pokken wrote: ↑2 years ago
onering wrote: ↑2 years ago
More often than not, the hand an opponent discards is going to be about equal to the hand they draw, while the remainder will be split (perhaps evenly, perhaps not), between the new hand being better or worse enough than the discarded hand to matter.
This has not been my experience at all. For me roughly half the time my hand gets much worse. Because I've held those cards for a reason and I kept that hand for a reason. I might be peculiar but I tend to hold a lot of cards and a huge percentage of the time they're stripping the reactive cards I held.
I hate the sheer random power for 3 Mana. I'll have to start keeping track I guess
TBH it sounds like maybe you either have had bad luck, or your playing decks that have a tendency sculpt hands. From my own experience, I know that if I'm running certain control decks a wheel is more likely to hurt me than help me, because I'll have good reactive spells I'll want to hold back until they are needed, and they'll accrue in my hand, or I'll be drawing a lot and discarding down to my 7 best in hand, which means that any random seven is likely to be worse than my current hand. But then that's not much of a coin toss either, those decks are just likely to get screwed in the same way that other decks are usually going to be helped (like most aggro inclined decks, decks that can play out non reactive spells at instant speed, decks with a good amount of gy synergy, etc.).
Now if someone fires it off early, that's a different story. You did keep your hand for a reason, and the new 7 doesn't come with a mulligan, so it can really screw someone that gets wheeled a no lander turn 2. Of course, if you had to keep a crappy hand because you had to mull to 5 to get the two lands you already played, you're gonna welcome the wheel.
Moreover, I suspect that getting screwed by a wheel is going to stand out a lot more than getting a comparable hand from a wheel, or even than an opponent's wheel helping you out of a bad hand. I'm speaking generally, not just about you. The turn 1 Sol Ring paradox is like this, where people tend to remember the times someone got a Sol Ring turn 1 and blew out the table, but in reality your actually less likely to win if you get a turn 1 Sol Ring than if you don't. I'm not talking about why that is, I personally suspect its the archenemy effect, because in this conversation the why doesn't matter, only that there's a perception that turn 1 Sol Rings lead to blowouts when the reality is that they reduce the player's chances of winning (regardless of the reason). The blowouts caused by turn 1 Sol Ring simply loom larger, players are going to remember how crappy it was to get blown out because the turn 1 Sol Ring guy ran away with the game, they're less likely to remember the times it led to a risky play that backfired or he got dogpiled by the table or he just got answered early and then couldn't recover and durdled the rest of the game. Similarly, from my own experience the games where I've gotten screwed by a wheel used fairly (or especially some guy firing off Winds of Change turn 1) stick out a lot more than the times where someone wheeled and I got a comparable hand, or even came out ahead because I went back up to 7. Those blowouts where suddenly your screwed feel really bad, but the other results either don't elicit emotion or only feel a little good. When you get handed crap by a wheel, you don't have many options to consider and the only thing you have to think about is what you lost, while if you get a comparable hand or a better hand you have a lot of new options to process and don't have the time or bandwidth to dwell on the emotions it elicited, so even if you were stoked by the result that feeling will quickly pass as you evaluate your potential plays.
The other thing with a wheel turning a good hand into a bad one that makes it stick out more is that its a loss, and people tend to fixate on loss and assign more emotional weight to it compared to gains. This goes beyond just trading a good for a bad hand though, I think it even extends to hands that are comparable, as the loss of the cards you had, and had plans for, is felt more than the gain of the new cards (and the new cards bring with them the need for new assessments, which need to be made more quickly and tax brainpower, which means a player might not be able to utilize the new cards as effectively as the old even if the overall quality is the same, but that's probably something that has an effect on the margins). At this point I wonder if even a slightly better hand would actually feel slightly worse than the discarded hand, based solely on how we as a species are psychologically predisposed to overvalue loss and undervalue gain.
And I might as well continue this stream of consciousness musing and connect it to why Sheldon might think wheels are so bad. I'll note that the commander banlist isn't about balance, but about sending a message about what the format is supposed to be. The cards on the list are, for the most part, there because they ruin fun, subjective as that is. Another way to put it is that the kind of problems those cards cause just make people feel really bad, to the extent that it ruins their enjoyment of the game, and does so consistently enough and broadly enough to get banned. Sometimes these cards are also very powerful, consistent, and were heavily played, but some cards like Worldfire, Biorhythm, and Coalition Victory flat out suck. They aren't banned for their power or consistency or because they'd be format staples, but because they're bull %$#%. The reaction to a CV win, or getting killed by Biorhythm, or having Worldfire resolve, for too many people for the cards to be allowed, is "Come on with that bull %$#%." I'd say getting your mana screwed because some douche canoe fired off winds of change turn 1 is equal to that. So wheels absolutely have the capability to be that %$#%, but they are much less likely to be like that than the Worldfires of the world and can be played responsibly to minimize that risk. But I think Sheldon might be seeing the nonsense with Hullbreecher and then looking at other kind of cheesy synergies and how wheels can sometimes randomly screw hands and is thinking "these sure show up in a lot of bull %$#%." I also think that Sheldon is prone to sharing his initial takes with the expectation that we should receive them with a grain of salt, because Sheldon's hot takes don't translate into RC action. I like that he gives them because it shows transparency, and I think they reveal that he doesn't act based on his own early reactions, but rather takes the time to gather different perspectives, test things out, and arrive at thoughtful decisions down the line that might differ considerably from his initial takes.