I think people should adopt the ATW or WATT Rating I suggested years ago for power level. Average Turn Win or Wins After This Turn. In a game of Goldfish/solitaire what is the average turn that your deck achieves a winning board state with no interaction.

This can be achieved with a hardlock, a critical mass of stax pieces, a combo loop, infinite turn loop, mill win, massive board state of creatures, etc. What turn over say about ten games does your deck achieve its win-con?

We can then apply these figures into the suggested brackets the following way

0-3.5 = 4th Bracket

4-6.5 = 3rd Bracket

7 - 9.5= 2nd Bracket

10+ = 1st Bracket.

 

In testing my Cedh Teferi listed the following data points giving me an average of 3.5 which gives me a rating of a tier 4 deck: 1,2,3,3,3,3,4,4,5,6. Key Point, you should always round to the next .5 for your calculations when averaging to account for player error ie missed triggers.

 

This type of system would allow other people to objectively verify your deck. It would also allow people to play powerful cards for flavor while placing them into the right pods for the real power level of the build of their deck. This system would also allow wotc to properly identify powerful cards that break the format as opposed to cards that people "dislike" playing against. For example Rhystic Study can be assumed to draw you at least 1 card per turn cycle in a casual game, not much better than a Phyrexian Arena. In a competitive game where people are attempting to combo off quickly it can average 10 cards per turn cycle over a period of 2 turns and then the game is over. If put into a deck does it increase the power level of the deck or is it the power level of the other decks at a table that increases its power level? These are important questions that this system could help to answer.

A Machine learning algorithm can be programmed to run these simulations for decklists pretty rapidly. It can even account for player error and determine whether a card is only good because players play against it poorly or whether it create situations that are genuinely difficult to interact with.

There are a lot of tools that someone can use to Goldfish/Solitaire a deck. I prefer to use MoxField.com That being said I wonder what other data points other people would be able to come up with. Perhaps with enough data we can start working on a way to document and create an actual teir list of deck builds and strategies.

It would also be interesting to see if we take these decks and put them into different pods against each other  to see what additional data we can record. Like does the WATT rating of a deck make it consistently stronger in pods against lower WATT rated decks? Do certain decks scale their WATT Rating with the table, ei Tergrid God of Fright?