Vintage 101: The Future of Vintage Data
Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of Vintage 101! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we're going to be discussing some changes upcoming to the MTGO decklists. This is a huge change to how we are getting this data, and definitely warrants discussion.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Return of MTGO Decklists?
You may have noticed that MTGO decklists have been gone for several weeks now, due to some maintenance occurring on the end of Daybreak Games. Well, the MTGO Decklists page is returning on July 8th, but with a lot of... changes. You can find this full announcement here, but I'll paste the image below as well.
At the end of 2023, Daybreak Games implemented some changes to how the Decklist pages pulled its data, utilizing an API that allowed for us to not only get every 5-0 that came through in a League, but also all of the Challenge decklists and Prelim decklists in an event. To say that this greatly revolutionized how data was being gathered by folks like Justin Gennari is a huge understatement.
Prior to this change, the way that we were gathering Challenge event data was through a mixture of self reporting and players in the events watching replays of matches to determine what an opponent was on. This led to having to figure out a player's deck on pure speculation and also leads to a lot of errors in reporting. The changes made to allow us to utilize full decklist data was a true godsend because it allowed for more granular functionality of data.
It seems though that this coupled with a few other issues (if you've been around the interwebs, you may have seen some rumblings of full league data, etc) led to this change being reverted back to us only getting Top 32 decks of scheduled events, but even more so we are going away from getting all 5-0s to getting a curated selection of 5-0s instead.
To me, this is truly an incredibly disappointing change, one that I can't even fault Daybreak Games for. Reading between the lines it isn't hard to see that this was a change driven by Wizards of the Coast, and at a time where public sentiment of Wizards and their management of various Magic format is already under intense scrutiny and heavily criticized. While Daybreak manages MTGO, it does seem that Wizards is still putting their fear of more open data into play.
I don't think this change, especially the curated 5-0s, helps formats. If anything, it hides issues within a format and makes things very difficult for those who are in the realm of collecting data. This means we have to go back to trying to get decklists via replays and self reporting again, a task that is incredibly tedious and monumental overall for everyone involved and that was already a lot when there were only two Challenges a weekend. We now have four Challenges a week! This is likely impossible, and I've already seen some feedback on the end of Justin Gennari and the Vintage Streamer's Discord that going back to this method with more Challenges will be too much for them.
At the very least we will get the past few missing weeks of Top 32s, but that feels pretty small in comparison to what we're losing. I truly hope that Wizards takes this feedback to heart, and if you have feedback about this to provide, provide it to them (and not Daybreak, because believe me, they know) and let them know what the player bases want, because I personally feel more open data allows players to stand on more equal footings in the long run, by giving players access to equal information that is accessible and open. I really would like to see Wizards find a compromise here. I don't mind for example, not having Prelim data (as concerns about tech/scouting in those events is a very valid concern and Prelims tend to be much smaller events so they don't move the needle as much data-wise), but having all the Challenge data and all League 5-0s would be perfect.
I certainly feel for our friends in the Vintage area in this regards, as Gennari and his Discord have been a constant source of open minded data driven discussion on the Vintage format, and I think this change certainly hinders that.
Around the Web
- Justin Gennari has a bunch of videos for us. Check them out below.
- Brian Coval has a video up on his win at NYSE. Check it out here.
- The full NYSE coverage is now on YouTube as well. Check it out here.
- FiretruckModo has some videos up for us too.
- Shir Kahn has a video up on Golos Shops. Check it out here.
Wrapping Up
That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for your continued support of the column and join me next week as we continue our journey into Vintage!
As always you can reach me at my Link Tree! In addition you can always reach me on the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the Vintage Streamers Discord.
Until next time!
