Not sure exactly where to ask this question, but it kinda pertains to this topic, so I'll just ask here.
We've been doing our own variant of this with 4 players. Right now we draft my 400 cube with each player making 12 packs of 8, take one burn 1 style, with one half-pack at the end. This means each player ends up with a pool of 50 cards to make a deck out of, a bit more than normal but still fine. We really like this method, but recently I've been thinking about the future. I would like to expand the cube to be able to add all the cool new cards as they come out, but I don't want to dilute the power level I'm currently at. This means I would want to do smaller, incremental size increases, only including things that are at or above the current standard.
A number I've come up with for these increments would be in batches of 16, which would add one half-pack to the end of every draft. The problem with this is that pools would gradually get bigger and bigger, increasing by 2 extra picks for every 16 cards added. Decks would be way too consistent and samey for my tastes. So I have to change the draft method somehow to make up for this. The cleanest step up would be packs of 12, take 1 burn 2, but that would require 540 to end up with pools of 45, but I don't want to go that high all at once because of the maintaining power level reason above.
One solution I thought of would be to allow for the pool size to vary from 45 to 50 as I increase the size of the cube. Whenever the pool size gets up to 50, I would increase the size of each pack by 1 and either discard leftover cards in each pack back to the cube box or have players burn a varying amount of cards. So for instance...
When I increase to 9 card packs, using the take 1 burn 1 method with 4 players, 1 card would be left over at the end. Method 1 would solve this by just discarding the remaining card. Method 2 would have the first player burn 2 cards, then players 2, 3, and 4 would burn 1 as normal. With 10 card packs, the first two players would burn 2 and the rest burn 1. With 11, the first 3 would burn 2 and the last player would burn 1. And with the ideal 12 card pack, all players would burn 2.
There are problems with both methods, and I don't really like either all that much. Hoping someone here could possibly offer some ideas to change them or a new solution all together. I'm not a fan of Method 1 because with leftover cards in the pack, players would have more pick options than they should and thus, more consistent decks. Method 2 is even worse because it's too complicated. I know no one will be able to keep it straight how many cards they need to burn from each pack, especially if that number changes like it would eventually. The solution needs to be more elegant than that.
So yeah, I've been puzzling with this for a few days now. If anyone has gotten this far and has some ideas to throw at me, I would love to hear them.
I think I've solved it. I've come up with a method to do burn drafting using an increasing cube size, so you can add new cards as they print ones you like instead of being forced to run ones you don't just to meet a certain cube size quota for drafting. Should be a lot more design freedom now that you don't have to worry about hitting an arbitrary number anymore.
Here's my write up for it, complete with formulas for coming up with pack size and burn count. Sorry if the writing is a bit impersonal, I was writing it in a very procedurally based manner to help me keep things straight as I was coming up with the method. It might actually explain the method better in this style anyways.
The cube is meant to be drafted by 4 players using a scaling pack size based on the total number of cards in the cube. Players will each make 11 to 12 packs. Starting at a cube size of 308, players will make 11 packs of 7 and draft them using the take 1 burn 1 method. Until the next 44-card break point, the 12th pack will gradually be added at the end. Every multiple of 44 cards added to the cube beyond 308 will require a readjustment of pack size. Each adjustment adds one additional card to each pack. Any remaining cards in a pack once each player has made their pick from it will be discarded back to the cube box. Every 3rd break point will also increase the burn count by one. With this method, sometimes pick 4 will consist of only a single card. Pack size and burn count can be determined using the following:
Since the number of packs varies as the cube increases in size, players' pools will vary from 44 to 48, but never go above or below that. There may be an uneven number of cards when trying to form the 12th pack if the cube size is not a perfect multiple of 4. To solve this, you can either simply discard the uneven cards to the cube box or distribute them randomly to as many players as possible. If you want to have the entire cube be drafted, I would prefer the second method.
New cards should only be added to colored sections in balance, or only exceeding balance by 1 card. For example, if monocolored sections consist of a minimum of 50 cards each, individual sections may not exceed 51. This allows you to add new cards one at a time instead of having to wait for a set of 5 color-balanced cards. The same goes for multicolored sections, with a set of 10 rather than 5. You may add to the Multicolor Flex and Colorless sections as needed without regard to balance (within reason).
Will get at least 45 every time, just have to burn any leftover cards in a pack after the 5th pick. This way is actually cleaner than what I had before where you only got 4 cards per round. You could never get an odd number of cards to eventually add up to 45, only 44, 46, 48. Now that your original pack comes back to you in this one, you'll get 1.25 cards per pack * 9 packs * 4 players = 45 card pool minimum. It won't be possible to fully eliminate the remaining 46th or 47th card (at most, 3 players will get 47, I believe) if you want to draft the whole thing due to the nature of the method, but that's pretty darn close.
I think it's worth it for not having to jump in size so drastically to make drafting work. Remember, those 36 card break points are only for increasing pack size and burn count. You can add the cards as little as one at a time if you want.
If you really really want to get rid of the cards over 45, you can just strictly adhere to the 36 card breakpoints to have pools be exactly perfect, but whenever something new gets printed that you want to include, you'd either have to wait for 35 more to go along with it or make a cut. Making a cut would probably the better option there, but that's getting harder and harder every set release, and having 47 card pools is a small price to pay to not have to cut cards that I really don't want to, in my opinion.
I also only really get to 2-player draft my cube. We used pancake drafting (which is similar to glipse and you see 198 cards) and it worked fine at 360 and 450. Drafting archetypes could be tricky 450 but glimpse drafting should work fine as you see 60% of a 450 cube and pancaking a 360 uses 55%.
I briefly ran at 405 with glimpse drafts and that's pretty sweet, doesn't give a lot of wiggle room for pet cards but opens up some space if you want to make a smaller step to 450.
Got an opportunity to glimpse draft yesterday with my friend's common/uncommon cube and it was a really great 2-person draft format. The decks turned out more powerful than an average 8-man draft deck, but we were happy with that. There's a ton of information to keep track of that was tough to make good use of, especially for our first time, but we both came up with solid draft and burn strategies that led to some good games. Thanks for posting this!
Wow. Just wow. I have been working on ways to make our 2 and 4 man drafts of my synergy cube more enjoyable and I think you guys have cracked the code. I should have assumed it would be Cody, wtwlf123, and the other main contributors on here that would come up with this strategy. This is a great way to draft via two man and I really think you guys have revolutionized cube drafting and possibly created your own formate- heads up cube or 2 v 2 cube. You could have even a cube tournament now with elimination rounds and have an 8 man draft, a 4 man draft, and a 2 man finals draft. Great idea and thank you for sharing it.
It is indeed a great idea. I love Glimpse with 2 (regular glimpse) and play a shortened version with only 8 packs and 40 cards drafted per player with 4 people, since my cube is a 480 cards one. Even the latter works nicely for us.
Considering trying this out myself. We tried glimpse drafting with 3 for the first time and it was awesome. Each deck turned out well and we felt it didn't add too much time to the drafting. However since my cube is only 450+15, I don't have enough cards to do it with the ideal 4 players.
Moving to 480 sounds like a decent stepping stone because I don't feel comfortable moving up to 540 yet. Do you feel very constricted with the 5 fewer cards in the pool? I feel like many of my decks end up with plenty of extra cards as sideboard but I would hate to be cutting it too close.
This is a weird and interesting format. My sister and I have a cube, and have drafted with two players a lot. We never came up with this exact method, but we came up with several other similar ones, including "ghost-drafters" who would take random cards out of packs between passing.
Our favorite variant uses an 8 person pod where each player is drafting 4 separate decks. It proceeds as would any draft with the exception that you draft 4 decks rather than one. It takes a long time to do the draft, but once it's done, you can play with the decks for days before you've had all the match-ups. It's nice to be able to go crazy with one of your decks to test an archetype, but not feel too bad if it fails.
This Glimpse format seems like a quicker alternative, and I'll try it at some point.
You can Sight Draft with as many players as you want. Glimpse simulates 1 player doing the work of 3 drafters. Sight simulates each player doing the work of 2 players. So with a 12 player cube (540 cards), you can Glimpse up to 4, and Sight up to 6.
We've been doing our own variant of this with 4 players. Right now we draft my 400 cube with each player making 12 packs of 8, take one burn 1 style, with one half-pack at the end. This means each player ends up with a pool of 50 cards to make a deck out of, a bit more than normal but still fine. We really like this method, but recently I've been thinking about the future. I would like to expand the cube to be able to add all the cool new cards as they come out, but I don't want to dilute the power level I'm currently at. This means I would want to do smaller, incremental size increases, only including things that are at or above the current standard.
A number I've come up with for these increments would be in batches of 16, which would add one half-pack to the end of every draft. The problem with this is that pools would gradually get bigger and bigger, increasing by 2 extra picks for every 16 cards added. Decks would be way too consistent and samey for my tastes. So I have to change the draft method somehow to make up for this. The cleanest step up would be packs of 12, take 1 burn 2, but that would require 540 to end up with pools of 45, but I don't want to go that high all at once because of the maintaining power level reason above.
One solution I thought of would be to allow for the pool size to vary from 45 to 50 as I increase the size of the cube. Whenever the pool size gets up to 50, I would increase the size of each pack by 1 and either discard leftover cards in each pack back to the cube box or have players burn a varying amount of cards. So for instance...
When I increase to 9 card packs, using the take 1 burn 1 method with 4 players, 1 card would be left over at the end. Method 1 would solve this by just discarding the remaining card. Method 2 would have the first player burn 2 cards, then players 2, 3, and 4 would burn 1 as normal. With 10 card packs, the first two players would burn 2 and the rest burn 1. With 11, the first 3 would burn 2 and the last player would burn 1. And with the ideal 12 card pack, all players would burn 2.
There are problems with both methods, and I don't really like either all that much. Hoping someone here could possibly offer some ideas to change them or a new solution all together. I'm not a fan of Method 1 because with leftover cards in the pack, players would have more pick options than they should and thus, more consistent decks. Method 2 is even worse because it's too complicated. I know no one will be able to keep it straight how many cards they need to burn from each pack, especially if that number changes like it would eventually. The solution needs to be more elegant than that.
So yeah, I've been puzzling with this for a few days now. If anyone has gotten this far and has some ideas to throw at me, I would love to hear them.
Here's my write up for it, complete with formulas for coming up with pack size and burn count. Sorry if the writing is a bit impersonal, I was writing it in a very procedurally based manner to help me keep things straight as I was coming up with the method. It might actually explain the method better in this style anyways.
The cube is meant to be drafted by 4 players using a scaling pack size based on the total number of cards in the cube. Players will each make 11 to 12 packs. Starting at a cube size of 308, players will make 11 packs of 7 and draft them using the take 1 burn 1 method. Until the next 44-card break point, the 12th pack will gradually be added at the end. Every multiple of 44 cards added to the cube beyond 308 will require a readjustment of pack size. Each adjustment adds one additional card to each pack. Any remaining cards in a pack once each player has made their pick from it will be discarded back to the cube box. Every 3rd break point will also increase the burn count by one. With this method, sometimes pick 4 will consist of only a single card. Pack size and burn count can be determined using the following:
Pack Size = floor(Cube size/44)
Burn Count = ceiling((Pack size - 6)/3)
Since the number of packs varies as the cube increases in size, players' pools will vary from 44 to 48, but never go above or below that. There may be an uneven number of cards when trying to form the 12th pack if the cube size is not a perfect multiple of 4. To solve this, you can either simply discard the uneven cards to the cube box or distribute them randomly to as many players as possible. If you want to have the entire cube be drafted, I would prefer the second method.
New cards should only be added to colored sections in balance, or only exceeding balance by 1 card. For example, if monocolored sections consist of a minimum of 50 cards each, individual sections may not exceed 51. This allows you to add new cards one at a time instead of having to wait for a set of 5 color-balanced cards. The same goes for multicolored sections, with a set of 10 rather than 5. You may add to the Multicolor Flex and Colorless sections as needed without regard to balance (within reason).
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Pack Size = floor(Cube Size/36)
Burn Count = ceiling((Pack Size - 8)/4)
Will get at least 45 every time, just have to burn any leftover cards in a pack after the 5th pick. This way is actually cleaner than what I had before where you only got 4 cards per round. You could never get an odd number of cards to eventually add up to 45, only 44, 46, 48. Now that your original pack comes back to you in this one, you'll get 1.25 cards per pack * 9 packs * 4 players = 45 card pool minimum. It won't be possible to fully eliminate the remaining 46th or 47th card (at most, 3 players will get 47, I believe) if you want to draft the whole thing due to the nature of the method, but that's pretty darn close.
I think it's worth it for not having to jump in size so drastically to make drafting work. Remember, those 36 card break points are only for increasing pack size and burn count. You can add the cards as little as one at a time if you want.
If you really really want to get rid of the cards over 45, you can just strictly adhere to the 36 card breakpoints to have pools be exactly perfect, but whenever something new gets printed that you want to include, you'd either have to wait for 35 more to go along with it or make a cut. Making a cut would probably the better option there, but that's getting harder and harder every set release, and having 47 card pools is a small price to pay to not have to cut cards that I really don't want to, in my opinion.
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I briefly ran at 405 with glimpse drafts and that's pretty sweet, doesn't give a lot of wiggle room for pet cards but opens up some space if you want to make a smaller step to 450.
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Considering trying this out myself. We tried glimpse drafting with 3 for the first time and it was awesome. Each deck turned out well and we felt it didn't add too much time to the drafting. However since my cube is only 450+15, I don't have enough cards to do it with the ideal 4 players.
Moving to 480 sounds like a decent stepping stone because I don't feel comfortable moving up to 540 yet. Do you feel very constricted with the 5 fewer cards in the pool? I feel like many of my decks end up with plenty of extra cards as sideboard but I would hate to be cutting it too close.
Our favorite variant uses an 8 person pod where each player is drafting 4 separate decks. It proceeds as would any draft with the exception that you draft 4 decks rather than one. It takes a long time to do the draft, but once it's done, you can play with the decks for days before you've had all the match-ups. It's nice to be able to go crazy with one of your decks to test an archetype, but not feel too bad if it fails.
This Glimpse format seems like a quicker alternative, and I'll try it at some point.
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My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!
My 630 Card Powered Cube
My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 50th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from OTJ!