Hilarious whiff and miss
The Kitchen Table forum
Posted on July 17, 2024, 9:03 a.m. by Icbrgr
I was playing a casual game with my brother yesterday essentially playtesting our modern decks with some new cards we got before going to our LGS next week... he is playtesting jeskai control and im playing my Hollow One brew.
here is the story.... we were in the end game (passed turn 5) and i successfully resolve Goryo's Vengeance bringing back Griselbrand.... after attacking my brother is in bolt range and all 4 copies of my Lightning Bolt are still in my library... i activated Gris twice bringing myself down to 1 life... drew 14 cards and not a single lightning bolt.... lost next turn on the crack back to Kaheera, the Orphanguard.
Im not sure if im salty or impressed.
plakjekaas says... #3
Assume no mulligans (7 cards), no fetchlands and no extra carddraw (past turn 5, 5 cards drawn); the hypergeometric calculator says that no bolts in a sample size of 26 cards is about 9,5%, that feels like it should be smaller.
Say you cast Faithful Mending twice and played 3 fetch lands, upping the sample size to 33, that increases the chance to see at least one Lightning Bolt to 96,4%. About one in 30 games still, that is expected to happen.
July 17, 2024 3:02 p.m.
Last_Laugh says... #4
Assuming you had like 48 cards left in your library, your odds of hitting a bolt were only 1 in 12 so the fact you whiffed on 14 isn't too far off statistically.
July 17, 2024 3:30 p.m.
Certainly a fun game... I cant say for certain how many fetch lands I played or how many/combinations of Goblin Lore/Burning Inquiry or Street Wraith were played (or even a good guess as to how many cards were left in the library at the time).. and I know it's not a guarantee but in the moment I felt it was lol.
July 17, 2024 3:58 p.m. Edited.
I got curious so I ran some numbers through the old hypergeometric calculator, I do this whenever I want to decide if I'm angry at my deck or not, I'm usually surprised to realize that what feels like a 'terrible hand' is actually reasonably likely to come up, this can be a clue to me to change my deck sometimes, because if I don't like drawing statistically normally. It can also be helpful to deter me from changing a deck, when some quick numbers reveal that a particularly bad hand won't come up very often.
Anyways, if you managed to get so far as to have only 40 cards left in your Library with all 4 bolts, and had life to draw 14 more cards you're whiffing over 16% of the attempts, that's not quite 1/5th of possibilities.
If you had only 30 cards in the library the odds improve obviously, but you'd still be whiffing over 6% of the time, and that's when you're drawing almost half your remaining cards.
If you started with only 20 cards in your library you'd whiff less than 1/3 of a percent of the time, if you whiffed when you were at 20 I'd say you should be salty if that's 'fun' for you.
July 25, 2024 9:31 a.m.
I am pretty certain I had more than 20 cards in the library at the time... granted it's not unreasonable to consider this because we did playtest a few times where I did lose via deck out (no he isn't playing any mill shenanigans) the looting effects just really RIP through the deck fast but Supreme Verdict is a card that just makes Hollow One and friends sad even when "winning"
Because my deck was actually working as intended in my opinion and I know for certain I had hollow one and company working down my brother's life total even through removal hence him being in bolt range.... I think the 40 cards stat is pretty fair to guess what I was working with.
I appreciate you crunching the numbers DreadKhan Very interesting, I am taking the deck to my LGS for Modern tonight and hopefully the odds will go my way!
July 25, 2024 10:34 a.m.
Glad that could help a bit, for sure the most frustrating thing I find in Magic is when you just draw terrible, but learning to accept the good with the bad is part of getting better I've found, that and eventually figuring out how to look for the pitfalls rather than just get annoyed. For me, it wasn't until I learned to take the good with the bad that I started looking at hypergeometric stuff differently, good deck building is about minimizing the number of bad hands while improving the odds of winning.
TBH I couldn't believe people even tried other Reanimation options, Griselbrand is mostly better Yawgmoth's Bargain, that's better than anything legal in Modern isn't it?
May you draw your bolts when you need em!
RiotRunner789 says... #2
Close games, even ones you lose, are always the best and most memorable.
July 17, 2024 2:15 p.m.