EO blue node - Why we split eights in blackjack

Magic: The Gathering - Puzzle Quest MtGPQ General Discussion
1

Play enough blackjack and eventually you’ll get the advice : Always split eights.

What does this have to do with the game we play, or even the new EO blue node? It introduces the concept of “losing less”.

Let’s take a look at the concept at work in blackjack first:

Losing less is often a hard concept for blackjack players to grasp. For example, you can expect to be dealt a 12 through 17 hand about 43 percent of the time you play blackjack. No matter what strategy you follow, the dealer will, on average, win more hands than the player will (with only one exception- a 17 vs. a dealer’s upcard of 6). Thus the best a player can do in a losing situation is to use a strategy that will allow him to lose less in the long haul.

This is in fact the situation with a pair of eights against a dealer 9, 10, or ace. If you hit the eights (or 16), you will lose on average about $52 for every $100 bet. That is quite a hefty loss, but not to be expected because you a big underdog when you hold a 16 against a dealer’s strong upcard of 9, 10 or ace. However when you pair split, you break up you 16, double your bet, and play two hands of 8. A computer analysis of this situation shows you will lose about $43 per $100 bet when you split 8s. This is still a losing proposition from the player’s perspective. But notice by splitting you’ve won just enough split hands to reduce your overall loss $9 per hundred dollars wagered. You’ve reduced your loss by pair splitting the 8s which is why it’s the better strategy than hitting or standing.

-Henry Tamburin

The important thing to take from this is that the binary result of a win-loss in any one game is less important than the probability of win-loss that stems from a certain action.

To relate back to the blue node in EO, I refer to the numerous complaints that winning the secondary objectives in EO is based too much on randomness. Top players are balking because they’re not able to hit the secondary objectives consistently. But that’s precisely the point of the whole exercise. By removing the ability for everyone to consistently hit full score on a node, we’ve effectively broken up massive ties. People are protesting the results will now be random, but that’s the beauty of it isn’t it? It looks random, but it’s really not.

Prince Richard: [the sons - in the dungeon - think they hear Henry approach] He’s here. He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.
Prince Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.
Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

-The lion in winter(1968)

Yes, we’re set up to fail. And in the same way we’re set up to fail with two eights against a dealer’s ace, how we fall matters. We can sit there and whine about how unfair it is, or we can analyse our options to make the best move. We split our eights, not because we guarantee victory that way but because we guarantee we will fare better than people who consistently stand or hit on sixteen in the same spot. How we we fall matters. What decks we play in that node matters. A deck that wins the objective 7% of the time will over time show it’s superiority over one that wins only 2% of the time. Rankings start making sense again.

It was pointed out to me a while back that 100% is a limit, and it’s presence skews a system to favor the lucky more because the skilled have no way of distinguishing themselves other than by luck. This has never been more true than in recent events where 20 way perfect score ties are common. In truth, the way to break ties in a game where everyone gets perfect scores isn’t to reward everyone, or even hand out rewards randomly as suggested. The game needs change to a point where people can’t get perfect scores easily. And on this, I applaud the fact that the game has taken this turn. It’s become competitive again. If all 3 nodes were this hard, there wouldn’t even need to be a solution to timezone problems because ties will be much rarer and few ties will be broken by time.

Consider poker, where pros can get beat by randomness and bust out early in tournaments all the time. But over time, we get a sense of who manages to get to the final tables more often. A clear ranking emerges. Just because a game is governed by randomness doesn’t mean that the results of the games are. The sooner we acknowledge this is a step in the right direction, the earlier we’ll be able to enjoy the new format of competitive events again. Remember, stephen curry isn’t great at 3-pointers because he sinks every shot. He’s great because he gets it in more consistently than the others.

Obligatory joke about running into a bear : You don’t have to outrun the bear. Just make sure to outrun your buddy.

2

There’s already a thread about this.

https://forums.505go.com/discussion/59292

mods plz move.

3

Wow nice analogy. I learnt something new about blackjack today.

4

If you’re interested, the other 2 examples in the family are splitting aces and tens.

Splitting aces turns a losing hand to a winning one, and splitting tens turns a winning hand into a winning hand that wins less.

5

Oh Boy,

this randomiser type of creating tiebreakers is in my opinion a lazy solution. This game is primarily skill based, not luck based.
So I don’t’agree with you that this is a step in the right direction, it’s’just a way for the devs not to give out more than they want regarding to prizes.

6

You may have glossed over the part where I explained how games of chance require skill as well to excel.

You tacitly acknowledge this concept by playing mtgpq in the first place and talking about skill despite the numerous random factors in each single game we start.

This is a randomiser the same way your starting hand is a randomiser. But we don’t go around accusing Mtg pro tour players of coasting on luck. Luck only carries you so far if you’re not prepared to take advantage of it. And those who have the skill to take advantage of it will eventually rise to the top anyway.

7

Ohboy, while I agree with you that for the most part objectives like these do feel like we need to focus on splitting 8s, you seem to be ignoring the fact that getting two 8s on these seems to be the best possible starting hand. I don’t think that people mind that sometimes they have to decide between winning the match or getting the objective. That happens with a lot of different nodes. But with some of these recent objectives, it seems to be that it should be your default position that you SHOULDN’T go after the objectives, because by doing so you are quite possibly overplaying your hand. And if that’s the case for a great many people, then I’d say that its the objective itself, and not skill or luck once you get into the game, that is the problem.

If my choice is splitting 8s, because it’s the only logical choice, then the Devs need to realize that they are setting players up to fail. Meanwhile, some players with the exact right cards, exact right starting hand, and exact right initial board setup, and who have set up their deck to take advantage of all that luck (i.e., the ones who take the risk that they are going to certainly get the five of spades that they need) are the only ones who can actually get it. That’s not good game design.

8

This is exactly how I think when I build my decks for a difficult to achieve objective. Winning in 5 turns for blue which has very little if any haste is difficult for sure. So what do you do? Just throw in the best you have and hope for random cascades and such?

No

You take probability by the horns and you make that chance to win happen. My deck was met with some skepticism by the person I showed it to and reasonably so as it looks a bit janky but it works because it does the above. It makes the chance of getting the objective more probable.

In testing in QB it worked about 30-40% of the time over many trials. In practice during the event it worked all 5 times. Once it worked so well I couldn’t even energize 5 gems which accounts for the two points I lost in the event.

So how did I leverage probability to make it happen?

The win condition was casting Deploy the Gatewatch with Desolation Twins and Piggy (Decimater of the Provinces) as the only two creatures. Anything short of this combo would likely not be enough on average. Twins drops two 10/10 creatures per cast so effectively 20 points of damage per turn per cast. Piggy by himself is 12 damage per turn per cast but when cast with two other creatures on the board he is also 20 damage per turn per cast plus haste, trample, and berserker.
When Deploy is pulling creatures for its three casts you can’t do any better on a per cast basis than this. GR is 16, Emrakul is 13, MC, Kozilek, etc. are 12 and it goes down from there.

If Twins come out first then 60 damage will be put on the board. If its all twins then it hits next turn. If Piggy comes in either or both of the next two casts then you get 60 haste damage this turn and the match is over next turn.
If Piggy comes out first then there are a number of possibilities but generally the damage for subsequent turns will be 36 or higher.

So the deck needs to Deploy by turn 3 or turn 4 at the latest.

What are the possible RNG problems with that primary goal?

  • Bad board state leading to slow mana gains
  • Bad draws with Deploy not in your openning hand or in the first 3-4 normal card draws
  • Forced discard or mana loss by opponent
    There are probably more but the first two are the ones that you really have to manage.

I needed to address getting Deploy early so there was a chance to charge it up. The only way to get that is to increase card draw. Tamiyo’s takes too long to be effective short term, Fevered Visions is good but only one card per turn. There are a few card draw creatures but that messes with Deploy damage. This leaves me with card draw spells. One of which happens to also energize which is a bonus. These are the filler in my deck. They reduce the probability of loss by not having the cards I need when I need them.

Deploy is a 23 mana spell and since I must use Dovin Baan to do this with his Blue/White color combo the most we can get from a single swap is 6 mana. That alone is 4 single matches of on color mana. This is not conducive to getting Deploy out by turn 3-4. So you have to look for combos and cascades to get more per turn. Also we need to cut down the effective mana needed to get Deploy cast. The only way to do that is mana per turn supports or Mirrorpool. The mana per turn supports are nice but only a couple give 3 a turn and even then its not until your next turn and that’s not efficient for this objective. So Mirrorpool it is. We need cheapish spells to fuel it which we have mentioned already above.

So the goal then is to draw and Mirrorpool out Deploy by turn 3-4.

This won’t always be possible so sometimes you have to think on the fly and eke out an alternative pathway.

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Prepare for chance to be in your favor so when it happens you are ready to capitalize on it rather than falling short of what is necessary.

9

This is exactly the point though.

IF you have the cards in your collection
and
IF you actively try to get those cards into your hand early
and
IF you deliberately try to counter a bad board state or capitalize on a good one

THEN you should be positioned to get the points and get a high ranking.

If you don’t have or don’t do those things then you should not be able to get full points.

You are not entitled to be able to get them. You must take them with your own hands. How else are we supposed to stratify the rankings if not by a challenge.

10

That’s basically the game we’ve been playing all along. The chances of being in that spot is just lower now, with a lot less room for error. This node just made a statement that no, those of us who thought we had mastered the game to the point of being able to handle anything thrown at us were wrong. We need to do more. Sometimes weigh the balance of probabilities of events happening 2-3 turns later.

During testing of this node with dovin last week, I realised aiming to complete objective 2(win in 5 turns, worth 1 point) sometimes meant you threw away with objective 1(energise 5, worth 2 points). This occurred when you had to choose on turns 3-4 whether to cast the creature that would give you lethal the next turn despite having no guarantees you would be able to draw/cast anything to complete the energise objective.

I thought that was brilliant because this added another layer of complexity to the game. It added the dimension of “go all in on a draw” to the game, which up to now was usually a decision one had to make only on the brink of defeat.

11

I’m still having a difficult time understanding how people can enjoy participating in the secondary objectives. The Valentine’s Day event was the funnest event I played in ages. If nodes of power had no secondary objectives, progression rewards expanding all the way to a perfect score, and matchmaking actually paired you with only decks in the event, it would hands-down be my favorite event out there.

12

Personally, hard secondaries make me rethink the way my decks can work and actually make me a better player.

For example, I’ve been practicing to do the EO blue node for a while, but nothing compared to playing the weekend pve, specifically nodes 1.1 and 3.1. Under pressure to hit those objectives forced me to figure out new tricks that I later incorporated into the blue deck for EO.

Compare this with the 60 way tie at one point in nop and Soi event. The old nop was exactly what you described as the perfect event. It bored me the moment there was nothing to aim for other than being careful not to lose games.

Until the AI improves to the point where it poses a good challenge, I have to settle for artificial goals in the form of secondaries for my entertainment.

13

If I wanted blackjack, I would find a blackjack game app and play it instead. This game is marketed as deck-building skill contest and the game design should continue to reflect that.

If the move is to go toward a more luck-based game, then I guess I am playing the wrong game.

14

I got silently moderated in the other, earlier thread about exactly the same topic. Hmf. Here’s a (hopefully) less contentious version of the pie chart I posted over there:

I left out the category for , as I know they don’t like it when you mention around here, even though there are currently 2 known despite the fact that [a whole mess of redaction]. Crashes also got left out; they’re relevant, but at least they’re constantly being worked on by the dev team, in some people’s opinions.

Anyway. We can of course quibble with just how much of the pie the various categories should take up, but IMO the figures are vaguely in the right ballpark, so it’s a good place to kick off from.

That big blue ‘card collection’ section of the pie? That’s the main reason why you’re seeing the same names at the top of the leaderboard so often. It’s because they have better cards than the majority of the other players in the bracket. The analogy between MTGPQ and poker breaks down in a lot of places under analysis, but this to me seems like the most obvious one: poker players don’t get to bring their own deck full of aces along to an event. And cards like BTB, Deploy, PA and SP are like turbo charged super duper 5 of a kind aces.

Deckbuilding is an element where a certain amount of skill comes into play, but it’s hard to determine how much because it’s so dependant on your card collection. It’s not actually hard to spot an OP card in your collection and put it in your deck; and players without OP cards often just won’t find an alternative that’s as powerful. That said, a good player can definitely gain an edge at the deck-building stage, and a bad player can fail to notice opportunities.

Luck is clearly important for placing in the top 5. There are some mean decks out there, and not facing any of them is a huge advantage, especially in the final respawn of the event, where speed is of vital importance. And then there’s ingame luck… each player’s start hand, draws and the lucky cascades they might get during gameplay. Ingame luck is something I think we all enjoy, to an extent, tho, isn’t it? This is Puzzle Quest after all, and we expect a certain amount of luck. I don’t know about you, but I find games that are 100% skill, like chess, rather boring.

And finally, the tiny little green sliver of pie is your skill in playing the game. I’ve made that one quite small, as you can see, because I think it’s by far the least important factor to placing in the top 5. It’s more relevant to winning the game you’re currently playing, of course; and there are opportunities for skillful play within the game on almost every turn, I think.. just not necessarily ones which affect the outcome of that game, especially a game in which you cast one or more super duper ace cards.

15

You seem to be missing “being able to perfectly clear all 5 games in NOP in 7 minutes or less”

Or maybe that was .

16

I think the skill portion of the pie chart is a little bit too little. I agree that card collection and deckbuilding matters the most.
But imagine giving a pre-made deck full of good OP cards to a new player who has little skills.
What kind of skills are we talking about?

3 gems matching skill, that’s seems rather easy and straightforward but if you are going for cascades, that one is going to take a bit of play experience to build up.
Also, sometimes it’s more important to delay your opponent by using up their gems than simply going for the gems that are in favor of yours.
Such judgement can be a form of measurement for skill in my opinion.
e.g. You’re Jace1 up against Koth and there’s only 1 possible 3 red match. There’s a couple of blue matches on board but none of them will trigger a cascade.
And your hand does not have the right cards to go on the offensive. Players who are not skilled may try to match the blue instead of the red to delay Koth.
Why not the blue? If your hand sucks and you use up blue, you will lose out on mana gain when a card you have been waiting for appears. And we all know that Koth with a sea of red gems can be tide turner for the game.

Card play skill. This one ties closely to deckbuilding. When deckbuilding, the builder forms an understanding on the desired outcome of the deck. Like sageofhalo has pointed out, his points of consideration when building his deck are meant for winning and clinching the secondary objectives. Those points of consideration require skill. Even if the deck has been made and you passed it to someone who doesn’t understand, the order of card play makes a difference.
e.g. You have Nissa Pilgrimage, Animist Awakening, Seasons Past, Nissa’s Relevation, Seasons Past, Geier Reach’s Bandit in your hand as Arlinn Kord vs your opponent. There is no creature on the board for both sides.
Which card would you play first? There’s no right or wrong answer. It all depends on the gem board and the situation. Different players will play differently and the outcome will differ. That’s where skill comes in.

Some people may argue that experience is not skill. But I think it is. One can experience a game and learn nothing from it. How you make use of that experience is skill in my opinion.

I think Ohboy is trying to say, it takes skill to take control and consideration of the luck factor when playing the game and that can be a challenge.
While I agree it takes skill, I personally dislike those secondary objectives even though it makes things more ‘challenging’.
Summon 2 or more werewolves in the round vs Win the Fight in 5 rounds or less, I would prefer the latter.
The reason for the above pick is, I hate it when I get constraints in my deckbuilding. I like to play my style of MTG. Why should i purposely put in a werewolf or two into my deck just to fulfill that stupid objective? That one or two werewolves is going to ruin the whole way my deck runs and I have to rethink through the whole thing.
And not allowing us to have multiple decks per planewalker makes it worse. Sorry, as a working person, I don’t have time for such things to keep changing my deck everyday for events.
Previously, I have shared some ideas of the challenges I would prefer in some thread. The ultimate objective is to win, with some starting handicap challenge. So long I can build a deck that win, isn’t that the point of paper MTG?

17

So, if you don’t have the cards in your collection–like Deploy–you shouldn’t be able to get full points?

That’s an interesting argument.

Being able to build a good deck? That’s a skill. Being able to play effectively and react to the board state? That’s a skill. Being able to prioritize specific cards on the fly, do the math, and so on? That’s skill.

Owning cards isn’t a skill. It’s luck and RNG. Unfortunately, there are some cards that are extremely powerful, and are perfectly designed for specific objectives–such as Deploy, or Hixus, or Prized Amalgam.

I even understand saying “then you’ll have trouble getting full points.” But SHOULD NOT BE ABLE TO get full points? That seems extreme.

18

Deploy was the best, but never the only way to get there. On events where I was knocked out earlier, I’ve tried other beat down decks to some degree of success. This new expansion opened up lightning runner as another path to the goal.

I think he just misspoke, but arguably the statement “if you don’t have X, you can never do Y” has always been true. My alternate account is never going to be able to do the black node for instance, because it doesn’t even own a black walker. I’m not even sure I own a werewolf for the terrors event. But that’s what tiers are for. When everyone’s congested in the top tier however, there has to be a way to separate the great from just the really good.

Magic was always designed to be about making the best of what you have. Complaining about collections is missing the entire point of the game, which is the proper allocation of limited resources.

Not everyone can be at the top of the league. It’s made of winners and losers. Haves and have nots. I think we should find the satisfaction of having done or even surpassed our best, instead of being bummed out about not winning top prizes all the time.

19

I think these piecharts are meaningless without considering a baseline.

You say collection is huge, but at the end of the day there’s free-to-play players all over the top of the scoreboard, and that’s even without being in a top-10 coalition in some cases. Play the game for a while you’ll get some cards that do some things. Sure if the baseline is the commons you start with then yeah it’s a showstopper, but the difference between a good f2p player and crazy moneyspinners is not that big.

Deckbuilding is a skill and can’t properly be separated from it. I think you grossly undervalue it, and again it’s about the baseline. If you compare competent players with competent players then sure skill is not a big differentiator, but I think you’d be surprised to see how poorly a lot of players play. Every now and then you see them here saying such and such single player mission is literally impossible etc., and they’re just the noisy tip of the iceburg. And then even competent players, I consider myself one but even so more often than not when I’ve dropped points (that’s not win in X turns) there was something I could have done better to avoid it.

Lurking behind both of those though is the one, massive thing you left out entirely: time/motivation. Time to actually play all the nodes in the first place of course, time to swap cards around for every different objective, and time to be active at the right times to race for tiebreakers sure. But more importantly, time to actually spend learning to play better, learning deck ideas, trying things out. Time to actually check the board for combos or things not to set up. Time spent playing the game and slowly gathering more cards even from just the various sources of free packs. Time spent grinding mana runes. Time spent, time to spare, time at the right time and time to study, they’re really four different things but combined they both overshadow and provide the foundation for all the other categories you have. Except luck of course, though I will say people who take the time to pay attention also avoid mistakes that others might call luck.

20

Please let me clarify. In my wall of text and being distracted with a baby monitor I didn’t state what I wanted to say clearly. The challenge of an event should be such that unless you have the collection, the skill, and yes that bit of luck you should not on average get full points for the event. It should be possible but the amount of luck necessary is higher. The part I didn’t add was the on average over multiple iterations of the event part. My apologies.