Discussion Forum

I'm wickeddarkman, I got "functional asperger's syndrome" which is sort of the medical term for "insanely brilliant"
In the past two years I've had some great breakthroughs in my many projects of letting evolution design decks for me.

As a result I find myself needing someone who plays modern at both a high level, but who is also willing to experiment to learn new ways of beating the opponent.

I got two different projects, one which you can perform yourself, and one where I sort of collaborate with you.

PROJECT CYCLEBOARD:
Traditionally players have built decks where the mainboard is less specialised compared to the sideboard.
As an insane genius this has always been something that pissed me off. Why would I insist on losing game one by not having a mainboard that at least have one card to stop a certain strategy from defeating me. My own builds tend to have solutions against all decks in the meta that I know of and then my sideboard has 5 cards specifically against aggro, combo and control, but each of those five also can be used against another archetype, which means that I got a total of 10 cards against each of the archetypes.

Recently I woke up from a rather vivid dream where I played with a sideboard consisting of only cards with cycling. The dream had a lot of other details to it, but the idea of a cycleboard was the most interesting part of the dream.

The overall concept of the cycleboard was that it was not important what you could bring into the deck when side boarding.
Rather the importance can be put on the fact that you could remove everything from your mainboard, and then the cycle cards will give you increased odds of drawing the keycards that you know works.

If, by change, some of your cycleboard are actually usefull during that specific matchup, then things are even better.

Since my playstyle has always involved having a few silverbullets against all decktypes in the format, the idea of a cycleboard appeals to me in the extreme.

As with all things in life, a cycleboard can be built to be less extreme, and it might turn out that there is a certain average around which this can be built.

The mainboard might actually contain a few cyclecards that makes it more flexible in general and gives it silverbullets that can be used to draw cards if you are facing the wrong matchup.

Likewise the entire sideboard might not need to consist of 15 cyclecards.

Overall, the concept that you can design decktypes that are based around moving cards away from the mainboard has actually been done before...

Transformational sideboards have been used in the past, and the "cycleboard" is more or less a new variant of that concept.
But it's a variant that the world haven't seen so far.

This is the project you can work on yourself. I will be doing my own research though, but you will in no way be dependant on me and can run this in solo.

Don't contact me in here, but if you contact me on one of my decks in the active or hot decks section I'd love to take a look at what you've built.

PROJECT TURBOHYBRID:
Did I mention that I use evolution to design decks ?
One of my more recent breakthroughs has been taking me in an unexpected direction, reviving an old project by looking at it from another perspective.

In order to create decks at a much faster pace in the old days I took an interest in "cluster theory" you took specific parts of a deck strategy and exchanged it in smaller clusters between decks.

If the deck you built contained white, then you might play 4 swords to plowshares and a wrath of god, and these five cards would usually be inserted in many decks that needed something to stop aggro. These 5 cards would usually follow each other from decktype to decktype.

In more recent builds 3 thoughtseize and 2 inquisition are a cluster that is inserted into most decks that splash black.

I was involved a lot in designing clusters in the olden days of magic and had a very extensive knowledge of usefull clusters in every color.

Then I came up with a sort of a shortcut.

Instead of focusing on moving clusters in and out of decks, I tried out just splitting decks into two functional halves, and so I invented what I would end up calling halfdecks on mtgvault.

The premises for the concept was that each half must contain a strategy of it's own, that would work regardless what other halfdeck it was merged with.

For a while mtgvault hosted a small group of players that used halfdecks, but it turned out to demand much more deckbuilding skills than people expected, so the concept ran out in the sand.

I took it upon myself to take competitive modern decks and split them into halfdecks, and some decks turned out to be a lot less "splitable" than others.

Years went by, and I more or less put the idea aside myself, even though I did give it a couple of revives on the way.

Then one day, brainstorming on a two hour walk between my city and the city where a friends lives, I was throwing up some ideas at random in different areas, and suddenly my mind bridged another project with evolution to the use of halfdecks.

For many years I've been measuring the individual performance of cards by using paperstrips.
By inserting them inside the sleeves with the cards, I can note down whenever a card is cast.

*** warning ***
This process damages the surface of valuable cards, so use cards you don't care about as proxies.
Also make the strips long enough so you don't have to "fish them out with a finger" which damages the sleeves.

By playing a ton of test games against a panel of proxy testdecks each card in the deck generates individual points which show how played they were during it all.

(It's important to the process that you play the most played card first if you have copies in hand, to track individual performance better)

At the end of it all I would remove the 9 worst performing cards, and then insert new cards at random.

My breakthrough idea was "what would happen if I instead kept the best performing cards"
This made my mind remember the whole halfdeck project and a new concept was formed.

You take the statistically best performing halves of two random decks and this will be your two halfdecks, ready to be merged.

The difference between the old way of creating halfdecks and this new one is extreme.

The old way of doing it would involve you making an estimated guess at which cards in each half deck could be safely split.

The new way of doing it is to use the knowledge of paperstrip to find an actual effective deckhalf.

Also, since the bad half of the deck is removed, when you merge two halfdecks in this new way, you've effectively removed the worst and combined the best.

I immediately performed some tests with this new way of doing things.

I created two different hybrids this way and tested them against both of their original halves.

One hybrid have been lantern control merged with merfolks and the hybrid managed to defeat both originals.
Two of my older projects were also used to form hybrids with nice results.

So, what I am curious about here, is how fast I can manage to design hybrids with my methods, and I need pro players to field test the results.

This has the potential to absolutely crash a meta, a few people dedicated to this technique can produce a number of hybrids that will confuse the meta enough to crash it.

Knowing exactly which hybrids works will make the group able to manipulate prices in their region.

I will openly share my technique, and guide you through it so that you can imitate it or get a friend to imitate it, and you will be able to influence prices in your area of play.

I specifically need someone who have at least two currently competitive moderndecks, then I will make them into halfdecks, merge the thing and then remove the 9 worst performing cards from it.

You will be left with a hybrid where you have 9 slots open to make your own adjustments of the deck, and you will be on your own with the sideboard.

Don't contact me here, contact me through the active or hot deck pages...