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I agree. To be fair, WotC doesn't really bother with Legacy anymore anyway and if this type of mulligan becomes the new norm, it should probably be judged more for its effects in Standard and Modern (and maybe Limited formats), since that's what they had in mind. In their podcast about...

I've spent a fair bit of text explaining why I don't believe that this sort of data collection is going on. You've simply repeated that I don't know, without justifying that position in any way. Also, the article that Melkor linked to included a brief summary of what is behind the decision, at...

Absolutely not. They can make whatever decision they want, and I've admitted (a few times now, I think) that I believe them when they say they ran tests and listened to player feedback. That's all fine. They also made a claim about interactivity in games and have stated that they don't think...

Thread necromancy! I was looking for something and saw this. I wish that I would have responded to it back then because this person's understanding of Goblin Bomb was way off. 1 in 32 is the probability of getting Goblin Bomb to go off as quickly as it is possible for the card to do so by...

Oh, I doubt they'd be that bad about it. I know I just accused WotC of a lack of statistical rigor where I think it would make sense for them to hire more statisticians and quantify things more, but they're still smart people. They probably wouldn't actually use just one tournament as their sole...

Nope. Didn't say that. I'm referring to the totality of the circumstances here... The Magic tournament scene varies in detail across regions and locally within regions depending on tournament size, level of rules enforcement, demographics of communities, quirks of local metagames, etc. To...

It kind of does. Magic is a huge, popular game and the physical version of the game (not Magic Online) is played almost entirely in places where there is no inherent record of the details of the match. Yeah, some tournaments include records of decklists for everyone in the tournament and...

Ooh, I like it. This thread is now officially about Pennsylvania intrastate rivalry. Continue...

I think Mooseman's post pretty much sums it up, although he's totally been at a lot more tournaments than I have, probably by an order of magnitude. But I'm not even saying that we know WotC isn't taking a data collection approach to tournaments as a whole just on the basis of what I've seen or...

I doubt that. To be clear, the concept of data collection with respect to a popular card game is different from "multiple tests" if that's what you're thinking. Data collection requires observation and recording of real games with real players. Yeah, like everyone else, WotC has access to the...

I don't think that anyone collects that sort of data, as it's too subjective. Even to get data on mulligan frequency at all would require changes to the way tournaments are run, I think...

Nothing was unbanned either. We're back to the doldrums of "no changes" in Eternal formats. Khans of Tarkir showing up and provoking some actual attention got my hopes up, but that was silly. If Erik Lauer can no longer be bothered to give Eternal formats any consideration whatsoever, they...

I definitely saw/heard cards called "jank" in the late 1990's. Looking at dictionaries, it seems that lexicographers consider it to be a probable back-formation from "janky" and/or a deliberate corruption of "junk." My sources indicate that "janky" goes back to at least the early 1990's in...

You have that right. In the event that keeping first-turn Land Tax offline becomes such a priority that one wants to hold a land drop back to achieve it, that land drop would be the second, and not the first. One could potentially use Mox Diamond to drop first-turn Land Tax and have it active...

Yeah, this set has a lot of potential gems. Looks like it could become the best set in a while...

It does seem rather silly, and I'm curious as to what these "non-interactive" games looked like. Interactivity is a concept that gets used in a lot of hazy arguments. Since it's Wizards of the Coast, I'm inclined to say that they think of interactivity as bashing creatures into each other. I...

Dark Petition looks amazing. I don't know what kind of deck would be right for it, but I'm excited for it.

It is expected to lower prices a bit, but the demand for many of these cards is very high and the set is more expensive than normal anyway.

Modern may be a crappy, overpromoted, micromanaged format in which Preordain is banned. It may be a real shame that WotC is trying to push Modern over Legacy. It may be the case that all the coolest decks that have ever been in the format were banned out of it because they were too cool for...

What happened? I've been working constantly and haven't heard about this yet...