The opening post of this thread has been updated to reflect the consensus points 1, 3, 5, and 6.
As for 2 and 4....
Is everyone forgetting that conspiracies, unhinged cards, and draft-matters cards were in last year's rankings and it was fine?
I think the continuing debate from last year should show pretty clearly that it wasn't fine with everyone. That's why it's so important for this vote to take place, and for everyone planning to be involved in the Power Rankings voting for this year to respect the results of this straw poll.
I did vote, but both options being presented in the current vote seem bad to me. Is 2016 just the year of voting for two bad options?
By putting the Conspiracy/Un-card question up to a vote on 3 different yes/no questions I have provided 8 options to vote for in the straw poll, and there is enough variety of opinions on all 3 questions splitting categories in the straw poll that it already seems pretty clear splitting the vote on non-traditional cards into three distinct categories was the right thing to do to determine the will of the community.
It's like the best option (all the non-traditional cards get voted on in their own category) was removed entirely.
I have volunteered to do this as part of a separate project. Every card not included in this year's Power Rankings will have the opportunity to be discussed, voted on and ranked there. I encourage you to participate in it!
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465 card Unpowered cube thread. Draft it here and I'll be happy to return the favor.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
Spike Rogue,
I just want to be clear that no matter how this discussion goes, the options available, etc., I'm really grateful that you and allread are doing this. It's a great service to the MtG Salvation cube community. I may have suggestions and criticisms, but please know that I appreciate what you guys are doing.
Spike Rogue,
I just want to be clear that no matter how this discussion goes, the options available, etc., I'm really grateful that you and allread are doing this. It's a great service to the MtG Salvation cube community. I may have suggestions and criticisms, but please know that I appreciate what you guys are doing.
Cheers,
rant
Thanks, rantipole, I appreciate that. I'm doing my best to take what everyone wants into consideration as we establish this framework, and while no one is going to get everything they want, I'm confident that the final result will be one that is useful to everyone.
Speaking of taking everyone's wants into consideration, I do want to address a couple of points that came up that are not being voted on or otherwise discussed:
I would vote for an "adjusted win percentage" metric here. The idea of an adjusted win percentage metric would be that you take the win % of the card (ie, the win % of players who cast the card), and weight that by the percentage of games the spell was actually cast. This forces you to consider casting cost in relation to power level, as well as flexibility in terms of likelihood the card makes your final deck. So a first pick Preordain might not be a super high win-percentage card, doubtfully much higher than 50%, but it's going to get cast in a huge percentage of games relative to a card like Future Sight or even Whirler Rougue, so it would be high up in the blue rankings.
I'd say that this concept sounds quite similar to what we've agreed on here. How effectively a card contributes to wins comes from efficiency and versatility just as much as raw power. However, gathering the data to measure that as precisely as you're suggesting sounds pretty hard to accomplish unless you're running the MTGO cubes. Have you found a way to do this for your own cube?
I like the idea of putting the creme de la creme into a "hall of fame." We acknowledge they are the best and want to see the rest. Library has been the best land every time. Ancestral topped the blue rankings. Sol Ring topped artifacts. I think we could safely keep the list pretty conservative at Library of Alexandria, Ancestral Recall, Sol Ring, Jitte, Time Walk, Lotus, Moxen. Heck, it might be fun to pull out all those perennial category winners and put them into a separate voting category and rank them. The point is that including them in the individual sections is rather uninteresting because we know those cards are good, and irrelevant for many cubers because they've excluded them for power reasons. I suppose there is some value in having those cards anchor the scale, but I, personally would rather see them in their own ranking.
In the history of the Power Rankings, the Power 9 and honorary power actually have not all maintained identical rankings. Even the number 1 spot has been contested with Library of Alexandria and Sol Ring having reversed places at the very top since 2009's rankings, and there are several top unpowered cards that have eclipsed traditional power in the top 5 like Umezawa's Jitte, Mind Twist, and Recurring Nightmare over the years. If the exact same cards dominated the exact same places year in year out, I might suggest doing something like that, but that does not appear to be the case.
However, as I run an unpowered cube myself I'm certainly sensitive to this. In fact, concerns about this were exactly why the Overall rankings were expanded from 20 to 30 last year, and that's something I supported at the time. Slots #21-30 proved to be of interest to powered and unpowered cubers alike, so I see no reason not to continue this tradition. In blue and colorless, I'll also be sure to point out additional cards in the "Just Missed" category, which should give a pretty good idea of what might have been in those top 20 if power weren't part of the vote.
To unpowered cubers who are voting this year, please do your best to vote on how you assess the cards you exclude from your own cubes for being too strong. If you have excluded a card from your cube on this basis, you've already made a judgment about how powerful it is. Please share your findings with the community when you vote.
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465 card Unpowered cube thread. Draft it here and I'll be happy to return the favor.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
Spike Rogue - Just to be clear, don't take my criticisms of this specific area of this project as a jab at you or allred123. I appreciate both of you and I'm thankful you guys decided to take on this massive undertaking.
With that said, I'll place my votes as appropriately as I can no matter the outcome. It should be stated, though, that these cards aren't likely to make any of my personal top 20 votes. I don't feel that they add anything other than a bit of fun here and there. I'm not a fan of Un cards in general and the draft constructs never make final 40s.
Is everyone forgetting that conspiracies, unhinged cards, and draft-matters cards were in last year's rankings and it was fine?
Fine is relative. As always it feels weird to me (and apparently quite a bit of people) to have cards that are eligible only get votes from a small part of the voters even if they clearly are strong enough. I also have always felt weird about voting for un-cards as some are broken (even though people generally ignorse these cards anyway).
Spike Rogue - Just to be clear, don't take my criticisms of this specific area of this project as a jab at you or allred123. I appreciate both of you and I'm thankful you guys decided to take on this massive undertaking.
With that said, I'll place my votes as appropriately as I can no matter the outcome. It should be stated, though, that these cards aren't likely to make any of my personal top 20 votes. I don't feel that they add anything other than a bit of fun here and there. I'm not a fan of Un cards in general and the draft constructs never make final 40s.
This quote is reason enough to just not include the conspiracy cards and uncards anywhere If people say they are going to vote appropriately and then within a sentence of that they say they won't include cards that are obvious top 20 material then what integrity does this project have with them included? As much as I love the cards and want them included, we should probably keep them out to maintain some level of integrity with the results.
@cuttups: Agreed. I didn't want to include them last year, wouldn't include them in my main list, and don't want to include them this year. We all have prerogative to vote how we see fit. I don't personally feel like these cards should make my top 20. It skewed the vote last year for this very reason. Why skew the vote when we can just vote on these cards in their own section? I have no idea how to rank these cards amongst other cards of the same color. It's better, imo, to just leave them out than to try and guess based on what others tell me are "obvious" rankings.
While it is your prerogative to vote how you see fit, it is recommended that you rank the top 20 cards by power level. If you're threatening to not do that because you don't want cards that you don't play with to be on the list, then I have to disagree with you.
I can see excluding non-standard cards from the list because some people are bad at evaluating them and we don't have methodology in place to deal with that. The part I'm not okay with is pretending that there's another reason or that the list is still complete.
If you're threatening to not do that because you don't want cards that you don't play with to be on the list, then I have to disagree with you.
That's not what he said. What he said was:
Quote from calibretto »
I have no idea how to rank these cards amongst other cards of the same [section].
Which means that he doesn't want to arbitrarily throw cards onto a list that he can't properly evaluate. Conspiracies are hard to evaluate without extensive playtesting. And a lot of the other non-traditional cards have a super-high variance, or are very context-dependent for quality. That makes them hard to vote on alongside cards that are all relatively "normal" in function.
..........
Quote from Spike Rogue »
By putting the Conspiracy/Un-card question up to a vote on 3 different yes/no questions I have provided 8 options to vote for in the straw poll, and there is enough variety of opinions on all 3 questions splitting categories in the straw poll that it already seems pretty clear splitting the vote on non-traditional cards into three distinct categories was the right thing to do to determine the will of the community.
But it ultimately left off the option that people were asking for in the first place, which was voting on them in their own section, competing against each other for votes. Including some in with the regular votes and leaving other groups out entirely was a surprise option that showed up on the straw poll that nobody was discussing before...
It just seems like the option a bunch of folks were asking for wasn't even presented as an option to vote on.
Agreed with all of what wtwlf just stated. Not only do I have no idea how to rank these cards against other "normally included" cards, but as far as Un-cards, I don't even know which ones I should be including. So, what, I have to wait until someone more experienced with those cards casts their vote and then cast my vote according to that other person's opinion? It seems like that is just as detrimental to the result as not voting on them at all.
Conspiracies are hard to evaluate without extensive playtesting. And a lot of the other non-traditional cards have a super-high variance, or are very context-dependent for quality. That makes them hard to vote on alongside cards that are all relatively "normal" in function.
Not only do I have no idea how to rank these cards against other "normally included" cards, but as far as Un-cards, I don't even know which ones I should be including. So, what, I have to wait until someone more experienced with those cards casts their vote and then cast my vote according to that other person's opinion? It seems like that is just as detrimental to the result as not voting on them at all.
The power level of Conspiracy and Un-cards are too hard to properly evaluate within the context of your own cube environment without extensive playtesting, but they somehow become easier to evaluate when considered separately from the rest of the cube environment? For people who don't play Conspiracy or Un-cards it's somehow harder to compare Backup Plan to cards you've played with regularly in a traditional cube like Umezawa's Jitte than to cards you haven't like Chaos Confetti? I'm having a hard time seeing the value of a separate category, and frankly, based on earlier comments I was under the impression that insistence on putting them into a separate category instead of simply excluding them was an insincere attempt at compromise from people who were more interested in them being excluded entirely. The clamoring to be able to vote in this separate category from people who are primarily voting to exclude is taking me by surprise, although I am not convinced that it is a particularly worthwhile endeavor in and of itself. My offer to discuss and rank excluded cards in a separate project from the Power Rankings also appears to have been Dismissed.
Still, this project is all about determining and respecting the voice of this community, and this point will be no exception, so here's what I plan to do. The current straw poll will continue until it closes in about 12 hours, and its results will be incorporated into the Power Rankings voting process. Afterwards, I will begin a second 24-hour straw poll to determine whether or not an additional Non-Traditional Card category should be created for all WotC printed cards that are otherwise excluded from the Power Rankings. Make no mistake, my vote on this will be "no", but if a majority votes for it, we'll do it. If not, I won't bother creating the separate project for non-traditional cards I discussed either. Someone else can take that on if they like. The results of this 2nd straw poll will be the end of discussion on Power Rankings voting procedure, and voting for White cards will begin on October 9th (on my side of the International Date Line).
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@cuttups: Agreed. I didn't want to include them last year, wouldn't include them in my main list, and don't want to include them this year. We all have prerogative to vote how we see fit. I don't personally feel like these cards should make my top 20.
wtwlf123, this was the part that really didn't sit well with me and that I would not cater to.
The power level of Conspiracy and Un-cards are too hard to properly evaluate within the context of your own cube environment without extensive playtesting, but they somehow become easier to evaluate when considered separately from the rest of the cube environment? For people who don't play Conspiracy or Un-cards it's somehow harder to compare Backup Plan to cards you've played with regularly in a traditional cube like Umezawa's Jitte than to cards you haven't like Chaos Confetti?
The difference is that I don't have to participate in that separate vote and try to compare these cards that I have no experience with. My Conspiracy module does not contain Un-cards. Wtwlf's, however, does. If there is a separate vote, people who play these cards can rank them and then people like me can view those results. I might even decide that there's one or two Un-cards that aren't as silly that feel more like Conspiracy type cards that I'd like to include in my own module. I just don't see the value of voting on how good Backup Plan is compared to Umezawa's Jitte, when the cards are never going to compete for the same slot. If our metric goes back to P1P1, then this comparison makes more sense. Even then, in the case of Backup Plan specifically, my group has done friendly mulligans in casual play since we started playing casually in '98, so I have no idea why everyone thinks Backup Plan is so good. My point here isn't to focus on my house rule, but to focus on how every group is different. A card like Umezawa's Jitte is in almost everyone's cube that allows rares. It's been in several iterations of the MTGO cube. Most people who would participate in a cube rankings vote have enough experience with that card to evaluate it properly on a Top 20 list. Backup Plan, however, is so wildly different from the norm in Magic that, if you've never played with it or if it's not relevant to your cube for whatever reason, it's extremely hard to evaluate. Even drafting someone else's cube where the mulligans aren't free, I probably wouldn't take Backup Plan because it doesn't look as powerful on paper to me as people who play it on these boards claim it is.
@cuttups: Agreed. I didn't want to include them last year, wouldn't include them in my main list, and don't want to include them this year. We all have prerogative to vote how we see fit. I don't personally feel like these cards should make my top 20.
wtwlf123, this was the part that really didn't sit well with me and that I would not cater to.
You don't "cater" to people excluding cards you like off their lists because they don't like them? Isn't that the point of this vote? What if I said I hated Snapcaster Mage and genuinely thought it was bad? Maybe I've had some bad luck with it. Maybe it just rarely ever flashed anything back and was mostly just a 1U 2/1 for me. That's my opinion. You can disagree with that opinion and try to convince me that I'm wrong, but I don't have to include it on my Top 20 for Blue just because it's a card other people think is deserving. Obviously this is an extreme example, but it's still valid. Maybe I don't include Day of Judgment because I think the regeneration clause on *** matters somehow. Everyone evaluates and values cards differently for their own reasons. These projects aren't ran to figure out what you think are the most powerful cards. They're ran to figure out what the community thinks are the most powerful cards.
The power level of Conspiracy and Un-cards are too hard to properly evaluate within the context of your own cube environment without extensive playtesting, but they somehow become easier to evaluate when considered separately from the rest of the cube environment?
No. They get voted on by the people who use them, and therefore can properly evaluate them.
Lets say that only half the voters vote on them. Their data in comparison to each other will be accurate, because those lists will be complete. Their data when mixed in with regular voting will be WAY off, since there would be a lot of abstained votes.
@cuttups: Agreed. I didn't want to include them last year, wouldn't include them in my main list, and don't want to include them this year. We all have prerogative to vote how we see fit. I don't personally feel like these cards should make my top 20.
wtwlf123, this was the part that really didn't sit well with me and that I would not cater to.
Right. But if you read the very next sentence, he explains why. It's not because "screw you guys, I don't want to" ...it's because he's unsure of how to properly rank them, so his votes would be arbitrary. Which he feels is just as bad (if not worse) than simply leaving them off. And he's not alone. So we can have bad results with people guessing on votes, or we could vote on them in their own category, where only voters with experience using those kinds of cards can cast a complete and accurate vote.
I do think the idea of voting on Backup Plan and Symbol Status (as an example) in the same list is pointless though. They aren't even in the same ballpark as to how they play or where they fit in my cube. I would want to have conspiracies in their own section but then Uncards would end up getting left out all together.
I do think the idea of voting on Backup Plan and Symbol Status (as an example) in the same list is pointless though. They aren't even in the same ballpark as to how they play or where they fit in my cube. I would want to have conspiracies in their own section but then Uncards would end up getting left out all together.
Yeah, those cards should never be competing for a spot. (And FWIW they're def both top 10 in the lists they should show up in.)
The Straw Poll is closed and the community has spoken!
Here are the results:
On Question #1: Should green creatures that produce non-green mana be categorized as GREEN or MULTICOLOR?
The community has voted that they will be categorized as GREEN in this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 26-11 with 1 abstention.
On Question #2: Should cards with Conspiracy in their type line be INCLUDED in or EXCLUDED from this year's Rankings?
The community has voted to EXCLUDE all Conspiracies from this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 20-18. They are not to be voted on in any currently existing category, including the Overall rankings.
On Question #3: Should spell cards that reference drafting be INCLUDED in or EXCLUDED in this year's Rankings?
The community has voted to INCLUDE all spell cards that reference drafting in this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 24-14. They are to be categorized by the color of their casting costs or as Land (i.e. Paliano, the High City) and also considered as candidates for the Overall rankings. Here is a link to all cards meeting this criteria.
On Question #4: Should silver-bordered cards from Unglued and Unhinged be INCLUDED in or EXCLUDED from this year's Rankings?
The community has voted to EXCLUDE silver-bordered cards in this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 24-14.
I ask all community members to respect this vote and to evaluate all cards the community has voted to include fairly and honestly as you can based on their ability to contribute to game wins in a traditional cube environment, as well as to refrain from voting on any cards that have been voted as excluded.
As some members have requested a separate category for non-traditional cards including Conspiracies and silver-bordered cards, there will be a 2nd straw poll on that issue in a separate thread.
OK, we've resolved a lot in the past few days, now let's talk about the 12th category for excluded cards. My thought was to create a single category for all non-traditional cards which would include Conspiracies, Un-cards, and all other cards that were previously excluded like holiday promos, 5-color Magic, Theros Hero Cards, etc. As far as I'm concerned, since these cards are excluded from the primary Power Rankings, you might as well scrap the "contributes to game wins" metric in any vote on them because as has already been brought up these cards are pretty disparate. I think it's also pretty clear that no matter what, there will be a smaller group of people voting on them. It really might as well be a simple vote for "best" or "favorite" at this point. Some of the people who are insisting on this category, yet advocated to exclude them from the main rankings, have already said that they don't actually plan to contribute to voting in this category.
Now that draft-matters cards have been accepted into the main Power Rankings votes, I'm even less of a fan of creating a 13th category to vote on, rank, and discuss Conspiracies than I am of creating a 12th category. It's 25 cards.
I'm holding off on posting the 2nd straw poll for the moment, so that the people who are interested in this category can give me a clearer picture of what it should include, and how they would like to see this handled. I'll give you a day or so to hash it out before I post the straw poll. One thing I insist on is that the actual voting and ranking of the 12th category be done after the Overall rankings have concluded to avoid potential confusion that the excluded cards might be able to be included in the Overall vote. I also think the straw poll shouldn't be gauging community support or opposition to the 12th category as a project, but interest in participation. If more than, say, 10-15 people plan to actually contribute to and vote in a 12th category the "no" votes don't really matter and we should go ahead, but if less than that plan to participate I think we can safely consider that portion of this project a non-starter.
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465 card Unpowered cube thread. Draft it here and I'll be happy to return the favor.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
Wow, is there really a justification for excluding Un cards from the lists? I get it if someone thinks Backup Plan is too different to evaluate, but Blast from the Past?
Wow, is there really a justification for excluding Un cards from the lists? I get it if someone thinks Backup Plan is too different to evaluate, but Blast from the Past?
The justification was the vote. We did the vote for a reason.
I get that, I'll abide by the vote, I just want to know if anyone can articulate a reason for voting that way beyond "those cards aren't in my cube so I don't want to acknowledge them"?
I get that, I'll abide by the vote, I just want to know if anyone can articulate a reason for voting that way beyond "those cards aren't in my cube so I don't want to acknowledge them"?
Coming from someone who voted "include" in all three points: please don't turn this into an argument. Let's not make this personal, please.
Cheers,
rant
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As for 2 and 4....
I think the continuing debate from last year should show pretty clearly that it wasn't fine with everyone. That's why it's so important for this vote to take place, and for everyone planning to be involved in the Power Rankings voting for this year to respect the results of this straw poll.
By putting the Conspiracy/Un-card question up to a vote on 3 different yes/no questions I have provided 8 options to vote for in the straw poll, and there is enough variety of opinions on all 3 questions splitting categories in the straw poll that it already seems pretty clear splitting the vote on non-traditional cards into three distinct categories was the right thing to do to determine the will of the community.
I have volunteered to do this as part of a separate project. Every card not included in this year's Power Rankings will have the opportunity to be discussed, voted on and ranked there. I encourage you to participate in it!
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
I just want to be clear that no matter how this discussion goes, the options available, etc., I'm really grateful that you and allread are doing this. It's a great service to the MtG Salvation cube community. I may have suggestions and criticisms, but please know that I appreciate what you guys are doing.
Cheers,
rant
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Thanks, rantipole, I appreciate that. I'm doing my best to take what everyone wants into consideration as we establish this framework, and while no one is going to get everything they want, I'm confident that the final result will be one that is useful to everyone.
Speaking of taking everyone's wants into consideration, I do want to address a couple of points that came up that are not being voted on or otherwise discussed:
I'd say that this concept sounds quite similar to what we've agreed on here. How effectively a card contributes to wins comes from efficiency and versatility just as much as raw power. However, gathering the data to measure that as precisely as you're suggesting sounds pretty hard to accomplish unless you're running the MTGO cubes. Have you found a way to do this for your own cube?
In the history of the Power Rankings, the Power 9 and honorary power actually have not all maintained identical rankings. Even the number 1 spot has been contested with Library of Alexandria and Sol Ring having reversed places at the very top since 2009's rankings, and there are several top unpowered cards that have eclipsed traditional power in the top 5 like Umezawa's Jitte, Mind Twist, and Recurring Nightmare over the years. If the exact same cards dominated the exact same places year in year out, I might suggest doing something like that, but that does not appear to be the case.
However, as I run an unpowered cube myself I'm certainly sensitive to this. In fact, concerns about this were exactly why the Overall rankings were expanded from 20 to 30 last year, and that's something I supported at the time. Slots #21-30 proved to be of interest to powered and unpowered cubers alike, so I see no reason not to continue this tradition. In blue and colorless, I'll also be sure to point out additional cards in the "Just Missed" category, which should give a pretty good idea of what might have been in those top 20 if power weren't part of the vote.
To unpowered cubers who are voting this year, please do your best to vote on how you assess the cards you exclude from your own cubes for being too strong. If you have excluded a card from your cube on this basis, you've already made a judgment about how powerful it is. Please share your findings with the community when you vote.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
With that said, I'll place my votes as appropriately as I can no matter the outcome. It should be stated, though, that these cards aren't likely to make any of my personal top 20 votes. I don't feel that they add anything other than a bit of fun here and there. I'm not a fan of Un cards in general and the draft constructs never make final 40s.
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Fine is relative. As always it feels weird to me (and apparently quite a bit of people) to have cards that are eligible only get votes from a small part of the voters even if they clearly are strong enough. I also have always felt weird about voting for un-cards as some are broken (even though people generally ignorse these cards anyway).
I feel compelled to repeat everything I hear
This quote is reason enough to just not include the conspiracy cards and uncards anywhere If people say they are going to vote appropriately and then within a sentence of that they say they won't include cards that are obvious top 20 material then what integrity does this project have with them included? As much as I love the cards and want them included, we should probably keep them out to maintain some level of integrity with the results.
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I can see excluding non-standard cards from the list because some people are bad at evaluating them and we don't have methodology in place to deal with that. The part I'm not okay with is pretending that there's another reason or that the list is still complete.
That's not what he said. What he said was:
Which means that he doesn't want to arbitrarily throw cards onto a list that he can't properly evaluate. Conspiracies are hard to evaluate without extensive playtesting. And a lot of the other non-traditional cards have a super-high variance, or are very context-dependent for quality. That makes them hard to vote on alongside cards that are all relatively "normal" in function.
..........
But it ultimately left off the option that people were asking for in the first place, which was voting on them in their own section, competing against each other for votes. Including some in with the regular votes and leaving other groups out entirely was a surprise option that showed up on the straw poll that nobody was discussing before...
It just seems like the option a bunch of folks were asking for wasn't even presented as an option to vote on.
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The power level of Conspiracy and Un-cards are too hard to properly evaluate within the context of your own cube environment without extensive playtesting, but they somehow become easier to evaluate when considered separately from the rest of the cube environment? For people who don't play Conspiracy or Un-cards it's somehow harder to compare Backup Plan to cards you've played with regularly in a traditional cube like Umezawa's Jitte than to cards you haven't like Chaos Confetti? I'm having a hard time seeing the value of a separate category, and frankly, based on earlier comments I was under the impression that insistence on putting them into a separate category instead of simply excluding them was an insincere attempt at compromise from people who were more interested in them being excluded entirely. The clamoring to be able to vote in this separate category from people who are primarily voting to exclude is taking me by surprise, although I am not convinced that it is a particularly worthwhile endeavor in and of itself. My offer to discuss and rank excluded cards in a separate project from the Power Rankings also appears to have been Dismissed.
Still, this project is all about determining and respecting the voice of this community, and this point will be no exception, so here's what I plan to do. The current straw poll will continue until it closes in about 12 hours, and its results will be incorporated into the Power Rankings voting process. Afterwards, I will begin a second 24-hour straw poll to determine whether or not an additional Non-Traditional Card category should be created for all WotC printed cards that are otherwise excluded from the Power Rankings. Make no mistake, my vote on this will be "no", but if a majority votes for it, we'll do it. If not, I won't bother creating the separate project for non-traditional cards I discussed either. Someone else can take that on if they like. The results of this 2nd straw poll will be the end of discussion on Power Rankings voting procedure, and voting for White cards will begin on October 9th (on my side of the International Date Line).
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
The difference is that I don't have to participate in that separate vote and try to compare these cards that I have no experience with. My Conspiracy module does not contain Un-cards. Wtwlf's, however, does. If there is a separate vote, people who play these cards can rank them and then people like me can view those results. I might even decide that there's one or two Un-cards that aren't as silly that feel more like Conspiracy type cards that I'd like to include in my own module. I just don't see the value of voting on how good Backup Plan is compared to Umezawa's Jitte, when the cards are never going to compete for the same slot. If our metric goes back to P1P1, then this comparison makes more sense. Even then, in the case of Backup Plan specifically, my group has done friendly mulligans in casual play since we started playing casually in '98, so I have no idea why everyone thinks Backup Plan is so good. My point here isn't to focus on my house rule, but to focus on how every group is different. A card like Umezawa's Jitte is in almost everyone's cube that allows rares. It's been in several iterations of the MTGO cube. Most people who would participate in a cube rankings vote have enough experience with that card to evaluate it properly on a Top 20 list. Backup Plan, however, is so wildly different from the norm in Magic that, if you've never played with it or if it's not relevant to your cube for whatever reason, it's extremely hard to evaluate. Even drafting someone else's cube where the mulligans aren't free, I probably wouldn't take Backup Plan because it doesn't look as powerful on paper to me as people who play it on these boards claim it is.
You don't "cater" to people excluding cards you like off their lists because they don't like them? Isn't that the point of this vote? What if I said I hated Snapcaster Mage and genuinely thought it was bad? Maybe I've had some bad luck with it. Maybe it just rarely ever flashed anything back and was mostly just a 1U 2/1 for me. That's my opinion. You can disagree with that opinion and try to convince me that I'm wrong, but I don't have to include it on my Top 20 for Blue just because it's a card other people think is deserving. Obviously this is an extreme example, but it's still valid. Maybe I don't include Day of Judgment because I think the regeneration clause on *** matters somehow. Everyone evaluates and values cards differently for their own reasons. These projects aren't ran to figure out what you think are the most powerful cards. They're ran to figure out what the community thinks are the most powerful cards.
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No. They get voted on by the people who use them, and therefore can properly evaluate them.
Lets say that only half the voters vote on them. Their data in comparison to each other will be accurate, because those lists will be complete. Their data when mixed in with regular voting will be WAY off, since there would be a lot of abstained votes.
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Right. But if you read the very next sentence, he explains why. It's not because "screw you guys, I don't want to" ...it's because he's unsure of how to properly rank them, so his votes would be arbitrary. Which he feels is just as bad (if not worse) than simply leaving them off. And he's not alone. So we can have bad results with people guessing on votes, or we could vote on them in their own category, where only voters with experience using those kinds of cards can cast a complete and accurate vote.
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Yeah, those cards should never be competing for a spot. (And FWIW they're def both top 10 in the lists they should show up in.)
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Here are the results:
On Question #1: Should green creatures that produce non-green mana be categorized as GREEN or MULTICOLOR?
The community has voted that they will be categorized as GREEN in this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 26-11 with 1 abstention.
On Question #2: Should cards with Conspiracy in their type line be INCLUDED in or EXCLUDED from this year's Rankings?
The community has voted to EXCLUDE all Conspiracies from this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 20-18. They are not to be voted on in any currently existing category, including the Overall rankings.
On Question #3: Should spell cards that reference drafting be INCLUDED in or EXCLUDED in this year's Rankings?
The community has voted to INCLUDE all spell cards that reference drafting in this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 24-14. They are to be categorized by the color of their casting costs or as Land (i.e. Paliano, the High City) and also considered as candidates for the Overall rankings. Here is a link to all cards meeting this criteria.
On Question #4: Should silver-bordered cards from Unglued and Unhinged be INCLUDED in or EXCLUDED from this year's Rankings?
The community has voted to EXCLUDE silver-bordered cards in this year's Power Rankings by a vote of 24-14.
I ask all community members to respect this vote and to evaluate all cards the community has voted to include fairly and honestly as you can based on their ability to contribute to game wins in a traditional cube environment, as well as to refrain from voting on any cards that have been voted as excluded.
As some members have requested a separate category for non-traditional cards including Conspiracies and silver-bordered cards, there will be a 2nd straw poll on that issue in a separate thread.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
Now that draft-matters cards have been accepted into the main Power Rankings votes, I'm even less of a fan of creating a 13th category to vote on, rank, and discuss Conspiracies than I am of creating a 12th category. It's 25 cards.
I'm holding off on posting the 2nd straw poll for the moment, so that the people who are interested in this category can give me a clearer picture of what it should include, and how they would like to see this handled. I'll give you a day or so to hash it out before I post the straw poll. One thing I insist on is that the actual voting and ranking of the 12th category be done after the Overall rankings have concluded to avoid potential confusion that the excluded cards might be able to be included in the Overall vote. I also think the straw poll shouldn't be gauging community support or opposition to the 12th category as a project, but interest in participation. If more than, say, 10-15 people plan to actually contribute to and vote in a 12th category the "no" votes don't really matter and we should go ahead, but if less than that plan to participate I think we can safely consider that portion of this project a non-starter.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
The justification was the vote. We did the vote for a reason.
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Coming from someone who voted "include" in all three points: please don't turn this into an argument. Let's not make this personal, please.
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Last Updated 02/07/24
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