Comment by jmgao
3 years ago
> With MTG, you have a huge effect from the quality of the deck. Unless you have each player play with each deck, there's no way to de-convolute the quality of the deck vs the quality of the player. And if you did have that data, Elo couldn't leverage it -- you'd need a more sophisticated model to account for that statistical effect.
How well a player chooses their deck is one of the factors that determines how good a player is. You can say the same thing about the other games: I'd probably have a better rating in chess if I didn't only play somewhat unsound gambits, and I'd definitely have a better rating in Starcraft if I didn't only do 2port wraith in TvZ.
It is very rock-paper-scissors even at top level
im not sure if its the same in magic, but when I played yugioh how well made a deck was was also just a indicator of how much money you had
I'm not so sure.
A deck is something you have. A build order, or a chess opening, is something you _know_ and therefore more or less what I'd be comfortable calling skill.
In my experience playing MTG (and other card games), when players discuss skill, they generally mean a (somewhat fuzzy) combination of both deckbuilding and "piloting" ability. It's understandable to want to draw a line between the two and say "I only want to evaluate in-game decision-making,", but, not only is that wildly impractical (it's going to be really hard to develop a model which fairly accounts for the fact that your buddy Jeff only likes playing decks which do nothing for 50 turns and then win the game on the spot iff no one else has a counterspell[0]), part of the way card game leagues work (again, in my experience) is that players spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make their decks better and adapt them to what other players are doing. If you can't capture that effort, I honestly think you might be missing the point a little bit.
[0] Let's be clear, Jeff's deck is bad and he's going to lose a lot, even if he's a time-traveling supercomputer with the diplomatic finesse of Otto von Bismarck.
> when players discuss skill, they generally mean a (somewhat fuzzy) combination of both deckbuilding and "piloting" ability.
I think the "piloting" ability is mostly (but not entirely) independent of the deck. You can see this most plainly in draft, where everyone is basically playing with a new deck. There are "soft" skills that are contextual and format-dependent, like knowing the cards that you need to play around (white just foretold turn 2, is that a Doomskar? Maybe I shouldn't play a creature this turn, etc). There are "hard" skills that are almost always valid (generally wait until after combat to spend mana, cast instants during your opponent's end step, etc).
But certainly deckbuilding talent is not necessary, because anybody can grab a decklist and head to TCGPlayer.
On that note I'd guess that draft (or sealed) tournaments are the best scenario to measure pure skill using Elo alone, since going into a tournament, everyone has equal chance to open good cards.
Beyond a certain level, everyone has access to all the cards they want. That might cause a poor fit on the bottom levels, but intermediate to advanced levels, its not about ownership
>everyone has access to all the cards they want
Top tier commander decks can easily cost over $10,000 I suspect the vast majority of players do not have access to them.
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