2 Champs and a Chump- Episode 75

I have to disagree on the house rankings. Spain just had its regional with 74 players. I would also say that the Spanish meta is one of the strongest in Europe (and the World, for that matter) so I do take the stats gained from the regional into account. Now the data we gained from that regionals was.

Top 16 of 74 players, average qualification rate should be 21.6% of a deck making it through to the Top 16 rounds.

Rates by House:

Stark: 5 of 16, 31.25%
Targaryen: 5 of 19, 26.3%
Baratheon: 3 of 12, 25%
GJ: 2 of 9, 22.2%
Martell: 1 of 8, 12.5%
Lannister: 0 of 10, 0%

Approximate House Ranking:
1. Stark, 2. Targ, Bara, Gj, 3. Martell, 4. Lannister

Rates for Common Agenda:
The Maester's Path: 47.4% (9 of 19)
Knights of the Realm: 33.3%
Siege of Winterfell: 20%
Knights of the Hollow Hill: 14.3%
Wildlings (3 Agendas): 11.1%
Kings of Summer: 11.1%

Approximate Agenda Ranking:
1. TMP, 2. Knights, 3. Siege, 4. Wildling, KotHH, Summer

Top 8 was

1. Martell/Maester's Path
2. Stark/Siege
3. Targ/Kings of Summer
4. Targ/Maester's Path
5. Stark/Maester's Path
6. Stark/ 3x Wildling
7. Stark/Maester's Path
8. Baratheon/knights of the realm


As we can see the event was won by House Martell, but in rankings it was also the only Martell in top 16. House Stark on the other hand clearly has found a new friend in the Maester's Path and as seen by the results is still capable of running Siege as it's agenda. So I think you are greatly underestimating how strong Stark truly can be and how many different Stark decks there are ~or is it one of those rankings like in moonboy where you guys ranked Stark low and won the event with it?

Lannister is pretty weak, 10 decks, not a single one got to top 16. Considering how well Lannister has done in Spain in the past this is really surprising.

I have an issue with your expected 21.6% chance to make top 16 for each house. That's assuming there is an equal number of each house in the field of 74. You should instead compare your percentage of house in top 16 to the percentage of that house in the entire field of 74.

ex: Stark is in 31.25% of top 16. But what is it's representation in the total field? If it's 24 or more in total, then Stark is actually under represented. Since you would expect more than 31.25% to make it if there were 24+ Stark decks.

My bad. Your numbers are comparing overall, since stark was out of 16 I assumed they all were and you were calculating just from the top 16. I'm an idiot...

It kinda seems skewed by Lannister sucking. All other houses actually appear in the top 16 at a greater percentage than expected out of 74 decks.

I think looking at just one regional does not give a large enough sample size to really do any decent analytic work with it... Perhaps if you combine this data with several other large regionals.

Well actually, Martell doesn't (only managing 12.5% with Lannister bombing that bad... quite interesting).

Yeah, it's not like these are actually statistically valid, especially for some of the more minor agendas. Combining with other results might be useful, but then we'd get effects from the cardpool not being constant between different tourneys. The point here was to have as current an estimate as possible.

The fact that the spanish meta is extremely competitive (weekly tourneys in some parts of the country!) and has a large enough player base for all Houses to be sufficiently well represented helps a bit in giving these results credibility, at least.

Anyway, I guess the main point here was that the results are in complete contradiction to what the 2C1C guys estimated. The really interesting thing here would be to find out, WHY.

One big reason is that American and European metas are very different. One generalization of the difference is Europeans love Stark and Americans love Martell.

I do find their placing Bara at #2 interesting, but it does seem midwest metas (including Missouri where 2C1C podcasts from) tend to like Bara more than the east or west coast.

Well, the funny thing about that comment is, by and large, Kennon and Zeiler (Zeiler especially) have panned Baratheon in the past on 2C1C. So, them placing Bara 2nd is a significant departure in my mind.

I'm largely with Hoyalawya on this one. It seems the stronger players in europe tend to play stark, while stronger players here tend towards control. If those same players decided to try the opposite houses, I bet results would be different.

That said, why the best players on each continent have a different view of the cardpool is very interesting. We need to have a World Cup circuit where metas travel around to compete. That'd be awesome.

The ranking of bara so highly might be in response to the red queen's faithful... Not necessarily from what they've seen, but what they expect to see.

@Ire, great to have more stats, but I'm curious, should a house's representation be weighted at all due to winning the event, or are you wanting to look purely at how many people played that house? I think differing arguments can be made on whether performance or representation better gauges power level.

@WWDrakey- Likely, the difference is due to this episode being entirely subjective on our part. With the hard stats of Regional events that we collected already done for, we wanted to examine our feelings and thoughts on what's coming up based on our own testing, examinations, and the latest releases. Overall though, that makes this episode largely opinion based.

@Hoyalowya & Doulos2k- D2k has the right of it here. Historically, Zeiler and I are generally down on Baratheon as a whole, even though we've each experimented with some combo decks in that house (though his experienced considerably better payoff). Based on what we're seeing in the cardpool now though, and our latest rounds of testing over the last several weeks, we're grudgingly having to admit that Baratheon is currently extremely better than we usually consider it.

@OkTarg- A World Cup circuit would be amazing! Though it sounds like the NA Championship and the World Championship will be the most international ever this year, so we may learn something.

@Asktmte- That card right there has a huge hand in what we're seeing.

@Kennon: The reason we chose to look at the qualification rate, is since it's one of the few methods of obtaining some believable statistical information on how the Houses perform, on average. Which is what I think should be what something being "strong" in a current meta should be all about.

Oh, and since I'm not exactly sure of what the correct vocabulary here would be, the qualifcation rates Ire posted refer to how large a percentage of the decks from a certain House were able to make it to the Top 16. Not representation rates, but more about those later on.

Personally I think that looking too hard at an event's winner is not really important, not at least from a statistical viewpoint. It would be valid, if we had the results from 20+ tournaments to compare, but if looking at just one tournament, it's not really that important. The reason here is that one single 'toss' doesn't tell you anything about the probability of your result. It's like tossing a dice, getting a 6 and then deciding that the dice tends to give out more 6's than anything else.

That's the reason why we had a look at the Top 16, since it gives us a decently sized group of 'succesful' decks, that we could compare to the overall field.

About representation rates: Now, the number of players that played a certain House is interesting also, since it gives an idea on what the players estimated to be strong. And if you look at the results here, it shows that they had a pretty good idea, since the qualification rates are quite close in order to the House popularity.

Any chance of obtaining the data you collected from the US Regionals btw? Would be interested in also having a look at that at some point.

I am only halfway through the cast so far, but I think it a bit odd that even on the back of a win for Heir to th Iron Throne at the Days of Ice and Fire, Targ aggro isn't looked upon as competitive. I think it's very strong.

But then I almost exclusively play Targ, so what do I know.

Brett mentioned bouncing the The Viper's Bannermen in a Martell Wildling deck. Care to elaborate this?

Oh sure. He was likely talking about using Desperate Tactics (BoRF) to bounce The Wildling Horde (TWH) back to hand and put The Viper's Bannermen (PotS) into play.

Ah ok, I can see that working.

So you are spending (potentially) 4 gold and an event to get to use 2 armies in different challenges, gaining 2 cards in the process with the end result of having neither on the board.

Then you still have to pay to get either of them back into play (unless you use the new City plot).

Actually, better card advantage could come from going the opposite direction. Use MtCW to put tVB into play. Gain 2 cards. Use them in challenges, then play DT to swap them for tWH, gaining 2 more cards.