I fully agree with you up to the point that you say “this should correlate fairly well”. The whole point of my article is that there are plausible reasons for why it won’t. I am not saying it’s impossible that it correlates, but I believe that’s limited to specific cases rather than all cards (hence my conclusion that there’s merit in looking at the top cards).

Is there anything in my analysis that you disagree with?

What I’ll add is that I believe in EDH REC’s trends moreso than its absolute numbers. I don’t analyze an Atraxa deck and then expect to see the full list of 100 cards show up at my LGS. Everyone has their own budgets, approaches, interests, etc. But when all the information is pooled in an aggregate sense on EDH REC, I start to believe more and more in what cards are popular and what ones aren’t. I’m not looking to predict how many copies of a card I’ll see at a local shop – I’m more interested in seeing how often players are looking at particular cards to include in their decks (whether actual lists or ideal lists). To me, this should correlate fairly well with demand, enough so that I think the data is useful enough.

Thanks again for posting this information!

Sig

The lack of data is always difficult unfortunately. I’m not denying that EDHREC is the best available source, we just can’t be sure whether it’s actually good for our purposes.

In a sense an arms race comes naturally, even my friends who barely if at all read / post online about Commander realised it. The thing is that they then chose not to participate. Most of them kept building the way they like, with this changing only when some more competitive oriented players joined in (shortly after which many of our more casual players stopped showing up).

The thing is that while groups may always end up in an arms race, it may very well not be towards some sort of ideal form of a deck due to the group’s meta and finances. There are many groups who never interact with other groups, or rarely. In fact, I believe this is the vast majority of groups, however, because you by their very nature don’t see them at your LGS it’s hard to quantify them. These are people who buy online or in big chain stores, or only purchase some things at your LGS and then leave without interacting with other players.

The difficulty is that these people are easy to miss, yet due to their numbers still represent significant purchasing power. Which leads to totally skewed financial results when they don’t behave as predicted by EDHREC as they choose their own path. Of course your local group(s) may behave exactly like EDHREC predicts, but more likely it will deviate to some extent, possibly barely, but likely largely. As your experience seems to be a drive towards stronger decks your group(s) may very well skew towards more competitve / expensive than EDHREC does. Other groups may very well skew more towards casual / budget. I personally skew more towards casual / expensive, as did my original Commander group (all long time players).

Personally I don’t think there’s a need to homogenize a playgroup to deal with the arms race. I do think though that talking about what different players are looking to get out of a game and what is and isn’t acceptable within the group is imperative so that there might be a gentlemen’s agreement that prevents the biggest issues that the arms race might cause.

TL;DR You may very well be right for your group, but due to the nature of the problem we can’t be sure to what extent it applies outside of our scope.