General Budget MTGO Cube Draft Online

[Nemo]

Running a cube draft on MTGO is a lot simpler if you don't have to trade any cards between accounts. How does one do that? Duplicate the entire cube on each account.

Most cards are cheap on MTGO. A great many cards that cost a few dollars in paper cost a few pennies online.

Online Cube Cost Example: Penny Pincher 2.0 - Inventor's Fair.
I had the good fortune to discover this cube yesterday. Here's how it looks at today's MTGO prices on a bot chain I like to use. (A ticket costs $1 on MTGO)

• Entire 360 card cube costs 31 tickets
• Cheapest 353 cards cost 10 tickets
• Cheapest 320 cards cost 2 tickets
• Cheapest 180 cards cost 0.283 tickets

Given that, it's easy for me to imagine a good cube in the range of 10 tickets or less. Even using the exact Penny Pincher 2.0 list could be reasonable.

When a handful of more expensive cards are important, those could be single shared copies that are manually traded. A few cards are much simpler to share than the entire cube. In the Penny Pincher 2.0 example, six cards account for two thirds of the cube's total online cost.

Cost for a new MTGO account: $5

Online Logistics
I was able to test dr4ft.info recently, and that was easy to use. The organizer pastes in a cube list and sets up the draft room. Then you send the link to your drafters. The draft and deck deck building interfaces are nice and simple. Each player exports their deck as a text file when done, then imports it to MTGO. The import is pretty easy, but there are two wrinkles to make it work properly: add a line break before the sideboard, and edit split card names from "Claim // Fame" to "Claim/Fame."

Interest Level?
Are some people interested in participating in a cube draft in this fashion? If so, I could help with some setup. There are some different ways to go about this.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Highly Recommend Dr4ft, but we've been using cockatrice instead as it doesn't have rules enforcement, so there's no accidentally clicking through a counter spell window

 

[Kirblinx]

We used to have a dedicated account with cards that we could use to do drafts and return them all back to the base account. Heck, we even ran a penny pincher grid draft league and that was pretty cool.

I would be keen to give any online draft a go, just there is way to much effort involved it getting the full 8 people online at the same time. We have a small community here and the overlap with that and the people willing to play on mtgo is even smaller.

If you have been doing this with others, then maybe you could suggest the some of us who are keen to join whatever online groups you have been drafting with? Then we could help hit that 8 player threshold that is required.

 

[Chriskool]

This is exactly along what I've been looking for in a post. I have been toying around with easily accessible cubing (i.e., cards are easy to obtain) and would love to expand the people I play with as well! Posted into the Riptide discord to bring some visibility.

Unfortunately, Kirblinx's experience (organizing the players) is mine as well; it's difficult coordinating cubing online. My workaround has been focusing solely on grid drafting (which has conveniently been my status quo for several years now); it is easy enough to maintain a single copy of a grid and trade with the other player on Magic Online.

I'd love to "reboot" the Pinny Pincher as Grillo's last update was Guilds of Ravnica. It seems like a lot of the new era of commons and uncommons would fit nicely into the format. That being said, I have never played Penny Pincher and feel like editing it is an affront without understanding it. (Built it in paper but haven't had a chance to play it with the virus pandemic regulating my social activities).

I can only play online using Magic Online or Arena, but that being said: some Magic Online pain points:

• Magic Online has some bugs that effectively make cards unplayable (in their expected capacity). Recently, I've learned Slimy Kavu and Zombie Trailblazer turn lands into Islands instead of Swamps. Oucher.
• Kicker X doesn't work. RIP Verdeloth the Ancient and Emblazoned Golem. If you haven't guessed, I've been playing Invasion-block-limited-inspired MTG.
• Random garbage cards are not easy to get on Magic Online. Heavenly Qilin is 19 tix. Same with Screeching Phoenix. I cannot find Gnarlback Rhino anywhere (but luckily got a copy for 4 tix...). But on the flip side... Survival of the Fittest is essentially free and the average ABU-era Mox is cheaper than a sandwich.
• All plays are FINAL! So there is no exploring other plays

 

[Nemo]

Hey, Chris. You know me as Zimbardo from MTGO.

This forum has a way of causing me to reevaluate my prior assumptions. I had considered MTGO rules enforcement to be purely an advantage of convenience relative to Cockatrice, but I guess it also creates drawbacks. I'm familiar with MTGO and enjoy it, so it's my default preference, but I'm willing to play another platform to get in some cubing.

Since getting players is hard, the first thing that comes to mind would be reducing the number needed. We could draft with 5 or 6, or put up with bots in 2-3 seats. We could also select a smaller cube, although the Penny Pincher 2.0 cube has a lot of appeal. I brought up that one in hopes that some people who've already studied it or played it might be interested.

It's theoretically possible that somebody with less time might do just the draft portion to get the queue up to 8 people and then the people who have time could stick around and play matches. Even if 4 people played matches, that's enough to play against three different cube decks.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I'll weigh in here because I think it's an interesting topic and Nemo makes a nice proposal for how to run a cube. $10 or so could give you an all-access pass to cube drafting online, and if there were a standardized list that was pushed around, I could see it getting some critical mass. Realistically, you would need it to catch on beyond the Riptide Lab circle to the wider cubing community. Some publicity in the right places could get it going.

Additionally, people who want to dip their toes in the water don't even really have to buy the whole cube. Just buy drafted cards as they go along. Even getting all the cards from something like mtgotraders can be a bit tedious, and one could imagine a scenario where an organizer of this sells bundles for a fixed price to cut out the hassle. (X tickets for all the cards).

The trading on MTGO really is a nightmare, and absolutely out of the question to do in a wholly public manner.

A couple weeks ago I was brainstorming some sort of hybrid approach. It doesn't scratch the itch for 8-player drafting, but you could imagine a drafting format where, say, you split the cardpool into two 180-card subpools. Then you draft in some mechanism, but only include in your deck cards from one subpool or another. Then you can play decks from the other subpool without dealing with card trading. This does, however, require account sharing, which has its own set of problems.

A dream scenario would be some sort of integrated cube hosting within MTGO, which they could even monetize. But such a thing is surely nowhere near the radar.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

How cool would it be if you could host your own phantom cube?

 

[Nemo]

Even getting all the cards from something like mtgotraders can be a bit tedious, and one could imagine a scenario where an organizer of this sells bundles for a fixed price to cut out the hassle. (X tickets for all the cards). The trading on MTGO really is a nightmare, and absolutely out of the question to do in a wholly public manner.

Two things makes it pretty easy to get the whole list from a bot. Doing these makes it pretty easy to buy the entire cube in one visit.
1) No cards in the cube that hard to find on MTGO, such as cards exclusive to planeswalker decks.
2) Make a .dek file available that has card version info. This way, when you create a wish list from the imported dek file, it will only have card versions that are easy to find on bot chains.

Realistically, you would need it to catch on beyond the Riptide Lab circle to the wider cubing community.

In that case, choosing the right type of cube is important. There's a tricky balance between making the cube good, cheap, and not too far from peoples' expectations of what a cube is supposed to look like. On that last point, the Penny Pincher 2.0 cube would be a little jarring for a lot of people, and it also seems pretty complex to figure out how to draft it. Something closer to The Elegant Cube, of which I am a fan boy, seems appropriate. That one costs more to buy online, but its value is similarly concentrated in the top few percent of its cards. I'm sure it could be a basis for a $10 cube.

The idea of two 180 card cubes that can combine is pretty interesting. I'm confident that a fun draft experience can be created with a four player 180 card cube, and that could act as a viable bridge to a larger community of people that has the actual possibility of firing an 8 person event.

 

[Nemo]

My workaround has been focusing solely on grid drafting (which has conveniently been my status quo for several years now); it is easy enough to maintain a single copy of a grid and trade with the other player on Magic Online.

Did you see that CubeCobra has just released a grid drafting feature that includes a 2 player local mode? Now it's easy to host a grid draft. The host shares their screen and clicks the appropriate rows for Player 2, then sends a link to the deck after the draft. Player 2 goes to that link and does clone and rebuild on the player 2 deck. Then import to Cockatrice or MTGO. This seems pretty slick. Using a Chris style budget grid like M-Origins (3 tickets), this would be another cheap way to cube draft on MTGO.

 

[Chriskool]

Using a Chris style budget grid like M-Origins (3 tickets), this would be another cheap way to cube draft on MTGO.

Thanks! The only problem with M-Origins is Gnarlback Rhino is impossible to buy on MTGO. I bought one when I built the grid in May from Goatbots for 3.3 (they had one additional at the time); now, I haven't been able to find a second at any price.

 

[Nemo]

Thanks! The only problem with M-Origins is Gnarlback Rhino is impossible to buy on MTGO. I bought one when I built the grid in May from Goatbots for 3.3 (they had one additional at the time); now, I haven't been able to find a second at any price.

That's pretty irritating! That answers the question of which card I was missing out of the 162 card list.