General Should Gold Sections Be A Bit More Nuanced?

[LadyMapi]

Man, I can't justify cutting Alesha, Who Smiles at Death but this is a neat card for the Legendary-matters theme I was hoping to support a little more with this set, and I don't want to double up on Mardu cards. Neat creature all the same though!

I've been mulling over this post for a little while now, and... is Alesha really a Mardu card, or is it just simultaneously a Boros card and a Rakdos card? Do drafters look at Alesha and feel the need to go Mardu if they're already in one of those colors?

Like, realistically speaking...



Do you evaluate this as Green or Black, or Green and Black?

 

[Jason Waddell]

Sections are a government conspiracy.

 

[inscho]

I used to balance my hybrids that cost C or CC as 1/2 of each color/guild as that is reasonably possible to cast on curve with a traditional cube mana base. Whereas CCC hybrids were not. So

Dryad Militant would be 1/2 green and 1/2 white
Kitchen Finks would be 1/2 green and 1/2 white
Wilt-Leaf Liege would be Selesnya

I'd also count Rise // Fall as 1/2 Rakdos and 1/2 Boros

The deeper you delve into it the messier it gets......

So Alesha would be 1/2 Rakdos and 1/2 Boros by that definition. Unless you somehow run a cube that can simultaneously support a vanilla 3/2 with first strike for 3 mana, as well as Alesha with access to the activated ability. Then it could be 1/3 Red, 1/3 Boros, 1/3 Rakdos

I abandoned it, because regardless of whether Kitchen Finks is playable without access to one of the colors, it visually communicates Selesnya. If I had a three card Selesnya section, and I added Finks and Militant as 1/2 of each of their colors and moved it out of the gold section I'd end up with 5 visually communicating Selesnya cards. When I cube, we are often drafting the full pool of cards, so this "felt factor" is more important for me. It matters less the smaller the portion of your cube you are drafting imo.

 

[ravnic]

Treating hybrid and gold cards the same is a practice driving me insane. They are the exact opposite, yet most people treat them the same. I acknowledge that it probably wont ruin your draft experience, but I think it has a much bigger impact than slight imbalances (50 white cards but 51 blue cards for example).

I advocate listing cards as they are drafted and played.

I even advocate listing something like Bloodthirsty Aerialist as a gold card if they make drafters play e.g. Orzhov 98% of the time. At least, cube managers should be aware of these effects and decide with that in mind wether they want to cut a "virtual gold card".

 

[MilesOfficial]

I previously sorted things in Cube Cobra / CT based on how they were played, including hybrid cards in my mono-colored sections where it made sense, etc. for all the reasons @ravnic discusses here. I stopped because it ended up being mentally easier for me to manage a list of 720 cards if I enforced strict rules for myself.

If my cube was 540 or smaller, I wouldn't care about color balance, definitions of gold cards, or anything like that, since I think the play experience is much better without such arbitrary restrictions. But in the same way I no longer run duplicates, it's much easier for my players to grok the list and for me to curate it at such a large size, even when it comes to silly things like sorting the cube with my drafters at the end of a session, to play it based on the card.

Not optimal, but easier.

In the specific example about Alesha, she's drafted about equally in RW and RB decks, so I actually am pretty happy considering her a Mardu card. If I wanted a second Mardu card, the only one stopping me is me, and it's for the reason above that I've been avoiding it.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I would actually put Alesha, Who Smiles at Death in the mono red section in a lot of cubes. Let me explain. Let's look at a typical list and the macro-archetypes it supports. is going to be weenie aggro, right? is going to be spells matter, is going to be sacrifice for value, and is going to be midrange aggro. Which of those decks would run Alesha if she were mono red. Most likely it's the deck and the decks. In other words, if most of the red decks that would want to run this card are actually in the right colors to run it, it doesn't really matter that the activated ability isn't red

 

[shamizy]

I never really cared about where I placed Hybrid or cards like Alesha, Who Smiles at Death within the listing of my cube. I've had Kitchen Finks marked as a Selesnya, White, Green or Hybrid card through various points of its inclusion just to keep that Cobra list looking aesthetically balanced. Hasn't made a single difference in terms of the draft or gameplay experience; if it's the drafted card pool then it's just another card to potentially pick and it has added flexibility. Unless your offerings are horribly balanced in terms of color distribution, no one will ever notice.

I just keep a bunch of hybrids, tri-color, and flexible cards in a generic 5C section under Multicolored because I don't necessarily care where they end up being played, but I'd like for these options to be present and anticipate that drafters will likely be in some multicolored deck where they are featured. If not? No skin off my back. I've given them the tools to work with, it's up to the individual to figure out how they'd like to use them.

It's more important to anticipate the given archetypes and roles that a specific card could fall into rather than spend time worrying about an aesthetic in classification. Figure out whether drafters can recognize where the card should be slotted relative to your ideas when you first included it in your list. That's far more interesting to explore.

 

[Jason Waddell]

I think it's just about being aware of your drafting dynamics. Wotc has had sets with all sorts of color arrangements, and cubes are no different. The needs of The Black Cube will be very different than the needs of a Mordor cube.

Your drafters never need to see your sections, all they see are the cards in the pack.

 

[safra]

Alesha is a red card. See? Says right in the top corner.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Sections are just a way to organize the cards in a Cube and keep the color ratios roughly the same for Cubes looking to have a fairly even distribution of colors. However, because most people tend to use spreadsheets or Cube websites like Cubetutor or Cubecobra to list their cards, they choose to keep everything even in numbers so it's cleaner to look at. Of course, this leads to situations like the classic Kird Ape issue where it's really a g/r card, but people didn't list it with their Gruul sections because it didn't cost green mana.

It can be difficult to choose where to place new inclusions as Hybrid cards, and stuff with stuff with off-color activation costs become more common. Ultimately, the placement decision doesn't matter that much as long as it's only a couple of cards here and there, assuming color ratio balance is valued.

It's worth noting that an increasing number of designers don't care about the number of cards per color and instead focus exclusively on power level and relevant synergies. I've seen Cubes with 3 Abzan cards and no Naya cards simply due to the variance in quality between 3-color inclusions. Likewise, I've seen Cubes with 90 Blue cards and 14 Green cards.

Just do what works for you, it doesn't really matter that much as long as it's in service of the Cube design.

 

[LadyMapi]

I'm honestly just bringing it up because there tends to be a lot of people going "I like this design, but it's [COLOR COMBINATION], and I already have three of those, including this hybrid card and this land here."

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I'm honestly just bringing it up because there tends to be a lot of people going "I like this design, but it's [COLOR COMBINATION], and I already have three of those, including this hybrid card and this land here."

My Wheel of Change cube has 50 cards classified as white, blue, black, and red each, and only 49 in green. It also runs 15 each for Dimir, Gruul, Orzhov, and Boros, but only 14 for Simic. And I even classified Vault Skirge, Scrapheap Scrounger, Porcelain Legionnaire, and Spined Thopter as colorless, and Yasova Dragonclaw as mono green. You wouldn't notice while drafting, especially because base green is the lane most likely to be 3+ colors after the draft. Gruul and Simic are the only green guild pairs I support, so Yasova in practice acts as a mono green card, since it'll always be paired with either red or blue (if not both).

In the end, our goal is to create a satisfying draft experience, and that experience most certainly won't suffer for having a slight discrepancy in the number of gold cards you run in each color combination.

 

[landofMordor]

there tends to be a lot of people going "I like this design, but it's [COLOR COMBINATION], and I already have three of those, including this hybrid card and this land here."

I've begun to think all Magic taxonomies are fallacious at some point, and perhaps the point of a taxonomy is what one learns in order to taxonomize.

I mean, at the end of the day, in most cubes:
- Wrath of God is as much as it is mono-
- Thalia, Heretic Cathar might as well cost
- Kird Ape is practically
- Ajani's Pridemate might as well cost
- Ketria Triome is practically a Cinder Glade (and the UR/UG version of that, too)
- Treasure Cruise costs

Hard-and-fast rules are ok if they lower the mental energy barrier of cube curation, which is why I loved @MilesOfficial 's response. Going super in-depth on categorization is also ok if it inspires deeper thinking about design. The key to either approach is to recognize that all such taxonomies are fundamentally heuristic, and can't capture the full complexity and nuance of Magic's cards without superhuman effort.

 

[ellogeyen]

So I might be priviledged in this regard because my main cube only has 3 colors, but I have very ridgid categories for each color pair. I know that this overly balanced categorization doesn't impact the drafts at all, but it gives me the happy chemical feeling whenever I'm looking over my cube on CubeCobra (and that happens a lot more than drafting anyway).

Currently my categories are:
- 2 multicolored cards: push player into multiple colors, and are often playing in design space you'd not find in any of their colors individually.
- 5 hybrid cards: they are mainly here to dissuade people from just playing 3-color goodstuff and enable monocolored decks.
- 2 monocolored cards with off-color activations (1 card in both directions): I'd like them all to be playable in their mono color, but with some additional benifit if you're playing or splashing the second color as well. They kinda sit between the multicolored and hybrid cards for incentivising certain color paths.

I'd also like to make my monocolored cards play with both other colors in some capacity, or with none of the other colors. So monocolored hold some meaning in the cube. However, I do have some artifacts which would never be played without have access to a particular color...

 

[Chris Taylor]

I've begun to think all Magic taxonomies are fallacious at some point, and perhaps the point of a taxonomy is what one learns in order to taxonomize.

I mean, at the end of the day, in most cubes:
- Wrath of God is as much as it is mono-
- Thalia, Heretic Cathar might as well cost
- Kird Ape is practically
- Ajani's Pridemate might as well cost
- Ketria Triome is practically a Cinder Glade (and the UR/UG version of that, too)
- Treasure Cruise costs

Hard-and-fast rules are ok if they lower the mental energy barrier of cube curation, which is why I loved @MilesOfficial 's response. Going super in-depth on categorization is also ok if it inspires deeper thinking about design. The key to either approach is to recognize that all such taxonomies are fundamentally heuristic, and can't capture the full complexity and nuance of Magic's cards without superhuman effort.

These are some hot takes

 

[safra]

I've begun to think all Magic taxonomies are fallacious at some point, and perhaps the point of a taxonomy is what one learns in order to taxonomize.

Per Borgès:

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

Per the Tao Te Ching:

Act before there is a problem;
Bring order before there is disorder.

Mumon's commentary:
that's fuckin right bro