Your deck choice also skews its strength as P1 vs P2. For example, playing White starter is much stronger as P1, Purple more balanced or maybe favouring P2. Having Strength in your deck boosts P2 playability without taking away from P1 playability --Rook as starting hero stops you being pushed around by aggro P1 starts (eg Vandy), and is much easier to maxband with P2 econ. So if P1 is really a big advantage, deck choices will shift to include more P2-favouring features. Latest CAPS decks include a lot of Strength.
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I like the point that petE pointed out. If P1 isnât allowed to play the strongest lines (for whatever reason) that will skew P1 win % downwards.
Such a reason might be that a tournament format requires one deck for all games, rather than one deck as P1 and one deck as P2. In the âone deckâ scenario, somebody might include one hero they want for sure when going first, another they want for sure when going last, and a 3rd that might do OK at either. That would for sure be worse than having either 3 boards that are all good for P1 and switch those out for 3 boards that are all good for P2.
As Sirlin has pointed out many times, he often makes the sort of games that have a lot of variables and which are pretty hard to analyze statistically as a result. It would take a long time and a lot of unrestricted matches to tease out the real P1 advantage with statistics due mostly to sample size considerations.
Games where both players are equal skill and both know their turn order before choosing their boards would (I think) be more representative of the real P1 advantage.
I do have to say, though, that the numbers I am hearing for win/loss seem a lot closer to 50/50 than what I expect. Closer by half, a very meaningful difference.
I think youâve maybe misunderstood what Inevitability means in Magic analysis. It may mean what you think for other games, Iâm not familiar with it in other contexts.
In Magic, if you have inevitability it means you win the long game. If I have inevitability, then the onus is on you to kill me before we get to the point where I win. So in a standard aggro vs control matchup, control always has inevitability. However, this doesnât mean that the match favours control - aggro may actually be strongly favoured, because even if control has inevitability, it canât stop aggro winning early.
Inevitability in Codex is much better measured by how strong relative Tech IIIs are, or whether one player has a game-winning combo. In my opinion though, itâs a lot harder to work out who has inevitability in the average game of codex. This is simply because Codices are far less tuned than the average Magic deck. Magic decks are tuned with a very specific victory condition in mind, and very few are flexible enough to be able to change their strategy once a game has started. Of course, in codex you have a lot more control over which cards you use, and so players will adapt their game plan to their opponents deck. So whether or not I have inevitability depends on what my opponent teched (and what they are going to tech in the future) and I donât know what that isâŚ
ETA: Here is a good article on Inevitability in Magic, if anyoneâs interested
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That sounds like the same thing to me, just said in different ways.
If P1 is ahead by some amount and then both players do things that cancel each other out for the rest of the game, P1 will win. P1 playing to an empty board gives it inevitability at the end of P1T1.
Again, that can flip, but itâs important to point out that status quo is in favor of P1 starting from the beginning of P2T1. Itâs P2s job to flip that more than anything else. They can (and according to recorded statistics often do) flip that, but that doesnât mean the whole concept of inevitability doesnât exist in Codex.
Itâs important to note the difference between game parlance and, say, me saying that itâs inevitable that I will pay taxes and die. Inevitability in game parlance means a different thing than that.
From any given board state, itâs usually pretty clear who will win if nothing changes. That person needs to maintain the status quo (or, ideally, cement their lead). The other person needs to disrupt the status quo as priority number 1. The concept still works when applied to Codex like it applies to every other game.
Edit - I see where you are coming from, trying to apply inevitability to the deck rather than the board, and thatâs harder to do with dynamic decks than it is with MTG where decks are more or less static (sideboards aside). I am more focusing on the concept as applied to the board state. If I, playing P1, can continually kill your tech 1 every turn and not sacrifice my advantage in the process, I most certainly do have a form of inevitability that is not dependent on Tech 3s or whatever. Thatâs the kind of inevitability that I am focusing on, purely a board centric one. Itâs possible to have a deck centric inevitability in codex, but itâs a lot harder due to the nature of teching.
Edit 2 - I would say that, in context, the board centric one is the much better one to be evaluating in Codex. In MTG, it might fall more to the static deck / matchups more than it does to the current board state, but current board state is also absolutely important in MTG as well. Codex is just farther along the continuum and dependent almost entirely on board state rather than any inherent in deck advantage.
Player 1 is certainly âaheadâ but itâs important to have a separate concepts for âwho would win if all the future stuff trades evenlyâ and âwho would win if all the stuff on turns 1-5 trades evenlyâ
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But this is precisely a situation where there is no inevitability, because both players can do things which will cancel each other out for the rest of the game.
If P1 is ahead and has inevitability, then P2 is in very bad position. P1 is ahead at the moment, and as the game proceeds, P1 is likely to get further and further ahead because their inevitability will make their position stronger and stronger.
If P1 is ahead but P2 has inevitability, then the game is much harder to call. It will come down to whether or not P1 can leverage their advantage sufficiently to finish the game before P2 inevitability overwhelms them.
This is why itâs important to think about who has inevitability instead of just looking at life totals or board states. A control deck may look very behind in terms of number of creatures on the board or relative life totals, but that doesnât stop it from being one turn away from locking the game up and the aggro deck conceding. I think Magic Inevitability is closer to taxes inevitability than you thinkâŚ
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Maybe so. Either way, both MTG and Codex are both won by P1 significantly more than 50/50 when ignoring things like matchups and individual cards. In both games, P1 has a long term advantage before they even start that leans things in their favor. In both games, itâs the primary goal of P2 to get ahead on the board, whatever that happens to mean in context.
MTG board advantage is much less solid than Codex board advantage. In MTG, itâs typically easier to come back from a 0 unit to 3 unit disadvantage as compared to Codex. That makes declaring the person with inevitability in Codex more easy than it is in MTG. There are just many fewer cards that auto-win when played in Codex as compared to MTG.
Deckbuilding advantages are certainly possible in Codex. Itâs entirely possible to have nothing and then lay out Garrison and start throwing out 0 or 1 cc stuff and swing the advantage back. You arenât really ahead by any significant measure if that sort of option is available to the opponent.
Rather than nitpicking about the meaning of inevitability, should I just coin another term that can be used instead?
The underlying point remains that P1 has a solid advantage before they even start playing that must be taken away from them at all costs by P2 and which must be maintained at all costs by P1. The struggle to maintain or to overcome that initial P1 advantage is more or less the entire game of Codex. Being the one who is able to attack productively is just that important every step.
Yes.
The whole point of having the term âinevitabilityâ is that it is generally not dependent on the current board/hand position, but rather is based on the contents of each players Deck for a game like Netrunner, or each playerâs Codex + non-workered cards for Codex.
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I think if this is the point you want to make, then âtempoâ is a much better term for you to use. P1 definitely starts the game with a tempo advantage, and P2 can respond by trying to remove this advantage and gain tempo themselves. However, there are other strategies available to P2. They can consolidate their economic advantage and instead try and gain a tech advantage over P1.
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Better tech in this context would only be useful to the extent that it could flip tempo.
The only kind of advantage that really matters is one of tempo, in this context.
Higher tech level wouldnât buy you anything until such time as you used it to prevent the opponent from attacking productively and to begin doing so yourself.
Do you not think itâs possible to have a game state where one player has tempo, but the other is actually ahead (due to having more money, better tech, being within 2 points of destroying their opponents base, etc)?
I have only played a few dozen games, but IIRC in all of them the person who won the game had a dominant board position every single time. The losing player always had their board state utterly collapse before all wins happened. Not that it must be that way, but it probably happens that way almost always.
I can conceive of situations where somebody flipped the tempo when they very nearly lost and the opponent is just hoping to draw a burn spell before they lose the game or something. I just donât think it happens that way very often.
To be nitpicky, the stats I posted above do account for sample size considerations (the smaller the sample size, the larger the standard deviations as a % of the mean). We can say with reasonable confidence that the first ~427 games of competitive Codex have slightly favored P1.
What the stats do not account for is that 427 games is not that many in the context of such a complex game. The strategies and metagame that develop after 4270 or 42700 games may reveal a very different balance of P1 vs P2.
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I think thatâs a fair point, and a lot of games of codex do involve a tug of war back and forward for board control. The player that wins board control goes on to win the game.
However, if you look at this game, I (as P2) conceded board control to my opponent very early by playing a very weak opening. He had tempo throughout the whole game, until I unleashed a killer combo which won the game for me in a single turn. Part of that may have been surprise effect, because Iâm not sure if he realised what the spec was capable of until the turn I won, but it goes to show that winning a game where youâve never had a tempo advantage does indeed happen sometimes.
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I will give you that. 4x 9/7s out of nowhere is pretty strong. I didnât go through the game in depth, but the opponentâs lead by then looks to have been pretty small if quince and a mirror token survived passing the turn. I have heard of people doing similar things with Crashbarrows and mirror illusions.
Thatâs true, I didnât say my opponent was ahead, just that they had tempo the whole game. I think I made a single attack before my final turn. My opponent (as P1) cleared my board on each of their turns, and then I played more units and heroes on my turn. Because Codex has patrol bonuses, and because I had an economic advantage from being P2 and from my opening (which sacrificed even more board control for even more economic advantage), I could afford to play strong enough units and heroes that even with the advantage of tempo, my opponent couldnât get ahead.
My point was simply that itâs overly simplistic to conflate tempo with being ahead. In most games of Codex if you donât have tempo and you really want it, itâs pretty easy to find a line of play which will give you tempo advantage. However, in order to get it, you often have to give up cards (you play more units out than your opponent can deal with), or economy (you skip workers so you have more gold and cards to play more units). @ARMed_PIrate is infamous on these boards for valuing tempo very highly, and if you look at any of his games you will see that he plays very aggressively and often trades economic or card advantages for board position and tempo. And itâs a completely legitimate way to play. But I think even he would admit itâs not the only way (or even necessarily the best way) to play Codex.
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The initial post about inevitability does begin to make sense when I mentally replace âinevitabilityâ with âtempo advantageâ (which happen to be almost polar opposites). Itâs still way oversimplifying though. Yes, tempo advantage is good, but thatâs why P2 has the extra worker which is also pretty damn good. If P2 had another extra worker I doubt the game would be balanced at all, yet tempo advantage would still be good and everything said about it here would still be true.
It does seem likely that P1 would be slightly favoured overall, but describing P1âs advantage in detail while glossing over P2âs isnât a convincing argument. Actually itâs even quite similar to the argument why you should draw first in RDW mirror in MtG (you trade everything 1-for-1 and then youâre the one whoâs left with the extra card - or if you somehow managed to do that in Codex, the extra gold). And even if I agreed to ignore individual matchups, there are still formats where itâs thought to be generally correct to draw first, most prominently in sealed.
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This match should clearly illustrate that P2 more often has inevitability, while P1 has tempo. Both are extremely exaggerated in this example, 'cause itâs me doing the P1, but thatâs the crux, right (as @NikoBolas put it in the original post)? P2 has econ, meaning eventual swing over to bigger and better units or more maxxed heroes and spells making a bigger difference. P1 has first shot at killing heroes/buildings/base, but may struggle to do so, especially as the game progresses.
That said, I do think certain engines/combos (as has been mentioned before) come with some inevitability of their own, and can grant it to Player 1. MoLaC is on everyoneâs minds, and Peace Engine, and to a lesser extent Metamorphosis and Earthquake. Playing against those (P1 or P2), the game becomes âCan I shut that down before it shows up and wrecks me sideways?â But then the game gets interesting again when two such strategies are played against each other. When the combos are cheap enough, the econ advantage becomes less relevant (unless someone had to skip tech), the tempo advantage becomes more relevant (unless someone else had to skip tech), and the draws on T3 and T4 become HUGELY relevant.
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While weâre on illustrative games, how about this very recent high-profile game. Featuring @FrozenStorm as P1 going âall-inâ on a base race, completely sacrificing tempo/board position to do the maximum base damage possible. In the end it cost him the game, but he came mighty close and the outcome could easily have been different.
Board position is great, and definitely what you should fight for, all other things being equal - but it doesnât always win you the game in itself.
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P1 is purposefully given an advantage and one that is purposefully fragile. The intent is that P2 can win some % of the time approaching 50% with correct play.
I just think that being ahead on the board is strongly correlated both with being player 1 and with winning the game. Enough that I view myself being significantly behind on the board to be a virtual game loss.
Other people are either not so convinced or playing devilâs advocates.
P2 does have +1 worker which is helpful. P1âs compensating advantage for that is that most of the trades happen on P1s terms and P1 is able to use buffs and things to setup cost effective trades.
If somebody gives up their winning on the board in order to try to win a base race, that doesnât prove that winning on the board is not important for winning the game. If anything, it proves that it is important for winning the game.