well fucking hell we just missed our annual holiday
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Not in England!
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The thing is that if we ignore minimum decksize, we see that this is obviously false. If you repeatedly remove the most useless card from your deck, you end up with a deck with no cards, and the winrate for that is pretty close to zero. So, there obviously is a point where removing cards starts decreasing your winrate. Is that point below, at, or above 45? How useless is your most useless card? Is it truly useless enough that it should be cut? The point might have been below 45 in the core set days when there just weren’t enough good cards, but I think we’re getting to a point in the cardpool where the optimal deck size (for runners) is getting close to or even above 45.
Where would you stop if you could ignore the minimum deck size?
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To be honest if you could ignore minimum decksize you could probably make a very good 5-10 card deck (that looks nothing like this one). If that was the case, I’d imagine 9 card Andy decks would be extremely common.
I’m not sure where I’d stop with this deck if you could ignore minimum decksize, but it wouldn’t be at 45, and I’m pretty sure you know that. If nothing else, if we could ignore minimum decksize you probably wouldn’t be playing this deck at all.
I think you’re seriously overestimating the value of a small deck and underestimating the value of having a variety of tricks at your disposal.
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Jeez, kids. I’m trying to take a family vacation here. How am I supposed to look away at such a time?
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Also, perhaps that 47 is prophetic? Should we go to 47 in Kate?
You know, I was doing it wrong. Prob. would’ve won Worlds if I just played 46 cards.
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We have just over an hour to settle up with 49, otherwise we’re going to 410 cards when the clock ticks over. Anyone want to count how many different tricks you can pack into 410? What’s the EV return of throwing in Sure Gamble #4 in 410 cards? How accurate will deck checks be?
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Yeah, the siphon recursion/DLR version of Noise was pretty strong through 2014 SCs/Regionals. Better than the Reina version of what Wooley christened AoA. Corp Econ got a lot stronger across 2014, which is why AoA stopped working as well.
I only run 46 card runner decks now, for the sole reason that I have been a secret padawan of @spags
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A 47 “cult” kind of already exists for some reason…
47 > 45
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I think the 46 thing has a connection to a dominion way-of-thinking that I think is useful - basically, in some sets of cards, the most important thing is to maximize your average money per turn, but in most games the absolute question of “How much total money is in your deck” and “do you have any X in your deck” ends up making a big difference. In the same way, in a deck simply consisting of good cards, but no breakers, even a single Pipeline makes the deck better, despite being by far the worst card in the deck. This could extend to larger decks too. If you’re consistently drawing through your deck or have extremely good tutors, getting rid of the worst card in your deck can actually be bad, if it’s very powerful in some particular situation.
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I’m really suspicious of the real reasons why people use 46 cards, though. It would seem strange for the optimum deck size to lie right exactly at 46. What 45 has going for it is that if the optimum deck size is anything 45 or less, you should run 45 cards, while you only should run 46 if the optimum is 46 exactly, and this is a priori extremely unlikely.
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I think 45 is always optimal.
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Looking at this from a statistical POV, 45 cards is always better than 46. Mathematically speaking, differences in EV of a few % is a lot indeed. However, this all means looking at averages over a hypothetical infinite amount of games, which in real life is actually never the case.
At the level of individual games, if you for example don’t find a specific card in your deck that you included 3 copies of, how can you be sure that it’s due to having 46 cards and not bad variance in general. Would you have found that card if you were running 45 instead? Even if you play a whole lot of games, you will never reach the theoretical infinite amount needed to approach the statistical result. Thus the statistical numbers cannot give you the whole story on the level of individual games IMO. I think the effect of differences between e.g. 24% and 25% EVs in your games is mostly psychological.
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You all are assuming that 45 cards can do everything that 46 can… And that just isn’t always true. That’s the core of @Calimsha’s versatility argument, and my experiences seem to indicate the same thing.
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A lot of deckspace in the Calim build are devoted to Lady/CyCy/Scavenge stuff. You can run Gordian/Zu and Snowball, get down to 45, and still have room for the 3rd SMC, 3rd QT, 3rd SoT etc to end up with a significantly more consistent deck. A 45 card deck can do all the same things, all you’re changing out is how efficiently you can break what types of ice at what points in the game.
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For me personally, how efficiently you can break what types of ice at what points in the game (i.e. “the icebreaker function”, in mathematical terms) is one of the very things that define a runner deck. Changing that and calling it “doing all the same things” seems all kinds of fishy, to me.
I should probably say one thing here, though - I’m not approaching this topic from the perspective of Blitz Kate (which is a much better name, btw, and one that isn’t disrespectful to the contribution of the other 20 people working on the deck before Calim, but I digress). The main deck I’m having serious issues bringing down from 46 is a Professor deck:
It seems to be a particularly good case for study in the context of this argument, because it:
- includes a lot of 1-ofs, from which it derives its power
- the rest of the slots are equal parts economy and infrastructure
And this is where it gets tricky:
- You can’t cut econ (I already did that to the stretching point just to get to 46).
- If you cut any of the 1-ofs (what I call “the payload”), you obviously worsen the deck (like, you don’t need Sneakdoor every game, but there are games you just win with, and just lose without)
- If you cut any infrastructure, you once again worsen the payload’s performance, and by extension, the deck
- For a bonus complication, a very significant part of the infrastructure (and various parts of the payload, depending on the matchup) actually pulls double duty as econ, so cutting it ends up undermining the econ balance as well
I’ve played a ton of versions of the deck, and so far I really didn’t find a 45-card version that wasn’t missing the card I cut to get there.
P.s. Any smartass coming in with a comment about how the Prof has no place in a competitive discussion or some other arrogant and uninformed bullshit should probably go read up on the scientific method instead.
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Thing is, you won’t break as efficiently as you would with CyCy / Lady and you probably can’t pull of the same kind of surprise run out of nowhere. Which means your econ won’t be as solid and some matchup will probably be worse.
It’s not like I (and others) haven’t tried to play with Gordian/Zu or with Snowball, in fact, we all did at Worlds and the deck was considerably worse than the actual version with CyCy / Lady.
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haha, I was that guy in Louisville. It’s a shame I had to play it 3 fucking times in elimination though, because after swiss nearly no one good loses to account siphon spam, and my corp deck was undefeated. This is why I don’t roll dice for psi games (we used die rolls to determine who played what).
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Yeah, you end up with a deck that consistently has to pay significantly more to get through ice. That is not a change that increases winrate.
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Not as good is disingenuous. You can often sneak agendas through against CyCy builds just by spreading code gates around on remotes, and similar results can be had by taxing lady counters. With more standard breakers, you don’t open up Windows where you need a scavenge or some way to overwrite a program. I’m sure it doesn’t come up too often when the pilot is good, but I usually have very little trouble against CyCy/Lady when playing the Corp.
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