Introduction

This is part 2 of the transcription of the limited level-ups episode 37. Preparation and the use of tierlists! Here you have a list of all parts of the transcription: part1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Transcription

Allright, so let’s get into our main topic here. And this is, like previously mentioned, Seven Habits of Highly Effective drafters. And I myself am the opposite of somebody who’s kind of data-driven and I think I’m very feel based in my playing. So like having somebody like you on the show, I think provide such a unique perspective and the topic here we have here today, I’m really excited to talk about it, because, I think just going through these habits which when I’m reading them, like, “Oh that makes so much sense that makes so much sense” and it will be interesting to hear from you the data analytical side of it and then just like see if we can relate that to gameplay. So, you’ve got your your methodology here. Why don’t you lay this out for us?

Yeah, and like knowing the limited level-Ups audience, what I wanted to do, is, I wanted to see if there was a way we can compare people who are sort of the top-tier drafters on that use 17lands to, not people on the totally opposite end of the spectrum, because I think the limited level-ups audience, is likely further up on the Chain, but to people who maybe are at a mid-tier and want to take a step up from there. And so yeah, basically, what I would have done is, I’ve segmented the users a little bit into 2 groups like that and we’re mostly going to be looking at data from best of one on Arena from the human drafts and we of course and the reason that we’re looking at the best of one data is because people just play more of it. So there’s a larger sample size. There are a few pieces here that we’ll look at that also includes best-of-three data. And so, just to give you a sense of what sort of drafters were looking at from the best of one side of things these highly effective drafters that we’re comparing are the people who have a win rate of 62 percent or higher in Platinum and Diamond over the last couple of months. So that includes the main sets of Ikoria, M21 and Zendikar, but also the flashbacks they did with Dominaria and Amonkhet Remastered. And yeah, so this is roughly 50 users that we’re looking at that have thousands of games. We’re comparing them to people who in that same platinum diamond level have a win rate closer to 45 or 50 percent and the latter group here are still good drafters. They might just be levelled off in that tier of rank on Arena. That second group is a bit larger, we’re looking at about a little over a hundred drafters in that group. And then on the best-of-three side, because that’s unranked, we expect 17lands users to have a higher win rate, so the effective drafters in that group are the ??? within 70% match win rate in Ikoria and M21. We’re comparing them to people who have in the order of about 50 to 65 percent win rate across those two sets and there were about 20-25 drafters of these. So, like I said, the best of three data is much smaller because people like to play best of one a lot more. And we’ve also put sort of a threshold to have a minimum of at least 15 matches in multiple sets for those users to qualify, as we’re not getting someone who played five matches in 1-4 of them. We’re getting people have a decent sample size and then also just some caveats before we get into the numbers in more detail. First thing, obviously, everything here is in correlation and doesn’t imply causation. I think that’s why this is best presented in a podcast format where Alex, you and I, can talk and think about why this might be. And then next caveat we have here, is the sample size on this, while 17lands has been growing, we’re not at the level where we can have the traditional 95 percent confidence interval here. But, again, we can talk about these things and think about what they mean.

Right, It’s not like, you know Back-In-The-Day, Magic Online, like, they used to release these big sets of data. Actually, you could actually there’s a few people skimming Magic Online like watching games and they, you know… Number 1, WOTC has so much more data than we could ever have. Right, and number 2, people were just like day in day out watching these games. So hopefully, in the future, WOTC loosens up their hold on the data a little bit. I think that’d be awesome to get a little bit more information.

I hope so, that would be that would be interesting to see how what we have kind of matches are or disagrees with what they see. And then lastly this comes up a fair amount, but 17lands are not necessarily a representative sample of the magic community as a whole. People who install a tracker whether it’s 17lands or untapped or any of the other ones. They’re more likely to care about what they’re doing and consume content, things like that. So you’ll see that the baseline that we’re comparing to often has a higher than 50% winrate.

And I think that’s probably a good thing overall. Well, all things considered, right? You’re not, I think… If you had players that maybe weren’t invested there would be more outlier data. I don’t know, maybe, that’s not true. But that’s what comes to mind, you think that’s possible?

Yeah, definitely and that made it easier for me to look at that segment to compare against because we have like a lot of our users are in that group where maybe they get to platinum or Diamond but they don’t take it all the way. Or they just don’t get enough reps to get all the way up to Mythic. So, I think it’s a good sample for us to look at to compare to our podcast listeners.

Yeah, sweet. Okay, so let’s get into these habits. So, number one here is, preparation. And okay, a caveat, that I also want to say is you know, I’ve been saying a bunch of nice things about 17lands.com. This is not a plug this is not a sponsor or anything. I just happen to really like 17lands and think, you know, I really believe in what you’re doing over there. So, the habit number one is preparation and the use of tierlists. So better drafters are more likely to have made a tier list on 17lands and that probably carries over to spreadsheets as well. The numbers you have here are 70% of the great drafters, in either best of one or best of three, have made their own 17lands list, but only 51 in the comparison group.

Yeah, we’re seeing high rates across the board of people using tierlists, but like you said, whether you’re doing this in a spreadsheet, or on the tool that we offer, or however you want to grade the cards, in my mind, it’s really useful to stop and look through all the cards, contextualize things before you play them. And yeah, it gives you a chance to think about them in context. Going back to the question of the week, if the only times that you’re seeing the cards are when you play them. The first couple times you’re only going to see them in a smaller context of the set. And so when you are doing these tierlists, you can look, hey, how many creatures are there at power 4 or greater to know how good Smite the Monstrous is. It makes you pause and ask those types of questions and be able to sort filter and things like that. And then the other thing I see with tierlists is that if you go through the effort of grading a card on your own and then go and compare them with someone else or listen to the LR set review or, in some way, figure out someone else’s opinions, you are much more likely to stop and think, “Hey, why did I grade this higher? Why did I grade this lower? Are we so different on these cards?” And makes you pay more attention to these discussions. How do you find value in the tierlists, Alex?

Yeah. I mean for me, I love making it myself just to set a baseline, right? That’s my biggest thing, like a baseline evaluation, so that when I do see it in play or when I do hear a differing opinion, like you said, that hits me off to say: “Oh, this is different than what I originally thought” and like you said, it’s a card of note and especially in the first, like, 10 drafts of a format or something, I think it’s super important to have those baselines. Because, you know, when you are new to a draft format, look, I am so enveloped in Magic and content creation these days that like it’s rare for me to not know what card is by looking at the card art by day one of the draft format, but at the same time there are still sometimes I’m like, “Oh, what does this card do again?” So I can imagine for people who, you know, don’t look the full spoiler, don’t look to make these tierlists. It’s even harder. So when you’re literally have you on minute to read all the cards in the pack. Like that, first of all, is just huge, you can completely put that aside and go, okay, I actually know what these cards do. Let me critically think about, you know, what card I want to take, the signals I’m sending, the signals I’m receiving and it just takes off a lot of the mental load, right, it alleviates the tax on your mental state like you don’t have to think as much you can put it into the second nature bank and you can really start to get that next level and start critically thinking. It’s almost like homework before doing, you know, a project or the test or whatever, you know? You’re so prepared that, you know, you can really step it up to the next level and just start critical thinking, a bit sooner basically, right? You can get to a week for the format and you know start that critical thinking but, like, that’s too late a lot of the time. Sometimes, if you don’t do that critical thinking you are behind the pack and people are going to, you know, be drafting circles around you. Because you’re just you know, you just haven’t put it in that work just yet.

Yeah, and I think, obviously, there are lots of caveats with tierlists, like you don’t want to be using a tierlist and just picking the highest card every time. I think one of the things that catches me up with tierlists is, thinking about using them when trying to read signals in the draft, especially early in the format. And so, I think, you need to use them with a grain of salt. Where, yes, this is how I sort of think about these cards but also recognize that, especially if it’s your tierlist, or a tierlist that might not be as public or widely shared, just because you’re getting some card late, that you think is the best black common or the best red comment or something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that other people think it’s right. So, I like to treat that with a grain of salt early on in the format while those card evaluations are still kind of settling out across the community.

Yeah, and I find a lot of times, like, the cards that people take the longest to get on board with how good they are in reality are the ones that are more contextual that like you look you can look at it at face value, you know, maybe the first time you’re seeing isn’t that first draft and you go, okay, I can assume, how good, I don’t know, Chilling Trap is. You know, the one mana blue instant that target creature gets negative four and you draw a card if you control a wizard. Well, if you don’t know that there are a ton of wizards in this set, for example, you might not rate that card as highly because of context. So, I think, you know, saving that baseline and providing yourself with context just puts yourself so far ahead of the pack, I think.

Yeah, definitely. I wanted to start with that habit because, like you said, this is preparation, this is homework before you even sit down at the drafting table…

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