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Yeah, the article's excellent. Feels like it distills a lot of discussion that's been had here and then goes beyond it. For me, the "eliminate the "leap of faith"" section was particularly well put; the way it expresses the need for cards to blend power and synergy in order to draw people into...

A perfectly fair little WW deck. - Baleful Strix was never castable. Mana didn't stretch that far. - I didn't draw Time Walk and Black Lotus much. Mana Crypt showed up often enough. - It did go 3-0. Lingering Souls was the all-star. Skullclamp also did a lot of work. - Some games were pretty...

I get this. I linked Pascal Maynard's article in a thread a little while ago: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/draft-fundamentals/ "Even though sets are getting more synergy-focused, you want to start with a card that has raw power and that you would likely end up playing no matter what...

I mean, you could say the same about Batterskull: players pick it p1p1 all the time and it ends up in all sorts of decks. Is this a good thing?

I don't think all first pickable stuff needs to commit you in a direction but if the cube's dense enough in good stuff that five or six picks in you're just picking good stuff, I feel that it's dangerous for you to end up with a powerful deck. I feel picking a strategy and drafting it well...

I think it's possible to run exciting powerful cards that impose some constraints on what you're doing. Wraths would be a classic example: you need to think a bit more about how to make them fit, you can't just jam them into any old white deck. If you're playing green, though, what deck can't...

Some really interesting points. As a player, it feels comforting to put the most powerful cards you can in your deck, and frustrating to be overpowered by other people playing one card that crushes all the advantages you've been working up to until now. The obviously good, all-round cards are...

I've slept, I'm cooler-headed, and I would like to apologise for some of the more frustrated stuff I was typing last night, and try to lay out clearly the argument I've been developing and which I think Grillo and I now have some level of mutual understanding of despite my perhaps poor attempts...

Quirion Ranger is a really cool card. I've seen it do so much work in Pauper Stompy. It's more interesting than something like Kiora's Follower because sometimes, returning that land is a real trade-off, and sometimes it's basically mana ramp.

I think there's a lot to be said for contextual removal. Most of us have more creatures in our cube than any other card type, and getting to a more nuanced understanding than "does this give me value as soon as it hits the board?" is I think a possible key to additional format longevity. Might...

Well, one thing I think the Penny Pincher Cube is good at is providing a wide variety of cards which are hard to evaluate without knowing what else is in the format. A really obvious example is Trinket Mage, whose value fluctuates with the one-mana artifacts available, but cards with Heroic and...

I like this. Not unplayably bad, presumably, but something that looks first-pickable that you should be taking 6th? Players do come in with preconceptions of how good cards were in their original formats, and Wizards every so often does a sneaky reprint of a past great which isn't so great in...

I think there's a lot of mileage to be had out of discussing what makes formats hard to solve - and what makes them enjoyable to play, and whether those are the same things. In theory, Cube should be starting at a huge advantage over other formats here, with so many highly interactive cards, but...

Well, it's often easy to express the empirical details of what's happening, and maybe separate them from the proposed cause. People are playing bouncelands less - presumably because they've seen what happens when they get destroyed. People are playing edicts again because some decks give good...

Grillo: this is not semantics. Semantics would be if we were discussing the same concepts using different language. We do not appear to be conceptually on the same page. That you do not realise the very substantial difference in the concepts concerns me, and yes, frustrates me. I feel like you...

The problem is the notion of metagames, of reacting to metagames, of treating the format as a metagame rather than a solveable game. It's absolutely true that people's evaluations of cards will change as they get used to them within the format, that their evaluations will grow nuanced as they...

Basically, my frustration is that the terms being used are still terms from the videos which are not simplified, but flat wrong in almost every respect. We end up discussing real phenomena but the model is nonsense. e.g. This idea is bad and wrong and it needs to die.

The problem is you still keep using terms like "pushed threat", as though imbalancing things made any difference, and "first order optimal strategy", like it was meaningful, and saying things like this: WHICH DOES NOT EXIST. You can make a format deeper, harder to solve, etc, but that does not...

Now, it's not much use looking at the Nash equilibrium for Brainstorm or whatever. We aren't going to have data at a level which we can use to make useful pronouncements on it. The interesting level is more at the point of decks and archetypes. The Nash equilibrium effectively arrives when...

Ugh. I've been staying off this thread because I'm tired, and busy, and this requires an epic injection of game theory to be useful, but it feels like it has to be done. I don't want to spend my weekend on this though. Grillo, for the love of all things beautiful, go read up on minimax and...