1st Official Wagic Deck Competition - TALK

[Psyringe]

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Update: Quarterfinal results and semifinal pairings have been posted to the results thread (I hadn't posted the results so far because I didn't wan t to spoil the suspense for the people who watched the videos. ).

Semifinal results will probably follow in a few hours

[Psyringe]

Update: the semifinals have been played! The match videos are linked in the results thread - don't miss them.

If you just want to see the results, you can download the spoiler here.

[r1c47]

This post may contain spoilers:









YES!

[AzureKnight]

Haha.. Looks like the winning streak for SilverBlade has finally come to an end.

I knida knew all along that facing Good Knight will be a Very Bad matchup.
Basically it's like a mirror match, except Knight has bigger beefier creatures at a slight cost of speed,
it even has a Protection from White Creature! And SilverBlade's Crusade just pumps the enemy even bigger.

I was really hoping this match wouldn't happen, I suppose it is unavoidable.
Good Knight is actually quite a good deck, but people just overlooked it because
there was a better performing White Weenie deck around. Maybe that's why no one voted for it.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun following this competition. And making Top 8 is quite an achievement.

I hope there will be more of such contests in future, and I will surely participate!

[bcdiscman]

One weakness of the AI (that Eviscerator has so successfully exploited) that I would like to see fixed if possible - would be: When pain cards such as 'Ankh of Mishra' are in play and the AI has plenty of land already on the board, it needs not play a land just because one is in it's hand (especially if 2 or 3 'Ankh of Mishra' are in play and the AI's life is at 6) - suicide by pain cards is just a little silly - don't you think?

[Psyringe]

This post may contain spoilers:
YES!

10 points for style.

I knida knew all along that facing Good Knight will be a Very Bad matchup.
Basically it's like a mirror match, except Knight has bigger beefier creatures at a slight cost of speed,

Yep. Good Knight is slightly slower, but its creatures are strong enough to often withstand SilverBlade's massive initial onslaught (the Crusade situation helps there; the AI is often smart enough to not play Crusade if it helps the opponent more than itself, but this still means a useless card in SilverBlade's hand, i.e. less ammunition for the fast-fire attack that SilverBlade depends on). And once SilverBlade has played its hand out, it's actually at a disadvantage in this matchup, because both decks will draw one creature per turn, and Good Knight (having more expensive cards) can utilize its mana base better.

Good Knight is actually quite a good deck, but people just overlooked it because there was a better performing White Weenie deck around.

Yeah, Good Knight sort of passed under the radar for a long time, because it lost its opening match 2-4 to Elfolk, scoring "only" second place in the first stage, and so it didn't seem that strong compared to the many unbeaten decks that were still present. But apart from this loss, Good Knight won every single match, except one draw. Now guess against which deck that happened ... right. Eviscerator.

(Side note: Did anybody else notice that group 2-A actually contained 3 of the 4 semifinalists? I guess White Blades and Twin Pricks hit it really bad with that group, especially White Blades could probably have progressed easily into stage 3 in any other group ...)

I hope there will be more of such contests in future, and I will surely participate!

Good, I'm counting on you.

[Psyringe]

One weakness of the AI (that Eviscerator has so successfully exploited) that I would like to see fixed if possible - would be: When pain cards such as 'Ankh of Mishra' are in play and the AI has plenty of land already on the board, it needs not play a land just because one is in it's hand (especially if 2 or 3 'Ankh of Mishra' are in play and the AI's life is at 6) - suicide by pain cards is just a little silly - don't you think?

It would be a good thing to improve the AI in this regard, otherwise we'll probably see Ankh of Mishra in every second deck in the next competition. It's the kind of card that really gives the AI trouble because something that's usually a good thing ("play a land whenever you can") suddenly turns into something potentially bad. Congratulations to colarchon for finding this weak spot of the current AI and building a truly mean deck around it.

Fixing this looks pretty difficult though. The current AI cannot analyze cards and their effects very well, and even if it could, then parsing all triggered effects on the off chance that a penalty for playing lands might be among them might be too much of a performance hit. We'll see if we can come up with something.

[wololo]

I think what saved Good Knight is lifelink. Good Knight managed to stay at a very high life level even when Silverblade had more creatures coming. This match was exciting to watch

[AzureKnight]

Yea.. I agree. The match between SilverBlade and Good Knight was really exciting.
It seemed like it could go either way, and it was really close.
Though it was quite disappointing for SilverBlade to lose, the results are final,
and I'm rooting for Good Knight in the Finals!!


So, according to the first post, the winner will be auto-included into Wagic,
but is there a chance to include the other Top 8 decks as well?
I think they all performed very well.

[Psyringe]

is there a chance to include the other Top 8 decks as well?
I think they all performed very well.

Definitely. The quality of many submitted decks was very high. I estimate that about 25 decks from the competition will be added to the next Wagic release, some with adjustments (e.g. replacing non-working dual lands with regular basic lands). They will then also be included in my AI comparison statistics, fighting against decks such as Elfball and Treefolk.