General CBS

Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Chris Taylor said:
So perhaps I should give more of an introduction than "Woah"

Spectral Chaos is one of Magic's first planned expansions, planned to be released a bit before Legentds IIRC.
So yes, this set is jank. A lot of early magic was. But it's interesting to see what had been planned.

They also admit this had NOT been playtested yet, or even developed. There's a RW enchantment that draws you 11 cards when it comes into play for pete's sake :p
Click to expand...

Sure, but your opponent also gets to draw 10 cards, so it's fair! :rolleyes:

Wasn't this set designed by one person as well?
 
Brad

Brad

Chris Taylor said:
So perhaps I should give more of an introduction than "Woah"

Spectral Chaos is one of Magic's first planned expansions, planned to be released a bit before Legentds IIRC.
So yes, this set is jank. A lot of early magic was. But it's interesting to see what had been planned.

They also admit this had NOT been playtested yet, or even developed. There's a RW enchantment that draws you 11 cards when it comes into play for pete's sake :p
Click to expand...

Ah, so these are actual untested WOTC cards?
 
Velrun

Velrun

I didn’t know this. Thanks for bringing this up Chris!

I mean Wizards officially printed a 1 mana spell in black that draws 7 cards. But it got banned pretty quick :p
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
From mtg wiki:
Spectral Chaos was a Magic expansion set developed by Barry Reich for Wizards of the Coast in the early 1990s. It was never released. Parts of this set (e.g. Domain) were used in the design for Tempest and Invasion

While helping design and playtest Ice Age and Alliances, Barry got the idea to develop a multicolored themed set, and was given the green light to begin work designing. Conceptual design was underway even before Alpha was released in 1993, and development and multiple rounds of playtesting continued over several years into the mid-1990s, as the newly popular company was finishing designs for Ice Age, Alliances, Mirage and other sets of the era. After four rounds of playtesting, Spectral Chaos was submitted to WotC in 1995 (and again in 1997). Apparently out of fear that the public wouldn’t want a multicolor-themed set right after Legends (which introduced multicolored spells to the world), WotC decided not to release the full Spectral Chaos set. Instead many of Barry’s ideas were incorporated into other early expansion sets.
 
Velrun

Velrun

How many people here use CubeCobra?

1. What does it cost to use?
2. Does it support custom cards?
3. Is it possible to move cards around in the visual spoiler at ease?
4. Is it possible to have a certain amount of columns so it doesn't change depending on your browser and other stuff? (I want 5 columns like CubeTutor)
5. Is it still being updated/upgraded every now and then?
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
Velrun said:
How many people here use CubeCobra?

1. What does it cost to use?
2. Does it support custom cards?
3. Is it possible to move cards around in the visual spoiler at ease?
4. Is it possible to have a certain amount of columns so it doesn't change depending on your browser and other stuff? (I want 5 columns like CubeTutor)
5. Is it still being updated/upgraded every now and then?
Click to expand...
1. It is completely free to use, though they are figuring out how they can reward patrons with non-essential rewards behind the scenes. Basically they're looking in the realm of cosmetics like, e.g., Path of Exile (the game, not the card). If you do want to be a patron, you can be one for as little as $1 per month: https://www.patreon.com/cubecobra
2. The support is reasonably good. Though you still have to use existing cards as placeholders, you can use a custom image URL and set various other characteristics. I'ld say it's at least on par with CubeTutor, if not better, except that you need to upload your images on an external site. I took a screenshot for you to show how I used Firedrinker Satyr as the base for a custom card.
22F9518A-5813-4BCB-B7DC-F6682D509CB2.jpeg
3. I don't know exactly what you are asking here. In any case, CubeCobra sorts your cards based on certain characteristics, and you can change the characteristics of your cards. So, if you change the casting cost of a custom card, for example, you can update the casting cost and the custom image URL of your custom placeholder in CubeCobra, after which it will automatically show up in a logical spot.
4. You can not dictate how many columns are shown in the visual spoiler. You can switch between small, medium, and large size images, but the amount of 'columns' then depends on your resolution. On my iPad, for example, medium will result in six columns, while on my work laptop medium results in eight columns. Technically there are no columns though, instead the images are shown in a large row with line breaks.
5. CubeCobra is regularly updated. There is a dev blog (https://cubecobra.com/dev/blog/0) that shows the last update was 4 weeks ago (as of October the 9th). New releases occur roughly every 2 to 4 weeks, so I'm expecting a new release pretty soon.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Velrun said:
How many people here use CubeCobra?

1. What does it cost to use?
2. Does it support custom cards?
3. Is it possible to move cards around in the visual spoiler at ease?
4. Is it possible to have a certain amount of columns so it doesn't change depending on your browser and other stuff? (I want 5 columns like CubeTutor)
5. Is it still being updated/upgraded every now and then?
Click to expand...

Bootman covered most of this, but it's worked great for me
Not sure about 4
 
Velrun

Velrun

1. Free
Great! And Patreon is 1$ which is super fine as well!

2. Upload to a different site.
Is it not possible to upload a card directly onto CubeCobra or am I understanding this wrong?

3. Like CubeTutor
Great!

4. No
Okay so this is a deal breaker for me. In my opinion it would be simple to give the cube owner the option to have their cube listed in 1-7 rows. I was hoping your answer would be “Yes you can choose how many columns your list will be listed as AND you can also choose for each row. So if you want row 1 to have 1 column and row 2 to have 6, you can so so.” That would have been awesome :)

5. Update regularly
Great! This is obviously the most important aspect of the product! CubeCobra is going places!

CubeCobra wins on many levels but I don’t think it will be possible for me to use yet. I expect the issues I have with the site is not shared by everyone but you cannot have a website that looks different for each person checking in. Not unless you want a different experience for each person checking in.
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Velrun said:
but you cannot have a website that looks different for each person checking in.
Click to expand...


Speaking as someone who has done web design, that's... how things work. Even if you don't explicitly design your site to take different screen-sizes into account, the fact that one person is looking at a 1920x1080 laptop screen and another person is looking at teeny-tiny phone screen will already force images and text to reflow.
 
sigh

sigh

Also not sure why that would be a priority and would like to know. I don't like visual spoilers anyways though; way too many pictures to take in. Just give me a list.


To be fair to phone screens, most are greater resolution than 1920 x 1080 (Galaxy S7 is 1440 x 2560 for instance)
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
ravnic said:
May I ask why the size/number of rows/columns is so important for you, Velrun?
Click to expand...

Velrun is using CT for his Coliseum "Cube", which has custom character cards with upgrade paths, amongst other things. It's a very cool concept, but it requires quite a specific layout to make sense of. CT has a fixed number cards per row in the visual spoiler, iirc. CC, a more modern site, is built with responsive design in mind, meaning it scales to the screen of the user, regardless of whether they are visiting the site on a big old computer with a high resolution screen, or a crummy old android device with a small screen. Responsive design is considered good practice, it's exactly how you want your site to behave, but in Velrun's specific case it's actually a downside.

CT Link: http://www.cubetutor.com/visualspoiler/66309
RiptideLab link: https://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/the-coliseum.2054/
 
Velrun

Velrun

Bootman is right (Edit: Except for the link. See further below)

My cube list of the actual draftable cards does not have to be in a specific order or with a certain amount of rows or columns. The rest does if I want to present the tournament properly. It coooooould work without but it wouldn’t be an upgrade from my CubeTutor = No need to switch from CT to CubeCobra.

So it sounds like Cobra is the superior product to most people.

As regards to websites looking different. It might be how they function behind the screen but the viewer experience is almost always the same except for some shady sites. Imagine if you entered Riptidelab and it would look totally different each time. And I don’t mean in an organized way but imagine if the makro buttons you were going to click or ‘finger click’ on like Cube Talk, CBS, Single Card Spotlight and Fight Club etc. were all over the place on the screen.

Anyways I thank you for the help. I think I will have to stick with expensive CubeTutor for now but I would appreciate it if someone could ping me if they ever change Cobra in a way where you can choose how many columns your entire set or each row should have.

Thanks <3
 
Onderzeeboot

Onderzeeboot

Ecstatic Orb
If you're interested in a few examples of responsive design: https://responsivedesign.is/examples/

It's not about putting buttons in wildly different places, though that sometimes is necessary to keep a site accessible on smaller screens. It's about maximizing readability and usability on different screen sizes. If that means you have to move some buttons, then that's what you do, but you still want them to be in a logical order in a logical place.
 
ravnic

ravnic

How many creatures are too many? Blue is the only color in my cube where creatures make up less than 50 percent of the color's section (49%). White, black and red are around 60 to 61% (not counting token making spells, which would bring red and white to something around 68%. Green is the creature heaviest color with 70% creatures, not counting a few token producing spells. At least in colorless I have just 36% creatures, multicolor is average with 60%.

Overall I have 52% creatures in my cube, 57% if you count noncreatures that have no other purpose than making tokens.

Are your numbers very different?
 
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