I’ll be going into detail in the next article, but in short: the risk is very high and the reward very low. In the right, super grindy shell Fire will be very good. Even if the deck itself is just A Deck in Modern, such a deck would just eat into tournament time. This means that it might not be oppressive to the metagame but to tournament Magic, and that’s a pretty good reason to keep it banned.

Would you agree an unban would be Thopter/Sword 2.0? Hope we don’t see it too much but basically irrelevant to the format now, safe to release as a extra tool for one tier 4 brew?

Or is your distaste for the card sufficient to make you think it’s not worth the risk ? (I felt this way about bitterblossom)

A distinction, I report a z-test. I do a number of statistical tests once the data’s in, including t-tests, and use a number of data analysis tools to deal with the variance/sdev problems. To some extent I don’t have to know the “true” deviation because it’s a controlled experiment with a hypothesis test, but I am aware of the statistical issues so I try and confirm my test results.

Most people have very limited experience with statistics and the z-test is usually the one they actually know or at least vaguely remember from their one semester in high school. It makes sense to use the one that readers are most likely familiar with, regardless of what I actually do.

I’ve also never had a situation where switching tests yielded divergent results (i.e. significant became non-significant). Instead it’s been differences in magnitude like p=.04854 instead of p=.049, so it makes no practical difference.

In the beginning, I had some trouble where the t-test gave weird results because the data set was binary. The z-tests didn’t care so I used them exclusively, but I’ve since learned how to fix that programming error so these days it’s all about ease of understanding.