Download the statistical data spreadsheet here!

This article is intended to be a guide to help understand the PT Houston statistics spreadsheet,"PT Houston Statistics" that is available for downloading. This spreadsheet contains information on the prevalence and performance of the different Extended deck archetypes at Pro Tour: Houston. This article is not intended to provide conclusions that can be made from those statistics - but I have written such an article,"Conclusions from the PT Houston Statistical Data," on http://www.cardshark.com. I encourage you to check that article out after you have read this. This article should enable you to look at the spreadsheet and read the data yourself, use the data for multiple purposes, and even modify some of the parameters if you so desire.

If enough people find this useful, I hope to continue to do this sort of analysis for other Constructed events in the future. Please feel free to email me at adam_mba@yahoo.com to let me know what you think and if you have any questions or suggestions (e.g. what do you think of downloading an Excel spreadsheet vs. having the information more integrated into the site as HTML or a database?). Also, note that this analysis is essentially the same type of analysis that I did for the OBC season... So if you are familiar with that then this data and article should already be familiar to you.

The best way to understand how to read the spreadsheet is to understand how I prepared the data. For the remainder of this article, I suggest reading it and referring to the spreadsheet provided at the same time. Individual worksheets within the spreadsheet will be denoted by italics. Also note that for ease of reading, I have hidden some columns - if you are curious to see these, just highlight around them and choose to unhide them in Excel.

Setting Up The Players And Categorizing Their Decks:
I copied various information from the Sideboard's coverage of PT Houston into Excel. The Player Records and Decks sheet (second from last in the ordering of worksheets) contains the names of all players who participated in PT Houston. Then, I looked at the deck lists given for each of the players and categorized them by deck type. I used deck types similar to that which the Sideboard used - but I modified them a little to provide what I felt was the most accurate categorization of the metagame. In addition, some of the deck types are further broken down into deck subtypes where most applicable (e.g. the different color combinations used for Reanimator decks). The deck types I used, in rough order of their prevalence at PT Houston, were:

1. Reanimator:
   All non-Hermit Druid based variants of the decks that used Exhume and Reanimate to get huge, powerful creatures into play.
2. The Rock:
   G/B decks based around control, mana acceleration, utility, and large creatures.
3. Aluren:
   Combo decks using Cavern Harpy with Aluren.
4. Psychatog:
   The U/B deck from Standard, transformed into Extended.
5. Sligh:
   The traditional Red Extended standby.
6. Suicide Black:
   Mono-B beatdown.
7. Hermit Druid:
   Decks that used Hermit Druid to mill their entire library into their graveyard in order to bring out an enormous Sutured Ghoul or Terravore to kill their opponent in one shot.
8. White Weenie:
   Decks based around cheap, efficient White creatures, often using some part of a Rebel engine, and often splashing U and/or B.
9. Ghoul Burst:
   Decks using the Academy Rector/Pattern of Rebirth/Phyrexian Ghoul combination along with the Pandemonium/Saproling Burst kill mechanism.
10. Tinker:
    Decks based around generating lots of mana and casting or Tinkering for game-ending artifacts.
11. Enchantress:
    Enchantment-based decks using Argothian Enchantress/Enchantress' Presence for massive card advantage. They either generated massive mana to Stroke of Genius the opponent out, or used Ancestral Mask to create a massive creature with which to kill opponent.
12. BUG:
    Decks using powerful spells in the above colors.
13. Zombie Upheaval:
    UB decks based abound Zombie Infestation, Upheaval, and lots of control spells.
14. Turbo Oath:
    Decks using Oath of Druids to get out a huge Cognivore. This did not include the decks using a Battlefield Scrounger-based recursion mechanism.
15. Other:
    Everything else not covered by one of the above types. Included only deck types played by fewer than five players.

Calculating Each Player's Performance:
After setting up the players and deck types, the next step was to list each of their performances. I captured the results for each match on the Match Results sheet. I included all matches, including the Top 8, with the exception of obvious intentional draws. I then included win-loss-draw information and winning percentages for Day1, Day 2, and overall (Day 1 and Day 2 combined) on Player Records and Decks. Note that the Top 8 is included in the Day 2 numbers. The players are ranked NOT by their"final standings" as reported on the sideboard, but rather by what percentage of their matches they won overall, followed by what percentage of their matches they won on Day 2.

Summarizing The Performance Of Each Deck Type:
I summarized the performance of each deck type on the Deck Performance sheet (the first worksheet in the workbook) by combining the performance of all players who played a given deck type. Thus, the"Avg. Win %" gives the percentage of matches that a particular deck type won, taking all players who played that deck type into account. Also, I provided a raw count of each deck type so it is apparent what the makeup of the field was.

The"Avg. Win %" number can also be interpreted as the best available estimate for the percent of the time that a particular deck type can be expected to win. Yellow highlighting denotes percentages greater than 50% but less than 60% and green highlighting denotes percentages greater than or equal to 60%.

The estimate for a given deck type is more accurate if more data is available (i.e. more copies of that deck type were played). In order to provide a measure of confidence in the estimate, I also broke out my MBA stats book and calculated the minimum value of the 60%"confidence interval" for each deck type - basically, the percentage that we can be 60% sure the"true winning percentage" of the deck type is above. This number factors in both the winning percentage of the deck type as well as how many matches that number is based on - the more matches played, the more reliable the number and thus the lower the margin of error. For example, Reanimator has a minimum of the 60% confidence interval of 47% - which is quite close to the 48% best estimate. This is because 568 matches worth of data is available for Mono-B Ctrl. However, Zombie Upheaval has a minimum of the 60% confidence interval of 28% - which is a good deal below the 31% best estimate. This is because only 29 matches worth of data were available for Zombie Upheaval.

The Summary worksheet includes various rankings of the deck types according to prevalence or performance under various assumptions.

More Detailed Performance Information On The Individual Deck Subtypes:
The Deck Perf - More Details sheet contains similar information to that on the Deck Performance sheet, but it breaks down the information according to deck subtype within each deck type. For example, Reanimator won 48% of its matches overall, but the Mono-Black versions were among the best-performing variants of Reanimator, winning 55% of their matches.

Calculating The Percentage Of Matches Each Deck Type Won Against Each Other Deck Type:
On the Matchups worksheet, I took each deck type and computed its average winning percentage against each of the other deck types. In the first table, each number represents the percentage of matches Deck 1 (the deck type in column A) won when paired up against Deck 2 (the deck type listed above the percentage). In the second table, each number represents the number of matches that were composed of each deck type pair (note that the table is symmetrical about the diagonal, as each pair is listed twice - once in the upper-right and once in the lower-left; thus the total number of matches included is actually 1428, half of the 2856 value listed).

For example, if you look in Row 5, Column H and Row 24, Column H, you can see that Enchantress played 9 matches against Psychatog and won 33% (i.e. 3) of them.

Determining The Expected Winning Percentage Of Each Deck Type In A Particular Metagame:
I used Matchups - Adjusted worksheet to calculate how a given deck type could be expected to perform in a given metagame. To do this, I first had to have a complete table of deck type matchup winning percentages. Unfortunately, some pairs of deck types were just never matched against each other at PT Houston and so no data was available. In these instances, I decided the best thing to do was to just assume that the matchup was 50-50. Luckily, this was less of an issue for the most prevalent deck types.

The first table uses a metagame exactly equal to the metagame on Day 1 at PT Houston. The number in the Grand Total column represents the percentage of matches a given deck type could be expected to win in a metagame that was exactly like that at PT Houston. For example, continuing with Enchantress, you can see from the first table of the Matchups worksheet that the deck type won just 41% of its matches. However, this was in part to it winning just 33% of its matches against Psychatog. Moreover, as can be seen in the bottom table, 9 out of Enchantress's 59 matches (or 15% of them) were against Psychatog. In other words, the"metagame" that BU Braids happened to face at PT Houston was 15% UG QR-Mad - which is a horrible matchup, according to the data!

However, as can be seen on the Deck Performance sheet, Psychatog was just 8% of the field at PT Houston. In other words, in this case it can be said that Enchantress had"bad matchups." The top table on the Matchups - Adjusted worksheet adjusts for this and looks at what the expected performance of Enchantress would be if it instead faced its"fair share" of 8% Psychatog. In fact, it does this for all the deck types and comes up with an expected winning percentage of 44% for Enchantress - somewhat higher that the deck type's actual performance of 41%. This information is also summarized on the Deck Performance sheet in the"Hypothetical Record Based on Event Metagame" column and the minimum of the 60% confidence interval is also shown.

However, there's no need to limit ourselves to assuming a metagame that is the same as the PT Houston metagame. For instance, what if you expected the deck types that did well at PT Houston to be a higher percentage of the field at the next PTQ than they were at PT Houston? Or what if you expected your local metagame to be substantially different? That's what the second table on the Matchups - Adjusted worksheet is for. Simply plug in a percentage for each deck type that represents how much of the field you expect it to be, make sure the numbers add up to 100%, and then the numbers in the Grand Total column represent the percentage of matches each deck type would be expected to win in the assumed metagame. This information, along with the minimum of its 60% confidence interval, is also summarized on the Deck Performance sheet in the"Hypothetical Record Based on Example Metagame" column.

Summary:
To summarize, the spreadsheets can be used to answer the following questions (among others) about Extended results for PT Houston:

1. What is the high-level overview of what decks were played in what numbers, how eack deck type performed, and how it might be expected to perform in the future:
   - Summary worksheet
2. What has the metagame looked like? What deck types are being played and in what numbers?
   - Deck Performance worksheet, first set of columns
3. How has each deck type performed? What percentage of matches has it won? How sure is it that these winning percentages are relying on enough data?
   - Deck Performance worksheet, middle set of columns
4. How can each deck type be expected to perform in a particular specified metagame?
   - Matchups - Adjusted worksheet for both metagame specification (across the top of the table) and expected winning percentages ("Grand Total" column); expected winning percentages (along with confidence level information) are also on the Deck Performance worksheet, last set of columns, of either spreadsheet
5. How does each deck type perform against each other deck type? How much data is this based on?
   - Matchups worksheet
6. How did individual players do? What deck types did they play?
   - Player Records and Decks worksheet

I hope you find this information useful, and good luck!

Adam Fischer
adam_mba@yahoo.com
Team CardShark