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I'm looking for decks that the AI plays well, and I thought "why not run a quick little tournament?"

If you private message me your best Legacy decks (up to three per participant), I'll enter them in Wizards Event Reporter and conduct a regular Swiss tournament where I let the AIs play the decks against each other.

Deadline is next Saturday, 9 April. Sunday night I'll run the tournament and post the results (and the top decklists).

If I get a decent response, maybe we can do this more often.

AI seems to handle this one ok, at least as far as I know. Its a R burn deck with Ball Lightning, Blistering Firecat, etc. It also has Fire Servant and plenty of burn spells. Hope it works for you!

great idea!
I'll start working on a decklist and send it later
Is there a way to test AI decks against each other in Forge? Last time I tried i couldn't get it to work.

serrasmurf wrote:Is there a way to test AI decks against each other in Forge?

You can turn a normal Constructed "you vs AI" duel into "AI vs AI" simply by clicking one of the radio buttons.

However, I'm having a bit of a problem with the match result screen. It used to be so that the match would conclude with a dialog screen that said "X has won the match", but now that only shows up 10% of the time. The rest of the time the match tab just instantly closes and it's very easy to miss who won. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, so I'd really like to hear how this works for you.

See attached for some decks I have toggled a bit with.
Sneak & Show is my official entry
In the end it is not so much about legacy but more about building the best Forge AI deck, using legacy legal cards. Which is cool.
I think some hard/very hard quest opponents will also be worthy contenders (even after stripping them from moxes). Like Higgins 3 or the bogles deck.
Let me know how it went!
Pity there are not more entries...

Xyx wrote:However, I'm having a bit of a problem with the match result screen. It used to be so that the match would conclude with a dialog screen that said "X has won the match", but now that only shows up 10% of the time. The rest of the time the match tab just instantly closes and it's very easy to miss who won. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, so I'd really like to hear how this works for you.

Hmm... not sure why that's kicking in, I think that code is to help speed up Quest Tournaments, so you don't have to click 20 times in between your matches.

Forge does have a match simulator, where you can pass command line arguments into forge.exe and run outside the UI altogether. Would this help for your idea?

friarsol wrote:Forge does have a match simulator, where you can pass command line arguments into forge.exe and run outside the UI altogether. Would this help for your idea?

Yes, that would be great! Would you have an example of such a command? Is there any documentation?

For the tournament I just need the match results. I don't need to see what actually goes on. If I then want to see how two decks handle each other in detail, I can always do it the UI way.

Xyx wrote:

friarsol wrote:Forge does have a match simulator, where you can pass command line arguments into forge.exe and run outside the UI altogether. Would this help for your idea?

Yes, that would be great! Would you have an example of such a command? Is there any documentation?

For the tournament I just need the match results. I don't need to see what actually goes on. If I then want to see how two decks handle each other in detail, I can always do it the UI way.

Here's the argument helper -

Syntax: forge.exe sim -d <deck1[.dck]> ... <deckX[.dck]> -n [N] -f [F]
sim - stands for simulation mode
deck1 (or deck2,...,X) - constructed deck name or filename (has to be quoted when contains multiple words)
deck is treated as file if it ends with a dot followed by three numbers or letters
N - number of games, defaults to 1
F - format of games, defaults to constructed

Basically, what you do is open up a cmd window in the folder where you have Forge. And run it like this:

.\forge.exe sim -d deck1 deck2 -n 3

It's not really setup to work in "first to X wins" matches right now, although since the AI doesn't sideboard running 3 games should give you what you're looking for. Additionally, it'll run in the background (not print to the command line) and outputs to the standard forge.log as it plays. It's fairly rudimentary, but each game ends with an announcement of the winner, and the current status of the match.

Match result: Ai(1)-Elves(Elves vs Goblins): 0 Ai(2)-Goblins(Elves vs Goblins): 3

Game 3 ended in 3215 ms. Ai(2)-Goblins(Elves vs Goblins) has won!

If you care about match status, you may need to manually trim the outcomes (the example above would need to be trimmed to 2-0; similarly, some 2-1 matches might have already ended at 2 games). Play around with it a bit, and lemme know if you have any feature requests. I can't make any promises, but it'd be cool to have a nice simulator for AI play.

Awesome! Thanks!

Took me a while to figure out the path (I moved my User folder and made a subfolder structure in the decks folder), but I got it to work. I'll fiddle with it some more tomorrow.

Should be good enough to run the tournament this weekend!

What type of tournament were you planning on doing? Swiss? Brackets? Group Play?

Swiss, but if you're interested in automating the process then I'd suggest round robin (which is arguably more accurate and very conveniently also a million times easier to code).

Starting the tournament now...

We have a winner! And a pretty clear one, too.



Congratulations serrasmurf for the excellent Goblins deck!

Tournament structure:

• The tournament ran for 11 rounds. I initially intended 4 rounds but I felt that left too much to variance (including matchups and mulligans).
• Matches were 3 games total, not best of 3. That means some went Win-Win-Loss for a 2-1 result that would have been a 2-0 result if it were best of 3. If a deck won 3-0, I entered that as 2-0. On the whole, I don't think this matters much.

The decks can be found here:

• ZhycksJund is my favorite gauntlet deck. It offers a wide variety of threats and answers. I use it to test almost all my creations.
• ZhycksRock is what I created specifically to beat ZhycksJund. It's a very similar deck but presents a lot of creatures that soak up removal. Obviously, these creatures fare poorly against decks that ignore the opponent. It also runs Painful Quandary, which the AI has problems with. I looked for other such "AI breaker" cards, and while I did find some, they weren't strong enough to compete.
• ZhycksPunish is an experiment with "punisher" cards (that give the opponent a choice). The results underline that these cards generally suck, since even the AI does a decent job choosing between "effect" and "damage".
• QuestVicStone3 is the Vic Stone quest opponent deck with the moxen replaced with basic lands. It did pretty well, so that was another good guess from serrasmurf.
• I looked at the Higgins quest opponent deck, but it ran 6 banned cards, and I didn't think it'd do well if I replaced those with lesser alternatives.

Some other observations:

• Matches with the serrasmurfEnchantress deck took longer to finish.
• There was some stuff with Sun Droplet. One match took nearly 3 minutes, at least 90% of which seemed to be caused by a runaway loop. Here is the log:

As for the command line interface:

• Took me a while to figure out that it was case-sensitive.
• I have a large (sub)folder structure for my constructed decks. I couldn't get the command line to load decks from my decks\constructed\AITournament subfolder, so I had to dump the decks in the main decks\constructed folder.
• It would be nice if there was a command line argument flag or something to keep the process from returning immediately while the match runs in the background. I had to open Task Manager and keep an eye on jawaw.exe to see when the match was done.

This was a very interesting experiment! Thank you all for participating and helping out. I certainly hope to do it again.

Most of the work is in entering the command lines to run the matches. The actual match then takes 10-15 seconds to complete (excluding Enchantress decks and Sun Droplet bugs). Next time I intend to run more games per match (at least 9) to reduce variance, and fewer rounds (4-5) to cut back on tedious manual labor.

So... Let's do it again sometime, and prepare for goblins when we do.

I won! I guess the odds were with me

some remarks:
- I think goblins and merfolk are close. For the first I chose chrome mox, for the latter aether vial. It would be interesting to test (100+matches) what the best configuration is (for the AI) and how many lords is optimal.
- Burn is the best imho, but in this AI metagame there are many aggro decks and I suspect the AI uses to many burn spells on creatures
- The higgins deck might indeed be a bit weaker, but is still a good gauntlet deck. I always play control in quest and the discard and direct/hasty damage makes it a tough opponent
- enchantress is a prison deck, when the lock is there the games indeed tend to go a bit longer...

Thanks for doing this! Good idea to repeat it (next month?). You could also make an additional post in the deckbuilding section and send some prime deck builders over there a personal message to recruit them. It is a nice simple and fundamental challenge: who can build the best Forge AI deck(and anticipate the metagame). You could also alternate between legacy/modern/standard..

I should probably modify my Burn Hotter deck with more player burn for next time. Are you doing another?