So I did something new now; I watched the first video.
At least, the first 20 minutes. These videos are extremely boring. Are there actually people who like this?
But anyway, I found out that the person they hired does have experience with Magic, but not with commander. Honestly.. good enough.
Here is the issue though. The two hosts of this video did not present the stats correctly. At all. I just know that this is going to come back to bite me in the future. At some point, I am going to spend a long time explaining to someone at my local game store that they shouldn't make a Planeswalker deck just because of The Command Zone's stats.
But I digress. What really caught my attention was that the numbers were extracted from the data set with a
Python script. That worries me. For something like this you really should use a proper statistical software like R Studio (my preference), SPSS, Mini-Tab, or even Microsoft Excel (for the
simple analyses). Still, this guy has a Harvard education, so he should know what he's doing (I now also understand why he got paid).
But the other thing that caught my attention; none of these graphs have error bars. So while a bar graph shows where the data did land, the error bars show where the data
could have landed, which is important for statistical significance. As a general rule, if the error bars cross, the data is non-significant. Here's an example:
Continuing with the trend of people wondering what I do on my spare time, this is a graph I made showing the height of Golden Rod flowers, where some have been parasitized (the ones with galls). You can sort of make out that the plants that have been parasitized are slightly shorter, but because the error bars cross, we can't conclude anything. If I had done these measurements again, with the same number of plants, then I could see that the parasitized plants were slightly taller.
Now this might seem hypocritical, because the last two graphs I posted to this thread didn't have error bars. That's because it was late for me, and while Excel can put error bars on graphs, it is not good at it... like... at all. You really have to smack it around to make it work. Instead, I ran the Chi squared test for significance.
Okay, enough ranting (for now). Here are the graphs that The Command Zone showed.
So while I haven't checked, I have a hard time believing that all the people without
Sol Ring landed
exactly on 25%. That seems like a fudged number.
So this picture isn't actually a statistic, it's just showing how each deck was defined in terms of play style. So you are an enchantment deck if you have 20 or more enchantments.
The more I see of these graphs, the less convinced I am that these are well-tuned decks. No way does combat damage do better than combo.
Now this might be me being nit-picky, but I'm pretty sure the numbers on this graph are wrong. 18%*3+42% makes a total of 96%. You can't just have 4% go missing.
Without p-values or correlation coefficients, these numbers mean nothing. But I'm going to leave these graphs here. I'm going to see if I can re-create them in the future,
with error bars.