List ideas here. They can be things that you already have opinions on (and would like to see advertised), or things you would like to learn more about yourself.
General Cubing topics you'd like to see covered in article form
- Thread starter Jason Waddell
- Start date
Every single comment Grillo makes.
That guy is insightful!
That guy is insightful!
If only more crickets could talk. The world's problems would be solved by now!
On a scale of 1 to infinite, how expensive would the lands thing be to implement on MODO?
Aoret
Developer
I was thinking through that right after I posted actually. The wastelands are easy given our gentleman's agreement on strip mine. I've never fired off a full 8 man so I'm not 100% sure how that would impact it. I've done 6 mans a few times, didn't count fetches but I know that my giant stacks of 20 were wayyy overboard.
My suggestion: do the next 1-2 drafts as normal, but make the request of all participants that they list what fetches they would run in their manabase assuming they had access to everything they'd want. My guess is that a playset of each is probably sufficient, though I might be wrong.
Most of the demand on the fetches actually just comes from people running off color ones, which are easy to swap out for alternatives.
My suggestion: do the next 1-2 drafts as normal, but make the request of all participants that they list what fetches they would run in their manabase assuming they had access to everything they'd want. My guess is that a playset of each is probably sufficient, though I might be wrong.
Most of the demand on the fetches actually just comes from people running off color ones, which are easy to swap out for alternatives.
- A top 10 favorites list could be a fun read
- How to push fringier archetypes and/or support them without being poison-y (Enchantress, Reanimator, UB Tezz etc.)
- More card spotlights when a new set is out (or at least just cover your favorite card spoiled from the set)
- Articles on archetypes that people could implement within their cubes; like that GW Lifegain article on CFB got me into Cube in the first place
- With fixing as good as it is, what incentives do you need to push people into fewer colors?
Aoret
Developer
1. He actually needs very little help. I guess maybe a decent collection of trinkets for your trinket mage? He's a very compact archetype which is sweet
2. Still haven't really gotten a satisfactory explanation on this whole counters theme despite reading the thread about 85 times. I feel like I'm doing it wrong cause it feels like it sucks.
3. You just put the fear in them.
I would like a sort of compressed article of the Perfect Imbalance thread. I have read bits and pieces of it, but when all I see is walls of text, my attention span goes elsewhere. There is some pure gold in there and I would love that it could get extracted for myself and non-riptiders to drown in pure unadulterated cubing theory.
Squad cubing is another avenue that only has just been scraping the surface. It seems like a great way to burn through cube ideas quickly. Would love to see what more it has to offer (respect to Blacksmithy for being the pioneer).
An updated version of drafting methods with less than 8 people. Some more methods have been devised since the last one. How do the decks play compared to the older drafting methods?
Squad cubing is another avenue that only has just been scraping the surface. It seems like a great way to burn through cube ideas quickly. Would love to see what more it has to offer (respect to Blacksmithy for being the pioneer).
An updated version of drafting methods with less than 8 people. Some more methods have been devised since the last one. How do the decks play compared to the older drafting methods?
Yeah I wouldn't mind hearing a summary of that thread. I have the same problem, especially with overly philosophical/fluffy threads that I don't have the brains to implement in my cube.
This one is on my list. Does somebody have a link to that MTGS format with the burning and the whatnots?
I have updates to Grid and Tenchester that make it way better.
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/...limpse-burnfour-draft-thread-my-and-wtwlf123s
also in your article you should totally use the name "MTGS format with the burning and the whatnots", that's way better than the real name
also in your article you should totally use the name "MTGS format with the burning and the whatnots", that's way better than the real name
Does anybody think an article series comparing similar cards, and how they interact with different themes would be useful? I was thinking along the lines of clone varients for instance, with pro's and con's for each of them.
I would like to see those. I am forever on a quest for an engaging 2-player cube experience.
Quilting is pretty fun. I could write up something for it, covered it briefly in my Cube thread like a week back.
Laz
Developer
I think there has been a lot of developments that have come out of this forum since I read an ancient cube article called 'Learning from Legacy'.
Given a lot of the discussion that has happened in the last couple of months, much of which has been driven by Grillo, maybe we need a 'Learning from Pauper: Designing Interesting Aggressive Decks' article, though I am not sure the thinking around that has completely crystallised yet. There is probably some value in trying to wrestle with the concept by attempting to get the words down on paper.
Given a lot of the discussion that has happened in the last couple of months, much of which has been driven by Grillo, maybe we need a 'Learning from Pauper: Designing Interesting Aggressive Decks' article, though I am not sure the thinking around that has completely crystallised yet. There is probably some value in trying to wrestle with the concept by attempting to get the words down on paper.
I would like to see some report style articled where an idea was tried out and we present our results from that trial run. Preferably in the style of analysis -> guess of game play impact -> ' tourney report ' -> evaluation and some more analysis. Doing some hard work and not just theory crafting.
I have to agree, this would be sweet. We could use the MODO cube drafts going on here to get some of that data for analysis, no? We should be able to figure out what cards are being taken when in the draft, which ones are being played, and their overall impact on games, etc.
I'd like to see an analysis of a cube's creature suite for combat purposes with respect to time. I've always found the "magic" power/toughness to be very interesting for Limited environments (e.g., 6 toughness can block a 2-powered creature and will always survive unless deathtouch or two tricks are involved). Also, it's interesting to find out how infrequent evasion and cards that interact with evasive threats occur in packs to prioritize them during drafting AND in games (kill theirs, protect ours).
Edit: The end result of this could be some sort of calculator that intakes a card list and outputs the key unaugmented power/toughness as well as what augmentation is most powerful for killing another creature in combat and/or surviving combat.
Edit: The end result of this could be some sort of calculator that intakes a card list and outputs the key unaugmented power/toughness as well as what augmentation is most powerful for killing another creature in combat and/or surviving combat.
Shuffling! This is the biggest stack of cards I've ever had to shuffle and I hate it. What is your Really Thorough shuffle when you need to un-sort your color-sorted stacks? What's your quick shuffle method when you believe it's already pretty decently randomized?
Also, the pros and cons of alternative draft formats! I've played grid draft a few times now, but waddell recently mentioned that as a draft format it's sloppy and imprecise, which rewards generalist decks and restricts narrow decks. I'd never thought about that before!
Also, the pros and cons of alternative draft formats! I've played grid draft a few times now, but waddell recently mentioned that as a draft format it's sloppy and imprecise, which rewards generalist decks and restricts narrow decks. I'd never thought about that before!
Just get you drafters to help. We all sit down and shuffle everything together and shoot the shit, it's nice.
Uh... so, actually, a lot of my drafters suck at this. They take like 60 cards and shuffle them over and over. That doesn't do a lot. What I do is:
1) place the cube into 8-10 piles
2) take the top 5-6 cards of each pile and shuffle them into a new stack.
3) repeat step 2 until the original piles are gone.
4) now take two halves of different stacks and shuffle them together. repeat until satisfied.
The key to shuffling a big set of cards is to cross-pollinate your piles.
Side point, some people don't even know how to shuffle a single stack properly. Say you split your deck for a sideways shuffle: [Cards 1-30] [Cards 31-60]
If you combine them like this, you are WRONG:
[Cards 1-30]
----[Cards 31-60]
Card 60 will always stay on the bottom (and some others with it), and Card 1 stays on the top! Instead, you have to cross over the other way:
-----[Cards 1-30]
[Cards 31-60]
This way all cards get shuffled after a couple rounds. Card 31 will go to the top, and then a little lower the next iteration, and everything gets churned around.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgcube/comments/34fet8/novel_method_for_shuffling_a_cube/
Basically, the problem with real randomness is that you get some crazy spikes in variance - packs with 10 red cards, or 11 lands. This isn't as uncommon as you would think, and is always a) an eyesore, b) something that players complain about, asking "did you really shuffle your cube?", and c) messes with signalling.
What you really want when you deal out your cube packs is the feeling of randomness. Unfortunately, randomness is a hard concept for the human brain to understand - people think uniform distribution when they hear the word 'random'. If you flip a coin ten times, people expect a random distribution to look something like HTTHTHHTTH. When the actual, real world flip ends up HHHHHTTHHH, people complain that it's "not random!!!11", when in fact that's exactly what it is.
In the case of cube, though, we actually want more a uniform distribution - retail packs never give us 10 red cards, because of the way print runs work. This shuffling method gives you something closer to that, while still leaving room for randomness; you could get a booster with 11 lands, but it's far less likely. It's the feel-good of people getting what they think is completely random, when you know well and good that it isn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/mtgcube/comments/34fet8/novel_method_for_shuffling_a_cube/
Basically, the problem with real randomness is that you get some crazy spikes in variance - packs with 10 red cards, or 11 lands. This isn't as uncommon as you would think, and is always a) an eyesore, b) something that players complain about, asking "did you really shuffle your cube?", and c) messes with signalling.
What you really want when you deal out your cube packs is the feeling of randomness. Unfortunately, randomness is a hard concept for the human brain to understand - people think uniform distribution when they hear the word 'random'. If you flip a coin ten times, people expect a random distribution to look something like HTTHTHHTTH. When the actual, real world flip ends up HHHHHTTHHH, people complain that it's "not random!!!11", when in fact that's exactly what it is.
In the case of cube, though, we actually want more a uniform distribution - retail packs never give us 10 red cards, because of the way print runs work. This shuffling method gives you something closer to that, while still leaving room for randomness; you could get a booster with 11 lands, but it's far less likely. It's the feel-good of people getting what they think is completely random, when you know well and good that it isn't.
I have used a method very similar to that one in the past, but then abandoned it due to the amount of time it took to organize everything by color before every draft. Even with everyone helping, it took a bit longer than just plain shuffling. I think I'm going to give it another shot for this weekend's draft.