General CBS

[shamizy]

Neat that they introduced a voucher option that'll be viable for most people, unfortunately my system having extra steps makes it a little tougher to implement 1-to-1 on Cobra. For traditional vouchers/squadron picks it's going to work very well just giving you the copies of whatever card(s) you need, but mine has the caveat of limitations to cashing in once per card and having to draft the actual copy of the card.

I'll probably just have to continue including the voucher options in the land box for a drafter to manually add to their Cobra decks online.

All that said, this is a pretty handy tool with some neat possibilities. I ran it for 300 in the background while working on stuff and it came out with some cool outputs:



Expected color distributions here, nothing out of the ordinary with the base breakdown.



26 clusters in my 450 sounds about right, I'm liking the criss-crossing overlap showing the ability to bleed between archetypes. I'm assuming that running for more simulations will leader to more dense clusters like @Erik Twice got with 500. Maybe I'll just go with 1000 or something at the beginning of work next week and see what happens by the end of it.



I like the visualization of these clusters with staples and other stats, really cool feature to nerd out over for hours at a time. The bots definitely have their limitations overall, but this looks way better than previous bot logic applied in single drafts. It identified just about every major archetype I've built over the years or covered in my cube primer.

 

[MusicalBen]

38 clusters found after 400 drafts

Many of these are repeated, which, after looking into the decks, sometimes makes sense and sometimes doesn't. The two "W Weenie" clusters, for example, roughly refer to two distinct groups of cards, a tokens build and an artifact aggro build. Yet, the two "WG midrange" decks have essentially the same staple cards...

Some of the themes that bridge certain colors are not represented, even though they are not an issue to draft in the cube, such as the White-Black Constellation/Saga Control deck. I think the nuances of this deck and these colors might too fine-grained for the CubeCobra bots, with options ranging/blending between Liliana's Contract/Changeling combo, Demonic Pact Blink, low-power-matters reanimator (Shirei, Shizo's Caretaker, Vesperlark, Triskelion) and so on.

Green and Red turned to be the least drafted combination, and the strange assortment of cards chosen by the bots reflect the variety of decks which might be drafted in these colors but which are, nevertheless, not always overlapping: tappers/untappers, land storm, madness, power-matters, etc.

Something I didn't expect, Dimension X Pizzasaur was the second highest picked card, being taken P1P1 98% of the time.

 

[OlegKlishin]

I played around a bit with my old cube and my WIP cube. Tried 100, 300 and 1000 drafts. At 1000 there are ton of extraneous data, like 4 same WR weenie archetypes. Also, bots obviously can't figure more niche archetypes. They figured out enchantments as WG midrange, but completely ignored BG and BW enchantments.

While I get that you can take lessons from how things connect on the map, I struggle to imagine how exactly to analyze the data to learn something actually useful. I'd be interested if someone more knowledgeable can point out what's valuable except obvious toy factor.

 

[Mown]

It's a cute tool, but it relies on a relative degree of normalcy. It can draft a storm deck in my cube and it looks quite competent, because it knows that Lion's Eye Diamond and Yawgmoth's Will often appear together in the same decks. On the other hand, it doesn't have the knowledge base to think about drafting Stoneforge Mystic and Trinket Mage to fetch Giantcraft Helm that buffs Disruptor of Currents and Ethereal Forager. To the contrary, the "exemplary" WB weenie deck plays a Stoneforge with no targets; the tool is more keen to pair the card with Ranger-Captain of Eos than Pre-War Formalwear (although they are both strongly associated). Ultimately, the bots are really good at building uninspired and boring decks that miss the point of the cube, so I struggle to see what utility I would get out of it. If I had a ton of drafts of my cube and ran it on only that data then you could maybe draw some fun conclusions.

It also picks the three SOS cards I just added 100% of the time with seemingly no context, so you get fun things like white weenies splashing Tragedy Feaster off 0 black sources.

 

[Erik Twice]

I did try with 2500 draftrs, but it doesn't lead to better data since it runs into limitations with duplication and clustering. The data is pretty much identical to 500, it's just repeated more times. It's also hard to adjust it to a reasonable level.

If sorting by colour, rather than just clusters, I think one can easily see the problem with green in my cube. Green is to the left, very heavily clustered around the lands archetype. It has UG ramp below and BG midrange on top, but little WG and, most importantly, no GR.

This makes sense since WG, UG and GR are historically weak guilds with little support and lack of powerful interaction or archetypes.

 

[Nanonox]

While I get that you can take lessons from how things connect on the map, I struggle to imagine how exactly to analyze the data to learn something actually useful.

Whether it's correct or not, I am treating the data as a way to show the more obvious archetypes that a cube contains. Another leap of dubious logic and now I'm equating that to what a newer player would find signals for.

I'll be posting more in my blog, but for example my lands/ramp cluster doesn't really communicate with the storm one, even though they should go well together. So as a more obvious signal, I am thinking of adding Sail into the West, a card I've considered before, but not as an explicit signpost to go into Simic combo.