General Ways to run an online cube draft

[Jason Waddell]

Hi guys, I'm curious to hear if any of you have had success running an online cube draft. How feasible is it to distribute decks worth of cards on MODO? Did you draft via TappedOut or some other interface?

If this budget cube list comes together I would love to test it online with you all. The mtgotraders price on a lot of the cards is really low, so we could probably throw it together without too much effort.

 

[Sterling]

Tomchaps ran an online Rochester draft of his $40 online cube. We used a spreadsheet that listed all the cards and then highlighted the ones that were picked and then made a post in a MTGS thread he had started just for the draft. The problem we had from that was it took way too long to get the draft completed and then it was rather difficult to meet up with players on MTGO at the same time. If it wasnt for the length it took I wouldnt have any complaints about doing it this way.

Ive also done some drafts on Tapped out and then played on Cockatrice. I havent done that in awhile but I believe cockatrice was taken down...? Tapped out works decent enough for more than 2 players. If Winston is something your looking for theres also this site http://www.metacortex.hu/~fable/generate.html to draft but you still need another program to play the games.

 

[VibeBox]

thea steele as well as the Limited Resources mtgo clan have both run tappedout drafts repeatedly. sometimes you can see them recruiting people for it on twitter, but less so lately. bringing actual playable cube experience to the masses who don't actually get to play it is something i think we should definitely do, and in fact i brought up the idea of running these kinds of drafts with a riptide lab branded cube in my first thread
http://riptidelab.com/forum/threads/opportunities-and-ideas.41/
as i stated there, i am willing to donate to the creation of a cube from my mtgo stock of Modern playables.

 

[Geothrix]

People run cube drafts on cockatrice/drafts.in all day long and they work fine. There is no rules engine so gameplay is a bit slower, but no slower than paper. The interface is actually pretty good for a free program but it is not as nice as MODO, particularly the smallness of the card images. It seems like a good option for what you want to do though.

 

[Jason Waddell]

People run cube drafts on cockatrice/drafts.in all day long and they work fine. There is no rules engine so gameplay is a bit slower, but no slower than paper. The interface is actually pretty good for a free program but it is not as nice as MODO, particularly the smallness of the card images. It seems like a good option for what you want to do though.

Can you do the actual drafting on Cockatrice? Or do you draft on TappedOut first?

 

[Chris Taylor]

The lack of a rules engine should actually be a benefit, I think. It's the worst thing when you accidentally click through a timing window for countering a spell, or those other feelbad moments.
Eg:
Player A: "Block, Regen my Drudge Skeletons"
Nearby Judge: "So you're done declaring blockers, correct?"
Player A: "What?"
Judge: "All blockers are declared at the same time, and spells and abilities can only be played before or after blockers are declared. Since you've already blocked with a creature, regenerating your skeletons signals that you're done declaring blockers"
Player A: "I'm just gonna go...quit magic."

 

[Jason Waddell]

The lack of a rules engine should actually be a benefit, I think. It's the worst thing when you accidentally click through a timing window for countering a spell, or those other feelbad moments.
Eg:
Player A: "Block, Regen my Drudge Skeletons"
Nearby Judge: "So you're done declaring blockers, correct?"
Player A: "What?"
Judge: "All blockers are declared at the same time, and spells and abilities can only be played before or after blockers are declared. Since you've already blocked with a creature, regenerating your skeletons signals that you're done declaring blockers"
Player A: "I'm just gonna go...quit magic."

Playing Netrunner online there's no real rules engine, and it's pretty delightful.

 

[Eric Chan]

Can you do the actual drafting on Cockatrice? Or do you draft on TappedOut first?

Cockatrice is just for playing. I think he's saying to do the draft on drafts.in, which looks like it pulls cube data from TappedOut.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Cockatrice is just for playing. I think he's saying to do the draft on drafts.in, which looks like it pulls cube data from TappedOut.

Ah, I didn't know what drafts.in was. It looked like a typo.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Okay, sounds like I should finally break down and try out Cockatrice.

 

[Geothrix]

Yeah I think you will like it. drafts.in pulls lists from tappedout which is handy and I would say that the actual drafting on it works better than tappedout, which is buggy and inflexible. drafts.in is a barebones design but it works well, letting you do all the basic things you need to do like sort by cmc or color and separate cards into maindeck, sideboard and "jank." It also has nice big card images and doesn't waste page space on frames, backgrounds, or other design junk. It took me a few practice games with some netdecks to get the hang of the cockatrice interface. You also gotta make sure you know how to save decks and add lands and stuff for the draft, but it was overall very easy to learn and I've been having fun cubing on there. I for one will join your rooms if I see you put a draft up.

 

[Eric Chan]

The part that worries me about TappedOut is that it sometimes inexplicably freezes up in the middle of a draft, and stops registering your picks. At that point, there's usually no way to salvage the draft. Happy to hear that there's a good alternative!

 

[Jason Waddell]

I am utterly lost as to how to create a username on drafts.in. I know you don't need one, but I just don't see it on the interface, even though there's a chat thing at the bottom.

 

[tomchaps]

Hey, sorry I'm late to the discussion. I do still have my MTGO cube, and am happy to draft and play it with folks again. The entire thing is around $60 for a 360, so I'm not too worried about theft. Tappedout with bots can be fine, and I've found that Winstoning online works well, too. (http://www.metacortex.hu/~fable/generate.html) It can be tricky to schedule the matches between a full draft pod of people--the last time it took weeks, and I never did get one deck back.

I need to update my list--I've made quite a few changes--but here was the original $50 cube: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=337649

 

[CML]

its part of the quintessential idiocy of modo that they think proxies and free tournaments would reduce the amount of money they could make.

Thea is friends with some wizards employees, who have access to 4x of each card on modo -- my best guess is that she was able to run these drafts with those resources at her disposal

i could conceivably ask thea or marshall, though i dunno if he counts as a wizards employee in this regard

 

[Jason Waddell]

Well mostly I'm just interested in testing a particular list that I am building, which we could probably throw together without expending much resources. But I always imagined that distributing the cards to people for deckbuilding it really tedious. Going the cockatrice route is probably easiest.

 

[VibeBox]

Thea is friends with some wizards employees, who have access to 4x of each card on modo -- my best guess is that she was able to run these drafts with those resources at her disposal

iirc, those types of "god accounts" cannot trade anything ever. for the 'draft elsewhere then distribute pools" model to work the cube has to be assembled by a player then parts loaned it.

i guess it's time i stopped being a dinosaur for two seconds and check out cockatrice

 

[LordOfTexas]

Cockatrice is definitely the easiest option for online cubing. It downloads sets and card images with one click, whereas Magic Workstation requires a lot of setup time. Only thing I really dislike about Cockatrice is the slow, laggy UI compared to MWS, but it's superior otherwise.

 

[Jason Waddell]

iirc, those types of "god accounts" cannot trade anything ever. for the 'draft elsewhere then distribute pools" model to work the cube has to be assembled by a player then parts loaned it.

I wonder what proportion of players get to play real constructed Magic, instead of the "what's the best deck I can play given my collection and budget, and how much am I willing to spend to improve the win rate of my deck and how much are those cards going to depreciate in value given the upcoming rotation and can I get them by Friday" weird pseudo-game.

 

[Dom Harvey]

8-person drafts are so hard to run properly, no matter what platform you're playing on. It's much easier to get a group of 4 together, and it's neater - everyone plays everyone else once.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Yeah, the logistics of 8-person drafting are infinitely harder than four-person drafting (unless we had an infinitely large community and could fire them off whenever).

 

[LordOfTexas]

Said logistics make me wish that there were a 4-player grid drafting web app available similar to the numerous 8-player drafting apps. I could make one myself, but I just don't have the time to commit.

 

[Peter Angell]

The lack of a rules engine should actually be a benefit, I think. It's the worst thing when you accidentally click through a timing window for countering a spell, or those other feelbad moments.
Eg:
Player A: "Block, Regen my Drudge Skeletons"
Nearby Judge: "So you're done declaring blockers, correct?"
Player A: "What?"
Judge: "All blockers are declared at the same time, and spells and abilities can only be played before or after blockers are declared. Since you've already blocked with a creature, regenerating your skeletons signals that you're done declaring blockers"
Player A: "I'm just gonna go...quit magic."

Out of Order Sequencing is specifically allowed by the Magic Tournament Rules. If you make a continuous sequence of actions and the game state is legal at the end, it's okay to make shortcuts. The specific example in the floor rules doc is "Block here, Block here, Animate Treetop Village and block with it." Block, Regen, Block is similarly legal. You can announce an end-of-turn evolving wilds, start untapping for your turn, then perform the search. The important part is you are announcing/performing these things continuously - you can't have an elongated pause in there and then perform an out-of-order action as that pause represents you as being satisfied with the game state and passing priority.

This all applies at competitive level events too, not just FNMs, and if you ever get a judge called on you for such a situation, you should bring up Out-of-Order Sequencing. Wizards has actually done a good job of removing a lot of rules lawyering from the game, and there's even some protection against "IRL misclicks." When in doubt, appeal to a judge's common sense.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Out of Order Sequencing is specifically allowed by the Magic Tournament Rules. If you make a continuous sequence of actions and the game state is legal at the end, it's okay to make shortcuts. The specific example in the floor rules doc is "Block here, Block here, Animate Treetop Village and block with it." Block, Regen, Block is similarly legal. You can announce an end-of-turn evolving wilds, start untapping for your turn, then perform the search. The important part is you are announcing/performing these things continuously - you can't have an elongated pause in there and then perform an out-of-order action as that pause represents you as being satisfied with the game state and passing priority.

This all applies at competitive level events too, not just FNMs, and if you ever get a judge called on you for such a situation, you should bring up Out-of-Order Sequencing. Wizards has actually done a good job of removing a lot of rules lawyering from the game, and there's even some protection against "IRL misclicks." When in doubt, appeal to a judge's common sense.

That's good to hear. It's something my local judge brought up in a cube game, so it was prefaced with "Make sure you don't do this in a tournament game". Good to know though.

 

[Jason Waddell]

Said logistics make me wish that there were a 4-player grid drafting web app available similar to the numerous 8-player drafting apps. I could make one myself, but I just don't have the time to commit.

Have you done a lot of 4-player grid drafting? I really haven't played the 4-player variant much, curious how it's performed for you.