drytron, two of the Fafnir Fieldspell and one Call by. The extra deck here is one Nordan, one Millennialized Restrict, one Herald of the Arklight, Zeus Beatrice, Downer, Mubeira, Mubeira, Kinkagashi Fucho. It looks like Goddess of the Underworld. I can never get that card's name in the first go.
Kinkagashi Fucho? Yeah, I can't either. That's wrong, but people don't know what's wrong with it. The Rank 1 Bird.
That looks like Underworld Goddess of the Clothes world. Boral Sword, it looks like Nightmare, Unicorn Nightmare, Phoenix, IP Mask, Grey and Linker Evo. The side deck is three Lancia, two lightning storm, one Duster, three Dark ruler and more, two Forbidden Droplet, three Twin Twister, one Red Reboot. Good stuff.
Next is the, that was a top four Drytron. First place, Prank Kids, three Roxy's, three Lamps, three Drop C's, three Fan Z's. The only 12 monsters in the deck except for, oh, of course, one Ash, one Nib, one Ghost Bell, therefore the Crossout. The Pro-Doesinator, yeah.
It's a Rank 2 of. Everything else seems pretty normal, three Talents, one Mystic Mine, one Set Rotation, Boo. Got the Prank Kids place, one Other Fieldswell that I don't recognize. I don't know, it's interesting.
Two Teekaboos, you got to run Teekaboos now. Yeah, pretty normal. Then third Crossout, third Teekaboo, one Skullmeister, one Twin all in the main deck. They're exclusively for one Twin and two Cosmics in the main deck for Crossout, which I find very interesting.
That is interesting. Because he's running the Twin in the, he said the Cosmics are probably better in his opinion, but he's running the one Twin that we can cross out of. So he can negate the Twin, he's opponent for some reason, make it. And then Lancey has Droll's, the last two Nibs and a Feather Duster.
Phantom Knights can't find the list. Top four Melphy Tribergade, we'll see. Which is interesting. This is amazing.
Okay, so, Gamma Package, two Caris, three Fractal, three Kit, three Nerval, three Rescents, three Rescue Cat, three Ash, three Melphy Catty, two Calantosa, one Melphy, oh, is that three Puppy one Catty? Is he a three Puppy one Catty or three Catty one Puppy? I can't talk. Which one?
What color is the three of? They're the same color. Hang on, I gotta look at this. Well, okay, okay, okay, okay.