MTG Salvation

Oh ok. Well I have been separating them into the 8 piles and then counting out equal cards from each pile and doing it that way but I suppose that is why I am running into problems. I guess if I want to switch back to doing it the other way, I will have to even out my colors

Correct. If the sections are uneven before you create your draft pool, then keeping every section separate is the better way to go.

I guess my problems then would be that I would need to put the colorless lands in the colorless section for them to show up with any kind of consistency in the drafts (seeing as I want at least 90 lands to be able to do an 8 person sealed event). I suppose I could make it work since by doing it my way there is no ceiling for how many cards I can have in a section (except for the fact that I want to only have playable cards and not dilute archetypes). The only other problem would be that using an equal amount of lands from the non-basic land pile as each color, colorless, and multicolor would result in way too much mana fixing in each pack, it seems. I have been doing it this way so far, but since I have all my lands (including colored lands and colorless lands) in the same area, it gives more variety. I suppose I could add less non-basic lands to the pool and more of each of the other piles? What would you suggest? And is there a standard way of organizing packs this way or am I just doing it a weird way?

I just shuffle the whole cube and make packs of 15. However the distribution ends up is fine.

Cheers,
rant

Quote from shredguitar7690

I have a question about how to divide up the cube and how that plays out when gathering cards for a draft.

Currently I divide my cube up intopiles by: Each 5 colors, colorless, multicolor, lands. I see that most people put colorless lands in with the "colorless section", multicolor lands in with the "multicolor section" and colored lands in with their respective colored section.

When drafting with friends we take a certain equal amount of cards from each pile (8 piles) and shuffle them together for consistency. I like doing it this way but I feel like I don't know where to put the lands. I recently put the signets in with the multi-color section which seemed like the right choice but I just don't know what to do with the lands.

Also I feel like with the way that I am doing it (aka. not just shuffling the whole cube together, but separating it into piles before drafting) I should have nearly equal piles if I want to use the whole cube. This may cause problems if I can't find enough colorless to match the amount I want to use for each color, for example.

I guess I am just wondering what the standard protocol is for this and if anyone has any advice for how I should be setting up my cube. Thanks.

Cube info: 720 or 810 cards (cant decide).

I shuffle my 360 cards and make 15 card packs and use elastic bands (not rubber bands, actual elastic bands) to seal them. Then I have bands for 450/540/630/720/810 and randomly dish out the packs as needed. 360 packs always get divided evenly or at least to the point where everyone has P1/P1 - 360 booster.

Quote from shredguitar7690

What would you suggest? And is there a standard way of organizing packs this way or am I just doing it a weird way?

The more typical way is to balance the sections, shuffle the whole cube, and make random packs. I don't like seeding packs with a specific distribution of cards.

Quote from therestless

I am a fan of seeding packs, and I keep lands as their own section.

Each player ends up with 6 each of WUBRG, 5 each of colorless, multi, and land.

Do you make each booster have a certain amount of each colour? Or do you just make sure that there is an equal amount of each colour in the draft pool?

I wouldn't like the former, personally, as it would be all too easy to see what the people either side of you are drafting.

I wouldn't mind the latter too much, but it seems like a lot of work.

I just like to make the pool even. Everyone makes packs at random from the pool so it still makes for randomized packs, but it covers any mistakes I may have made in shuffling the entire cube. Plus I can have uneven amounts of piles and it doesn't matter cause they all end up even in the pool anyway. I usually only have a 2-4 friends that ever play with me at any given time anyway so I don't need to worry about running out of cards or anything.

What I do in my cube is give everyone 8 cards of each color, then 4 colorless cards, and shuffle that together, then do 4 packs of 11 (when we are 4).

This ensures that colors are balanced in the pool without knowing each pack.

I also prefer a completely randomized fashion to the packs, as I think it provides an extra layer of challenge to reading the cards coming and draft accordingly. It also seems like it would take more time to prepare a draft (do you just keep the whole thing color sorted to grab x amount from each section?).

-AA

Ya I keep everything color sorted and grab x from each section. I grab less from the land section though because I don't want there to be that many dual lands in the pool. I'm not sure what a section ratio is but I don't see why making sure that the card pool has equal amounts of each color and so-forth messes with the power lvl at all. Also I want a large cube even though I don't plan on playing with that many people because I like variety and want to play with tons of different magic cards. Also I don't understand why I would put the colorless lands and 5 color lands into the gold pile. What I did was put the colorless lands in the colorless pile, put the colored utility lands in with their respective colors, and keep "lands" as 2 color lands and 5 color lands. Then I just distribute less lands to the cardpool as noted before because that is how it would be if I were just shuffling up the cube.

I'm contemplating being able to support upto a 16 person sealed cube, for the purposes of 2 headed giant (where you take 180 cards together and build decks) tournaments.

This however is going to require a 1440 sized cube. Very big. Cube drafting has been around now for a decent amount of time and magic as a whole even longer. If the shuffling is done well enough and you have access to all the cards in the game, would one have to worry about big shifts in power among people?

Are there enough cards in the game of magic over all, for 16 people to make roughly the same decks in terms of power? Archtypes are possibly lost except for control and midrange, aggro could still live if some score lucky pulls.

Quote from Umaro

I'm contemplating being able to support upto a 16 person sealed cube, for the purposes of 2 headed giant (where you take 180 cards together and build decks) tournaments.

This however is going to require a 1440 sized cube. Very big. Cube drafting has been around now for a decent amount of time and magic as a whole even longer. If the shuffling is done well enough and you have access to all the cards in the game, would one have to worry about big shifts in power among people?

Are there enough cards in the game of magic over all, for 16 people to make roughly the same decks in terms of power? Archtypes are possibly lost except for control and midrange, aggro could still live if some score lucky pulls.

feels like ur better off just getting someone else to build a cube of 720 and have two separate pods...

then faceoff for the grand champion~

It's possible sure. I will probably just have to wait until the cube evolves so much that what we see as the best of the 540-720 cards get replaced as cards from 360/450 push them out and so on.

It'll happen. Just as 360 staples have slowly been pushed out over time.

Since I proxy everything, the point is almost moot, but if I had real cards, you both, really don't know how absurd it is, to actually suggest two or more cubes.

However, with that said, I'm, outside of my normal element and I understand this is very uncharted territory because I think we are just now beginning to see real 720 staples from the trickle down effect, thus, I'm happy to accept the 2nd cube suggestion as valid, when normally I don't.

So i will just wait it out, we'll get there. 360 cubes of today are drastically different from 360 cubes of 4 years ago.

I don't know. That card is consistently stellar for us.

Yawg Will is AMAZING in powered, you have so many good cheap cards in the yard a lot of the time and a lot of mana. In unpowered lists it doesn't play the same way, while still good it isn't Regrowth which doesn't force you to play things sorcery.

I like the card more than Regrowth most of the time, considering it almost always grabs more than one card while it's in there. Doesn't need to be powered in order to be great. In fact, I don't think it makes much of a difference at all. Grabbing a Lotus is certainly cool, but it doesn't much matter if I have powered cards in my 'yard or not. In fact, I think it might actually be better in an unpowered cube, where the games run a turn or two longer and you can get more value by having more mana to dump into Yawg's Will.

Quote from Ausschliessi

wtf why did I cut Yawgmoth's Will a year ago?

I suspect you were subject to Phyrexian mind control. I usually find that's why I make daft choices in my cube list.

Yawgmoth's Will is usually solid (replaying a land is usually the kicker) and occasionally broken. It gains points for its important place in magic history, but ironically it is rare to see the level of brokenness that made it so notorious.

Quote from DerBK

The hell?

No seriously, are you out of your mind?

I agree. The big advantage of Eidolon's numbers are that they are more transparent than Cube Tutors.

It seems to me that if Eidolon is going to continue his project -- I hope he does -- he will need to switch from deckstats to Cube Tutor in the near future.

You could just datamine the entire cubelist from cubetutor.

That way people don't have to do anything to participate, but will be autoincluded if they have a cube on cubetutor.

I personally are lazy and busy at the same time. But I would appreciate the data if it's served for me on a silver plate.

The Cube Comparison Project was one of the most valuable tools I had when I was building my list, and I am thankful to eidolon232 for keeping the project running all this time. That said, I too noticed the declining numbers of lists in the respective thread.

I don't think that the existence of CubeTutor makes the information in those threads irrelevant, but I don't think that ignoring that CubeTutor exists and has a gigantic database is a good idea either. Maybe you could talk to lebenski to try to join efforts in this?

Also, I believe that "restrict the access to the results to people who have submitted their lists" is a very bad idea. Take me, for instance. I haven't submitted my list there in a while because of the rules stated in that very thread, namely

1.1) Your cube update with cards from the most recently released Standard legal set has to be completed.

and (to a lesser extent)

As long as the cubes are not listed that way in the first place, I tend to draw the line at ~ 100 very unusual choices (cards that see play in less than 10% of the cubes that you also can't fit into the "optimal" cube with 150% the size of the cube in question + something similar for the excluded cards*)

I think you may need to rethink them; the second one because I believe it may hinder the creativity of people (especially in larger lists, where the sample size is smaller); and the first one because sometimes people take time to get the cards. Some of us have a tighter budget than others; I'm still missing Voice of Resurgence and Kalonian Hydra; heck, I finally got my Tarmogoyf yesterday! Should the information in a list be discarded due to a small number of cards?

I'd rather have (somewhat) sub-optimal information that I can take with a grain of salt than have unreliable information due to a low sample size. So, it is in my (and I believe everyone's) best interest to keep this project alive. eidolon232: If you need to discuss about this in detail, feel free to PM me. I'll try to help anyway I can.