| The author evaluted his model's "accuracy" by looking at how good it was at reproducing the decks in its training set card-for-card. That is no way to evaluate the quality of an M:tG deck. For instance, it can never tell us anything about "sleeper" decks, or about the value to an existing deck of new cards that are added to a format as sets rotate and so on. All that the accuracy metric used by the author can do is tell us how good the model is at representing the past. I am of the firm belief that WoTC will be laughing in their tea cups in the tought of banning something as pointless as this. In M:tG the past is about as valuable as a hat made of ice in the tropics. Edit: For some added context. The way M:tG metagames work is that at the start of a season, there are some "decks to beat" that are usually the most obvious ones in the format. As the format progresses, players often find strategies to beat the decks to beat, initially known as "rogue" or sleepers. These can't be predicted by representing the current decks to beat. Some level of understanding of the game and what's important in a format in terms of strategy etc, is required. Famous example. "The solution" by Zwi Mowshowitz [1] that dominated the 1st Pro Tour–Tokyo 2001 Invasion Block Constructed. Mowshowitz noticed that the dominant aggro decks' clocks (sources of damage) were predominantly red, so he stuffed a deck with anti-red cards, shutting down the dominant aggro decks. That requires way, way more than modelling the current metagame at any point in time. _____________________ [1] http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/22483_Innovations_Th... |
There is a vast amount of interesting space (both as AImresearch and as a fun toy) between “fully groks the current and predicatable near-future meta on a professional level” and “drafts playable decks”. As I read it, the OP is saying “Hey, I built something surprisingly simple that can draft playable decks. When I compare it to an available corpus of draft data from random human players, I think it does as well or better.” On the other hand, I don’t see anything like “I built AlphaGo for Magic drafts.”