what ads has he running? i block everything. i even blocked the champion ad.
but yeah, he has server costs and he put a lot of work into the project in advance. when his expected goal is 3k/month to work on cubetutor as a fulltime job, Id expect him to put at least 40hrs a month into the site by now.
I'm in the process of constructing a casual 450 card pauper cube with some staples, some nostalgia cards, and a few Un cards. I've been test drafting it on cubetutor and I realized that I really don't totally know how to properly assess cards in a draft when they're singleton at pauper level. I guess that is to say, I don't even really know how to cube draft. I have drafted my friend's pauper cube a few times in Boston, but I never gave the draft much mind; it hasn't been until now that I've been scrutinizing over the cube so much that I realize this is an assessment ground I don't know much about.
I draft lots of FNMs so I'm familiar with the basic concepts of drafting. It's the nuances at pauper that I'm interested in.
I wish I could FNM draft around here. The local store is all about constructed which I have no interest in whatsoever. Good luck getting your cube in order!
welcome to the party, cat!
To get an idea of powerlevel, you can check this forum like the evatluate everything thread or the spoiler threads. It takes a lot of time for the theorycraft, though.
A better approach is to just playtest your cube, tune it and get your own experience. You can either raise the powerlevel to catch up with the strongest cards or you decrease it by cutting them. Thats up to you. Collect some statistics while playing, like what decks were winning, how did certain cards perform and so on. Try to force strategies or certain cards while you draft, to playtest them yourself. After few drafts you will notice synergies and archetypes. You then can support them a little more by adding fitting cards, its an organic process.
What is? - Tempo You develop your boardstate faster by running cheaper creatures for the p/t ratio or cheating on mana like Dark Ritual. Also cheap removal/bounce on higher CC creatures can be considered tempoplay, if you develop your own board.
What is? (direct) card advantage - you spend 1 card to either get 2 or more cards like draw spells. (indirect) card advantage - you spend 1 card to kill 2 cards of your opponent. Via discard, combat or removal (2:1) (virtual) card advantage - you spend 1 card to get an effect of 2 cards. Like draw1+effect
-----------------------------------REPLY--------------------------
moved my reply from the this or that thread into this one
To add my two cents. When rating cards purely for power there is still some room for interpretation. There is personal experience, and even your regular playgroup can have an impact on how you assess a card. It is ideal to avoid all of these things, but when assessing cards that require other effects/cards to make them shine then things can get a bit more subjective. Imperiosaur is an extremely easy card to evaluate for power. It is a 5/5 for four mana with a completely negligible downside. Something like Thermo-Alchemist is more difficult to get a concrete rating on.
If I had a cube that was only half creatures I know that my play group would struggle big time. I have a large proportion of very casual players who pretty much only play magic when we get together to draft the cube or play some multiplayer games with our multiplayer decks. The first pack usually involves people all round the table chuckling and stressing out as they can't figure out what is open and what colours to get into or painfully groaning as they are forced to pass Happy Fish or some other awesome card.
A creature count of 50% is totally fine for everyone, because even then you will end up with 23 playable creatures on average. Also a poweredcube should have the philosophy that form follows function, meaning you wont cut on strong spells to add semi-good creatures for better looking statistics. If red would only have spells, so be it, players need to get creatures from other colors then.
Also its not too complicated to rate the powerlevel of a card.
If its a windmill slam card in every deck, its a staple.
If its an all around great card but competes with other cards, its cubable.
If the card is cubable for bigger cubes, but has too many slightly better competitors at 360 its borderline.
If you need certain conditions the card is borderline or bad, depending on how hard it is to turn it on in basic/powered cubes
If the card has no use anywhere its terrible.
A bad card might still be very strong in your personal meta, if you built around it. In corner cases this might be vice versa as well, like Imperiosaur is worse in cubes with tons of duals or mana artifacts. To be fair, we rated some exceptional effects like Pestilence or former wincons like Capsize staple, although they should be cubable only.
I had totally different players draft my cube(s). From very experienced tournament players, to pauper constructed players to EDH folks, limited players and total newbs.
In my experience the advanced players that know the cube are starting to hatepick after pack 1, because they know the strong synergies and keycards. Unexperienced players have sometimes awkward card choices in their decks, like tempocards in midrange control decks or slow cards in otherwise low curved decks. But it never happened someone had to struggle building a well working deck, because there are only playables anyway. The struggle is more about what to cut. Some players even started to blind pick after pack2 because their deck was already finished or they played 50+ card decks just for the fun. Of course you still have an advantage if you finetune the strategy of your deck, but even the "random" decks are able to catch you.
Also, there is no "open" or closed color in cube, because of the density of strong cards, I had drafts where 6 of 8 were black or red with no problems. Or 2 players next to each other were in RG aggro. Only very llght supported archetypes might not work, but even that isnt a problem in powered cubes because the decks will function nonetheless. For example you might lack Kiln Fiend and friends for the UR spells matters approach but you can easily shift into UR tempo, UR control or even completely change colors in pack 3.
You might have more problems with watered down archetype cubes, because of an unbalanced meta. Certain cards are horrible outside their archetypes and drafters could end up with a bunch of unplayables. Its up to the builder to balance the cube and cut on strong cards (or too fringe ones) or even completely dismiss some archetypes for a healthy meta (danger of cool things). Its also harder for new players to figure out the synergies while drafting, most of them will "accidentally" have them in their decks and stumple across them while playing. Thats pretty fun for them, although their decks otherwise are pretty bad, so dont worry too much. Part of the fun of drafting is the skilltest.
Why are you arguing 50% creatures is fine for everyone when your cube has 57% overall, 57% in black, 68% in white and a whopping 78% in green?
The % of creatures in a cube is a tool the cube designer can use to differentiate colors. The number of commons for a normal draft set usually has W at 66% creatures, U at 50%, B and R at 55% and green at 60%. You may not care about the color pie, but if you lower the number of creatures you run into another problem. You may end up with 23 playable creatures, but those may not all be the creatures your archetypes want. If your cube wants to support archetypes properly, you need to adjust your creature numbers for those archetypes. You should make sure the archetype is playable even if you don't always end up with all the creatures that support it.
In addition, aggro decks need a much higher number of specific creatures per deck, so if you lower your overall number you're cutting corners somewhere, even if you maintain all your aggro support. Just saying "50% is fine for everybody" makes no sense. You have clearly not designed your cube like that either.
Also, "advanced players" hatepicking after pack 1? Dear God.
Al brought the argument about evaluating a cube based on its statistics, I just continued to argue on that topic. All im saying is, if your cube has around 50% or even slightly less it can function perfectly, despite what some forum theoretics will tell you. Whether or not your creatures support archetypes its up to the constructor.
btw why are you counting the creature in my colors? 100% creatures in white and 0% in red will still be 50% overall.
I didnt build my cube with statistics in mind, it evolved over months by adding and cutting cards and this is what it is now. In Als argumentation there is still not enough creatures and thats just wrong. I had a creature count of 50% for quite a time and it was fine, its just that we got more good creatures.
Volcanic Hammer is awful and i will never understand why you think its good. I wouldnt even run it in my "tier2"
That you are so suprised about the hatepicks is interesting, because in my playgroup the players have their pet archetypes and the others like to disturb their plans. Also they just dont like to play against some cards :D. Certain bombs will be hatepicked a lot like Sprout Swarm, Crypt Rats, Armadillo Cloak.
But again it seems you dont cube very often and get your experience from normal limited.
One drope are strong
-they put early pressure on the opponent
-they let you develop your board faster
-you can navigate your deck even when youre manascrewed
-they support aggro
-theyre crucial in a format loaded with cheap removal to keep the temporace
Calling it now (purely baseless speculation:) kaladesh will have colored equipment at common
That'd be interesting and I could totally see that in Kaladesh. I really hope for more good common equipment, it feels like in general equipment has been downshifted in power for some time (not just at common level.)
I wouldn't expect them to print anything better than Scmitar at common, but I guess we can hope. Equipment is just one of those types of cards that they nerfed a while ago (aka upshifted in rarity), along with removal, land destruction and a couple of other things. Unless they completely change their modern card design philosophy again, I don't think we'll get many cards that will push the currently playable equipment or Doom Blade out of the cube.
Well, nothing is going to push out something a card nuts as bonesplitter, but I haven't given up hope we might get some more equipment to keep it company.
Something like a bonesplitter for R with equip 1R seems cubable and maybe printable, if a bit pushed for a contemporary set
If we see 2 good pieces of Equip a year, I say it is a good year. Mirrodin gave us overpowered stuff, so almost all else is bad by comparrison. That is why I liked Cultist's Staff so much, it is a fair piece for common. It rivals Sickleslicer as acceptable, but not broken.
If we see 2 good pieces of Equip a year, I say it is a good year. Mirrodin gave us overpowered stuff, so almost all else is bad by comparrison. That is why I liked Cultist's Staff so much, it is a fair piece for common. It rivals Sickleslicer as acceptable, but not broken.
I want more/better guild cards personally.
I feel like I'm set for guild cards but only run 2 per (not counting hybrid) and like where I'm at there.
I want to see more powerful beasts. Wirewood Savage seems like one of Green's best common card draw options. I had her in my cube for one draft session, but I ended up including too many sub-par beasts that didn't really have any other synergies so I have since removed her along with Advocate of the Beast.
I'm also happy with guild cards. I've got so many I would be happy running currently. I would prefer more of the either/or double colour ones though. I could justify adding an additional multicolour card as such cards can still go into a deck that only has one of the colours.
Every guild has at least two slam-dunk picks though, with some guilds going as high as three or four. I'm pretty happy with where we're at now, but I'd be interested to see your most contentious cards
You've got 16 flashback cards, 16 cards that look for something specific in the graveyard (Gravedigger, etc), and four Delve cards. Nearly 10% of the spells in your cube are "graveyard matters"
Walker of the Grove is also really neat with blink. but unless you go all in on that archetype (all available blink effects + the wedges which usually table), you shouldnt rely on blink too much. just throw in 2-3 blink effects and 2-3 strong synergies which are good on their own, like the monocolored morphs. you probably end up using blink against removal more often.
http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/17954
Is the 1800 in addition to the ~1500 in ad revenue?
I did forget that it does cost him, I dunno... $600-$800 a month to just keep the server up.
$1000 is still a lot of "do nothing" cash
but yeah, he has server costs and he put a lot of work into the project in advance. when his expected goal is 3k/month to work on cubetutor as a fulltime job, Id expect him to put at least 40hrs a month into the site by now.
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
I'm in the process of constructing a casual 450 card pauper cube with some staples, some nostalgia cards, and a few Un cards. I've been test drafting it on cubetutor and I realized that I really don't totally know how to properly assess cards in a draft when they're singleton at pauper level. I guess that is to say, I don't even really know how to cube draft. I have drafted my friend's pauper cube a few times in Boston, but I never gave the draft much mind; it hasn't been until now that I've been scrutinizing over the cube so much that I realize this is an assessment ground I don't know much about.
I draft lots of FNMs so I'm familiar with the basic concepts of drafting. It's the nuances at pauper that I'm interested in.
Thanks!
GWUBRDraft my Old Border Nostalgia Cube! and/or The Little Pauper Cube That Could!RBUWG
Modern:WDeath & TaxesW | RUGRUG DelverRUG
My singleton Masters Cube
To get an idea of powerlevel, you can check this forum like the evatluate everything thread or the spoiler threads. It takes a lot of time for the theorycraft, though.
A better approach is to just playtest your cube, tune it and get your own experience. You can either raise the powerlevel to catch up with the strongest cards or you decrease it by cutting them. Thats up to you. Collect some statistics while playing, like what decks were winning, how did certain cards perform and so on. Try to force strategies or certain cards while you draft, to playtest them yourself. After few drafts you will notice synergies and archetypes. You then can support them a little more by adding fitting cards, its an organic process.
btw, cubetutor wont help you need actual games
-----------------------------------REPLY--------------------------
moved my reply from the this or that thread into this one
A creature count of 50% is totally fine for everyone, because even then you will end up with 23 playable creatures on average. Also a poweredcube should have the philosophy that form follows function, meaning you wont cut on strong spells to add semi-good creatures for better looking statistics. If red would only have spells, so be it, players need to get creatures from other colors then.
Also its not too complicated to rate the powerlevel of a card.
If its a windmill slam card in every deck, its a staple.
If its an all around great card but competes with other cards, its cubable.
If the card is cubable for bigger cubes, but has too many slightly better competitors at 360 its borderline.
If you need certain conditions the card is borderline or bad, depending on how hard it is to turn it on in basic/powered cubes
If the card has no use anywhere its terrible.
A bad card might still be very strong in your personal meta, if you built around it. In corner cases this might be vice versa as well, like Imperiosaur is worse in cubes with tons of duals or mana artifacts. To be fair, we rated some exceptional effects like Pestilence or former wincons like Capsize staple, although they should be cubable only.
I had totally different players draft my cube(s). From very experienced tournament players, to pauper constructed players to EDH folks, limited players and total newbs.
In my experience the advanced players that know the cube are starting to hatepick after pack 1, because they know the strong synergies and keycards. Unexperienced players have sometimes awkward card choices in their decks, like tempocards in midrange control decks or slow cards in otherwise low curved decks. But it never happened someone had to struggle building a well working deck, because there are only playables anyway. The struggle is more about what to cut. Some players even started to blind pick after pack2 because their deck was already finished or they played 50+ card decks just for the fun. Of course you still have an advantage if you finetune the strategy of your deck, but even the "random" decks are able to catch you.
Also, there is no "open" or closed color in cube, because of the density of strong cards, I had drafts where 6 of 8 were black or red with no problems. Or 2 players next to each other were in RG aggro. Only very llght supported archetypes might not work, but even that isnt a problem in powered cubes because the decks will function nonetheless. For example you might lack Kiln Fiend and friends for the UR spells matters approach but you can easily shift into UR tempo, UR control or even completely change colors in pack 3.
You might have more problems with watered down archetype cubes, because of an unbalanced meta. Certain cards are horrible outside their archetypes and drafters could end up with a bunch of unplayables. Its up to the builder to balance the cube and cut on strong cards (or too fringe ones) or even completely dismiss some archetypes for a healthy meta (danger of cool things). Its also harder for new players to figure out the synergies while drafting, most of them will "accidentally" have them in their decks and stumple across them while playing. Thats pretty fun for them, although their decks otherwise are pretty bad, so dont worry too much. Part of the fun of drafting is the skilltest.
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
The % of creatures in a cube is a tool the cube designer can use to differentiate colors. The number of commons for a normal draft set usually has W at 66% creatures, U at 50%, B and R at 55% and green at 60%. You may not care about the color pie, but if you lower the number of creatures you run into another problem. You may end up with 23 playable creatures, but those may not all be the creatures your archetypes want. If your cube wants to support archetypes properly, you need to adjust your creature numbers for those archetypes. You should make sure the archetype is playable even if you don't always end up with all the creatures that support it.
In addition, aggro decks need a much higher number of specific creatures per deck, so if you lower your overall number you're cutting corners somewhere, even if you maintain all your aggro support. Just saying "50% is fine for everybody" makes no sense. You have clearly not designed your cube like that either.
Also, "advanced players" hatepicking after pack 1? Dear God.
btw why are you counting the creature in my colors? 100% creatures in white and 0% in red will still be 50% overall.
I didnt build my cube with statistics in mind, it evolved over months by adding and cutting cards and this is what it is now. In Als argumentation there is still not enough creatures and thats just wrong. I had a creature count of 50% for quite a time and it was fine, its just that we got more good creatures.
Volcanic Hammer is awful and i will never understand why you think its good. I wouldnt even run it in my "tier2"
That you are so suprised about the hatepicks is interesting, because in my playgroup the players have their pet archetypes and the others like to disturb their plans. Also they just dont like to play against some cards :D. Certain bombs will be hatepicked a lot like Sprout Swarm, Crypt Rats, Armadillo Cloak.
But again it seems you dont cube very often and get your experience from normal limited.
One drope are strong
-they put early pressure on the opponent
-they let you develop your board faster
-you can navigate your deck even when youre manascrewed
-they support aggro
-theyre crucial in a format loaded with cheap removal to keep the temporace
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
That'd be interesting and I could totally see that in Kaladesh. I really hope for more good common equipment, it feels like in general equipment has been downshifted in power for some time (not just at common level.)
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
My 490 Pauper Cube
Modern frame only- Common on paper only - no functional copies, no strictly-betters - no subtype-matters
Well, nothing is going to push out something a card nuts as bonesplitter, but I haven't given up hope we might get some more equipment to keep it company.
Something like a bonesplitter for R with equip 1R seems cubable and maybe printable, if a bit pushed for a contemporary set
I want more/better guild cards personally.
Loose Change Pauper Cube-cast
Pauper Cube Article #1
Pauper Cube Article #2
Personal Enjoyment Cube
I feel like I'm set for guild cards but only run 2 per (not counting hybrid) and like where I'm at there.
I used to write cube articles on StarCityGames, now for GatheringMagic and podcast about cube (w/Antknee42.)
I'm also happy with guild cards. I've got so many I would be happy running currently. I would prefer more of the either/or double colour ones though. I could justify adding an additional multicolour card as such cards can still go into a deck that only has one of the colours.
My singleton Masters Cube
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
Every guild has at least two slam-dunk picks though, with some guilds going as high as three or four. I'm pretty happy with where we're at now, but I'd be interested to see your most contentious cards
My Cube (DeckStats)
My Pauper Cube: 540 (CubeTutor link!)
Level 1 Judge
Putrid leech is crazy strong and consume strength is a solid aggro card.
Grisly salvage if you run graveyard matters
TBH every pauper cube should support aggro in B and G so I see no problem here
Is it an overall midrange/good stuff strategy?
Loose Change Pauper Cube-cast
Pauper Cube Article #1
Pauper Cube Article #2
Personal Enjoyment Cube
Loose Change Pauper Cube-cast
Pauper Cube Article #1
Pauper Cube Article #2
Personal Enjoyment Cube
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t
T2 powpercube Value https://cubecobra.com/cube/list/37t