Wood Duck

[plopzito]

The Wood Duck is not particularly strong, at least not strong enough to warrant much consideration as being "powerful". I almost never face it when I play against players in the 300-500 ELO range and I find it hard to play with the 2 fruit and seed cost. # food is already alot for a low point bird and its ability only nets 1 card. It's good, but its tempered by its food cost.

TLDR: The Wood Duck is a completely fair bird and is often not worth the cost to play it.

Early Wood Duck, if played correctly, is a nearly guaranteed winner. I would say it wins over 90% if you have it in your starting hand (often by large margin too).
The reason you ‘almost never’ face it is because of a sheer number of cards in the deck, certainly not because strong players refuse to play it (also many 3xx players are not exactly strong…) Also if you get it after round 1 it may be too late and not worth playing it anymore.
Check out some of the top player’s games with Wood Duck to learn how to play it as you clearly underestimate its strength.

Making up statistics doesn't make them true. And it makes you look bad to say that I don't know how to play it. I have WORLD ELO #1 trophy for Wingspan. If I can reach World #1 player in Wingspan I'm pretty sure I know if the Wood Duck is strong or not. Maybe you should learn how to play the other birds better so you don't lose 90% of the time to the Wood Duck?

Reaching that trophy doesnt make you the Best. You might have reached it at the beginning of the season. If you cannot be above 400 always You still have to mucho to learn.

[swilkiway]

I'm a little late to the party, but I actually do have a way to calculate some stats-- I wrote a script a while back that can calculate stats for different birds based on all my games. Granted, that does mean the stats might be a little slanted since I tend to play a certain way, but it should still be a fair estimation with enough games logged (and I have a lot of them) since at most half of the players in a given game is me. Don't have access to it right now but I will run it on the Wood Duck when I have a chance and post the results here.

Even without seeing the stats, though, I am strongly in the camp of the Wood Duck being strong. I would argue it's probably better than the Big 4 in some circumstances (e.g. if you also start with Pileated Woodpecker or Chipping Sparrow), although I do think the Big 4 are more consistently overpowered and therefore are rightly banned first.

[swilkiway]

All four birds give you a net gain of one resource just like many other birds. It's absurd to ban them, especially the killdeer and franklin's gull.

I think this is an oversimplification. Yes, they net you one resource, but this statement assumes all the resources are equally valuable, which is not true at any point in the game and definitely not at the beginning. To win the game, you need birds, so your strategy (at the beginning of the game at least) revolves around getting the resources to play birds. What do you need for that?
- One bird card
- Zero to three food (I'm going to call it two on average)
- Zero or one egg (I'll say one)
The ultimate currency of the game is action cubes, so compare that to what your starting actions give you: one food, one card, two eggs. So that means that one bird costs, on average, half an egg action, one card action, and two food actions. That means at the beginning of the game, a power that gives an extra food is roughly twice as good as a power that gives an extra card, which is roughly twice as good as a power that gives an extra egg, simply because of the relative scarcity of each resource. Obviously this is an approximation since circumstances dictate how much each resource is actually worth, but I think it's a fair approximation.

Now we get to the big four. Looking at their powers, we're trading one of the most abundant (and therefore least valuable) resources for two of a scarcer resource. So while you're only netting one resource, if you convert it into action cubes, it's like you're trading half a cube for two cubes or more. That's an insanely good deal at the beginning of the game.

In addition, the ravens are exceptional because they don't give you a fixed food-- you get to take whichever food you want. That's a fair amount better than the other food-gaining powers, which are already pretty good.

I won't address the other reason they're overpowered because it's already been mentioned -- the fact that you can completely ignore an entire habitat by playing one of the big four in a different habitat.

[swilkiway]

TL;DR A 90% win rate for players who start with the wood duck is an exaggeration, but only slightly, and it's far and away the best non-big-four bird.

All right, I've got some stats. Across the course of all the two-player games I've recorded (I include only two-player games because they're easier to analyze), here's how the wood duck does. I'll compare it to the other birds people mentioned as being strong in this post: the crows, the chipping sparrow, the quail, the dove, the towhee, the gnatcatcher, and the song sparrow (and the sapsucker wasn't mentioned, but I'll include that as well since it has the same power as the gnatcatcher). Quick note on interpreting the results: margin is the average number of points above or below the average points scored in a game. For example, if player 1 scored 80 and player 2 scored 70, and player 1 had the wood duck, that would be a margin of 5 for the wood duck for that game since player 1 was 5 points above the average. I include that so you can see how big of a win each bird tends to get.

Fish Crow
Occurrences: 105
Margin: 1.5095238095238095
Wins: 58
55% win rate

American Crow
Occurrences: 97
Margin: 1.4690721649484537
Wins: 53
55% win rate

Chipping Sparrow
Occurrences: 87
Margin: 1.103448275862069
Wins: 50
57% win rate

Spotted Towhee
Occurrences: 68
Margin: -0.2867647058823529
Wins: 31
46% win rate

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher
Occurrences: 67
Margin: -1.4179104477611941
Wins: 26
39% win rate

Mourning Dove
Occurrences: 64
Margin: -0.1796875
Wins: 30
47% win rate

Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker
Occurrences: 58
Margin: 0.8793103448275862
Wins: 34
59% win rate

California Quail
Occurrences: 49
Margin: -1.7755102040816326
Wins: 18
37% win rate

Wood Duck
Occurrences: 48
Margin: 3.8020833333333335
Wins: 35
73% win rate

Song Sparrow
Occurrences: 33
Margin: -2.772727272727273
Wins: 6
18% win rate

Assuming that all the birds are roughly equal (with some only being equal in niche situations, but having fewer occurrences to balance that), you'd expect all of them to be on the winning board every other game. Most of these birds are pretty close; the wood duck, however, is on the winning board three out of four games, which is (in my unstatistical opinion) way too high to be due to chance. Well, maybe that's because the wood duck is only played in the forest one spot, whereas the other birds get played more often later in the game and that's dragging them down. We can check that. Here are the stats for all of these birds in the first spot in their best habitat (omitting the song sparrow, since BGA only records where the bird ends, not where it begins). I haven't bothered including which habitat because you can probably guess for each of them.

Chipping Sparrow
Occurrences: 37
Margin: 3.581081081081081
Wins: 26
70% win rate

American Crow
Occurrences: 33
Margin: 1.893939393939394
Wins: 17
51% win rate

Fish Crow
Occurrences: 32
Margin: 2.125
Wins: 18
56% win rate

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher
Occurrences: 32
Margin: -1.15625
Wins: 10
31% win rate

Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker
Occurrences: 27
Margin: 1.7037037037037037
Wins: 18
67% win rate

Wood Duck
Occurrences: 25
Margin: 5.54
Wins: 20
80% win rate

Spotted Towhee
Occurrences: 23
Margin: 2.0217391304347827
Wins: 14
61% win rate

Mourning Dove
Occurrences: 19
Margin: -0.3157894736842105
Wins: 8
42% win rate

California Quail
Occurrences: 14
Margin: -3.607142857142857
Wins: 3
21% win rate

This did improve the rate for most of them by a bit-- the biggest difference was for the chipping sparrow-- but still, none of them approach the wood duck's win rate of four out of five games. Improving your chances of winning by 30% simply by playing one particular bird at the beginning of the game is ridiculous. I will grant that the sample sizes for these are small, and getting more of them might help; probably no one is as interested in the stats as I am, but if you are, feel free to message me later when I have more games to draw from and I'll keep you updated.

[Lumin_S]

Here are the stats for all of these birds in the first spot in their best habitat (omitting the song sparrow, since BGA only records where the bird ends, not where it begins). I haven't bothered including which habitat because you can probably guess for each of them.

This is the relevant section for those arguing to ban Wood Duck. Ideally the comparison is a Stage 1 play but this is closeish. The Crows are more playable throughout the game as evidenced by their much higher play counts, and I think that's a point against banning Wood Duck - there's nothing to be scared of if it shows up after a certain point.

That said, what's your sample? Did you select a group of players and check all their games? Is it your games? This is also very relevant to any potential argument. What also matters are the ratings of both players in each game, and hopefully the players playing Wood Duck are right around the average rating of players in your sample.

[Mathew5000]

...

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher
Occurrences: 67
Margin: -1.4179104477611941
Wins: 26
39% win rate

...

Here are the stats for all of these birds in the first spot in their best habitat (omitting the song sparrow, since BGA only records where the bird ends, not where it begins). I haven't bothered including which habitat because you can probably guess for each of them.

...

Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher
Occurrences: 32
Margin: -1.15625
Wins: 10
31% win rate

Am I interpreting this correctly, that players in your sample whose first bird in the forest was the Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher won less than a third of the time? And if so, in your opinion is that a "real" effect, or is there some confounding influence in the data? Or is it just chance? I find this surprising because if you play it early, that adds up to a lot of free worms in the course of the game.

I'm surprised that the overall win rate of players who play this bird is only 39%, and I'm even more surprised that the bird apparently does worse in position 1 (10 wins out of 32) than in positions 2 through 5 (16 wins out of 35). Or have I misunderstood something?

[swilkiway]

That said, what's your sample? Did you select a group of players and check all their games? Is it your games? This is also very relevant to any potential argument. What also matters are the ratings of both players in each game, and hopefully the players playing Wood Duck are right around the average rating of players in your sample.

My sample is the biggest problem with these statistics, haha. I'm only drawing from my games, and I'm playing opponents from all different ELO levels (they're all at least 100 ELO, but that doesn't rule out much). That's probably the reason some birds are underperforming, too, like the gnatcatcher. The wood duck is mostly played by strong players, which skews the results to make it look stronger; the gnatcatcher is played by strong players and weak players alike, so its results are averaged out across skill levels. (As an aside, I think the gnatcatcher is actually generally worse than people assume. Lots of extra worms can be useful, but people often stack it with other birds that give extra food, and you end up with a surplus of food and not enough bird cards to spend it on. I don't have the stats on this, but I'm guessing that in games where people also get a bird that gives extra bird cards, like the ruddy duck or the yellowthroat, the gnatcatcher contributes more.)

[swilkiway]

Am I interpreting this correctly, that players in your sample whose first bird in the forest was the Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher won less than a third of the time? And if so, in your opinion is that a "real" effect, or is there some confounding influence in the data? Or is it just chance? I find this surprising because if you play it early, that adds up to a lot of free worms in the course of the game.

I'm surprised that the overall win rate of players who play this bird is only 39%, and I'm even more surprised that the bird apparently does worse in position 1 (10 wins out of 32) than in positions 2 through 5 (16 wins out of 35). Or have I misunderstood something?

Yup, you're interpreting it correctly. I'm not sure what to think of it either. I do think the gnatcatcher isn't as strong as most people think (see my previous post responding to another message), but it puzzles me greatly that it's not performing better when played in position 1. My only theory is that maybe it tends to be played in position 2 most often with a "play another bird" power, so those players are skipping straight from one food per action to three food per action, which is a huge leap, but I'm not sure that really explains it. Hopefully getting more data will explain it some.

[enbycass]

I'm not saying the Wood Duck isn't strong, but I am saying that banning so many birds when we don't even have even have the full core set feels like it's making the game more homogeneous. With ravens banned, you at least have the crows, but the Wood Duck is the only bird remotely resembling Franklin's Gull and the Kill Deer and it can't be played in the grassland. Unbanning those two and adding the swift start cards is the way to go for now, in my opinion. Then adding EE when the publisher allows.

[Madlaine]

Thank you so much for sharing statistics, I really wish such thing was added on BGA.