So true about reaching out to deck creators! Wenjong helped me the week before Worlds when I asked if I could bring his Swift Lat to Worlds, which was unpublished at the time but had a top cut open decklist at pre-Worlds Showdown.
A lot of great matchup advice and tips on specific card choices and discussion on the icebreaker suite vs the meta. Ended up going 5-2 thanks in large part to Wenjong’s advice
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I also brought Azmari (4-3) and I won all the games where the opponent hasn’t seen the deck, and only won one match against an opponent who knew the deck. I would say it’s hard to get reps with the deck without a testing group; testing on regular jnet did not prepare me for my tougher matchups nor did the opponents consistently know the deck.
I don't quite understand the favoring of the conversion metric over winrate. Surely the winrate tells us more about the individual deck, while conversion also embeds the results of the players' other deck?
I get that it gives a more nuanced picture than just winrate on its own, which is not a perfect metric either, but if a deck has a very h igh winrate and low conversion rate, that still means that it won a lot of games! And the reason for the low conversion rate could easily be poor deck choices for the other side. So what is the reason for dismissing Azmari, for example, when it has a fantastic win rate but just happened to be paired with middling runners in this particular tournament?
If a deck has a high win rate but a low conversion rate, that tells me that it probably beats average decks/players, but struggles to beat the best decks and players. To convert to day 2 and the cut, you have to be able to beat the best players on decks like Asa, Ag, R+, and Lat!
In other words - Azmari often wins you enough games to get to the top tables, where it gets paired against Lat and loses, preventing you from making the cut.
I guess you could argue that staying on the mid-to-lower tables most of the time gives Azmari a collectively low strength of schedule, and that it wasn't properly tested against the top players and decks, but that pattern isn't extremely strong.
So true about reaching out to deck creators! Wenjong helped me the week before Worlds when I asked if I could bring his Swift Lat to Worlds, which was unpublished at the time but had a top cut open decklist at pre-Worlds Showdown.
A lot of great matchup advice and tips on specific card choices and discussion on the icebreaker suite vs the meta. Ended up going 5-2 thanks in large part to Wenjong’s advice
——
I also brought Azmari (4-3) and I won all the games where the opponent hasn’t seen the deck, and only won one match against an opponent who knew the deck. I would say it’s hard to get reps with the deck without a testing group; testing on regular jnet did not prepare me for my tougher matchups nor did the opponents consistently know the deck.
I don't quite understand the favoring of the conversion metric over winrate. Surely the winrate tells us more about the individual deck, while conversion also embeds the results of the players' other deck?
I get that it gives a more nuanced picture than just winrate on its own, which is not a perfect metric either, but if a deck has a very h igh winrate and low conversion rate, that still means that it won a lot of games! And the reason for the low conversion rate could easily be poor deck choices for the other side. So what is the reason for dismissing Azmari, for example, when it has a fantastic win rate but just happened to be paired with middling runners in this particular tournament?
Any favouring of one metric over another is unintentional--both metrics are important.
By my own definition, Azmari performed well. It just didn't perform as well as it has at previous tournaments.
The fact that it lost so many games towards the beginning of the tournament suggests that variance may have been a contributing factor.
If a deck has a high win rate but a low conversion rate, that tells me that it probably beats average decks/players, but struggles to beat the best decks and players. To convert to day 2 and the cut, you have to be able to beat the best players on decks like Asa, Ag, R+, and Lat!
In other words - Azmari often wins you enough games to get to the top tables, where it gets paired against Lat and loses, preventing you from making the cut.
I guess you could argue that staying on the mid-to-lower tables most of the time gives Azmari a collectively low strength of schedule, and that it wasn't properly tested against the top players and decks, but that pattern isn't extremely strong.
TAI Breaker Ag was also trying to solve for Crew decks, which we expected to see more of than actually showed up.
Interesting! Sokka says his Built to Last deck was chosen to beat charmcrew anarch decks.