Deck statistics - need your feedback

[Goblin Hero]

Next big feature to do is deck statistics. Sample hand generator is already written. What types of deck statistic you do really need? Screenshots from other apps, formulas and detailed descriptions are welcomed!

[kristijanH]

OK. Some stuff I personaly would love to see but you should deffinetly wait for other users' comments.

1. Avrage mana cost of all cards
2. number/percentage of color spells (a color pie for all 5 + colorless)
3. number of card types - creatures, lands, etc.
4. number of cards with different cmc
rarity color pie (although useless)
5. I realy like the opening hand preview on the official wizards page - if you already got it thumbs up for you
6. If you can manage probabilities then combo probabilities (what's the chance to get 2 cards in opening hand)

[rjp14]

I would love to see all the stats that are in MWS made available in Magic Album. Basically those are the ones I take a look at most often.

Also maybe a way to comparing changes to a deck would be possible? Would be nice to be able to see comparison stats for changing a couple cards in a deck. Such as seeing how your sideboard interacts with your deck.

So maybe have the ability to take a "snapshot" of the original stats you have and then have the new stats from the changes you made in the decks. Then between the two have how the stats have changed. Eg. Average CMC went up +1 or went down -0.5. (Maybe highlight -ve's with red and +ve's with green).

This would be helpful when looking at adding cards to decks and seeing how your sideboard will affect the main deck.


You could even have a deck comparison tool for two completely different decks for that matter.

And maybe a way for you to keep track of how a deck is doing. Such as wins - loses. Maybe add a versus what type of decks. And if you won 2 games to 1 or such. Would be a great way to track how a deck is doing and how it does against certain decks. Maybe add a graph of sorts for these. Win percentage and straight wins to losses by match and by game.

If I think of anymore stats I'll post about them. But as far as I figure there aren't much more. Unless we look at key words maybe. But I really don't see that as a stat that is really going to tell you much other than what type of deck you have if that. Although maybe you could do a probability stat for that. But then why bother when you could just do a stat on the cards probabilities like mws does with an OR. (Although IIRC the OR doesn't work in MWS which is a shame.)

[Bloodnut]

There's little to add to the excellent suggestions above, the OR option of the probability calc is definately felt missing. also the prob. calc. needs to have the percentage of NOT having something in the hand (for example a basic mana land - for those cases when you have a specific color first drop and you want to know what are the chances of starting with it in hand and without the needed land).

I really support rjp14's compare feature: have the deck swap cards and see how that affects the mana curve - color breakdown etc'

another nice feature is land suggestion: like in Magic Online, if you have a deck and want to instantly add lands the analyzer suggests how many lands to add based basically on the color percentage of the deck (just for example, notice in the added link that by the end of the draft he adds lands by with the suggest land button. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw21OvQlOUw)

I don't think that any other info can be incorporated in the deck file because it needs to be read by MWS later but if you do somehow manage that then have the option to add notes, I use an extra .txt file to all my competitive decks to write what I'm swapping in and out of the sideboard against each deck.

lastly: have the option in the inventory to allocate cards from the inventory to the deck, meaning that the comment on the card entry in the inventory will have a tag that this card is in that deck (just an example: I now write it myself with "@Deck: Pyromancer Ascension").

[Goblin Hero]

Here's some UI samples of controls which define the card combination for probability calculation:

Do you understand it?

Answers | Open

1st card combination: having (Mountain AND Shock) OR (Swamp AND Vendetta). The probability of having first turn removal.
2nd: having (Lions OR Hound) AND (NOT (Plains OR Foundry)). The probability of having first turn drop but without mana to play it.

What do you think of it? Is it too complex? At least it's very functional. You will be able to define several conditions and the way it's checked: any condition should be true (AND) or only one condition (OR) should be true. There will be four types of conditions: AND, OR, NOT AND, NOT OR.
AND: is true if all cards inside the condition are present.
OR: is true if any of the cards inside the condition is present.
NOT AND: is true if any of the cards inside the condition is absent.
NOT OR: is true if all of the cards inside the condition are absent.
I hope you get my ideas If you can think of better UI - you're welcome. Let's discuss it.

[woogerboy21]

Here's some UI samples of controls which define the card combination for probability calculation:

prob1.JPG

prob2.JPG

Do you understand it?

Answers | Open

1st card combination: having (Mountain AND Shock) OR (Swamp AND Vendetta). The probability of having first turn removal.
2nd: having (Lions OR Hound) AND (NOT (Plains OR Foundry)). The probability of having first turn drop but without mana to play it.

What do you think of it? Is it too complex? At least it's very functional. You will be able to define several conditions and the way it's checked: any condition should be true (AND) or only one condition (OR) should be true. There will be four types of conditions: AND, OR, NOT AND, NOT OR.
AND: is true if all cards inside the condition are present.
OR: is true if any of the cards inside the condition is present.
NOT AND: is true if any of the cards inside the condition is absent.
NOT OR: is true if all of the cards inside the condition are absent.
I hope you get my ideas If you can think of better UI - you're welcome. Let's discuss it.

Will there be example or pre-defined basic criteria for the user to understand how to build logic based on the type of static information they are looking for? Or are you expecting the user to determin that if they wanted to have the probability statistic.

What I mean by this is the idea is in your example will you have the ability to add preset criteria with fill in the blanks for the user or is everthing built from scratch by the user?

[Goblin Hero]

will you have the ability to add preset criteria with fill in the blanks for the user or is everthing built from scratch by the user?

I do not mind having some kind of presets but I can't figure how to do it. The problem is you must understand basic logic operations (OR and AND) to define needed card combination. May be documentation with examples will be enough.

[woogerboy21]

will you have the ability to add preset criteria with fill in the blanks for the user or is everthing built from scratch by the user?

I do not mind having some kind of presets but I can't figure how to do it. The problem is you must understand basic logic operations (OR and AND) to define needed card combination. May be documentation with examples will be enough.

Documentation may work. It definatly would be a start. You would always want a completly blank user definable entry but the only thing that comes to mind on how to build presets is something that would walk the user through. Other people can chime in with other idea's but what comes to my mind would be something that once the deck is built start the user through a question and answer session basicly that will drill down through the logic tree but only ask it in a game criteria way. You wouldnt have to program logic for every card just start with basic questions. Something like "what would you like to calculate first? removal, creature casting, hand probability and work the questions through the logic tree that way. May be more coding than you had in mind for the functionality of the application though. Also didnt know what you had in mind for the direction of the functionality. Might be another area in the application you may consider to keep user customizable with some type of ability for users to create the presets in whatever method you choose to go with. Maybe something like how the application accepts input like the pricing?

Just throwing idea's out... what is others thoughts?

[Goblin Hero]

There are two analyze tools in 1.1.6 update. Try it, discuss it.
Some words about probability analysis. Calculated numbers are not exact. They are estimated using Monte Carlo method. If you press "Calculate" several times - numbers can change a bit (probability accuracy is 0.1%). Unlike other programs it takes some time to calculate the probabilities (two second on my 3GHz CPU), but unlike other programs you can define complex conditions.

[rjp14]

Nice work to start off with. I was wondering about the calc delay but after reading your comment that makes sense.

- Sample hands is nice and simple.
Suggestions:

- Show the number of cards in hand and the number of draws made.

- Have an option that allows you to view all the cards right away without clicking draw a card 43+ times.

- Add some kind of divider to divide the starting hand from the drawn cards.

I'm curious if you plan on adding more to this. Something along the lines of what MWS with drawn hands probabilities. Such as after x amount of shuffles the number of lands you draw, and the number of hands w/o 1-st drops or first and 2-nd drops? (These would be a nice to have at some point but can wait if your trying to just get the basics done at this time. Which is completely understandable.)

Draw Probability:

- I like the layout of this currently. However it would be nice to have some sort of bar graph to get a quick visual idea of the probabilities.

- For whatever reason the word cards in the probability box just looks off in my mind. But I can't quite figure out why. Although it is the right term to use as opposed to turns.

- Could we have an auto calculate option please.

- Add the ability to check later probabilities than card 17 as well please.


Other than that I really love the stats. The card probabilities options are really robust which is great and the interface is nice, sleek, and simple to use.

Keep up the great work!!

[rjp14]

It would also be nice to have keyboard shortcuts such as using the delete key to remove cards from the card combo box.

[Goblin Hero]

Ok, round two. No new features, but a lot of small improvements of deck analyze tools in 1.1.7. Thanks to rjp14 for his feedback.
P.S. Do you like bar graphs I've done?

[kristijanH]

Could you add a preview card box in the sample hand window? Sometimes I don't know the cards by their name.

[rjp14]

Nice work GH. And KristijanH read my mind. I was just thinking about that last night. Not that it was super important but it would be nice.

Okay now some more feedback:

Sample Hands:

- Rename Cards in hand to Hand, Draws made to Draws, and Cards left to Library. It'll be nicer to read. If you like add a tooltip saying a little more. (It'll make for nicer aesthetics)

- Also if you draw all you can still use the mulligan button. You may want to disable that. Although it still works.

- The shading to show your original hand was a nice subtle touch.

Draw Probability:

- Very nice touches with the auto option, and the ability to see more cards.
- The graph bars are nice. However I'd like to see them just covering the percentage column. I think that may be nicer as right now they seem a bit off. Like they shouldn't be covering the cards column. Maybe something different. I've attached two quick ideas to this post. Let me know what you think. You could even let the user decide between the different options.

Overall though it looks like these two pieces of the program are coming together very well now. Keep up the great work! ( I realize that 80% should be 100% but it was just to give you a visual idea of what I was thinking. The bar should still grow right to left like you were doing. Just not covering all the text. Hope this helps!)

Ps. Also another bug I noticed is that if the program can't find the last deck that it wants to start with and you don't hit the okay button on the can't open file error the application will crash. This happens when the paths in preferences aren't correct when I change between computers with my flash drive most of the tip. I think it has to do with the tip of the day being forced to wait for the error message to disappear, and other parts of the program waiting for this as well.

[Goblin Hero]

Better?