VG: Mystery Flare Dragon odds

So today they revealed the new Gear Chronicle Stride Unit, (Time-space dragon) Mystery Flare Dragon that spots a "if hit, reveal the top 4 cards of the deck, if it has 4 different grades, cb4, take another turn, shuffle the deck" skill.

That's quite over the top with vg skills since if it ever does work, you will probably just outright win the game on the spot. Even if the game does not end, 3 more attacks plus another 2/3drive checks is gonna put the gear chronicle player too far ahead for a normal comeback to happen.

The question becomes: how likely is this game ending skill going to work?

Using a common distribution of 16-14-11-8, counting from the full deck size,

I get 4! x (16x14x11x8)/(49*48*47*46) = 0.093036

which is about 10% of the time.

Additionally, even if you have a exact same ratio of cards, a rough gauge of 4! x (1/4)^4 gets 0.09375 which is essentially pretty much about 10% of the time.

So it is highly unlikely that you would actually lose to that skill but as long as it does work, you've pretty much lost the game right there. It is somewhat like another shot at a double critical trigger.

Still, I hope I never get to be at its receiving end.

Moving away from Doomsday?

So it's now the post Khans of Tarkir era, with Treasure Cruise pushing tons of delver decks into the top slots. The eternal weekend legacy's t8 was flooded with all variations of delvers.
It had 1 Maverick with Punishing fires (which eats delvers), 1 Tezz deck (with its maindeck leyline of the void) and 6 assorted delver decks.
It has been awhile since I have gone out to play Legacy and I brought my Doomsday fitted with 2x Dig through time and 1x Treasure Cruise in the SB. I lost againt BUG Delver (after I tried to go off against a Force of Will and getting stuck on one Swamp) and 2 Miracles decks.
With blue being more prominent, the storm side of the Doomsday deck is much weaker than it was. While my hands were rather bad all night, the problem was more fundamental than that.
I do not foresee that this overly complicated deck has the staying power to bash through the format as it is now.

The new challenge now is how to get through a format where people can play 4x Ancestral Recall.
I'm not sure where to start but I think I could try Sudden Shock, Pyroclasm etc.
I guess I should try to design a Delver killer, then move to finding the means to beating the other matchups. True-Name Nemesis overly complicates this effort but perhaps that would be the way to go... The Tezz deck does this very well with Chalices, Baleful Strix, Thopter-swords combo etc.
I don't think I have the core cards for that deck irl but maybe I can test it online to find a new direction to go towards. It has become a notch more difficult to deal with decks if they can simply refuel with Treasure Cruises.

Next Generation VG

The new season of Vanguard is here with its new Stride, G-assist and Generation break mechanics.

Stride is a very interesting mechanic because it is as good as having an early breakride with very minimal requirements.
Its main flaw is that it is very undercosted for what it does since it replaces itself with an extra drive check but has an additional 15k worth of attack stacked on, making it much harder to guard.

If they start slapping powerful abilities unto these, it will look pretty nasty because these are by far the most accessible cards in the game and would allow one to recreate the same games with a high degree of consistency.

The biggest winner is Commander Laurel who can turn a triple drive into a hexadrive and that is really not funny. 

G-Assist is really good since you can get out of a grade lock faster with minimal costs and generation break as a mechanic is interesting because it requires you to stride before you can use it and anything above gb1 means that you will probably see it work rather late into the game. Potentially more powerful

The flow of the game has vastly changed again and I think that those clans that are not vg-centric have the most to gain with stride since the G-unit is gonna at least be really fat and pressuring. I foresee the faster clans to be able to make full advantage of this.

Below is the new numbers to take note of:

So the math for a triple check is as follows (under the assumption that 1/3 of the deck is triggers):
The most common is 1 trigger which is about 44% of the time, as suggested by the one-in-three cards odds. This is followed by a no trigger at 30%.
Collectively, approximately 75% of the time, there will only be a maximum of 1 trigger from a triple drive check. This also means that 1 in 4 games where you take on a triple check, you will get hit by at least a double trigger and 1 in 25 games, you will get hit by a triple trigger.

Looking forward to getting a set of 8 G-units and the Dotx

Updating Doomsday

Last night, I managed to get a bunch of Treasure Cruises and bought 2 Dig through Time from a player opening boosters so I could finally update whatever I could play.

With the new set, I think that the format has changed significantly, mainly because of how Treasure Cruise is trying to be an Ancestral Recall and how it actually does end up being played for U.

We used to had to have very incremental advantages to get ahead of the opponent, playing cards like Brainstorm and Ponder to extend their reach to the fullest. However, now, those bad players who spam those spells early can just negate that minor advantage and break past with Treasure Cruise. I used to believe that just jam packing cantrips was inferior to playing actual threats (so I'd say 4 Brainstorm + 1 Ponder would be better than 4 Brainstorm + 3 Ponder in a deck like miracles that did not strive on finding any particular cards).

It brings us into the part of Vintage that I could never really handle, Ancestral Recall. In the era of Classic, I had really played for these very incremental advantages and I was doing quite well but I was on the backseat after Ancestral Recall became the core part of the game that would primarily dictate the flow of the game. I had mine countered and the opponent could use it twice. That did not pan out well.
In the same way, I have fears that Treasure Cruise might warp the various formats to have this tension. Treasure Cruise is like a reverse threshold in how it functions and dedicated decks can easily abuse it.
The modern Jeskai Ascendancy deck is a very powerful deck that just randomly wins really fast and is fueled by Treasure Cruise. I'm wondering if it can be played in Legacy/Vintage but I do not yet have any ideas on how to convert the decks over or how they should play out (instants cantrips to outdo removal?).

In any case, I tried updating the Doomsday deck by removing the Emrakul combo (since everyone has some form of guard against it, it has been the weakest link of the deck). I am trying 2x maindeck Dig through Time which seems quite insane with its 7 choose 2 reach and a Treasure Cruise in the SB as a wish target. It feels quite comfortable to play but I guess I have to do this with a live opponent to actually have proper feedback. I haven't played much since the release of the new set but I think the new additions are good to go.