Potential Feature: Synergy Index?
TappedOut forum
Posted on Feb. 22, 2012, 3:28 p.m. by yeaGO
Hey all,
Do you think its possible to calculate synergy between a collection of cards, and if so, how? =)
MasterFlinter says... #3
Short answer: no
Long answer: hell no
More detailed answer: The best you could do is get a group of people together to come up with what they consider to be synergy. Obviously you could never look at every interaction between every group of 2+ cards possible to put if they are synergistic or not but it is possible you could create formulas based on keywords on the cards that in most cases lead to synergistic reactions. For example you could have a program that searches gatherer for cards with rules text 'destroy' and 'creature' and also for cards with rules text 'when', 'creature', and 'dies'. In most situations this would be a synergistic relationship, though not always.
Obviously this approach would miss synergies involving unique card effects. It would also be extremely demanding to create formulas that catch synergies between more than just two cards. You would probably be one of the leading computer scientists in the world if you could figure this out.
Even still, you would only be creating an index of what your think-tank considers to be synergistic.
February 22, 2012 4 p.m.
Quick, name some cards you consider synergistic!
I got one, Painter's Servant. This card influences every other card in your deck. Is it synergistic to every other card?
Okay, another one: Amoeboid Changeling. Is this card synergistic? It seems 'selfishly synergistic', it doesn't change other cards but it does react to a lot of cards which change other cards.
Phyrexian Dreadnought - sacrifices a bunch of cards upon play. Is that synergistic? Or only with cards that have a synergy with sacrificing?
Let's keep thinking.
February 22, 2012 4:39 p.m.
Maybe instead of 'synergy', think of it as 'combos with'?
Synergy would be used to describe a bunch of cards comprising an artifact affinity deck.
'Combos' would be significantly smaller in scope, usually 2-4 cards.
February 22, 2012 6:24 p.m.
MasterFlinter says... #6
There are close to 12,000 cards in mtg. Trying to go through and name every card that each card has synergy with is insane. Then you've got the synergies that are only present between 3 cards, 4 cards, etc.
February 22, 2012 6:27 p.m.
@deleteme - I have that behind the scenes but I never made an interface for it because I couldn't ever figure out a good way to crowd-source that cleanly. Vs whether to try and auto-populate combos vs combos with maybe one interchange-able card.
@master WTF are you talking about that's only a max of like 144 million. Totally do-able =)
February 22, 2012 6:38 p.m.
What about rather than a synergy calculator it calculates the correlation of card appearances in decks with other cards that appear in that deck and cross references that with the correlations to every other deck on the site
Or you could think about having a double random card generator and have users grade the synergy on a Likert type scale. Then when you look up. Card you could also display the top 5 cards that are listed to have synergy and what the correlate value between them is
Or have one random card and people can enter a card that goes well with it and enter a correlate value as to the effectiveness of the synergy
February 22, 2012 7:16 p.m.
@squire I think I'm gonna do as you say, populate a bunch of combo objects based on correlation. We could use those to a) discover combos b) less intensive similarity detection between decks.
February 22, 2012 8:01 p.m.
You could also try putting a "synergistic with" or "combos with" list on the individual card pages. So on the Splinter Twin card page there would be a list with Pestermite, Deceiver Exarch, etc.
February 22, 2012 9:10 p.m.
The problem is that Path to Exile is a hooker that pairs nearly with everything! How do I get past that into the good stuff?
February 22, 2012 9:35 p.m.
MasterFlinter says... #12
The problem with squire1 's idea is exactly what you just touched on yeaGO! - sometimes decks are full of cards that are just good without having synergy.
If you were to run an analysis on which cards appeared in decks together frequently during the zendikar-scars standard season you would find stuff like Spreading Seas being highly correlated with Stoneforge Mystic despite there being absolutely zero interaction between the cards.
Another issue is that by showing people what cards are appearing in decks together you are not really showing them anything at all. They made the decks that the cards appeared in together in the first place, after all. There is no predictive power unless you can create a system based on the attributes of the cards and not the cards themselves.
February 22, 2012 10:19 p.m.
I'm thinking a system kinda like how FB suggest friends for you.
First, I'm gonna build a correlation index from scratch for cards of all decks ever. Then T/O can easily suggest cards for you based on this index and make sure to only offer you options that match your current color/format. You'll then be free to dismiss them or accept them and throw them into your Maybeboard.
I'm sure there could be other uses too.
February 23, 2012 12:51 a.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #14
That sounds like a good method, and presenting it as a "suggested inclusions" feature instead of a "synergy index" will avoid the fact that it's prohibitively difficult to measure synergy. Taking MasterFlinter's example, if a person was building a WU deck with Stoneforge Mystic during that time period and didn't have Spreading Seas, the feature would suggest it as a useful card for the deck archetype that the builder might have missed.
February 23, 2012 9:27 a.m.
Yeah, the first few suggestions will be staple cards but I'm hoping that the story gets more interesting after that.
Also, maybe it would be neat to pick 2 or 3 cards and then build a deck around them using this method?
Epochalyptik says... #2
That's kind of difficult to answer. What kind/extent of synergy are we talking? How do you determine the relation of one card to others?
February 22, 2012 3:42 p.m.