MTG Salvation

Gearhulk, not close IMO!

Quote from opterown »

Hey wtwlf123, would you happen to have an updated 360-size cube list available? If not, what would be the main things to cut from your current cube to make it 360 or so, or if there's another 360-sized powered cube to look at? Cheers!

If you are looking for a basic framework to get you started, I would recommend a 360 list that steve_man made a few months ago. His tastes and evaluations are really solid and similar to wtwlf123's, and you could just tweak and update it how you like: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/100126.

Good luck!

Q&A time my friend...I have been cubicly dormant as of late, but now I come back to see that you have come around to that 450 life!

I spent 2-3 months last winter working my cube to 450, so a comparison of differences has elicited some questions/comments:

WHITE:
We’re similar, but you tend to indulge in 4’s and 5’s more than I do. 1 Card whose absence is notable to me... Eldrazi Displacer! This has been very powerful and popular in my circle and is totally doable, especially with some allied Talismans instead of Signets. No love here?

BLACK:
No Nether Void? Does the “Black Armageddon” no longer deserve a spot in Black’s top 20?
Sinkhole missing? I thought you were a strong advocate of this as a draw to move into Black aggro. Space is tight, and it’s narrow, so I get that...

RED:
The absence of Fireblast, Char, and Smash to Smithereens is kinda shocking! Nerfing Red aggro or just ultra tight on space? Red seems like it’s getting squeezed...

GOLD:
Bring back Sphinx of the Steel Wind!

BALANCE & GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS:

I’ve been super happy with having 60 pieces of mana fixing (duals, rocks, rainbows, etc) and I see you have done similarly (61). I actually read an old post of eidolon’s which had a formula and this inspired me to go 60 (# of drafters possible/2 for each guild’s fixing + [cube size * 2.22])

Our only major difference is your adherence to the full set of creature lands. As awesome as they are, I just really want my aggro colors curving out, and I feel at 450 you need 4 untapped fixers in a guild to enable this in an 8-man draft. Currently I’ve got Blackcleave Cliffs, Caves of Koilos, and Battlefield Forge going. The latter two also help enable Displacer decks.

(I have a small green aggro subtheme I’m toying with that includes Nacatl, Warden, Rancor, Tattermunge, and Militant, mostly to enable Naya, Jund, and Abzan aggro. To support this I’m running Horizon Canopy over Wildwood and Blooming Marsh over Hissing Quagmire, although I could see being convinced to going back to the ‘Quag at some point!)

I’ve felt that 13 2-mana rocks at this size is too much! I feel like 10 to 11 is the sweet spot, and thus I cut the Everflowing Chalice and Coldsteel Heart (which is your 61st fixer). Mind Stone has been in and out as the 11th but I think I’m too fond of it to permanently part with it...
How has your experience been with the density of rocks? I know they’re super good in the artifact deck and with things like the new Karn, but an overabundance can make drafters not value them highly and just try to wheel ‘em. Thoughts?

One concern for me at this size has been cards that deal with Planeswalkers. The saturation seems to keep creeping up (Karn, Teferi, Will, etc) and I’m starting to look at cards like Commit // Memory, Never // Return, Song of the Dryads, and Dreadbore with a more favorable eye, even though at first blush they don’t quite seem like 450 material. Has this been your experience at all here?

Cheers mate...

I’ve had similar experiences. With Humans getting so much camera time at the PT I saw a lot of Freebooters and that’s when I decided to try him out, as it seemed fairly effective. It also reinforces my impression that evasive black 2-drops are very critical for the black aggro archetype that lacks reach from burn.

Quote from SaucyFaucet »

I would love to spin off into particular opinions, but I'm going to fight the urge to always de-rail This or That.
(one quick one: plz try out Whisperwood Elemental in place of Master of the Wild Hunt for me, passes way more removal tests, so much more fun to manifest and you get it that turn. Mass fight is just as unique as boardwipe protection too!)

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm afraid that being about 16% less likely on avg. to be able to play Whisperwood on curve than Master makes it a no go for me. I like my green 5's a lot and don't need another! (Slime, Hermit, 'Tusk, Gearhulk, Nissa WW, Plow)

Thank you very much steve_man, Salmo, SaucyFaucet and AntiPox for the discussion. Like I said, I'm not ready to cut Sower. I've played with and been successful with the card plenty to understand what y'all are saying. However, I could see a day where the environment is too hostile toward Sower and it would be replaced by something else, especially if power creep is involved, so I find it less than useful to say to myself "I'll never cut this from my cube."

Current creatures at 4cmc or higher under scrutiny and their status:
Gisela the Broken Blade (doubtful) strong in certain matchups if it survives, but I don't believe I need this and white 4's are jam packed.
Hero of Bladehold (staying) Takes over game if unchecked, survives most burn, often included in decks with high creature count which taxes opponents removal.
Baneslayer Angel (doubtful) Takes over game but has stiff competition at that CMC slot.
Sower of Tempation(staying) As discussed...
Meloku, the Clouded Mirror (staying) Difficult to analyze, but the flexibility of the card paired with the comparitive lack of good options in that CMC range makes him safe for now. Also synergizes with many things in the cube.
Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet (doubtful) I like this card and the lifegain is welcome in black, but Chupacabra has taken his place and I don't mind running the full suite of that type of effect.
Polukranos, World Eater (staying) I'm not a huge fan of this card, but the lack of good options at this CMC slot in green makes him safe for now.
Master of the Wild Hunt (staying) Better than World Eater, but still am looking forward to replacing this someday.

I wanna see Magus of the Magus. Finds any Magus from SB and puts it into play for free.

1. Vapors
2. Probe
3. Stoke
4. Lacerator
5. Caravan

Quote from calibretto »

I like the new Control Magic arts more than the original, but having been playing Magic since 97 that old art is just so iconic to me. I'd run a beta copy over any of the newer options.

Funny you say that. I had the new Terese Nielsen Control Magic in there for awhile because I like her art, but it didn’t feel right. Same with a few others, like the new Balance.

I recently decided that I’m going with all unfoiled original set/art now for my whole cube, and for ABU I’ve been getting the Collector’s Edition. The CED Control Magic looks awesome and has that great nostalgic feel to it!!

Factory.

Hello,

Concept
This is a project to utilize a large data resource, specifically www.cubetutor.com draft picks, to create a statistical ranking of the best cube cards by color and CMC. This is a good data resource, because it has a 100k+ cubes and hundreds of millions of draft picks. For example, just the ~3500 cards considered in the project were picked over 123 million times on www.cubetutor.com. Because the sample size is so high, we can have increased confidence that the results reflect the actual preference of cube drafters, rather than just random luck.

This project takes inspiration from the annual power rankings last held in 2016, which I have found to be an awesome and useful reference.

The main difference is the power rankings were based completely on polling of mtg salvation regulars. In contrast, these power rankings are at least initially based completely on cubetutor ratings (later, I joined the data with gatherer information which allowed me to include gatherer user rating as a feature as well as adjust cube count for the number of reprinting of each card) in order to reduce the amount of parsing work required and increase the sample size of the data.

Voting is now CLOSED - the results have been updated to reflect the voting and the netted rankings from all the data (cubetutor, gatherer and mtgsalvation votes).


Goal
Use data to comprehensively rank the top cards overall, by color and also by CMC within each color.

Features, Feature Statistics and Pre-processing

We are currently using four features:

1) Ln(Pick %): Pick % is the percentage of times the card was selected by a drafter in a pack. The mean pick percentage is 13.6% and the card with the highest pick percentage is Black Lotus (86%), followed by Ancestral Recall (73.7%) and Sol Ring (73.5%). Anecdotally, pick percentage corresponds very strongly to cards considered to be the best. The distribution of pick percentages is extremely condensed with the vast majority of cards lying in the [10%, 15%] range while a few outliers like Black Lotus are about 16 standard deviations above the mean. Because of this, the distribution has extremely high skewness and excess kurtosis - in other words, it is very far from normally distributed. To mitigate this, I take the natural logarithm of the Pick %, which helps to condense the outlying numbers. On a natural logarithm scale, Black Lotus is only 9 standard deviation above the mean, and the skewness and kurtosis is significantly lower (distribution closer to normal). Lastly, I standardized the Ln(Pick %) to have zero mean and unit standard deviation. This standardized score is given 60% total weight on the final score.

2) Cube Count / Expected Cube Count: Cube Count is the number of cubes in which the card is included. The most included cards are Evolving Wilds (37881), Lighting Bolt (36037) and Counterspell (32355). While a valuable feature, this feature does not correspond as strongly to the "best cards", since cards like Black Lotus (9220), Ancestral Recall (7427) and Sol Ring (17078) may be included in fewer cubes due to availability, price
or style (e.g. powered or unpowered). However, this feature does have value, primarily because the Pick % is much more reliable when the number of cubes including the card is large. If you created a ranking based only on Pick %, then Pet Project would be ranked #24, with 28.72% pick percentage and a cube count of 545. Furthermore, Kindle would be #34 with a 24.6% pick percentage and 2001 cube count, which is clearly ridiculous. Lastly, I found there was an extremely strong linear relationship between #of reprints and cube count - in fact a linear regression of # of reprints versus average cube count for cards with that # of reprints has an R^2 of 94% (see attached picture)! In contrast, # of reprints has zero correlation to Pick % or Gatherer User Rating, so there's little reason to believe that # of reprints is a feature indicative of cube card quality. This suggests that by controlling for the influence of reprints (availability and price proxy) on Cube Count, we can improve the relevance of the Cube Count feature. You can see the relationship in the attachments Lastly, I standardized the (Cube Count / Expected Cube Count) feature to have zero mean and unit standard deviation. (Cube Count / Expected Cube Count) was given a 15% weight.

3) Ave Cube Bonus: Cube tutor also maintains 360, 450 and 720 average cubes, broken out by unrestricted, peasant or pauper. Although less granular than the "Cube Count", this tells us the popular cards and has the additional advantage of excluding pauper and peasant cards that would not make the list in cubes where money is no issue. For example, Murder is excluded from the 360 and 450 lists even though it is in the top 300 cards by cube count. I gave cards 1 point for being in each list (so cards in none of the lists have 0 points and cards in all of the lists have 3 points). Ultimately, this feature is still 80% correlated to the "Cube Count" feature and also has some quirks (like Library of Alexandra doesn't even make the 720 list). I standardized this feature to have zero mean and unit standard deviation and gave it only a 10% weight.

4) Ave Gatherer Rating: This is the average gatherer user rating across all versions of the card. For versions of the
card that had no user rating, the rating was defaulted to 4.0 (which is is average user rating). This feature turned out
to be 31% correlated to Ln(Pick %) and clearly tends to be higher for good cards than bad cards. While not a particularly
strong feature, feature diversity in general can help improve our ensemble and eliminate some random variation. Once
again, this feature was standardized to have zero mean and unit standard deviation, and given a 15% weight on the final
score.

For more information on feature correlation and statistics, see the attachments.

Weaknesses / Challenges
A numeric ranking is only as good as the features available from the data.
In this case, the features are decent but there will always be outliers and the ranking will never be perfect.
For example, I think Channel is ranked much too low (#87) but this is because of its relatively meager pick % of 18.66%. Part of this could be due to more generic cards / universally playable cards (like Karn or Wurmcoil Engine) having much higher pick percentages than more powerful, but narrower cards like Channel.

Another big challenge is that unlike, say, a Linear Regression that aims to explain the sale price of houses, there is no actual numeric target label that we are trying to explain. Instead, we are trying to match something inherently subjective and undefined - how "good" magic cards are in cube setting. The best we can do then, is try to find decent proxies of goodness in cube. Currently, the strongest proxy seems to be pick % in cube. If we believe there's a good degree of correlation between pick % and the strength of cube cards, the best way to identify potentially valuable features is to find other, somewhat distinct features that still have a significant degree of correlation to the strength of cards in cube.

Cards Considered
I selected the top 2000 cards based on both Pick % and Cube Count. Because there is some overlap, this works out to 3,444 cards.

Furthermore, I filtered out cards with a cube count of less than 2300, because this leads to a lot of false positive cards with small sample size, like Kindle. This left me with 2111 cards total.

For cards that missed the "720 average cube" list entirely, I allowed myself to filter out the following cards that were in the top 1000 and which seem to be complete outliers. For cards that make the 720 average cube list, in contrast, there is no outlier filtering allowed:


Furthermore, there were a few cube worthy cards outside of the CubeTutor 720 Average Cube List that are simply criminally underplayed, which I added back in for consideration:

Link to Full Card Rankings and Data
https://drive.google.com/file/d/15BShDHNTGlUlKc6rzZe89ItJ1Xrb_kDx/view?usp=sharing

Cube Tutor Top 300:
These are the top 300 cube cards according to this methodology.
I've attached images showing how the rankings broke out for the top 50 cards.

FWIW I think there's a bias to lower Pick % for these cards because they are more narrow color-wise

By Color and CMC





VOTING (OPEN):

I created an editable spreadsheet so that anyone can vote on any of the over 2,000 cube cards in the rankings.
To vote, type your username in the top row of a new, unused column and save your scores for the cards you care about in a 0-10 numerical range. You can vote on as many or as few cards as you wish. Once voting closes, the average user rating will be used to adjust the numerical ratings to get combined ratings. This way we will have three difference rating systems: 1) cubetutor/gatherer numeric data only, 2) user ratings based, 3) combined scores (combining #1 and #2, i.e. using the user ratings to adjust the cubetutor/gatherer numeric ratings)


VOTING RATINGS GUIDE:
10: Unequivocal P1P1 over everything else in the game. These cards are broken and make other great cards look silly. For me, the only 10s were Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall and Sol Ring)
9: Power Nine Level Cards - these are in the top 20 most powerful cards in powered cube. For me, a few examples were Moxen and Mana Drain.
8: A cut below the power 9 in level, these cards tend to be the strongest in their color and often still make P1P1. Some examples for me were Vampiric Tutor, Lightning Bolt and Wurmcoil Engine.
7: The are solid role performers that typically make even the smallest powered cube lists (360). You are usually never unhappy to play these cards. Some examples for me were Blade Splicer, Arbor Elf, Shriekmaw, Flametounge Kavu and Treasure Cruise
6: These are cards you would play at 450 but not at 360.
5: These are cards you would play at 540 but not at 450.
4: These are cards you would play at 720 but not at 540.
3 or below: You would not play these cards even at 720.

LINK TO VOTING SPREADSHEET:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15xe5pY2niCsEisv5Nu-vK-NppLiGG2Pu9BkbipExZ9Q/edit?usp=sharing

How will voting change the results?:
Voting will close 3/31/2019 assuming there are enough votes. Otherwise, voting may be extended another quarter.
Once voting closes, the average scores across all the cards that received votes will be standardized to have zero mean and unit standard deviation, and then we add in the average cubetutor z-score for the set of cards that received votes. The reason we add this mean is that people will tend to vote mostly on the best cards which already have positive cubetutor z-scores and we don't want to bring down the mean of these good cards due to selection bias.

To determine the "combined scores", we treat the numeric rating based on cubetutor/gatherer data as a prior and update it based on the number of votes received - cards that received many votes will see their scores adjusted significantly while cards that receive few votes will not have their scores adjusted much.

Specifically, because the statistical significance of the average user rating scales roughly with the square root of the number of voters, each card's combined score will equal:

z_combined = z_cubetutor * (1-sqrt(n / (n+16))) + sqrt(n / (n+16)) * (z_ave_user_rating+z_cubetutor_mean_score_of_cards_receiving_votes)

where n is the number of votes, z_cubetutor is the numeric cube tutor score, z_ave_user_rating is the z-scored average user rating, and z_cubetutor_mean_score_of_cards_receiving_votes is the average cubetutor z-score for the set of cards that received votes.

For example, if 16 users vote on that specific card, the combined score will come 50% from the cubetutor ranking z-score and 50% from the user ratings (which have also been standardized into a z-score). If zero users vote, the user ratings count for 0%, if 4 vote it counts for 42% and if 20 vote the user ratings count for 75% of the total score.

Thanks.

Yeah I pretty much already did this at this point. There is a reasonably long list of excludes in the original post.


FWIW I currently control for # of reprints in the cube count since this is a strong relationship.

If there was a source that listed the print count by common, uncommon, rare and mythic I could pretty easily calculate the total circulation of every card and control for that, which should boost the ranking of low circulation cards like Fractured Identity a lot.

Fractured Identity, shockingly, fails to meet the minimum requirement of being in 2300 cubes (2267) which is mentioned in the original post. Actually, it's pick % (11%) is pretty low too - it doesn't even rank in the top 2000 cards by either cube count or pick percentage. As a result it's excluded from other lists like the "720 average cube", for example.

Even if it did make the list based on pick percentage, it would still be filtered out, along with a lot of false positives like Kindle that are properly excluded, because it is included in <2300 cubes.

To get cards like Fractured Identity that slipped through the cracks, I'd need to expand the analysis to even more than the 3500 cards initially examined. I do have to say that I'm shocked this great card is so underplayed; hopefully it will see more play in a year from now.

I will most likely just post a link to the full spreadsheet at some point which would show you where every card is ranked.

Hi guys - I added a couple features and provided the top cards by color, artifact/colorless, land and guild.

For blue, I provided the top 60 cards because blue has about 3x as many cards in the top 300 as the other colors (no great shock...).

Next step is to also break it out by CMC and if there's interest do polls to further refine things.

New year; new cube list. I've just completed a huge overhaul of my cube. The original post is updated, so for the first time in about a year my physical cube, my Cubetutor list,and my MtgSalvation list are in perfect harmony.

Today's changes are below. The upshot is I cut three cards from each color to add 6 signets, 4 guild lands, and 5 colorless cards. A few other small changes happened too. I'd appreciate any feedback. I'm a little worried I cut too many creatures. Also, not sure I chose the right land for Golgari, or should Golgari get its signet?


Thanks!

Cheers,
rant

I know the 4cc white spell section is stacked, but I'd still play Gideon, Ally of Zendikar over Spear of Heliod.

I think you can live without Inkwell Leviathan in blue if it gives you access to Remand.

I'd play Liliana, the Last Hope and probably Skinrender too, even at 360. I would probably remove Hypnotic Specter and Liliana, Seath's Majesty to make room.

I'd keep Earthshaker Khenra over Keldon Marauders. And if the artifact.dec is gonna be a thing, keep Goblin Welder over maybe Char, Crc Lightning or Incinerate.

I'd swap out green Gearhulk and 5cc Nissa for Craterhoof and 3cc Nissa.

i don't think you need 4 lands per guild at 360. I'd play dual/shock/fetch, and see if you can get a 3rd card per guild. I'd also play the same number of nonland cards in each guild. Colonnade and Tar Pit should sneak in as spells. Any extra slots should free up more colorless cards.

I'd get Sundering Titan in there; it'll open up that Inkwell->Remand change in blue if you do. I'd also play little Karn before big Karn.

Overall a super nice list. Looks really powerful.

Cheers, and happy cubing.

Quote from wtwlf123 »

Nope, I don't. I would scale everything back proportionately, but I don't have a list to go by. Sorry.

Quote from B8R »

Quote from opterown »

Hey wtwlf123, would you happen to have an updated 360-size cube list available? If not, what would be the main things to cut from your current cube to make it 360 or so, or if there's another 360-sized powered cube to look at? Cheers!

If you are looking for a basic framework to get you started, I would recommend a 360 list that steve_man made a few months ago. His tastes and evaluations are really solid and similar to wtwlf123's, and you could just tweak and update it how you like: http://www.cubetutor.com/viewcube/100126.

Good luck!

Hi guys, thanks for the replies. Have been looking at GRN and been trying to tweak things, but I think I've settled on a 360 powered list for now: http://www.cubetutor.com/cubeblog/118426

Comparison link to wtwlf123: http://www.cubetutor.com/comparecubes/118426/170
Comparison link to steve_man: http://www.cubetutor.com/comparecubes/118426/100126

Cubetutor is yet to update with GRN, but I'm planning on adding: Goblin Cratermaker, Knight of Autumn, Assassin's Trophy and Tajic, Legion's Edge.

Would you all have any thoughts or suggestions on how it's looking? What are questionable cards that I've included (or excluded)? I would ideally like to add another guild card to each category (4 lands + 3 cards) but not sure how to approach this, or whether it's even necessary.

Thanks!

Control
1. Ancestral Vision
2. Thirst for Knowledge
3. Time Spiral
4. Treasure Cruise
5. Timetwister

Tempo
1. Treasure Cruise
2. Timetwister
3. Ancestral Vision
4. Thirst for Knowledge
5. Time Spiral

Spells Matters
1. Treasure Cruise
2. Ancestral Vision
3. Timetwister
4. Time Spiral
5. Thirst for Knowledge

Artifact Ramp
1. Thirst for Knowledge
2. Time Spiral
3. Timetwister
4. Ancestral Vision
5. Treasure Cruise

Quote from B8R »

Thanks all. I think I'll go with Lich and just swap Chainers and GFFT back and forth until a clear winner emerges (if that even happens). Either way should be fine though.

I have another design puzzle I'd like help with. I have 1 slot in blue that is up in the air and I want some kind of draw spell. Please rank the following pool of draw spells from the perspective of each supported archetype (450 powered):

Pool:
Ancestral Vision
Treasure Cruise
Timetwister
Thirst for Knowledge
Time Spiral

Archetypes:
Control:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Tempo:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Spells Matter:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Artifact Ramp:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.

Thanks!

Control:
1. Thirst for Knowledge (assuming permission based control, otherwise swap with vision)
2. Ancestral Vision (improves a lot if you have discard outlets)
3. Treasure Cruise (it is a very late game card in this archetype, still playable)
4. Time Spiral
5. Timetwister

Tempo/Spells Matters -
1. Treasure Cruise (often a bomb here)
2. Ancestral Vision (much better if you have cascade, expertises and/or As Fortold)
3. Thirst for Knowledge
4. Time Spiral (a bit too expensive for these archetypes)
5. Timetwister

Artifact Ramp:
1. Thirst for Knowledge
2. Ancestral Vision
3. Time Spiral (you'll sledom have six lands and it does not untap artifacts)
4. Treasure Cruise (few instants and sorceries for delving)
5. Timetwister