Saturday, November 20, 2010

The Singapore Legacy Metagame (or How to Prepare for your Local Tournament)

A week after publishing a consolidated spreadsheet of decks that perform well in the Star City Games metagame, I present the Singaporean Legacy metagame!

Singapore Legacy Metagame Spreadsheet

Explaining the Singapore Legacy Metagame

Click on the table above to go to the online Google spreadsheet. The first table you see is the consolidated list of all decks present in Singapore's Legacy tourneys since June 2010. As you can see, Belcher, Merfolk, and Rock are always present in our local meta. Also enlightening is the recent popularity of Madness Survival, mirroring the SCG Metagame.

Moral of the story: Don't play a deck that cannot beat Belcher, Merfolk, and Rock. Look out for recent developments in overseas Legacy meta.

More exciting is the next table, which ranks the number of top-8's for a deck. As you can see, Singapore is Belcher city – Belcher made top-8 consistently for the 4 previous Singapore Legacy tournament. Merfolk is also performing consistently, making top-8 in 3 out of the 4 tourneys.

Since we play Legacy, we're all geniuses. However, before you go too deep into the figures, note that there's only 4 tournaments reflected in this sheet as of today and any surprises in a tournament will skew the results. Just take a look at the performance of Rock and you'll see that 3 copies making top-8 catapulted it to 2nd place, just behind Belcher.

Moral of the story: Help me populate the sheet by sending me data for Singapore Legacy tournaments held before June! Or better still, help me update the sheet!

Player Standings

I've saved the best for the last. The last table you see all the way down shows players' performance in the previous tournaments. This is the table you should download, play with, eat, and digest, as it tells you who to aim for in the coming tournaments.

First, out of the 40 players who have participated in the 4 tourneys, 19 of them made top-8 at least once. So I have a 50% chance of making top-8 if I had participated in a tourney? Doesn't tell me much. Not interesting.

Second, and more interesting is how well a small group of players have performed. The table is sorted according to the number of top-8's a player has achieved in the past 3 tournaments since Angus started his Ang series (LOL!). These tournaments have at least 18 players and results for them should be significant.

Stroke of EgoRemember when I said that you should prepare for the players expected to play in your local tournament? Here's why. When you look at the player standings, you'll find that Yong Xin made top-8 every single time he played in the past 3 tournaments. (Hint hint, that's not a matter of chance.) Closely following him is Kelvin, who made 2 top-8's only because he participated in 2 of the 3 tourneys organized by Angus. Now I hope you know who to gun for. =)

Lest I forget, Kaiser, Angus, Albert, and *gasp* yours sincerely also made 2 top-8's in the Ang Series. @Kaiser, Angus and Albert: You're welcomed. I know. I feel my ego being stroked as well. [Edit, I've previously left out Kaiser due to human error. He's definitely 1 player, if not the player to look out in Singapore!]

Last Lesson

The final piece of advice I will give is to look at the deck choice for the players. I've mentioned before that players tend to bring the same decks to tourneys due to various reasons.

Although more data is needed, we can see that happening to players such as James, who brought burn, a wise budget deck choice. The same thing happens for Raymond, and his brother Ryan, who seem to gravitate towards combo decks based on monsters and Show and Tell. Lastly, I've brought Merfolk to tournaments for 3 times and performed well with it twice. Guess what I'll bring next time?

Summary

I hope you know from this article how to use the spreadsheet to predict what will be present in your local tournament next time. The 2 biggest factors that affect what appears in your local tournament are hype and player tendencies. You should have a better sense of the tournament scene once you pay attention to players.

So, do you agree to what I say? Do you have other insights that I've missed out? Or do you think this is total rubbish? Comment below and let me know. If you think what I said is godly, spread it on. If you want to help out in populating this sheet, contact me via email or Twitter at mtgtrinket@gmail.com, or add me on Facebook at pluto1985@hotmail.com.
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