To me it's absolutely no wonder green is overrepresented, because it's the only color that completely takes over the ramp portion of the deck. No other color dominates a big semi-mandatory part of a deck like that.
This is what I was thinking too. Most non-green ramp is colorless, so it won’t show up in this kind of analysis. As soon as you have green, that ~10 to 15% of the deck almost automatically becomes green.
Looking at the data points that Joey brings up for the top 100 commanders of balanced / inbalanced colors( at 18:47 and 46:44 ), what I think is super cool is that the biggest differential between the most and least represented colors was 13 decks and I'd posit that shows that white and red have gotten a lot of support in recent years and isn't sidelined as it used to be. I'm glad to see WotC continuing to give those colors more powerful effects.
I think White has received a massive amount of support. Red I see as having received a lot of Mono Red or 2 colour support… but I don’t see that much has changed where it is in 3+ colour decks.
I really dislike the data he presented here. It's described and shown in just about the least helpful way possible. It doesn't tell you *how* sidelined a color was, it doesn't show you how often it was *doing* the sidelining, it just shows the color makeup of the top 100 most lopsided decks which just doesn't say much. We can see that this is mostly useless because, in the top 10 and the discussion generally, green abolutely *dominates* the decks that it's in. But somehow, red, a color that doesn't dominate a *single* deck inside the top 50, is just behind it in representation? And black, the only color other than green to dominate a deck in the top 10, has the same level of representation. That doesn't make any sense. It would be much more useful to show how often each color dominates a deck in the top 100, not just how many times it shows up in those decks. You could even show total number of cards in the top 100 decks. Like "white was in 49 decks and had 300 cards across those decks meaning it averaged 6 cards per deck in the top 100 most lopsided decks. Meanwhile green was in 60 decks and had 2000 cards in the top 100, meaning it averaged 33 cards per deck." That's far more helpful in demonstrating that when green is in a deck that deck likely has a *lot* of green cards in it. The data that's presented just doesn't really demonstrate anything. I just intuitively believe that color representation and color dominance aren't strongly correlated.
OH, I GET IT, THE NEW THING THIS YEAR IS GOING OFF THE RAILS AND FORCING JOEY TO BRING THE SHOW BACK ON TRACK!!! I was wondering what the new mess with Joey bit would be after they stopped trying to steal the segway.
Played against Jim from the spike feeders. He was playing Pir/Toothy. Counter war against 2 flicker spells with a rhystic study. He won and drew 40 cards with a 39 card library
@@Atmatan bought a box yesterday to open the packs and play a bit of draft and it was super fun. But it in a cube so when i want i can play them in draft again
I think that time they were going off on electricity puns the whole show proves they could go the whole show making bad jokes. To this day, one of my favorite ones... and I don't remember the main topic!
My 5c Maze End deck (when it was cool between Golos ban and Nine-Fingers Keene) was over 50% green cards and I don’t think you could build a good one without doing so.
I remember when I built my Yusri coin flip deck when I checked my mana costs after putting it into manabox it came up 50/50 and I think that was a really neat coincidence
All the most-imbalanced decks being full of green cards makes sense. If you can play green cards, why would you play cards of other colors? They're just inferior versions of green cards.
That’s not a really any more a constructive comment than my saying, “All the best 1 CMC targeted Removal is White, so why play inferior versions of White cards?” People complain about how many decks are base-green for land-ramp, for example. Well, unlike Creatures, Enchantments, and Artifacts, there is an entirely non-mechanical protection for Lands. Lands are mechanically as easily destroyed, but trot out one too many Armageddons, and you won’t be welcome at the table. Little wonder, then, that people invest in acquiring the one advantage in-game that can’t be easily wiped, whatever the reason.
Across the thirteen decks I have that are two colors or more (because I think my two mono-red decks would skew the tally a bit, lol), green takes the lead with 334 pips, followed by white and red with 276 and 203 pips, respectively. Blue and black are woefully behind at 147 and 141 pips, respectively. At least six of those decks definitely lean heavily into those top two colors despite my want to have them more balanced.
I fully agree with Matt at the end when it comes to his mana base in relation to the color balance. I don't much care about how balanced it is when building. Although, I do like to make sure all the colors at least are represented in the deck.
Interesting analysis that I would like to see in the future is not the most balanced and imbalanced decks, but the most balanced and imbalanced archetypes. When landfall dominates the most imbalanced, it dominates the conversation and doesn’t show large trends outside of the archetype, whereas looking at the most imbalanced archetypes could be more broadly applicable to the larger edh ecosystem. Saying 80% of landfall decks are very imbalanced or the average imbalance in landfall decks is xyz opens up the conversation about green, but allows you to move quickly.
my Borborygmos Enraged deck has a total of 6 mono red cards and 2 gold cards (not including the commander). As a dedicated red player, I justify it by saying that Borborygmos turns my 46 non-MDFC lands into 0 mana lightning bolts, which is a red card, so my deck basically has 52 red cards.
I made a Tori D'Avenant, Fury Rider deck, and its based around every creature being red AND white. Currently its not quite card balanced with 2 more white cards than red, but the pips are perfectly balanced at 60 of each colour.
Might I also suggest Homura Human Descendant/Homura's Essence from the SAME set? More expensive BUT he flips into an enchantment (just sac him with ANY sac effect) that gives all your creatures +2/+2 and Flying in addition to the fire-breathing. I would also suggest Moonveil Dragon from Dark Ascension. Why pump ONE of your creatures when you can pump ALL of your creatures (It even comes with a Flying 5/5 body that ALSO gets pumped)? Dragonrage is also worth considering as a one-shot version of the effect. Until end of turn it gives all your creatures fire-breathing AND you get a red for each attacking creature you control.
I like Matt don't really care about the balance of color cards but I will count my pips and skew which dual and tri lands and then my finally basic land count. I almost always keep up 2, 5 basics of whatever colors I'm running but I'll shift that to like 7 basics of the heavy color 3 of the lighter color.
First when I saw the title I thought it would be a bit about how strong one color is over another or how color X does stuff better then color Y and how that changed. But also this episode is really interesting
I had one of these moments while playing my Garna the Bloodflame deck. As much as I love Cavalier of Flame, the deck is 85% black so I could never cast the dang thing
Making a few Tatyova decks, absolutely the blue was just a splash. No other colour puts lands into play properly so yes this is by design (this isnt a bad thing as well)
Amass always throws me off as it SOUNDS like it should be doing something very different from what it's actually doing. If one is 'amassing an army' in the traditional usage, one brings however MANY troops one has and then makes it bigger by adding MORE troops. One would therefore expect 'amass' to read as 'make x 1/1 orcs' (or goblins, or soldiers, or horses, etc). What it actually does is make a SINGLE token OR make that single token bigger if you already have one. One man does not an army make... no matter how jacked or roided up he may be.
I usually don't mind color balance at all. However, I do have an INCREDIBLEY color imbalanced Lathril, which is to be expected, but it's basically only a Lathril led deck because of color identity rules. Otherwise I probably would be better off just running Ezuri, Renegade Leader
They give ramp to other collor in form of treasures - and then the same people that complain green has all the ramp, complain that treasures were too op.. We need more "natural" answers to green ramp as well..
Feel like that's normal for three color. Usually a certain two color combo is encompassing the majority of ur game plan and one is a support color. Blue being card draw/counter magic support makes total sense
@@maxpelaez4955 It’s probably 2:1, Red and Black make up about 80% total with Blue being a few useful ETB creatures, card draw and a few counterspells. Even that is because I replaced several Red cards in an effort to better balance Blue.
@@april5767 Out of 160 mono color cards on EDHREC, 32 are Blue and about half of those are counter spells. Excluding a CEDH version of it (and it’s been well power crept out of CEDH viability) Marchesa is a predominantly Rakdos/Artifact deck.
@@Dragon_Fyre EDHREC is garbage what that says is that lots of people build bad marchesa decks, not that marchesa is best built as a predominantly rakdos/artifact deck There is a level of play in between jank and cedh so suggesting that marchesa shouldn't play blue because blue is the best cedh color and marchesa isn't cedh is laughable
Why don’t the numbers for card colors/mono-color/multi-color match the numbers for color? For example, Toxrill has 66 mono color cards, but only 25 blue and 26 black cards.
I just happend to have my archidekt open while listening to this. UW is my most colour balanced. My Etrata deck is very blue because blinking and cloning are Etrata's goals. My Glissa deck is heavy black thanks to the Nercons. Deveri Birds is UWg not a lot of green birds. Other than my mono red deck, red is always a minor colour in the decks it is in. I have white as a main colour in an enchantress deck without green
Apropos of nothing: the Universes Within versions of the Street Fighter cards are all inferior to their Universes Beyond variants. Art on all of them is fantastic, though.
CHALLENGE THE STATS submission: Spurnmage advocate, and the other advocates while we are at it, are overlooked but amazing in grouphug/politics decks. Played in 0%.
Especially Pulsemage Advocate and Nullmage Advocate. Being able to reanimate a creature or destroy an artifact/enchantment REPEATEDLY and essentially for FREE is bonkers.
Joey, why are you acting so weird in this one? The non-sequiturs were strange enough, but now you're laughing at moving to another number in the list!? Stay off those drugs, my guy. 😂
I don't mind deck building advice for new cards, but with hardly any stats to challenge yet, such cards really don't suit this segment at all in my opinion. A bit of a pity for me, cause I typically love the segment for what it is and these feel like they occupy the slot of an actual stat challenge.
There really should be a requirement of being at least a year old for this. These newer cards aren't being ignored or undervalued... most people haven't had a chance to realize they even EXIST yet.
![Kodak Black - Sharp Vibes [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/oEV0OoLJeIs/mqdefault.jpg)
To me it's absolutely no wonder green is overrepresented, because it's the only color that completely takes over the ramp portion of the deck. No other color dominates a big semi-mandatory part of a deck like that.
This is what I was thinking too. Most non-green ramp is colorless, so it won’t show up in this kind of analysis. As soon as you have green, that ~10 to 15% of the deck almost automatically becomes green.
Matt and Dana may steal challenge the stats segues, but they'll never steal Joey's segue away from dad jokes at the beginning of each episode
Just wait…
Looks like a challenge to be accepted by matt and dana
Please i want to see dana intro
Never underestimate Dana or Matt
Looking at the data points that Joey brings up for the top 100 commanders of balanced / inbalanced colors( at 18:47 and 46:44 ), what I think is super cool is that the biggest differential between the most and least represented colors was 13 decks and I'd posit that shows that white and red have gotten a lot of support in recent years and isn't sidelined as it used to be. I'm glad to see WotC continuing to give those colors more powerful effects.
I think White has received a massive amount of support. Red I see as having received a lot of Mono Red or 2 colour support… but I don’t see that much has changed where it is in 3+ colour decks.
I really dislike the data he presented here. It's described and shown in just about the least helpful way possible. It doesn't tell you *how* sidelined a color was, it doesn't show you how often it was *doing* the sidelining, it just shows the color makeup of the top 100 most lopsided decks which just doesn't say much. We can see that this is mostly useless because, in the top 10 and the discussion generally, green abolutely *dominates* the decks that it's in. But somehow, red, a color that doesn't dominate a *single* deck inside the top 50, is just behind it in representation? And black, the only color other than green to dominate a deck in the top 10, has the same level of representation. That doesn't make any sense.
It would be much more useful to show how often each color dominates a deck in the top 100, not just how many times it shows up in those decks. You could even show total number of cards in the top 100 decks. Like "white was in 49 decks and had 300 cards across those decks meaning it averaged 6 cards per deck in the top 100 most lopsided decks. Meanwhile green was in 60 decks and had 2000 cards in the top 100, meaning it averaged 33 cards per deck." That's far more helpful in demonstrating that when green is in a deck that deck likely has a *lot* of green cards in it. The data that's presented just doesn't really demonstrate anything. I just intuitively believe that color representation and color dominance aren't strongly correlated.
OH, I GET IT, THE NEW THING THIS YEAR IS GOING OFF THE RAILS AND FORCING JOEY TO BRING THE SHOW BACK ON TRACK!!!
I was wondering what the new mess with Joey bit would be after they stopped trying to steal the segway.
I don't understand why he keeps saying they're going off the rails when they're just making relevant tangents.
Played against Jim from the spike feeders. He was playing Pir/Toothy. Counter war against 2 flicker spells with a rhystic study. He won and drew 40 cards with a 39 card library
Gobsmacked is actually a card from unfinity. Very good pauper aura!
I was personally offended that they forgot about the best pacifism.
The vast, vast majority of people seemed to hate Unfinity.
Personally, it was one of my all time favorite sets.
@@Atmatan bought a box yesterday to open the packs and play a bit of draft and it was super fun. But it in a cube so when i want i can play them in draft again
I always love these recurring episodes. When can we expect another most unique commander episode?
Thanks for making the Clue movie joke WotC was afraid of.
Omg that challenge the stats for zaxara could not have come at a better time. Was brewing it while listening to the pod
I think that time they were going off on electricity puns the whole show proves they could go the whole show making bad jokes. To this day, one of my favorite ones... and I don't remember the main topic!
Speaking of nostalgia; i saw Thraximundar at The Garden in '89.
My 5c Maze End deck (when it was cool between Golos ban and Nine-Fingers Keene) was over 50% green cards and I don’t think you could build a good one without doing so.
I remember when I built my Yusri coin flip deck when I checked my mana costs after putting it into manabox it came up 50/50 and I think that was a really neat coincidence
All the most-imbalanced decks being full of green cards makes sense. If you can play green cards, why would you play cards of other colors? They're just inferior versions of green cards.
That’s not a really any more a constructive comment than my saying, “All the best 1 CMC targeted Removal is White, so why play inferior versions of White cards?”
People complain about how many decks are base-green for land-ramp, for example.
Well, unlike Creatures, Enchantments, and Artifacts, there is an entirely non-mechanical protection for Lands.
Lands are mechanically as easily destroyed, but trot out one too many Armageddons, and you won’t be welcome at the table.
Little wonder, then, that people invest in acquiring the one advantage in-game that can’t be easily wiped, whatever the reason.
Across the thirteen decks I have that are two colors or more (because I think my two mono-red decks would skew the tally a bit, lol), green takes the lead with 334 pips, followed by white and red with 276 and 203 pips, respectively. Blue and black are woefully behind at 147 and 141 pips, respectively. At least six of those decks definitely lean heavily into those top two colors despite my want to have them more balanced.
I fully agree with Matt at the end when it comes to his mana base in relation to the color balance. I don't much care about how balanced it is when building.
Although, I do like to make sure all the colors at least are represented in the deck.
Wisconsin shout out! Woo! Lolol (yes it is way too warm here)
Man and Arizona has snow
Interesting analysis that I would like to see in the future is not the most balanced and imbalanced decks, but the most balanced and imbalanced archetypes. When landfall dominates the most imbalanced, it dominates the conversation and doesn’t show large trends outside of the archetype, whereas looking at the most imbalanced archetypes could be more broadly applicable to the larger edh ecosystem.
Saying 80% of landfall decks are very imbalanced or the average imbalance in landfall decks is xyz opens up the conversation about green, but allows you to move quickly.
my only thoughts during the entire intro... y'all bunch of glorious nerds. :D intro was almost 6 minutes :P
love this topic, glad you guys revisit it from time to time!
I wonder how the metrics change if you ignore the green cards that directly replace mana rocks
my Borborygmos Enraged deck has a total of 6 mono red cards and 2 gold cards (not including the commander). As a dedicated red player, I justify it by saying that Borborygmos turns my 46 non-MDFC lands into 0 mana lightning bolts, which is a red card, so my deck basically has 52 red cards.
Hi, Marisi player here! Green is mostly for old faithful, red and white gives me haste creatures and flying creatures especially boros cards
I made a Tori D'Avenant, Fury Rider deck, and its based around every creature being red AND white. Currently its not quite card balanced with 2 more white cards than red, but the pips are perfectly balanced at 60 of each colour.
This is a great episode . My play group literally had this conversation the other day .
Matts dad joke this week was A+++! XD
If you like Ghitu War Cry, Captive Flame serves as a second copy.
Might I also suggest Homura Human Descendant/Homura's Essence from the SAME set? More expensive BUT he flips into an enchantment (just sac him with ANY sac effect) that gives all your creatures +2/+2 and Flying in addition to the fire-breathing.
I would also suggest Moonveil Dragon from Dark Ascension. Why pump ONE of your creatures when you can pump ALL of your creatures (It even comes with a Flying 5/5 body that ALSO gets pumped)?
Dragonrage is also worth considering as a one-shot version of the effect. Until end of turn it gives all your creatures fire-breathing AND you get a red for each attacking creature you control.
Id love to see a video on themes by color. Example how many colors or combinations are landfall, tokens, monarch, big mana.
Have you ever tried to shuffle butter? It gets squishy really fast.
I like Matt don't really care about the balance of color cards but I will count my pips and skew which dual and tri lands and then my finally basic land count. I almost always keep up 2, 5 basics of whatever colors I'm running but I'll shift that to like 7 basics of the heavy color 3 of the lighter color.
Could we do another analysis of color balances but without considering ramp?
First when I saw the title I thought it would be a bit about how strong one color is over another or how color X does stuff better then color Y and how that changed. But also this episode is really interesting
It has been a heatwave here in Wisconsin 😆
I had one of these moments while playing my Garna the Bloodflame deck. As much as I love Cavalier of Flame, the deck is 85% black so I could never cast the dang thing
My friend has a 5 color deck that makes 32 mana of each color which is pretty neat
Making a few Tatyova decks, absolutely the blue was just a splash. No other colour puts lands into play properly so yes this is by design (this isnt a bad thing as well)
Thank you Dana you saved me from being made fun of
Amass always throws me off as it SOUNDS like it should be doing something very different from what it's actually doing.
If one is 'amassing an army' in the traditional usage, one brings however MANY troops one has and then makes it bigger by adding MORE troops.
One would therefore expect 'amass' to read as 'make x 1/1 orcs' (or goblins, or soldiers, or horses, etc).
What it actually does is make a SINGLE token OR make that single token bigger if you already have one. One man does not an army make... no matter how jacked or roided up he may be.
How about a friendly game of “your deck is bad and you should feel bad”
I usually don't mind color balance at all. However, I do have an INCREDIBLEY color imbalanced Lathril, which is to be expected, but it's basically only a Lathril led deck because of color identity rules. Otherwise I probably would be better off just running Ezuri, Renegade Leader
Any time I get a professional wrestling reference, the video is getting a like.
Gobsmack sounds like a counter spell that deals damage
I just built Wayta Trainer Prodigy as a stuffy doll tribal deck and I’ve only got 5 white cards despite it being a naya deck lol
Nanogene Conversion works great in my Deekah, Fractal Theorist deck too!
They give ramp to other collor in form of treasures - and then the same people that complain green has all the ramp, complain that treasures were too op..
We need more "natural" answers to green ramp as well..
I have a Maarika deck and it's tons of fun! LoL you guys should give it a shot
The worst color balance I have in a deck is in my Marchesa the Black Rose deck. Blue is a clear minority amongst all the Black and Red cards.
Feel like that's normal for three color. Usually a certain two color combo is encompassing the majority of ur game plan and one is a support color. Blue being card draw/counter magic support makes total sense
@@maxpelaez4955 It’s probably 2:1, Red and Black make up about 80% total with Blue being a few useful ETB creatures, card draw and a few counterspells. Even that is because I replaced several Red cards in an effort to better balance Blue.
Your Marchesa deck is probably pretty low power then. Basically all good Marchesa lists are very minimally red and very primarily dimir
@@april5767 Out of 160 mono color cards on EDHREC, 32 are Blue and about half of those are counter spells. Excluding a CEDH version of it (and it’s been well power crept out of CEDH viability) Marchesa is a predominantly Rakdos/Artifact deck.
@@Dragon_Fyre EDHREC is garbage
what that says is that lots of people build bad marchesa decks, not that marchesa is best built as a predominantly rakdos/artifact deck
There is a level of play in between jank and cedh so suggesting that marchesa shouldn't play blue because blue is the best cedh color and marchesa isn't cedh is laughable
Why don’t the numbers for card colors/mono-color/multi-color match the numbers for color? For example, Toxrill has 66 mono color cards, but only 25 blue and 26 black cards.
I just happend to have my archidekt open while listening to this. UW is my most colour balanced. My Etrata deck is very blue because blinking and cloning are Etrata's goals. My Glissa deck is heavy black thanks to the Nercons. Deveri Birds is UWg not a lot of green birds. Other than my mono red deck, red is always a minor colour in the decks it is in.
I have white as a main colour in an enchantress deck without green
I actually run a Child of alara mono green mazes end gates theme deck. So I probably play 10ish non green spells 😂
There are two man ways to fix manna and ramp. Land ramp and artifact ramp. But you aren’t looking at colorless cards cause the focus is on colors.
*Glances at Maarika deck*
Let's see, 9 green cards, 5 red, and 25 black.
I may have built an atypical Maarika deck. >_>
Tesak is also the deck for War Cadence
This show is made by the jokes
Funny thing. Toxrill has color balance even in multicolor, because It does not play any multicolored card by those stats.
My Talion is almost just blue, because its clon tribal. I have max 10 black cards in it 🧚
Apropos of nothing: the Universes Within versions of the Street Fighter cards are all inferior to their Universes Beyond variants. Art on all of them is fantastic, though.
I always dislike it how all the big MTG database sites default to to UW names instead of the UB names
Hope we can jam games at magiccon Chicago
Third! (my earliest so far on edhrecast)
💜 💜 💜
soooo if it has green... green dominates the ratio lol
gobsmacked is an un card in unfinity
If I email you a deck list will you guys give me advice on it?
Tune in this week as the boys cover climate change, the Bible, and bullying!
Will we ever get a Dad Jokes in review episode? :)
Ultimately, Landfall is the most boring archetype and essentially just boils down to Green plus a miniscule amount of other colors.
!
CHALLENGE THE STATS submission:
Spurnmage advocate, and the other advocates while we are at it, are overlooked but amazing in grouphug/politics decks.
Played in 0%.
Especially Pulsemage Advocate and Nullmage Advocate. Being able to reanimate a creature or destroy an artifact/enchantment REPEATEDLY and essentially for FREE is bonkers.
@@zackkelley2940 i'm adding them to my Phelddagriff deck. I'm giving them targeted regrowth effects plus I am getting something out of it.
Joey, why are you acting so weird in this one? The non-sequiturs were strange enough, but now you're laughing at moving to another number in the list!? Stay off those drugs, my guy. 😂
very true
I don't mind deck building advice for new cards, but with hardly any stats to challenge yet, such cards really don't suit this segment at all in my opinion. A bit of a pity for me, cause I typically love the segment for what it is and these feel like they occupy the slot of an actual stat challenge.
There really should be a requirement of being at least a year old for this.
These newer cards aren't being ignored or undervalued... most people haven't had a chance to realize they even EXIST yet.
Video starts 5:40