AgInfusion clears up at UK North Regionals
Martian farmers exploit a sudden drop in Anarch popularity
UK Regionals - North
5th Oct 2024
Sheffield, UK
45 Players
5 rounds DSS, Cut to top-8 (single elim)
Players in the UK travelled from across the country in order to complete their collection of specially commissioned Brindelmold alt arts, and for their last chance to win a beautiful Angel of the North playmat.
With only a few weeks before the World Championship, this was also the last chance for any UK players to get some in person competitive practice in, before making the long journey to San Francisco.
So, what did they play? Pretty much everything other than Anarch.
The most popular Corp IDs were PD [8], R+ [7] and Outfit [6], but none of these converted well into the Top Cut, and of the three only PD managed a positive win rate (53%). Azmari [5] had a much better day, managing to secure two places in the Top Cut with a 61% win rate.
51% Shaper attendance should come as no surprise, at this point, but 13% Anarch is almost unprecedented—you have to go all the way back to the infamous ACC upset to see Anarch popularity dip this low. Combine that with a 36% win rate—the lowest of any runner faction—and a 0x conversion rate, and you’ve got just a terrible day to be a fan of raised orange fists …
…but a great day for fans of red sand castles.
With Hoshiko in low attendance, the path was clear for AgInfusion to dominate the tournament—and dominate it did, with a 90% [9/10] win rate and a 3.75x cut conversion*.
The only threat to Martian supremacy was Kit, but, despite an impressive 66% win rate, only one Kit player actually managed to fight their way into the Top Cut—making for a disappointing 0.7x cut conversion. It’s worth comparing this with Lat’s—still respectable—50% win rate and 2.4x conversion rate.
In a noteworthy departure from the emerging pattern, the overall corp win rate in Swiss was 48%, dropping to 47% in the Top Cut.
One explanation for this is that a burst in popularity of Criminal has coincided with a decline in the popularity of Jinteki—which has long been Criminal’s natural predator. This would also explain the unusually high Criminal cut conversion rates.
Another thing worth noting is that, at this tournament, NBN did not find the wins against Shaper that it usually does—as you can see in the mighty Shaper win rate (64%).
Whether this is a sign of the meta to come, and whether it encourages less players to play NBN and more to sleeve RH, we will have to wait and see.
* about the cut conversion metric
I want to make a brief aside about the cut conversion metric—the number of players who successfully made the Top Cut with an Identity, as a proportion of the total number of people playing that Identity at the tournament.
I am a big fan of this metric. It leverages the natural mechanics of the swiss pairing system to “solve” a number of otherwise thorny analytical problems—which is a solution that is both elegant and beautiful, and therefore true. However, it is not a metric that is as easy to express as it’s counterpart—the humble win rate.
Up until now, I’ve settled for expressing cut conversion as a percentage, but this number is meaningless unless compared to a baseline %—the % of players that will make a Top Cut regardless of ID choice. If you have a 100 player tournament with a cut to top 16 then 16% of players will make the cut regardless of ID—so that’s a 16% baseline. Anything higher than a 16% conversion indicates a strong performance for an ID, anything lower indicates poor performance.
This baseline, of course, changes from tournament to tournament. In order to be able to compare conversion rates across the season, and in the hopes of improving the readability of these articles, I’m trying to express Identity cut conversion in a different, and hopefully clearer, way.
In our example of a 100 person tournament with a cut to top-16, if 16% of PD made the Top Cut, then that would be exactly average. We can express this as 1x (16/16)—meaning that PD cut conversion followed the baseline exactly as expected. If 32% of PD made the Top Cut, we could express that as 2x (32/16)—that is to say, if you played PD at this tournament, then you were twice as likely to make the Top Cut than the average Corp. Likewise, if only 8% of PD made the Top Cut, that would be a cut-conversion of 0.5x (8/16)—in other words, you were half as likely to make the Top Cut with PD than the average.
Too long—didn’t read? Anything more than 1x is good. Anything less than 1x is bad.
Hopefully this simplifies the expression of a somewhat complicated, but I think important, statistic. If we look at this metric in combination with win rate, then I think together that gives us a pretty solid performance indicator for an ID. If win rate for an identity is above the side average, and the conversion rate for that ID is above 1x, then I would say that ID can be safely considered to be “highly competitive”.
Let me know what you think in the comments!
Final Standings:
RotomAppliance (Snare Bears) - PD [4-0-0] / Lat [5-0-0]
Saus3 - Azmari [3-2-0] / Lat [3-1-0]
cursor (EA Sports) - Sports [2-3-1] / Kit [6-0-0]
Lap - AgInfusion [3-0-0] / Lat [2-1-0]
King Solomon - PE [3-0-0] / Zahya [3-1-0]
ChonkySeal - AgInfusion [3-0-0] / 419 [2-3-0]
Kikai (EA Sports) - Azmari [3-1-0] / Steve [2-1-0]
Utati - Sports [1-3-0] / Zahya [2-1-0]
24.09 meta analysis is available here
I am a big fan of this way of expressing cut conversion, whilst conversion rates are inherently impacted by other factors (such as pilot and that player's other deck) so is overall winrate, a deck might win 100% of it's games on bottom-mid tables.
This way of showing it is very clear and a useful statistic in my mind.
I'm not a fan of cut conversion rate because it conflates corp and runner success rates. To cherry pick an example, take the Worlds Showdown, where Santa made the cut with Azmari (2-2-0) and Ari (3-0-1). What are we to conclude about Azmari cut conversion when the player was carried by their runner?
Or in the same event, look at cicada who played Azmari 3-1-0, but 419 at 0-4-0. Had Cicada played a different runner and gone 2-2-0, she would have been in the bubble. If she had played 419 to a 3-1-0 record like enkoder or ChonkySeal, she'd have made the cut. What are we to conclude about Azmari in this case?
I can see an argument that cut conversion averages out these effects, but I don't think the sample size of any given ID in any event smaller than continentals is big enough to be confident in that claim. I think cut conversion is an inherently messy stat and not where I look for insights.