I was procrastinating with a work thing and decided to port over some of my old Wayback Machine archives I had from CubeTutor into CubeCobra (as well as saving the CSV and throwing it in Google Sheets for good measure), since I like seeing how my Cube has evolved since the summer of 2012 when I first put it together.
After doing my best to recapture the pedantic sorting season I used at the time, I hit the lovely "Compare Cubes" function with where my Cube is now, as of OTJ/BIG/OTC and
this was the result.
I've swapped out 450 cards.
450 cards is a whole Cube worth of cards. 62.5% of my Cube has been changed out in the last six years.
If you asked me to guess...actually, I probably would have gotten it pretty close. It seems like a healthy movement, even if it does make me a little melancholy. I call my primary Cube the "
California Premiership Cube" and I've made a "
California Champion's League Cube" out of rejects to help me cope with losing long-standing favorites, but even that format is shifting regularly for balance and gameplay reasons.
But back to this: I only have 270 cards that have stayed the same for the last six years. I can live with that, I think. It's probably a similar ratio to the most-played cards in most constructed formats. I figured Blue and Brown would be the most similar to how it was in 2018, and that Gold would be the most-changed, so I looked at the % of new cards by color and got this:
White: 67%
Blue: 56%
Black: 62%
Red: 67%
Green: 58%
Gold: 80%
Artifact: 57%
Land: 53%
Blue and Brown were indeed the most static (besides lands), but Green was a lot closer than I would've guessed. Gold's 80% change-out rate was even higher than I expected, as was the Land section! I didn't realize how much I've improved the mana base of my Cube in this (relatively) short amount of time.
My earliest complete archive I have for my Cube
is from midway through 2013, when my Cube was around a year old and only 450 cards.
I only have 164 cards from that rendition left, but hey, that's 36% of the 450 list and pretty close to the ratio from my 2018 list - not too bad for 11 years!
I'd love to figure out a way to honor cards that have stuck from the very beginning in the draft process. Stickers and the like would be too easy to feel through sleeves, and custom inner-sleeves would be expensive...but also, it'd be cute. Maybe if I can figure out a way to work out what cards are 100% from 2012, I could do something like this:
(I don't know why I put "since 2011" here instead of "since 2012" but it illustrates the point I hope)