If you weren’t such an outstanding member of the community I might have been mad at your wording decision 
Joking, of course. I agree that it’s a weird top 8 but still nothing to write home about. Weird stuff happens.
Yeah, this is a situation where there’s a term-of-art mismatch with common parlance, but I think you both knew that :). It’s not an outlier, but it is an unusual situation, which is worthy enough to comment on. Sometimes, people will misuse a term of art or overspecify. It’s fine 
I think your point #3 is the strongest: that local metas will be “lumpy” in their deck distribution; if the best players at the event aren’t interested in Anarch / Jinteki, then the top-8 is more likely to be unusual!
It’s awesome that we’re collecting the top-8 data; still looking forward to seeing that spreadsheet! I’m sure someone will run the Bayesian analysis!
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Yeah, I wasn’t going to get into that on Twitter, but even if it were an outlier, you don’t just reflexively throw all outliers away when doing an analysis.
Conversely, I also think all of the grousing about how now Damon is going to think IG is fine because no one in Minnesota wants to play it is ridiculous. I’m not going to play a deck I don’t enjoy in a misguided effort to show FFG what’s wrong with the game. I think the current state of the Minnesota meta is a direct reaction to those problems anyway – players here are strongly avoiding the Corp decks that the entire Mumbad cycle is supposed to be pushing, and people are also leaving the game as those decks get pushed harder and harder with each pack.
Seems like a pretty obvious signal that people don’t like the direction the game is headed.
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I would not have said anything except that the use of the term lead to a vitriolic remark on Twitter. The gist of the discussion was: @dodgepong said this is an outlier, Damon replied that it’s still worth inspecting, then a third party (@dodgepong linked to the tweet) said that we should remove it from the analysis cause it’s an outlier. However, the basic premise of this discussion is flawed since this is not an outlier (and BTW, even if it was, statisticians don’t just “drop” outliers out of data).
As an aside, I believe that one of my roles as a scientist is to advocate and educate. I agree that people might misuse a scientific term, I am sure that I do so myself way too often. When that happens, I feel that it’s legitimate to try and explain the correct usage. I have a feeling that that board gaming community in particular has a tendency to abuse statistical terms. I am lucky to have some background in the subject so if the opportunity presents itself I try to allay the situation.
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Crunching the data some more: The Minnesota regional featured the most crims in a top 8 with 4, Utah had 3, and 4 regionals had 2 (Hasselt, San Antonio, Dusseldorf, and Cambridge).
There was also only 1 regional that featured 4 shapers in top 8, Durham. No other regionals had more than 4 shapers in top 8. That said, there were 5 regionals with 3 shapers, and 10 regionals with 2 in the top 8.
It’s pretty hard to argue that Anarch isn’t everywhere, though. There was one top 8 that was 100% anarch (Nurnberg), one with 7 anarch (Portland), and 9 top 8s with 6 anarch. The regional with the fewest anarch was the Minnesota regional, with 3 in the top 8. All other regionals had 4 or more anarchs in top 8.
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Now I’m wondering what were the Criminal numbers in 2013 and 2014 
I guess we’ll never know.
Well, in Portland there was no Crim, and 1 Shaper (with no Clot). There was also no Decoder in the top 8, and if it wasn’t for myself, there wouldn’t have a Fracter! If that doesn’t speak volumes about the state of the game, I’m not sure what could.
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Well, short of a plot of Crim/NEH (hint hint!) we won’t know for sure.
No Decoder is a symptom of the Code Gate Pit in my opinion, as much as it is Faust/D4v1d.
Trivial, but any deck needs some answers to code gates, or somebody would win every corp deck by packing enigma.
No decoder is because there’s no code gate that is not solvable by parasite/faust/d4v1d, which I’d hardly call a “Code Gate Pit”.
The only reason Dumblefork even packs a killer is Komainu and Swordsman, two cards that match up well to the p/f/d rig.
That’s his point. The game is in a place where almost every competitive runner deck doesn’t care about ice types. They only care about their AI breaker and protecting their AI breaker. It fundamentally makes the game less interactive.
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In the final analysis can you also look into the most recent data pack cards in each tournament that might have influenced somebody to bring shaper as opposed to anarch? There are meta decisions of course.
My point was that the meta is at a place where those cards are so ubiquitous that a decoder and fracter are not necessary. That would have never been the case at any other time in Netrunner history (Except maybe Atman decks after C&C but most of those ran backup breakers). The point is that the games in a weird and unique spot right now, and for the most part, people are responding negatively to it.
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I think the only good shaper card in the last cycle is PolOp. Oh wait…
Haha, yeah I edited my comment a little bit because there might have been more out of faction decisions to be made.
It’s also that Decoders are awful right now. So much cheap, high strength ice was printed in response to Yog.0 that running a Decoder is something best avoided - it barely makes sense to install them for most played code gates. (There are two exceptions: Refractor and CyCy).
That’s what I mean by the Code Gate Pit.
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Good point w.r.t lack of decoders/fracters. I’m amused that Damon’s “hero tweet” neglects to mention that the winning Ken deck is a Faust deck (that runs Breach just to blank Wraparound!).
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Crim is good against NEH FA… LA regionals top 8 was almost all NEH kill. I was the only Crim and I lost both my games because I didn’t find my 1 plascrete. I would’ve been better off as Whizzard, who has I’ve Had Worse in addition to Plascrete, and can also turntable away Breaking News to prevent the 24/7 kill.
Crim did help me get into the cut, but I actually didn’t beat any NEH on the way!
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What’s the big deal? The IDs hardly matter. As noted, a Siphon spam Faust deck won. Doesn’t matter the ID, nor color of that ID card. #banFaust #banMuseum
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I’m amused about most of the stuff Damon tweets, but that’s largely because he seems to embrace his inner uncritical troll – “get good”, etc.
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CT regionals 5/21
- @mediohxcore - Whizzard / IG
- @Crunchums - Kate / NEH
- @IirionClaus - Kate / Gagarin
-
@tf34 - Val / NEH
? Kit / ?
? Nero(?) / ?
? Noise / ?
?
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