Thursday, November 11, 2010

Historical VtES Deck Size Statistics

Currently there's a discussion going on in the VtES Usenet Newsgroup regarding the optimal decksize. By chance, a few weeks I collected some data from Lasombra's TWDA, checking for decks and their number of cards used by tournament winners. As you can see 90 card decks make nearly 60% of the total TWD. This number has dropped in recent years, but still a fair number of decks from the past few years carry 90 cards.
Please take note the scale is logarithmic, otherwise you wouldn't see much beside the overwhelming number of 90 card decks. It looks as if there's no deck with the size of 69 cards, but due to the logarithmic scale the one deck with 69 cards is not shown.

In addition, some data from the VtES EC 2010. During the EC in Paris the average decksize of the five finalists of the five main tournaments were as follows:
  • Legendary Vampire -- 78 cards average
  • Last Chance Qualifier -- 78 cards average
  • Day 1 Tournament -- 87 cards average
  • Day 2 Tournament -- 88 cards average
  • First Chance Qualifier -- 90 cards average
It's not so easy to draw any conclusion whether 90 cards decks are good (or even optimal), since you don't really know if these decks would have performed any better with less cards. On the other hand, decks with 60 or 70 are not automatically better than those with higher card counts, otherwise more of them would show up in finals or as tournament winners.

In summary, all I am saying is that historically (with the data given) there's no evidence that 90 card deck do inherently better or worse than decks with less cards.

Here's the raw data as extracted from Lasombra's TWDA:
Decksize # Decks Decksize Grp #Decks
60 41 60-64 57
61 6

62 3

63 4

64 3

65 9 65-69 24
66 8

67 4

68 2

69 1

70 41 70-74 84
71 9

72 13

73 9

74 12

75 42 75-79 111
76 19

77 28

78 12

79 10

80 87 80-84 156
81 16

82 23

83 15

84 15

85 18 85-89 175
86 23

87 21

88 48

89 65

90 894 90 894

7 comments:

Arwall said...

what is more difficult is that competition in v:tes was not really optimised until like 6-7 years ago.
So the main idea about reducing deck was not around (i remeber an old nnewsgroup postby legbiter where he was coming back from the us and saw david tatu plays with reduced deck)


deck around 75 cards are better for card flow control except on the few games where you will lack some cards to finish up the game.

A few deck need more cards and deck siez just need to be adjusted to deck typology and style of play.

Izaak said...

This is some seriously nice data Ralf. Would it be possible to see average deck sizes by date and by tournament size?

extrala said...

I see what I can do to gather some additional data.

floppyzedolfin said...

Excellent, Ralf !
Impressive!

Jussi said...

That's really interesting. And, for what's worth, I'm really intrigued about the deck size increase during the EC2010.

"deck around 75 cards are better for card flow control..."

Agreed.

"A few deck need more cards and deck siez just need to be adjusted to deck typology and style of play."

I'd say, that it's because of default hand size of seven card. In 75 card deck you just don't put that many copies of one or two cards that they'll hinder your "silver bullet" side of your hand.

So, you don't need that much hand recycling and by those standards, you are able to bluff more.

Dr.Mafrune said...

I wonder how people manage to handle deck flow with 90 cards ( with single number of exceptions). I hardly can do it with my reduced decks!!!
Another deck size issue is pure economic. It´s not the same to need 5 parities/ mind rape than to need 3 or 4.

Drain said...

How about differentiating these numbers by deck type and seeing which decks dominated the competition this year? I'd be highly interested in seeing that information.