GBS

CML

Contributor
you know if my parents had had the foresight to give me a real first name and not hyphenate the last one i coulda scored a free trip from birthright
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
you know if my parents had had the foresight to give me a real first name and not hyphenate the last one i coulda scored a free trip from birthright
This is one of the most ludicrous comments I've read on a message board.
 
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I've been trying to draft my cube on cubetutor whenever I have time, to try and improve the bots. Pretty interesting, and already stronger than tappedout.

We should draft each others' cubes, improve the draft experience. It's also, frankly, one of the best ways to get a sense of how a cube plays out.

Here's mine: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/67
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
I've been trying to draft my cube on cubetutor whenever I have time, to try and improve the bots. Pretty interesting, and already stronger than tappedout.

Have you (or anyone else) figured out whether we can add multiples to our cube lists? Maybe I'm just missing something, but I can't seem to figure out how to tell it that I have 4 Squadron Hawks.
 
Yes, you can definitely have multiples. I just drafted a sweet double-Armageddon Boros aggro deck from Chris Taylor's cube.
 
Where do you guys buy your cube cards from? I used channelfireball to round out my cube as it is now, but their selection isn't great when it comes to weird commons/uncommons, and the shopping cart resets every once in a while. Wouldn't be a huge issue but i was ordering 100+ different singles, and i ended up having to re-add everything twice by the time i finally placed the order. Any suggestions for my future online purchases?
 

CML

Contributor
jason: i played bw martyr (offensively named "the intifadeh" because it involves martyrs killing themselves to gain seemingly infinite life, and then it seems like you can ignore them, but then they kill you too. also martyrs always have a manichaean worldview)

list is here: http://magic.tcgplayer.com/db/deck.asp?deck_id=1105569 -- changes were maindeck -1 guildmage +1 zealous; board -1 zealous -1 titan +2 good elspeth. i think the 60 is "optimized" (whether it is good or not depends on the meta, though it often is good) but i might have done better had i not wasted 3 sb slots on blind obedience. and not punted to wrapter and detora in rd's 10/11
 
I would like to second tcgplayer. For large orders, I end up ordering from 3-4 different places, but it allows you to pick up the cards at their cheapest in exchange for paying shipping charges more than once. I've been nothing but satisfied, even though it takes a bit of work to shop around for the sellers that have what you want and are selling low.
 
Thanks guys! I've looked at tcgplayer before but I was never sure if it was a safe place to spend money. Also, I'm checking out the website now and noticed they have a "mass product entry" system where you just can add a whole bunch of cards to the cart at once. Hallelujah!!
 
Yeah, it's an aggregator, generally speaking I will not make a purchase from a store front that has less than 1,000 sales/less than 99% rating just to be on the safe side. There are stores on there that only have a few hundred or less sales, and I steer clear of them until they have proven to be upstanding sellers.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
Yes, you can definitely have multiples. I just drafted a sweet double-Armageddon Boros aggro deck from Chris Taylor's cube.
Sweet! I'm doing a few on my lunch break every now and again. Gideon probably shouldn't come 8th.
I'll see if I can get the discussion up on here sometime today/tommorow, since there are 52 cards missing from my cube list atm (Custom cards)
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
Where do you guys buy your cube cards from? I used channelfireball to round out my cube as it is now, but their selection isn't great when it comes to weird commons/uncommons, and the shopping cart resets every once in a while. Wouldn't be a huge issue but i was ordering 100+ different singles, and i ended up having to re-add everything twice by the time i finally placed the order. Any suggestions for my future online purchases?

ChannelFireball has a not very well known site for buying cards from a text list:
http://store.channelfireball.com/products/multi_search

Other than that I previously used MagicCardMarket.eu, but that is Europe only.
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
I've used adventuresON and strikezoneonline the most when shopping for old cards. Both of them have pretty reasonable prices.

I'll have to give the tcgplayer aggregrator a shot next time. I visit that site all the time, and for whatever reason, I had no idea how their shop worked, so I never tried it.
 

Chris Taylor

Contributor
My personal favorite is MTGIsland for online retailers. Eric, this is relevant to you since it's based in toronto, so in-store pickup is real nice.
The selection is a little shabby, but the price is second to none. I don't even wanna count how many sweet cube foils I've gotten for under a dollar.
In fact I'm actually going to pick up my pack foil mana tithe today! :D
 

CML

Contributor
the single store with the best prices in the world is mugugames, located 10 miles north of chez moi
 

VibeBox

Contributor
funny you should mention them because i just happened to have ordered cards last night from tcgplayer. the aggregator is cool and i indeed ended up ordering half my cards out of the ~55 of them from adventureON because they consistantly kept coming up with the lowest prices on commons, uncommons, and older stuff.
the tool works well and makes it easy to get the best price on stuff in bulk, my only word of caution would be that i avoid the "auto scrape" function. it says it will "opptomize" for you, but the one time i ever used it the resulting order added 25 bucks to my bill and ruined irrevocably my hour of work constructing my cart
 

Jason Waddell

Administrator
Staff member
I think it's time to write an article about how all the existing classification systems completely miss the point.
 

Dom Harvey

Contributor
That, and also stuff like Carnophage and Griselbrand being grouped in the same colour despite never being in the same decks.
 

CML

Contributor
cats:

i dig the tappedout multiple methods of categorization. they're all important to me (yep, even 'latest set')

sure like you never have delver tidespout.dec or nacatl primus.dec and that's ok! but ugh can you guys imagine what happens when a color has no cohesive identity, and there's not enough fixing, so you can't mix and match and all options just suck? like the guy who was caterwauling about how it was impossible to fix his black when every deck would be carnophage g'brand.dec was pretty hilarious -- his orzhov section may have been laughable but the cube gestalt was also worth a derisive chuckle

as for kird ape and friends, i see little value in strict color balancing, but accurate (if not precise) bookkeeping has been necessary to keep 7/9 decks from being green/x/x every wednesday. i dunno what the problem with the monkey is, it's a gruul card = .5 G / .5 R or so (there's a thread on the old google discussion group about this) -- like you're never playing kird ape without G or lingering souls without B, so ... anyway i think with big multicolor sections it's impractical to balance precisely, given the nature of its good cards (best as 4-ofs in constructed) red should lean the heaviest on gold/hybrid and blue should have the least
 

Eric Chan

Hyalopterous Lemure
Staff member
given the nature of its good cards (best as 4-ofs in constructed) red should lean the heaviest on gold/hybrid and blue should have the least

Man, this comment is prescient. In my cube, red tops the charts in gold & hybrid cards, while blue is at the bottom. It didn't happen on purpose, but red just seems to have way more multicolor goodies. Blue, on the other hand, barely has anything, but it's easy to compensate for that by adding more to its monocolour section.
 

CML

Contributor
yep, another (positive) unintended consequence of this is that blue is the color that needs the other colors the most, so fewer gold cards curb its intrinsic power.
 
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