Ya, I definitely consider Upheaval to be a top 5 card, rant. Can't argue with that.
Savant is a very good card, but it's value can be pretty polarizing depending on where it gets picked up in the draft. As an aside, have people seen how good Savant is in multiples? You can choose different spells for each one to start, and then choose any of them as you cast it. Nutty.
I haven't voted in blue yet, but I'm puzzled at how low a lot of people are ranking Upheaval. It's probably going to end up in my top 5 because that card just wins tons of games.
For me, Upheaval loses some value under the new metric because it's very much a build-around. If I don't already have a bunch of mana rocks and see Upheaval in the 3rd pack I don't expect it to be particularly good in my deck even if I'm already in blue.
It also must be considered that Upheaval isn't always a stellar card in every cube--take the legacy cube, for example. There is a dearth of mana rocks, meaning that Upheaval is at its best as a Simic card and is much more limited in application.
Also true. My unpowered cube does run plenty of mana rocks - Signets, the card-disadvantage moxen, and Worn Powerstone and the like, which are lower picks than a lot of the powered cube-only mana rocks, and there also less of them than in powered cubes, so it's a lot easier to end up without the tools to make Upheaval great if it's picked up later.
Don't get me wrong, I still think it's great and ranked it #11 based on how great it is as a build-around, but the value of any build-around drops drastically when picked after the first pack and I have to factor that in.
As an aside, have people seen how good Savant is in multiples? You can choose different spells for each one to start, and then choose any of them as you cast it. Nutty.
You've played cubes that break singleton to run Arcane Savant? That does sound pretty nutty.
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For me, it was also the build-around aspect of Upheavel that made me rank it #10 (and mind you, being blue's #10 is nothing to scoff at). I feel that the cards that I ranked higher contribute to winnig the game more on their own, and in a wider variety of decks. Except Tinker and Show and Tell, which are also build-around-me cards in the same vein, but they cost halve the mana, and I've just seen many more Tinker wins than Upheavel wins. When Upheavel is cast the game is usually sealed, whereas with Tinker or Show and Tell there's still more chance of a comeback. But it's also much easier to cast the latter two and especially Tinker decks come together more often (at least in our cube).
I'd run Upheaval in any blue deck that can reasonably get to 6 mana. It is a build around, but it's a lot more than that. At least a few times, I've cast Upheaval just to get something out from under an Oblivion Ring. Which is pretty evil.
Agreed on Upheaval. It's a powerful build around, but it's still pretty good in just about any blue deck that can survive past six mana. Upheaval followed up by pretty much anything that can put you a few turns ahead of your opponent is good.
Good question, it certainly made my list. Then again, I can't say I see any stinkers in anyone's voting lists. The competition in blue is mighty fierce indeed....
Also, here's a repost from the second Straw Poll thread:
To save time, I'll open up a single thread for the non-traditionals after Overall Rankings are done. We can vote for the top 10 Conspiracies, and the top 20 non-traditional cards. Even though it'll only be in a single thread, feel free to vote for either or both categories.
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Blue voting's still open for another 12 hours or so, but I'm opening Black voting now. With the time difference between Allred and me, I either have to open 12 hours early or 12 hours late, and I'd rather err on the side of keeping the project moving. I hope no one minds the short overlap.
EDIT: Since Red's voting is coming up soon and this issue was discussed in the White Results thread, I've a Straw Poll on whether to rank Wildfire & Burning of Xinye as 1 card or 2, as well as whether to rank Incinerate and Searing Spear/Lightning Strike as 1 card or 2. Discuss and vote on it here.
I meant to bring this up earlier - I guess Contract from Below is not included in black? It does appear in 316 cubes on cubetutor.
You can't vote on it. The rule is:
Essentially, any released Magic card from Kaladesh or earlier that is DCI approved for one or more formats of competitive Constructed Magic can be included in your voting. In previous iterations of the Power Rankings Conspiracy-type cards and silver-bordered cards were permitted to be voted for and ranked but after discussion the community voted to exclude them from this year's rankings. They will now be voted on in a separate category after the OVERALL voting has finished.
Ante cards are banned in all official constructed formats.
We didn't specifically vote on or discuss ante cards while we were discussing non-traditional cards, and perhaps we should have. I know wtwlf123 is an advocate for ranking specifically Vintage-legal cards, but that's not the standard we actually voted on in the Straw Poll on the subject.
However, if you don't have house rules that allow for some sort of ante during a cube match, does Contract from Below even do anything? I'd argue that since Ante is strictly forbidden in the Magic: the Gathering Tournament Rules, playing for ante is not part of a traditional cube environment. Therefore, Contract from Below can't possibly be remotely effective at contributing to game wins in a traditional cube environment, since the card says you'd have to remove it from your deck before playing, so it would just be a waste of a draft pick.
We're not voting on how effective cards are under anyone's house rules, even if apparently 316 cube managers out there have this as a house rule.
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Because you have to house rule Contract From Below for it to work properly in a cube environment, I don't think it should be included in the vote. Obviously a draw 7 (8?) for a single black mana is ridiculous, but that's not what the card actually says.
I have a question for later that I think we should also settle ahead of time. Specifically, I'm thinking about how the draft Constructs should rank.
What exactly do we mean by "contribute to game wins"? Do we mean increase in win% by picking the card vs. picking a different card (and passing the card in question)? Or increase in win% by picking the card vs. the card not being in the draft and picking something else? Or increase in win% by seeing the card in a pack vs. the card being in the draft but not getting to you?
I think it's #1, but it's best to clarify. For cards like Paliano and Lore Seeker, those are very different metrics.
I am still not really grokking the new metric actually. Why is Tinker ok to be voted on high, while Shackles is not? Both have a prerequisite to be good. How do you take narrowness into accoutn without knowing your deck or your pool?
P1P1 felt a lot clearer to me, less prone to different interpretations.
Tinker is an insane card that often wins the game when it's casted, and when your deck has two options for point of attack (say: Myr Battlesphere vs Inkwell Leviathan) you're able to pretty much beat any deck with a Tinker casting. Shackles is good, but it's been less the shut-down card for us than it apparently is for other players because of its reliance on having islands.
I think it's being rated appropriately; if anything I'm more surprised that it's not in more top 5s.
Tinker is an insane card that often wins the game when it's casted, and when your deck has two options for point of attack (say: Myr Battlesphere vs Inkwell Leviathan) you're able to pretty much beat any deck with a Tinker casting. Shackles is good, but it's been less the shut-down card for us than it apparently is for other players because of its reliance on having islands.
I think it's being rated appropriately; if anything I'm more surprised that it's not in more top 5s.
That was just an example. I agree that Tinker is more powerfull then Shackles, it is more about how people understand the metric.
What I've been doing is looking at my current list and trying to narrow it down. I'm thinking about each card and how often I've cast or had it cast against me and had it just be extremely powerful. I'm trying to also take into account how highly I value these cards in draft as well, but I like that this is not the only metric. There are only about 5-10 for each color that I'm really stoked about taking at P1P1, so the last half of each list was mostly made up of cards measured by the metric we're currently using anyway. Basically it's about evaluating each card and forming a cohesive list. How powerful is this card? How highly do I value it in draft when I'm already that color? Is it so good that it sways me toward that color? How important is it to the cube as a whole? Does it create an entire archetype in and of itself? I like this metric because it lets me truly evaluate each card for what it is rather than just asking if I'd take it over the next card at P1P1.
You factor the narrowness into the evaluation, just like every other factor. How do you compare a 2UU card to a 3U card without knowing your pool? And P1P1 value IS still one of the factors that contributes to the card's strength. It just no longer the only metric.
I am still not really grokking the new metric actually. Why is Tinker ok to be voted on high, while Shackles is not? Both have a prerequisite to be good. How do you take narrowness into accoutn without knowing your deck or your pool?
Use your best judgment based on your experience with these cards in cube. I rank Tinker quite a bit lower (#14) than most because of the high setup cost, and the fact that it's a high-risk high-reward card. While it often just wins games when it is cast in a deck that is built to abuse it, if you draw the Tinker fodder and Tinker on time, and if you don't draw your Tinker target early, and if your opponent doesn't have countermagic or removal to turn that Tinker into a blowout, Tinker wins games quite handily.
Then there are the times that the stars don't align so well and Tinker rots in your hand because your turn 2 Signet got blown up, or it's marooned in a sideboard because it wasn't even opened till Pack 3, or because the giant robots were poached by opponents drafting ramp, reanimator or Sneak & Show decks. When we play sealed deck, Tinker is sometimes impossible to build around. My cube is unpowered, so there's also a lower concentration of 0-2 CMC artifacts to use as Tinker fodder. All of this brings down the value of Tinker as far as I'm concerned. It certainly makes my top 20 in blue, which is high praise for the card, but all things considered I can't rank it in any higher than I did.
Vedalken Shackles is easier to build around, you just need a high enough concentration of blue spells to justify running a lot of Islands, and it's an extremely hard card to beat once it's in play, so I did rank it over Tinker.
What exactly do we mean by "contribute to game wins"? Do we mean increase in win% by picking the card vs. picking a different card (and passing the card in question)? Or increase in win% by picking the card vs. the card not being in the draft and picking something else? Or increase in win% by seeing the card in a pack vs. the card being in the draft but not getting to you?
I see what you're getting at with regards to draft-matters cards like Lore Seeker, as those questions don't really matter with any other type of card, while being the person to pass Lore Seeker to the person who opens it means you get the last pick from that extra pack as opposed the person who's lucky enough to get 2nd pick from that pack just because the person before them happened to pick Lore Seeker. I'd say do your best to factor all of that together, but I'll also say that in my own ranking I'm primarily focusing on the effect that I expect a card I've picked from the draft to have on my own chances to win games. If I see the effect of passing a card as being detrimental enough to my chances to win that I must take it over other cards in the pack, I'd have to rank it higher.
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I'd say do your best to factor all of that together, but I'll also say that in my own ranking I'm primarily focusing on the effect that I expect a card I've picked from the draft to have on my own chances to win games. If I see the effect of passing a card as being detrimental enough to my chances to win that I must take it over other cards in the pack, I'd have to rank it higher.
You can't just say "factor all those metrics together". Factor them together into what? It sounds like in the end you're leaning towards win% for taking it vs passing it, but it doesn't make sense unless we actually define what we are measuring. The point of having a metric laid out explicitly is that we don't all arbitrarily pick how we're measuring "top" cards.
I'd say do your best to factor all of that together, but I'll also say that in my own ranking I'm primarily focusing on the effect that I expect a card I've picked from the draft to have on my own chances to win games. If I see the effect of passing a card as being detrimental enough to my chances to win that I must take it over other cards in the pack, I'd have to rank it higher.
You can't just say "factor all those metrics together".
First things first, please don't put quotation marks around words I did not say. I said "factor all of that together", and in case you're confused by what "all of that" means in context, I was referring to what you said here:
Do we mean increase in win% by picking the card vs. picking a different card (and passing the card in question)? Or increase in win% by picking the card vs. the card not being in the draft and picking something else? Or increase in win% by seeing the card in a pack vs. the card being in the draft but not getting to you?
When evaluating draft-matters cards like Lore Seeker, I think you're pointing out that there's a bit of a splashback effect of sorts of passing draft-matters cards and having it immediately taken by the next drafter. In the first pack of an 8-man draft, the person to the left of the person who takes Lore Seeker benefits quite a bit by accident by getting 2nd and 10th picks from that pack, the person on the right (who passed it) gets penalized by getting stuck with only the 8th pick. To me it sounds like the penalty of having it taken by the person you pass it to is something as a drafter you want to consider when deciding whether or not to take it, so it sounds reasonable to me to say it would be valuable to factor that into your idea of how it contributes to game wins.
Does that mean Lore Seeker should be #6, #13, #18, or #37 in your Colorless Power Rankings vote? That's ultimately for you and each voter to decide for themselves.
Factor them together into what? It sounds like in the end you're leaning towards win% for taking it vs passing it, but it doesn't make sense unless we actually define what we are measuring. The point of having a metric laid out explicitly is that we don't all arbitrarily pick how we're measuring "top" cards.
We are using a single metric, how effectively a card contributes to game wins, and it isup to each individual voter to evaluate that about each card to the best of their ability. Ultimately, this metric is quite subjective, and we're counting on each other to use our best judgment about which cards we think are most powerful in cube based on our experience and observation.
We are using a single metric, how effectively a card contributes to game wins, and it is the responsibility of each individual voter to evaluate that about each card to the best of their ability.
I think the metric is pretty straight-forward. You can use any combination of factrs you want to determine how effectively a card contributes to game wins, including the impact on the draft (for the purposes of Lore Seeker, etc).
If the metric is straightforward, then you should be able to state it in more precise terms so that people are not interpreting it differently. (Getting everyone to try to adhere to it may be a different matter.)
As far as I can tell, there are three possible metrics we could be evaluating: (a) increase in match win% conditioned on seeing the card in a pack, (b) increase in match win% conditioned on picking the card, or (c) how much the card feels like it carries its weight.
Combining two or more of those metrics does not make sense as you don't end up with something meaningful. Metric (c) is not very useful and I hope that's not what we're talking about. In the case of Lore Seeker, it might crack top 20 on metric (b), and it's probably the worst card in a cube on metric (a). If you combine those and say Lore Seeker is kind of average, when there is no sense in which Lore Seeker is an average card, you're just not saying anything meaningful.
But... wanted to air my opinion on the black voting. People are comically underrating entomb. I've seen no person rate in their top 20, which is absurd in my eyes.
The difference in power level between a reanimator deck that has entomb, and one that doesn't is night and day.
Reanimator is effectively a 3 peice combo deck that requires the following:
An expensive creature in your hand to be able to discard to your graveyard
A way to get the fatty from your hand into your graveyard
A reanimation spell
Entomb allows you to merge 2 of those steps into 1, tutoring for ANY creature in your deck (some decks require different threats) that's not in your hand for the cost of 1 mana.
There's no on color card that comes CLOSE to that. Speed and consistency is critical for combo decks, and entomb is both the fastest and the most consistent way to set up the combo (by a significant margin).
Very early in my duplicate cube I tested 2 copies of entomb (underrating its power), and it was IMMEDIATELY apparent how broken reanimator became when I did. Much more so than a second copy of animate dead/reanimate.
Savant is a very good card, but it's value can be pretty polarizing depending on where it gets picked up in the draft. As an aside, have people seen how good Savant is in multiples? You can choose different spells for each one to start, and then choose any of them as you cast it. Nutty.
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For me, Upheaval loses some value under the new metric because it's very much a build-around. If I don't already have a bunch of mana rocks and see Upheaval in the 3rd pack I don't expect it to be particularly good in my deck even if I'm already in blue.
Also true. My unpowered cube does run plenty of mana rocks - Signets, the card-disadvantage moxen, and Worn Powerstone and the like, which are lower picks than a lot of the powered cube-only mana rocks, and there also less of them than in powered cubes, so it's a lot easier to end up without the tools to make Upheaval great if it's picked up later.
Don't get me wrong, I still think it's great and ranked it #11 based on how great it is as a build-around, but the value of any build-around drops drastically when picked after the first pack and I have to factor that in.
You've played cubes that break singleton to run Arcane Savant? That does sound pretty nutty.
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Also, here's a repost from the second Straw Poll thread:
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EDIT: Since Red's voting is coming up soon and this issue was discussed in the White Results thread, I've a Straw Poll on whether to rank Wildfire & Burning of Xinye as 1 card or 2, as well as whether to rank Incinerate and Searing Spear/Lightning Strike as 1 card or 2. Discuss and vote on it here.
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You can't vote on it. The rule is:
Essentially, any released Magic card from Kaladesh or earlier that is DCI approved for one or more formats of competitive Constructed Magic can be included in your voting. In previous iterations of the Power Rankings Conspiracy-type cards and silver-bordered cards were permitted to be voted for and ranked but after discussion the community voted to exclude them from this year's rankings. They will now be voted on in a separate category after the OVERALL voting has finished.
Ante cards are banned in all official constructed formats.
However, if you don't have house rules that allow for some sort of ante during a cube match, does Contract from Below even do anything? I'd argue that since Ante is strictly forbidden in the Magic: the Gathering Tournament Rules, playing for ante is not part of a traditional cube environment. Therefore, Contract from Below can't possibly be remotely effective at contributing to game wins in a traditional cube environment, since the card says you'd have to remove it from your deck before playing, so it would just be a waste of a draft pick.
We're not voting on how effective cards are under anyone's house rules, even if apparently 316 cube managers out there have this as a house rule.
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What exactly do we mean by "contribute to game wins"? Do we mean increase in win% by picking the card vs. picking a different card (and passing the card in question)? Or increase in win% by picking the card vs. the card not being in the draft and picking something else? Or increase in win% by seeing the card in a pack vs. the card being in the draft but not getting to you?
I think it's #1, but it's best to clarify. For cards like Paliano and Lore Seeker, those are very different metrics.
P1P1 felt a lot clearer to me, less prone to different interpretations.
I feel compelled to repeat everything I hear
I think it's being rated appropriately; if anything I'm more surprised that it's not in more top 5s.
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That was just an example. I agree that Tinker is more powerfull then Shackles, it is more about how people understand the metric.
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Use your best judgment based on your experience with these cards in cube. I rank Tinker quite a bit lower (#14) than most because of the high setup cost, and the fact that it's a high-risk high-reward card. While it often just wins games when it is cast in a deck that is built to abuse it, if you draw the Tinker fodder and Tinker on time, and if you don't draw your Tinker target early, and if your opponent doesn't have countermagic or removal to turn that Tinker into a blowout, Tinker wins games quite handily.
Then there are the times that the stars don't align so well and Tinker rots in your hand because your turn 2 Signet got blown up, or it's marooned in a sideboard because it wasn't even opened till Pack 3, or because the giant robots were poached by opponents drafting ramp, reanimator or Sneak & Show decks. When we play sealed deck, Tinker is sometimes impossible to build around. My cube is unpowered, so there's also a lower concentration of 0-2 CMC artifacts to use as Tinker fodder. All of this brings down the value of Tinker as far as I'm concerned. It certainly makes my top 20 in blue, which is high praise for the card, but all things considered I can't rank it in any higher than I did.
Vedalken Shackles is easier to build around, you just need a high enough concentration of blue spells to justify running a lot of Islands, and it's an extremely hard card to beat once it's in play, so I did rank it over Tinker.
I see what you're getting at with regards to draft-matters cards like Lore Seeker, as those questions don't really matter with any other type of card, while being the person to pass Lore Seeker to the person who opens it means you get the last pick from that extra pack as opposed the person who's lucky enough to get 2nd pick from that pack just because the person before them happened to pick Lore Seeker. I'd say do your best to factor all of that together, but I'll also say that in my own ranking I'm primarily focusing on the effect that I expect a card I've picked from the draft to have on my own chances to win games. If I see the effect of passing a card as being detrimental enough to my chances to win that I must take it over other cards in the pack, I'd have to rank it higher.
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First things first, please don't put quotation marks around words I did not say. I said "factor all of that together", and in case you're confused by what "all of that" means in context, I was referring to what you said here:
When evaluating draft-matters cards like Lore Seeker, I think you're pointing out that there's a bit of a splashback effect of sorts of passing draft-matters cards and having it immediately taken by the next drafter. In the first pack of an 8-man draft, the person to the left of the person who takes Lore Seeker benefits quite a bit by accident by getting 2nd and 10th picks from that pack, the person on the right (who passed it) gets penalized by getting stuck with only the 8th pick. To me it sounds like the penalty of having it taken by the person you pass it to is something as a drafter you want to consider when deciding whether or not to take it, so it sounds reasonable to me to say it would be valuable to factor that into your idea of how it contributes to game wins.
Does that mean Lore Seeker should be #6, #13, #18, or #37 in your Colorless Power Rankings vote? That's ultimately for you and each voter to decide for themselves.
We are using a single metric, how effectively a card contributes to game wins, and it isup to each individual voter to evaluate that about each card to the best of their ability. Ultimately, this metric is quite subjective, and we're counting on each other to use our best judgment about which cards we think are most powerful in cube based on our experience and observation.
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I think the metric is pretty straight-forward. You can use any combination of factrs you want to determine how effectively a card contributes to game wins, including the impact on the draft (for the purposes of Lore Seeker, etc).
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As far as I can tell, there are three possible metrics we could be evaluating: (a) increase in match win% conditioned on seeing the card in a pack, (b) increase in match win% conditioned on picking the card, or (c) how much the card feels like it carries its weight.
Combining two or more of those metrics does not make sense as you don't end up with something meaningful. Metric (c) is not very useful and I hope that's not what we're talking about. In the case of Lore Seeker, it might crack top 20 on metric (b), and it's probably the worst card in a cube on metric (a). If you combine those and say Lore Seeker is kind of average, when there is no sense in which Lore Seeker is an average card, you're just not saying anything meaningful.
But... wanted to air my opinion on the black voting. People are comically underrating entomb. I've seen no person rate in their top 20, which is absurd in my eyes.
The difference in power level between a reanimator deck that has entomb, and one that doesn't is night and day.
Reanimator is effectively a 3 peice combo deck that requires the following:
An expensive creature in your hand to be able to discard to your graveyard
A way to get the fatty from your hand into your graveyard
A reanimation spell
Entomb allows you to merge 2 of those steps into 1, tutoring for ANY creature in your deck (some decks require different threats) that's not in your hand for the cost of 1 mana.
There's no on color card that comes CLOSE to that. Speed and consistency is critical for combo decks, and entomb is both the fastest and the most consistent way to set up the combo (by a significant margin).
Very early in my duplicate cube I tested 2 copies of entomb (underrating its power), and it was IMMEDIATELY apparent how broken reanimator became when I did. Much more so than a second copy of animate dead/reanimate.
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