Hello everyone,
I launched my Patreon as a way to better connect with fans of Pauper, but also support the work I do in collecting metagame data. In the intervening years I have tried to figure out a better way to break down the Pauper tournament information that is publicly available to provide context and format analysis in a way that is driven by data. After a lot of trial and error (and help from friends), I think I’ve cracked the code.
One thing I love about baseball is how obsessed with numbers the game can be. A game with such a long history can be broken down into data to allow for reasonable comparison between different eras, and yet not lose anything if you just want to sit and watch teams battle for twenty seven outs. Baseball, like Magic in many ways, can be as shallow or as deep as you want.
There’s a statistic in baseball called WAR – Wins Above Replacement. It measures how much better a player is than an “average” Major League Baseball player. It’s an incredibly useful stat that helps fans to see exactly how good their favorite player is at the moment, but also against the history of the game. WAR can be discrete – measured for a period of time – or cumulative – over an entire career.
Thanks to the help of some friends over the years, I now measure a stat from the Pauper Challenges called, uncreatively enough, Meta Score Above Replacement. The Meta Score Above Replacement of a deck roughly measures how well an archetype performed in a specific challenge but also the course of an entire season. This statistic can also be adjusted for decks that have fewer overall appearances to give a rather robust view of discrete eras of the Pauper metagame.
Today I want to launch a project to start analyzing seasons from Pauper’s past. Using the publicly available Magic Online Challenge tournament data I want to go back and explore formats and see what the best decks at the time were; I want to see if there were times where the metagame was in balance; I want to examine the times where there were broken decks and see how they stack up against each other.
And here is where you step in. This takes time and as much as I want to do it I cannot justify it from a temporal perspective at the current moment. I am launching two goals on my Patreon to make this endeavor more reasonable. If I can reach $250/month, I will start doing set retrospectives. These posts will take a look at different releases in Magic’s history and discuss their impact on Pauper to date – think of them as a set review, but with the benefit of seeing which cards actually performed. If I can reach $500/month I will start going back and looking at historical metagames, applying the same measures I use today to those eras to try and compare the format to itself at various points in time.
To support this I’m launching an additional $5 tier on the Patreon. This tier comes with all the prior benefits but you’ll not only get early access to my Patron only posts, but will also be able to view the spreadsheets and documents as they are being compiled.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I am excited about these projects and I hope you are as well.
Best,
-Alex
NerdtotheCore 