I really prefer not to mention Ryan Murphy's stuff again, but I just couldn't hold it. Before reading this blog, you should read his article on Makyura deck for the Traditional format. It was all swell until he started doing percentages, where everything is just really bad. Don't worry, I'll go through them.
Warning: don't read if you hate math.
1. "We already know that we’ll be doing this math out of only 36 cards, because of the three copies of both Thunder Dragon and Toon Table of Contents".
This is just wrong. Although Thunder Dragon and Toon Table of Contents usually thins out the deck by 2, there is a chance that the opening hand will contain multipl copies of Thunder Dragon and Toon Table of Contents. Let's calculate the chance of not drawing another copy of Thunder Dragon assuming the first copy has already been drawn.
So in the 6 card hand, 1 is Thunder Dragon, so 5 cards are left. The chances of the remaining 5 not being Thunder Dragons is 37/39 * 36/38 * 35/37 * 34/36 * 33/35 = 76%. That's big, but not so big it's negligible. The same result applies to Toon Table of Contents too, so it becomes even more likely that one of them will show up in multiple copies.
But let's assume it's 36 cards since it makes calculations a lot easier.
2. "With the above changes to our total deck count made, we are (in a sense) only running 25 cards."
He says this after saying Pot of Greed, Upstart Goblin, Graceful Charity, Hand Destruction and Dark World Dealings will thin 1 card each, although Hand Destruction digs through 2 cards. He also says Pot of Greed and Graceful Charity both arguable digs through more than 1 card, but it's not even arguable. Pot of Greed thins the deck by 2 and Graceful Charity thins by 3. How can this be argued? I don't know. But I'm not going to focus on this though.
Rather he goes on to say that there are 7 ways to send Makyura to the graveyard after getting it in hand. But all of those 7 ways (Graceful Charity, Hand Destruction and Dark World Dealings) are already used to thin out the deck, so if we use the assumption of 25 cards, there are no way to send Makyura from hand to graveyard.
Instead, the 7 ways should be left out and instead of 25 cards, the deck has 31 cards (36 - 3x Upstart Goblin - 2 for Pot of Greed), then do the 7 ways of discarding Makyura. This isn't perfect though since we have to take in account using several of the 7 ways to dig deeper and then recalculating the percentages. It's not that hard but it's tedious and I'm not going to do it now. The point is don't do what Ryan Murphy did.
3. "That chance is 0.16. Then we’ll have to discard him, which we can do with seven cards. The chance of that is 0.28. That brings the chances of pulling this off to a total of about five percent.
0.16 x 0.28 = 4.48%. Now with the decrease in chance as said in point number 1 of this blog, at least he could round down to 4%. But no, he rounds up, perhaps to make the deck look just a bit better. I'm not sure though.
4. "We can also simply draw Premature Burial, which is two cards out of the 25, yielding an eight percent chance of doing so. That gives every card a thirteen percent chance of sending Makyura to the graveyard: we start with six. That means our starting hand has, on average, a 78 percent chance of sending Makyura to the graveyard. Those are some incredible odds!"
I don't get this paragraph at all. First he has a typo for Foolish Burial. No biggie though. But he somehow concludes that every card has a 13% chance of sending Makyura to the graveyard. First the 5% he got from point 3 is based on using 2 cards, so how can he add the percentage of using a 2 card combo to a single card and then claim that each card ha 13%? I have to say though although this intuitively doesn't make sense to me, in the end the percentage does work out to about 78%*. His method of calculating just doesn't make sense to me, but if it works then I guess it works.
So point 4 wasn't that bad for him, but his calculations from points 1 to 3 is really messed. So that's it, and mabe this blog will remind you not to take numbers from an article without a grain of salt. If there are miscalculations in this blog, then I apologiz, but then at least you're doing the stuff in the previous sentence.
* Using his assumptions (ie. 25 cards in deck and 7 cards to send Makyura to the graveyard), and the assumption that our hand is free of Toon Table of Contents and Thunder Dragon, getting Makyura in hand is 1 - 21/25 * 20/24 * 19/23 * 18/22 * 17/21 * 16/20 = 69% and the chance of gettin a way to send it to the graveyard is 90%. That means both happening at the same time is about 62%.
For using Foolish Burial, the chance of not having Makyura in hand is 76% (1 - 6/25, since every card in opening 6 has 1/25 chance of being Makyura). Then the chance of having a Foolish Burial is 43% (similar calculation in above paragraph).
The percentage os sending Makyura to the graveyard first turn can be calculated by 1 - the percentage of not pulling the 2 card combo and not using Foolish Burial. This comes to 78%.
Tags: Yugioh Probability
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