Vintage Masters has hit Magic Online, and Vintage constructed events are in full swing. A few Vintage Daily events fire each day, and there's a lot of action in the 8-player and 2-man queues.

Due to the relatively high value of Vintage Masters packs and the structure of constructed tournament payouts, these Vintage events provide significantly better value than comparable events in other constructed formats. Legacy constructed events have been changed to match the Vintage entry fee and payout, so they too offer significant value.

Tournament Payout Expected Value Analysis

I've done some simple comparative analysis of Magic Online tournaments with regards to expected value:

8-Player Queues

8-player events cost 6 tickets to enter. With 8 players, that equals 48 tickets in entry fees.

A Vintage or Legacy 8-player event pays out 3 Vintage Masters boosters to first, 2 boosters to second, and 1 booster to third and fourth places. As of writing, Goatbots pays just under 7 tickets--6.96--for a Vintage Masters booster.

These Vintage 8-player events pay out 7 Vintage Masters boosters worth a total of 48.72 tickets, which, minus 48 in entry fees, equates to a small overlay worth 0.72 tickets split between the 8 entrants. This number will change depending on the exact booster price of the moment, but the point is that these events offer a small overlay, compared to the alternative of significant rake.

A Standard, Modern, Theros Block Constructd, or Pauper 5-3-2-2 queue pays out a total of 3 Theros, 4 Born of the Gods, and 5 Journey Into Nyx Boosters, which, at the time of writing, Goatbots is buying for a total of 27.28 tickets. At 48 total tickets in entry, that's a significant house rake of 43%

2-Player Queues

2-Player heads-up queues always offer negative value, but, nevertheless, Vintage and Legacy queues are better value than their Standard and Modern counterparts:

Entry for both players is 4 tickets to enter each, and paying out 1 Vintage Masters booster to the winner, the Vintage/Legacy 2-player queues effectively have a rake of around 0.5 on 4 tickets, or 12.5%.

2-player queues in Standard or Modern cost 2 tickets entry each, but pay out a booster of Journey into Nyx with a buy price averaging below 2 tickets, meaning a rake of over 50%.

Daily Events

Daily Events cost 6 tickets to enter, and pay only 4-0 and 3-1 finishers. They don't have a set number of entrants, but the pairings math works out so that, on average, only five people get paid for every 16 entries--one 4-0 and four 3-1 finishers. One 0-4 , four 1-3, and 6 2-2 finishers leave with nothing.

Vintage and Legacy events pay out Vintage Masters boosters, 6 to the 4-0 and 2 to the 3-1s, meaning an average of 14 packs Vintage Masters packs in payout per 16 players. At 6 ticket entry and a pack price of 6.96, that equates to 97.44 tickets in payout for each 98 tickets in entry fees, a tiny rake.

Standard and Modern Daily Events pay out 3 Theros, 4 Born of the Gods, 4 and Journey Into Nyx boosters to 4-0 finishers, and 2 Theros, 2 Born of the Gods, and 2 Journey Into Nyx boosters to the 3-1 finishers. This equates to 11 Theros, 12 Born of the Gods, and 12 Journey Into Nyx boosters, with an average bot buylist value of 2.66, 2.5, and 1.86 respectively, for a total of 81.58 in payout. With 96 in entry, that's a rake of 15%

Value Summary

The most reliable and profitable option for grinding is to play 8-player queues, which fire throughout the day and offer an overlay.

Vintage Masters and the influx of new cards has greatly increased the popularity of Legacy 8-player queues, and Vintage queues fire quite often. Through these events, there is a lot of value to capture for the winning player. And with an existing overlay, achieving any win percentage higher than 50% would generate significant gains.

It's clear that Vintage and Legacy events are a better value proposition than playing other constructed events online. Each day, Vintage and Legacy constructed 8-player events fire with demand. In addition, there are currently three Vintage Daily events, firing at 8:30am, 6:30am, and 9:30pm EST, and four Legacy Daily events, firing at 10:00am 2:00pm, 7:30pm, and 11:00pm EST.

There are also Vintage Premier events scheduled for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday at 8:30pm EST, and Legacy Premier events scheduled for Friday at 2:30pm EST, and Saturday and Sunday at 4:30pm.

Currently, Vintage and Legacy Premier events do not seem to reach the required 33 players to fire, but due to the high price of Vintage Masters boosters, they would offer a very significant value. At the 33 required players, 10 tickets entry per player, with a set payout of 83 total boosters , these events would offer a very significant overlay of approximately 250 tickets on the 330 in entry fees, approximately 75% overlay, making them the highest value events on the Magic Online platform.

With such ridiculous value, it’s a shame they do not fire, but I expect the trend cannot continue for long with so much value being left on the table. In fact, if these events do start firing with regularity, they would play a part in lowering the value of Vintage Masters packs system-wide.

Extracting Maximum Value from 8-player Queues

Maximizing Value in 8-player queues comes in two ways--increasing win-rate and increasing the amount of events played.

Unlike loading up poker tables or firing off Standard 8-players, Vintage and Legacy 8-player events do not fire often enough to offer an endless supply of events to join, and they often feature a significant wait time. There is often an opportunity to join multiple events at once, but given the relative complexity of the formats, playing three or more tournaments is quite difficult, and would assuredly lower the win-rate by some degree in each match. For those capable and interested in playing more than one event to increase hourly rate, I'd recommend sticking to just two events to test the waters.

It's clear that in the case of Vintage and Legacy queues, the best way to maximize value is to maximize win-rate.

Maximizing Win-Rate

Maximizing win-rate comes in two ways--playing optimally and playing the optimal deck.

Playing optimally comes from things like knowledge, experience and focus. Focus is the most variable, and to achieve the highest focus, one needs to be completely absorbed in a game. Playing more than one event necessarily decreases focus and win-rate, but not necessarily enough to make multi-tabling a worse proposition if the increase in volume makes up for the decrease in win-rate.

The other major factor in win-rate is in choosing the optimal deck for that tournament--or metagaming--which is the deck-selection process everyone is used to going through before any event. The ideal deck for an 8-player event is going to be the ideal deck when matched up against the 7 other players. Decklists from the 8-player queues are not publicly shared online, so predicting the metagame is more difficult.

8-Player Metagame

One way to get an idea of the 8-player queue metagame is by observation, or trial by fire. Play events, start keeping track of data, and create your own metagame database. This is time consuming, costly, and simply inefficient for predicting a metagame when just beginning. But over time, and given enough data entries, it's going to provide a good, realistic look at what your are playing against when it comes to an average tournament and is therefore very valuable.

When constructing this database, I would also keep a log of time and day of the week, which can be used to create a chart of the metagame at various times of day. Luckily, MTGO saves a log played games, which can be referenced later for collecting data.

Practically, one can look at the results from Daily Events and extrapolate it to the 8-player metagame. Decklist are posted by the MTGO team here: tournament decklists

Decklists are aggregated here by mtgGoldfish:

• Vintage
• Legacy

Daily Events provide a solid picture of the 8-player metagame, but, in general, 8-player events are filled with slightly faster decks more conducive to double or triple queuing, and, even moreso, they are filled with cheaper decks on average, courtesy of grinders just looking to extract the most value from Magic Online, not necessarily get engrossed in the Vintage or Legacy format.

For that reason, Dredge is more common in Vintage 8-player events than normal, due to its low cost of around 300 tickets, making it the only bargain deck in a format where decks regularly cost between 1000 and 2000 tickets.

In Legacy, Dredge is also a bargain and has a lot of crossover between Vintage and Legacy, so many choose that archetype for their first forays into Eternal formats.

I'd recommend filling a Vintage 8-player sideboard with upwards of 8 graveyard hate cards. The Artifact-based prison deck Stax (or MUD) is one of the most powerful yet simple decks in the format, and it too composes a significant portion of the metagame, so I'd be sure to pack a selection of artifact-hate in the sideboard as well.

In Legacy, take special care against Burn, which, at under 100 tickets, is the cheapest competitive deck in the format, as well as one of the easiest to multi-queue.

In short, showing extra attention to budget decks, particularly through sideboard hate, will lead to increased win-rates.

Wrapping-up

Vintage Masters has changed the previous tournament entry fee and payout structure for Magic Online Legacy Events and has introduced the Vintage format to Magic Online with an identical tournament structure to Legacy events. Due to the relatively high price of Vintage Masters boosters and the details of the payout structure, this entry fee and payout structure provides significantly greater value than comparable events in Standard, Modern, Pauper, and Block Constructed formats.

This greater value can be found across events, including Daily Events and 8-player events, the latter of which generates a value overlay and has the distinction of being the highest-value event found on Magic Online. Vintage and Legacy Premier events offer a huge value overlay, but do not fire with any regularity.

The 8-player queues are the only firing events online that generate value and are thus truly +EV. I recommend these events for anyone who enjoys grinding and is looking for a way to reliably and profitably increase their Magic Online bankroll.

I'd be eager to discuss and create more Vintage and Legacy content, so please let me know in the comments if you liked this article and what you would like to read about!

-Adam