General Cubing topics you'd like to see covered in article form

[Eric Chan]

Yeah, I guess the big divide is whether or not you do an "inventory" after each draft. I only cube once a month these days, so that's infrequent enough that I usually have 10-20 cards I want to swap out after each event, with the number going up to 30-40 whenever a new set's released. When I make big swaps like that, it makes sense for me to sort out my whole cube by colour first.

Whereas, I can see that if you draft bi-weekly or weekly, this introduces a lot of additional overhead that might not be worthwhile.

 

[Ferritovore]

I've actually stolen a shuffling method I found on the /r/mtgcube subreddit. It takes a little more time and effort than normal shuffling, but has a big upside: it's not actual random distribution, but something more akin to the pseudo-random seeding that Wizards does with retail boosters.

Wow Eric that is REALLY huge information! Anyone who didn't click Eric's link, note this: using "normal" shuffling, only half of your packs will actually contain all 5 colors.

using traditional shuffling in an 8-man draft, approximately 9-10 out of the 24 packs will be missing a color. ~2 packs will be missing two colors. 12-13 should have all five colors. Using my modified shuffling method, ~7 packs will be missing a color. ~0-1 pack will be missing two. 16-17 should have all five.

This should totally go up on the website somewhere, so that more people can see it! It doesn't have to be a long article. But people read them! Due to articles I thought that Lifegain Subthemes were considered a good thing around here until I saw people cracking jokes about it on the side in threads.

Packs missing all sorts of colors is NOT how normal set drafting works! Cubes are SUPER different from normal card packs if everyone is just shuffling cubes up and not knowing about highly influencing-the-draft tidbits of information like this! I'm going to reshuffle my cube now just to fix this. Well, maybe I won't, because then I'll feel obligated to make the next wave of additions and subtractions, which could take hours and I must sleep.

---- Maybe for grid draft you could put 2 from each pile thus making "packs" of 10 which leads to a tiny bit of overlap but still ensuring each grid of 9 has pretty good variety. There are just some days in a grid draft where several packs go by with nothing you want, so you just hate draft which is not ideal.

---- Cubes that are heavy on artifacts and multicolor might benefit from a modification that ensures one pack isn't all artifacts and the next one is all gold?

 

[Jason Waddell]

---- Maybe for grid draft you could put 2 from each pile thus making "packs" of 10 which leads to a tiny bit of overlap but still ensuring each grid of 9 has pretty good variety. There are just some days in a grid draft where several packs go by with nothing you want, so you just hate draft which is not ideal.

This method doesn't have lands or artifacts or multicolor cards.

I wrote an article about it, but in my experience Grid gets wayyyyyy better when you use just 4 colors instead of 5.

 

[Ferritovore]

Cool, I haven't read that one yet!

The reddit person's Everything Else pile starts out as: "

• Multicolor/Hybrid/Colorless/Land (120 cards)"

 

[Jason Waddell]

Cool, I haven't read that one yet!

That's because it hasn't been published yet.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Inform us when that happens btw, Channelfireball doesn't get visited as often as it likely should in my house

 

[MCMcEmcee]

I just spend a few minutes every other day or so grabbing a few random groups of cards out of my cube, shuffling them together, sticking them back into the cube, and repeating this process till I get bored.

 

[Ferritovore]

Many entertaining superstitions and bad science here:
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/334925-all-about-shuffling

If you click Variants, then click Hot, you can see the most popular variant draft methods that might be interesting to discuss in forum and/or article here:
https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/463/magic-gathering#forums

 

[Jason Waddell]

Would you guys be interested in a Point Counterpoint cube series? If so, propose some controversial topics. Or something you're curious about.

 

[James Stevenson]

Would you guys be interested in a Point Counterpoint cube series? If so, propose some controversial topics. Or something you're curious about.

I would love to read an article concluding something from/discussing the Has Mana Fixing Gone Too Far (sic) thread, cuz I am interested and can't be bothered to read the thread.

 

[Chriskool]

...can't be bothered to read...

+1 for working discussions into articles. There are so many great discussions here that would be awesome in article form (and I can even be bothered to read- they just are hard to follow in their current incarnations).

 

[Kirblinx]

Would you guys be interested in a Point Counterpoint cube series? If so, propose some controversial topics. Or something you're curious about.

I would love to read an article concluding something from/discussing the Has Mana Fixing Gone Too Far (sic) thread, cuz I am interested and can't be bothered to read the thread.

Yeah, generally there are some stronger voices than others in certain discussions (Mana Fixing Gone Too Far, Perfect Imbalance) and they generally are in point/counterpoint sequence anyway. Is it worth seeing if other forum members are willing to contribute/write articles?
As I feel that Eric would be one side on the Mana Fixing Article and Grillo is one side on the Perfect Imbalance. The other side can be either the article writer (Jason) or maybe another forum member (Ahadabans has been pumping out some decent walls of text in those forums).

I've tried to glean what I can from those threads, but man, the amount of words in some of those replies keep me up at night. My attention span must be terrible.

 

[Aoret]

I've tried to glean what I can from those threads, but man, the amount of words in some of those replies keep me up at night. My attention span must be terrible.

More isn't necessarily better. Half of writing is deleting shit you thought was clever when you wrote it. But yeah, condensing some of this stuff into articles is a good idea. Maybe multiple authorship could be a thing? I dunno

 

[vennythekid]

Half of writing is deleting shit you thought was clever when you wrote it.

Ah, so you've figured out how I operate on internet forums!