MTG Salvation

What about: Rank the top 20 cards of the given color Strongest to weakest under the context of when you are drafting and building your deck, how important is this to your deck?

This would take into consideration the strength of super strong build around me cards, the flexibility of cards that can fit into multiple decks, the mana cost etc, the impact it has on the rest of your draft, the impact the card has on how you construct your deck.

Is this a good place to start for a definition?


As for tribrid cards, the reason I am pushing for including them in their mono colored section is I want to know where cards like noble Hierarch and Soulfire Grand master rank compared to the rest of the cards in there respective color. I already know Noble Hierach is one of the best cards in it's tri-color combination.


maybe if we have a top 10 shard / wedge section this year we could have it included in both?


Edit:
I forgot to ask, Does any one have a stats background? if so can you pm me? I was thinking it would be nice to get some statistical data on the results. In previous years there have been cards which have been seperated by .2, .3 .4 points. It would be nice to see if they are statistically similar etc. I have access to some software packages, but need a little guidance on what types of tests to run etc etc

I see what you mean about safe P1P1 picks often not being the most powerful.

"Powerful" is certainly subjective, but it's certainly clearer than "best". Perhaps we can come to some kind of consensus on a working definition of "powerful". One possible working definition for the metric of power would be how much does a particular card contribute to winning games during cube matches. Quite a lot is baked into that, including efficiency, effectiveness at development, card advantage, versatility, tempo advantage, how quickly it ends a game, ease of casting, viability as a build-around, quality as a late game topdeck, etc. Thoughts?

Why not just embrace the subjectivity and go with 'best,' according to whatever parameters the voters want to use?

I'm okay with the subjectivity, and feel that players should be able to vote for whatever they want. Since a lot of voters are gonna do that anyways, leave the metric off, and let players put down whatever they feel constitutes the "best" cube cards for that section and move on.

I'm okay with the subjectivity, and feel that players should be able to vote for whatever they want. Since a lot of voters are gonna do that anyways, leave the metric off, and let players put down whatever they feel constitutes the "best" cube cards for that section and move on.

This is making the perfect the enemy of the good. While subjectivity is inevitable as card evaluation in cube design is as much an art form as it is a science, making no attempt to establish a clear definition of what people are voting for beyond "best" and "whatever they want" won't produce rankings that mean much beyond the winners of a popularity contest. This has been called the "power" rankings because we want to know what cards are strong enough to produce exciting and competitive games in an environment that generally consists of the most powerful cards in the history of MTG.

As I manage an unpowered cube, cards that are most powerful are not among the best for my cube because they would produce games that are too uninteractive, so they would not crack my ranking of the "best" cards for my environment. However, even though I am not considering the Power 9 and most fast mana cards for my cube it is still helpful to know what is ranked near them so that I can keep an eye on cards that are at or near the ceiling for possible inclusion or exclusion based on what I've deemed the appropriate ceiling of power for my cube. Therefore, I propose this as a working definition of "powerful" as we rank the how powerful cube cards are in the Power Rankings:

"How effectively a cube card contributes to winning games when included in a traditional powered cube environment."

There's a lot to evaluate here, as different cards contribute to winning games in different ways, including card advantage, board impact, card selection, damage output, mana efficiency, ease of casting, set up cost, and mana fixing. I expect there to be a high correlation between P1P1 value and maindeck percentage and this definition of "powerful", but they're not necessarily identical. No metric for subjective evaluation will ever be perfect, and some people may well violate the spirit of this voting in one way or another, but I think that on the whole we can trust the community on this forum to do a good job of adhering to this metric in good faith as we vote in this year's Power Rankings.

On other points mentioned:

Willdice, Allred and I have discussed the possibility of coming up with a way of reducing the impact of outlier votes that have led to some of the top rankings being diluted by a single "no" vote despite an overwhelming majority of #1 votes. None of us has much of a stats background, so any suggestions on how to do this, or whether this is even wise would be appreciated. Otherwise, votes will be determined by a simple mean as they were last year.

As for tribrid cards, the reason I am pushing for including them in their mono colored section is I want to know where cards like noble Hierarch and Soulfire Grand master rank compared to the rest of the cards in there respective color. I already know Noble Hierach is one of the best cards in it's tri-color combination.

I think there is a valid argument to be made for categorizing cards based on their costs and basic lands/colored permanents required in play to get full value from them. I don't think anyone considers whether or not to include Noble Hierarch based on how good it is compared to, say, Roon of the Hidden Realm, but instead based on how good it is as a green 1-drop. Noble Hierarch may not be at its best in a Gruul ramp deck, but it would do enough in a Gruul deck to compete with Llanowar Elves for inclusion. We count Mox Pearl and Mox Jet as colorless, why not Avacyn Pilgrim or Elves of the Deep Shadow as green?

I don't agree on changing categorization for the FRF tribrids, as they're just vanilla or French vanilla creatures without access to one of the appropriate colors of off-color mana. It's impossible to come up with a truly satisfying way of categorizing them, but because they do so much less without access to at least one additional color of mana I think considering them as part of a larger 3+ color card category is the best we can do here.

This will be the last post about this that I will put in this thread. Shortly I'll begin a Power Rankings Discussion thread in the Card and Archetype Discussion thread, where I'll recap all discussion that's taken place on these points so far. We can continue hashing them out there.

The official thread for Power Rankings discussion has been posted! Please continue all discussion on the voting procedure here.

We just played my cube groups biannually Cube the Conspiracy event yesterday. We were 5 participating players.

First we drafted the 23 playable Conspiracies, and the two draft altering cards that let you remove cards from your card pool while drafting. I randomized them in packs of 5 that was our first draft round. Then we drafted 3 regular 15-card packs, with one draft altering cards feeded in each pack.

Our pod featured decks as:
My winning Double Stroke & Time Walk UW control deck. I took 4+ extra turns in 3 games out of 4 matches (9 games in total).

Backup Plan & Advantageous Proclamation aggro with Library of Alexandria.

And the coolest deck of the night
Sovereign's Realm & Hymn of the Wilds planeswalker midrange combo deck. With 14 walkers and Summoner's Bond combo finish with Lightning Mauler and a 15/15 Pyretic Hunter.

Hey all, I'm pretty new to the powered cubing scene and I was hoping you could answer a few quick questions:

1. Do moxes count as part of your 16-17 lands?
2. How is Jace Beleren suppose to be played? It seems quite inferior to Jace's other forms.

Quote from THUNDERWANG »

Hey all, I'm pretty new to the powered cubing scene and I was hoping you could answer a few quick questions:

1. Do moxes count as part of your 16-17 lands?
2. How is Jace Beleren suppose to be played? It seems quite inferior to Jace's other forms.

1. Yes.
2. Play him and draw two cards. Then alternate between +2 and two -1 until he dies. He's basically a Phyrexian Arena with a drawback of giving your opponent a card every 3 turns instead of costing you life.

Quote from THUNDERWANG »

Hey all, I'm pretty new to the powered cubing scene and I was hoping you could answer a few quick questions:

1. Do moxes count as part of your 16-17 lands?
2. How is Jace Beleren suppose to be played? It seems quite inferior to Jace's other forms.

1. Regular ABU Moxen (like Mox Sapphire, etc.)? Yes, in most cases. Sometimes off-color moxen need to be run as spells if the mana demand is too high to afford a "colorless" land, but generally, they (should) replace basics when you can afford it.

2. I love Jace Beleren, but it can be a tricky card to play sometimes. The more experience you get with it, the better you'll learn the whens and whys of his order of operations, so to speak. Think of it like a Phyrexian Arena variant for blue. It exchanges the lifeloss for some immediate draw, and a balancing act between taking combat damage and activating at card parity.

Just for fun, I clicked on the "Load Price" button on Cubetutor. Almost fell out of my chair when it said that my cube was worth over $32,000! Surely, that couldn't be right!? I quickly found out what the problem was: Cubetutor had automatically set my ABU duals as Alpha, thus assigning a price of over $2,000 to each of them. I changed them to the Revised versions that they truly are and voilà: My cube's price was now estimated at $6,000. That is a drop of $26,000 simply because I changed the edition on ten cards!

Even at Revised, the 10 dual lands make up roughly a quarter of the price of my 600 cards cube. Which is still pretty nuts.

Same thing happened to me, Star Slayer.

Cheers,
rant

Quote from Star Slayer »

Just for fun, I clicked on the "Load Price" button on Cubetutor. Almost fell out of my chair when it said that my cube was worth over $32,000! Surely, that couldn't be right!? I quickly found out what the problem was: Cubetutor had automatically set my ABU duals as Alpha, thus assigning a price of over $2,000 to each of them. I changed them to the Revised versions that they truly are and voilà: My cube's price was now estimated at $6,000. That is a drop of $26,000 simply because I changed the edition on ten cards!

Even at Revised, the 10 dual lands make up roughly a quarter of the price of my 600 cards cube. Which is still pretty nuts.

And this is why I proxy. Having the real thing would be cool, but cubing w/o losing arm/leg is more important.

I was strongly against proxies for many years, but now I am thinking about taking out the revised duals and replacing them with black bordered proxies. Doing so would have three advantages:
1) It would free up a noticeable amount of capital (aka I can set aside those duals for selling them).
2) It would make me worry less about my cube and the money invested in it.
3) 100% of my cube would be black bordered.

The downside is that playing with proxies feels like cheating to me, even if it is in a purely casual environment.

I am still baffled how much those duals exploded. When I built my cube a bit less than 10 years ago, I got them for 1/5 of their current prize.

You can't help how you feel nor would I tell you how to, but cheating implies intended deception. Are you planning on deceiving your players by using non-real versions or will they know? How is it actually cheating them and you? Will the feel of a 'fake' card be vastly different? If so, is that worth it? If not, is that still cheating when the play is all kitchen table? Is the value of the card worth more than the feeling of having the real card? How about worth more than the safety of knowing your investments can't be accidentally destroyed? What is stopping you morally from printing versions of the cards? Is the joy of playing with the real card worth the worrying of wasting money if they're accidentally destroyed? How out of place will the proxies look? How much of your enjoyment of cube is in using the real cards and having a collection vs. playing cube in general? How do you think you'd react if one of the cards was destroyed? Is that potential awful moment worse than the feeling of playing with the real cards? Is it enough to stop you?

These aren't questions you need to answer here, nor ones with a right answer since they are so individually dependent and not everyone is going to feel the same way about them based on a lot of factors, but they are questions I asked myself when making the full transition to only proxying cards going forward vs. buying them. At the end of the day it's your cube and your life, so you should do what makes you comfortable, but it's worth looking into why you're feeling a certain way and exploring all the avenues you go down when answering the proxy-or-not? question.

This will definitely be cheaper than the 3 Kingdoms version. Huzzah!

That's sweet. Also, I love the convo going from "Proxies?" to "bagillion dollar judge promo"

We have an altered black border P3K version. It's P3K, but the borders were painted (by a pro, not just random guy with a Sharpie) to be black. Honestly, I like our current version better than this foil. New frame, shooting star? Yuck.

I also prefer and will be keeping my altered version. But for those folks that don't like/use alters, I prefer this to the white-bordered option.

I just use different basics for each cube, because I can then just grab the box with the cube I want, without looking if I got also the basics. I think it would be terrible to come to a friend and say: Hey, here is my cube, oh I forgot the basics.

I would use different basics too.

I use different basica that for each of my cubes.

• AB basics for my main cube
• Full art (1 of each foil) for my artifact cube
• ABU for my Old school cube
• Old frame foils for my tribal cube

I use different basics for my two cubes. For the powered cube, we've chosen our favorite land (or at least one we can all agree is sweet) and worked on getting it in foil. For the low power list, I've just kind of gone through all of the lands and chosen lands that I really like, so it has all different arts.

I put a fair bit of cash and trade stock into pimping out my basics box, so when I built my Peasant cube I made sure the sleeves matched my rare cube so that I can use the same basics box for both. It's never been a problem, and I couldn't imagine doing it any other way.

I have a separate box for basic lands anyway (and my main cube is spread over three fatpack boxes), so for the times where I had a secondary cube (in each case stored in their own two fatpack boxes), I just used the same basic lands (all stored in their own fatpack box) for all cubes. Different use in sleeves wasn't really noticeable. And I didn't have to assemble a whole bunch of basics all over again. Fullart Zendikar (and recently Battle for Zendikar) basics for all of my cubes!