Thank you for sharing your paperstrip method. It seems ingenious, and I will definitely be giving it a try.

Winning on turn four is allowed. Turn three is not.

My argument is that Twin is the only card on the entire banlist banned solely for “diversity” reasons. Why is this? There are other cards that homogenize archetypes. Since Twin is the only card banned by this justification, it would seem that Wizards INVENTED this justification in order to conceal their true motives for banning Twin.

None of those cards listed win the game on turn four and avoid sorcery speed removal in the process. The twin package is fairly small, and slotted into various decklists. The diversity argument you’ve made is illustrating the reason for banning: it didn’t matter what other colors you were in, twin was worth inclusion because it was too powerful.

It’s not “really” a computer-simulation, It’s more like a statistical tool.

All the data is “human-generated” as the users have to play magic to generate any data.

Against the first decks the entire deck consists of blank cards and you simply decide what you draw. The more decks the “Tool” gets to play against the more reality chips away the less adaptive cards, and at the end of the project you have a deck built totally from scratch. The you restart it all and focus on a mix of new Cards and the best of the old Cards.

I often take some of these “evolutionmade” decks to tournaments when I have the time, and I get better and better ranking with it. So far I haven’t broken through to the top, but I keep on restructuring the whole process endlessly trying to generate something that can adapt to the meta faster than ordinary players.

I usually start from scratch which is why it would be interresting to use my tool on something which is already considered a powerfull deck 😀

Not arguing that you should test Twin. However, to be fair, the “diversity” argument WotC put forth seems rather hollow and has only ever been used to justify one other card (Mental Misstep) which clearly homogenizes decks far more than Twin. What blue grindy deck isn’t going to play Snapcaster? What red, white, and black decks in need of removal won’t play Bolt, Path, or Push? What green deck that needs a beatstick won’t play Tarmogoyf? The level or representation across different archetypes Twin had wasn’t so different from these, and nobody thinks these cards are so prevalent they should be banned.

So in the end we’re forced to accept that Wizards didn’t ban Twin for diversity reasons, because that would be disingenuous with other cards left alone in the format. Twin was banned, as many have suspected, primarily to spice up the upcoming Pro Tour. The question is whether they’ll ever own up to it and release it or if they’ll continue to hide behind the “diversity” argument given in the ban announcement.

It’s an impressive piece of work and a good simulation. It’s just not what I’m looking for. Sims model reality but are not themselves reality. I’m looking for human generated data as that is more in line with what would “actually” happen, with all the oddities and imperfections that entails. To get that data human beings have to play Magic.

It would be interesting to see how closely the sim matches the test data once it’s in.

I mean I don’t know for sure, but 1R for 2 damage is an abysmal rate. We just had JTMS come off – a card with a lot of comparables in that it can theoretically generate mind boggling CA and literally win the game itself given enough time to do so. The issue is “time” is in short supply in this format.

I am not convinced running a playset of punishing fire in every deck is any more likely than running a playset of JTMS in every deck. If the card isn’t in every deck, then no, it wont push out every 2 toughness creature anymore than fatal push pushes out every 2 cmc creature. Not every deck plays those cards because not every deck is vulnerable to those cards.

Graveyard hate is also a thing that looks increasingly important in this format as more and more decks look there for value . Perhaps we just go to more maindeck nihil spellbombs if punishing fire.

Test it and I bet you’ll have the SFM experience – card is bad or irrelevant vs many decks, and very good vs other decks. On the whole its a card you can play to improve those matchups – but not a card you just autosleeve 4 up everytime.

Blue Moon is already a deck. It now needs to look for Through the breach, madcap experiment or splash white for Nahiri etc.

Blue moon with Twin would be really scary and if anything it would be stronger now than it used to be, as the format doesn’t count on having to always answer a T3-4 play on the spot or die. Yes Fatal Push is a card. But you can EOT tap the land and then they have to use the removal even if you didn’t have the combo.

I loved my Temur TarmoTwin deck, but I doubt it would be a good choice to bring it back. Not yet at least.

As impressively impassioned as your arguments are, they’re beside the point. Twin wasn’t banned because is was unanswerable or inherently overpowered. The problem was diversity. There was nothing you could do in URx that was better than just winning on turn four. The core card pool for URx isn’t dramatically different from when Twin was legal, so I can’t see a compelling reason Twin wouldn’t just replace all existing URx decks again. After all, why not just add in the combo to an existing Jeskai or UR deck. Spell Queller and Search for Azcanta are at least with good in Twin as they are now in controlish decks. Why wouldn’t you just run Twin in every blue deck? Until that question can be answered, there’s no reason to test Twin.

Even if that wasn’t the case, there’s less to learn by testing Twin than the other options I presented. We’ve seen Twin in action before, we know what it would do. For that reason I’m not testing Twin this time, regardless of arguments to the contrary.

I’ve recently restructured the whole thing. It still takes a month to test against the top 25 decks in modern but now the number of Cards I can test simultaniously can be extremely large.

It took the old version 5 generations to produce something close to being competitive while the new version seems to generate something equally good in just 1 generation.

I’m pretty sure the method will now cover your needs to generate testdecks while at the same time test any number of keycards. Using the process with others will speed it up a lot.

If you want to you can “outsource” a build to me and I’d generate it within a month 😀

https://www.mtgvault.com/wickeddarkman/decks/deckbuild-with-paperstrips-v3/

That said, I also vote Splinter Twin, and my main argument is #1.

Great article,

George.

I think the worry with artifact lands is not that they might enable an unbeatable deck, but that they might turn every artifact-based deck into Dredge. Meaning matches where the only thing that matters at all is whether the opponent draws their hate card in time and double Stone Rains the artifact deck with Ancient Grudge, or resolves an effective one-sided Stasis in the form of Stony Silence.

Makes sense. I just thought it would be cool to see how good it would be in the current meta.