The reason why I rank moat low, is that it's a real swingy card. I value stable higher.
Moat is one of those cards that have to be sided out alot, because your opponent have too much burn, too many fliers or are too controllish (moat doesn't stop Jace).
I think Moat is being undervalued because a lot of people don't run it in their cubes since many people consider it to be "cube power / unfun." I still voted for it though despite not owning a powered cube.
Where the metrics diverge in my opinion is on more narrow build-around cards. Picking up Rofellos or Tinker P1P1 is going to contribute to a lot of wins, but if they show up in pack 3 they might not even be maindeck material. I'm not sure what that should mean in terms of "how effectively they contribute to game wins".
For me this means I'll be ranking build-around cards with a high setup costs quite a bit lower now. All other things considered equal, a card that needs to be built around in order to contribute to game wins just can't be said to do so as effectively as a card that goes into any deck. Obviously some build-arounds have enough raw power once built around to compete, and Tinker seems like a good example of this, but the number of times they're just not playable at all have to count against them.
Correct. It means that the generic goodstuff cards actually have a chance of competing with them. P1P1, there's no question that the build-around card with the absurd upside is the pick over a replacement-level effect. But when you have to factor in that generic intrinsic value, and the pack 3 value, and the Sealed Deck value, and every other metric that goes into evaluating a cube card, the lists get to include all the "best" cube cards, and not just the best 1st picks.
Outsider to traditional cube environments here: Seeing balance so definitively at the top of the power rankings is interesting to me. Intellectually I know why it's such a good card, but I'm not sure I get why it's absolutely the best white card in cube. I acknowledge I'm really bad at traditional cubes, but can someone explain balance like I'm five?
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Balance is a card that looks asymmetrical, but isn't. You can cast it at times that are opportune for you, but very inopportune for your opponents. So while you may have to sacrifice one land and discard a card, your opponent may be losing an army of creatures and his entire board presence. And that's really without much effort at all on your part. There's also the times that you can combo with balance using sac outlets or discard effects turning Balance into a two mana Wrath of God, Armageddon, or Mind Twist or all of the above. For TWO MANA!
Balance is a card that looks asymmetrical, but isn't. You can cast it at times that are opportune for you, but very inopportune for your opponents. So while you may have to sacrifice one land and discard a card, your opponent may be losing an army of creatures and his entire board presence. And that's really without much effort at all on your part. There's also the times that you can combo with balance using sac outlets or discard effects turning Balance into a two mana Wrath of God, Armageddon, or Mind Twist or all of the above. For TWO MANA!
Very fair. I guess I couldn't see why it was ranked consistently higher than the 'geddons, but I suppose it's also much more flexible.
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Generals meant to be drafted first in a single pack of 6 cards.
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Flexible is probably the wrong word to describe Balance, because there are plenty of situations where it's bad, and it's at its best when it's built around. However, there are very no cards that can do anywhere near as much as Balance can for only 2 mana.
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Not more flexible, but it just has a much higher ceiling. It's effectively part Mind Twist, part Wrath of God and part Armageddon ...and in the right deck, you control which parts; and they all only hurt your opponent. And it only really requires setup when you're tied or winning. When you're just outright losing in every measurable aspect of the game, it does all those things for you without any additional work.
The best use of balance is in a control deck with mana artifacts and planeswalkers.
Turn 1, 2, 3 mana rock, mana rock
Turn 3 or 4 planeswalker
Turn 4 or 5 Balance with counter backup or instant removal
That is one of the most common and powerful usages of Balance in my powered cube. It's a start that's very hard to come back from from any aggro or midrange deck.
Thanks, Spike Rogue, for organizing this! I always greatly enjoyed the power rankings. They are a great resource, especially for new cube players and cube managers, I know they were for me when I started cubing. I'm late for the vote, but I think it's great that the P1P1 metric has been discarded. That always felt odd. Your first pick only makes up one card in your deck, or may not even make the final 40 in the end. And it doesn't take many picks until focus shifts from powerful-in-a-vacuum or great build-around-me cards to cards that complement your deck. Judging how much a card contributes to winning a game may actually be more difficult, but makes much more sense, imo.
Kind of miss this thread project since I've been very busy with the job this week. So much stuff has been said already... Just wanted to take the time to thanks Spike Rogue for it! Trully appreciated. I also enjoy the new evaluation metric very much. Changes the evaluation process a lot! Overall, build around cards like Moat, Mentor and Reveillark has already showed better results so far. We should also notice the same phenomenon in other colors, with cards like Opposition, Dark Confidant, Purphorous and Channel.
I'm reposting this from the White voting thread. This thread's a much better place to post questions and discussion about voting criteria, not only to keep that thread clean, but also because no one should really have any reason to be checking it for anything other than results.
I find the new criterium pretty hard to use in practice. An aggro creature might be important to draft P1P1 but it might just be one part of your whole team of one drops. Is that less important then a typical midrange powerhouse? How do you take double or triple casting cost into account in this new evaluation?
How do you take double or triple casting cost into account in this new evaluation?
The same way you evaluate it when determining your cube construction. Is the card so good that it justifies the difficult cost? Maindeck percentage is part of card evaluation, but it's not the end-all for making a card good or not. For example, a card like Rofellos would certainly make my list still. Whereas a card like Geralf's Messenger probably wouldn't. It's up to each individual cube manager to decide how CC and CCC costs impact your rankings.
The new system is pretty close to WAR (wins above replacement). How good is card X compared to other cards of its ilk? If it's largely replaceable, and not that much better than similar effects, its stock will go down. When the card is the absolute best at what it does, and replacing it with a "replacement-level" effect of the same type would really damage the quality of your deck, you know you have something special. So it doesn't matter what theater you're discussing, it's just a matter of how much better the card is than the competition.
I'd agree with all of this and add that efficiency and color intensiveness are absolutely factors you should consider when evaluating how effectively to game wins. A very hard to cast control finisher or reanimation target may close out a lot of games it's cast in, but it will be cast in a lot fewer games not only because its owner might not survive to cast it, but also because it won't even fit into the kind of decks that are trying to make the game end before turn 6. From white voting, I'd say a good example of this is the fact that Elspeth, Knight-Errant is getting ranked so much higher than Elspeth, Sun's Champion even though big Elspeth makes 3x as many soldier tokens per turn and doubles as a board wipe. Pretty much any deck that can cast a double white 4-drop can cast OG Elspeth, but big Elspeth tends to be relegated to control an some midrange decks (although she does excel in those decks).
Color intensiveness also plays an important role here because even though a more color intensive card will usually do more to win a game it's played in than a splashable one, it won't be contributing to as many game wins as its splashable counterpart, so I think it's very important to weight these two together. For me, this is why I'm ranking Oblivion Ring and Council's Judgment much closer together than many.
Thanks, Spike Rogue, for organizing this!
You're quite welcome! I'm really glad to see this project coming together, and thanks to Allred123 for all your help and to everyone else who's been contributing to the Power Rankings with your votes and discussion.
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Is Arcane Savant not making people's lists because they really think it's not a top 20 blue card?
It almost made mine, but without more experience with the card I have a tough time ranking it above anything else on there. Like looking at my own list there is nothing there that I can personally say "oh yeah that's definitely worse than Arcane Savant." Plus, blue is insane.
There is a (strong) chance I'll change my tune for the next vote, but until then I'm OK leaving it off.
I feel like it's easily top 10 material in any cube with decent targets for it (Temporal Mastery, Time Spiral, Upheaval, Living Death, Opportunity, Tooth and Nail, Bribery, Plow Under etc.). That includes some cards you can reliably pick up late that let Savant hit way above the curve.
Blue is insane. I'm not surprised at all. My top 7 are all cards I would take over almost anything, and then after that it's still all first picks that I would probably re-order depending on the day.
It makes my top 10 list of blue creatures, but it was nowhere close to a top 10 blue card. It was an honorable mention for cards that missed my top 20, but it wasn't at the top of that list either.
Saying that it's a top 25-ish blue card is super high praise. It's a very good card. It doesn't need to make the top 20 list in order to be a card of respectable powerlevel. Blue's cards are nutty.
I found the blue ranking to be much easier than the white ranking. My top 10 was clear from the beginning and after some shuffling around, I was done with the second half, too. Just like with the white ranking though, there were a few cards that I would have clearly put into a top 25, but that just didn't find room in the top 20 (mostly Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Vendilion Clique and Tamiyo, the Moon Sage).
Just like with white, I put a card that I have never played with or against in cube, but that is very powerful and deserved a mention into the 20th slot: True-Name Nemesis for blue and Moat for white. I think both of them are very unfun cards, but I can't argue with sheer power.
I found blue to be the more difficult of the two. I had like 25-30 cards I wanted on the list, and had to prune down ...leaving me with some excruciating omissions. No such issue with white; where I had to go back and look for more cards to add on after I included the ones I felt belonged.
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.
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.
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Out of 20 votes so far, only 4 haven't put it in their top ten, and ~2-3 of those have it at 11 or 12. I think it's being ranked pretty well for what it is. And when you break it down, 4 of the top 5 are kind of auto includes IMO (Recall/Time Walk/Tinker/Mana Drain) sooooo there isn't a ton of wiggle room in that top 5 to include everything you want.
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. In other decks that don't ramp it's fine, but it's way less explosive and doesn't play like a top 5 blue card in those decks/environments even w/o Recall/Time Walke/Tinker/Mana Drain, all of which are undoubtedly too powerful for an unpowered environment.
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.
Moat is one of those cards that have to be sided out alot, because your opponent have too much burn, too many fliers or are too controllish (moat doesn't stop Jace).
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For me this means I'll be ranking build-around cards with a high setup costs quite a bit lower now. All other things considered equal, a card that needs to be built around in order to contribute to game wins just can't be said to do so as effectively as a card that goes into any deck. Obviously some build-arounds have enough raw power once built around to compete, and Tinker seems like a good example of this, but the number of times they're just not playable at all have to count against them.
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And here is the actual cube, meant to be drafted in 4 regular sized packs. (60 card decks)
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Very fair. I guess I couldn't see why it was ranked consistently higher than the 'geddons, but I suppose it's also much more flexible.
Generals meant to be drafted first in a single pack of 6 cards.
And here is the actual cube, meant to be drafted in 4 regular sized packs. (60 card decks)
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
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My Article - "Cube Design Philosophy"
My Article - "Mana Short: A study in limited resource management."
My 49th Set (P)review - Discusses my top 20 Cube cards from MKM!
Turn 1, 2, 3 mana rock, mana rock
Turn 3 or 4 planeswalker
Turn 4 or 5 Balance with counter backup or instant removal
That is one of the most common and powerful usages of Balance in my powered cube. It's a start that's very hard to come back from from any aggro or midrange deck.
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I'd agree with all of this and add that efficiency and color intensiveness are absolutely factors you should consider when evaluating how effectively to game wins. A very hard to cast control finisher or reanimation target may close out a lot of games it's cast in, but it will be cast in a lot fewer games not only because its owner might not survive to cast it, but also because it won't even fit into the kind of decks that are trying to make the game end before turn 6. From white voting, I'd say a good example of this is the fact that Elspeth, Knight-Errant is getting ranked so much higher than Elspeth, Sun's Champion even though big Elspeth makes 3x as many soldier tokens per turn and doubles as a board wipe. Pretty much any deck that can cast a double white 4-drop can cast OG Elspeth, but big Elspeth tends to be relegated to control an some midrange decks (although she does excel in those decks).
Color intensiveness also plays an important role here because even though a more color intensive card will usually do more to win a game it's played in than a splashable one, it won't be contributing to as many game wins as its splashable counterpart, so I think it's very important to weight these two together. For me, this is why I'm ranking Oblivion Ring and Council's Judgment much closer together than many.
You're quite welcome! I'm really glad to see this project coming together, and thanks to Allred123 for all your help and to everyone else who's been contributing to the Power Rankings with your votes and discussion.
450 card Peasant cube thread. Draft it here.
http://www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/63569
It almost made mine, but without more experience with the card I have a tough time ranking it above anything else on there. Like looking at my own list there is nothing there that I can personally say "oh yeah that's definitely worse than Arcane Savant." Plus, blue is insane.
There is a (strong) chance I'll change my tune for the next vote, but until then I'm OK leaving it off.
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Saying that it's a top 25-ish blue card is super high praise. It's a very good card. It doesn't need to make the top 20 list in order to be a card of respectable powerlevel. Blue's cards are nutty.
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Just like with white, I put a card that I have never played with or against in cube, but that is very powerful and deserved a mention into the 20th slot: True-Name Nemesis for blue and Moat for white. I think both of them are very unfun cards, but I can't argue with sheer power.
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Out of 20 votes so far, only 4 haven't put it in their top ten, and ~2-3 of those have it at 11 or 12. I think it's being ranked pretty well for what it is. And when you break it down, 4 of the top 5 are kind of auto includes IMO (Recall/Time Walk/Tinker/Mana Drain) sooooo there isn't a ton of wiggle room in that top 5 to include everything you want.
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. In other decks that don't ramp it's fine, but it's way less explosive and doesn't play like a top 5 blue card in those decks/environments even w/o Recall/Time Walke/Tinker/Mana Drain, all of which are undoubtedly too powerful for an unpowered environment.
tl;dr Blue is stacked.
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Upheaval is my #1 "unpowered" pick.
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