I have written before about cards I thought were under and over rated however these were simply my opinions as to how others perceived cards. On this occasion I am using actual statistics!
I use Cube Tutor a lot for a wide selection of things , it is a great cube resource that offers a lot of interesting things that can help you build, analyse or just inspire you. I use the top cards by set and "average cubes" functions a lot as well as just having it as an easy to manipulate list for my cube. On this occasion I have been using the stats gathered by the Cube Tutor draft function to assess how the cube community values things.
http://www.cubetutor.com/topcards/1
Reading stats is pretty hard, you have to understand what is going on and what the things represent. This particular form of stats is quite hard to untangle as well. It is very hard to objectively measure the value of things, the pick % does a decent job but it falls short when looking at cards not commonly found in cubes. Themed cubes like pauper and stuff like the time shifted cube or whatever it was called have a huge effect on the results. As will the simple difference between powered cubes and unpowered ones.
Another big factor obscuring the results is that there is nothing riding on these drafts, no initial investment made, no prizes, rank or pride at stake. People are far more inclined to draft fun, exotic and risky decks in this kind of setting and this was very obvious in the results. What I really want is unfettered access to the MODO cube statistics, they would be far more revealing.
It was far easier to spot the things at the top end of the spectrum compared to those at the bottom. The undervalued cards are obscured among loads of cards that are not commonly in cubes. The range is also much lower at the low end, a difference of 0.1 in pick percentage for a card in the 12% pick range area is pretty huge compared to the difference of several percent in the 20% pick rate region. Another way to phrase this is that there is more change in pick % in the top 20 cards in cube than there is in the remaining 4,000 or so!
Rather than finding much out about specific cards I found that these stats were more illuminating in terms of peoples bias and of general trends than any thing else. A good example of this is Black Lotus, a card that is 10% above anything else for pick %. It is the most valuable and most iconic card in magic and that translates into how people value it in cube. Certainly it is a great card, one of the very best, but it isn't that much better than the rest of the very best. Sol Ring and Black Lotus are pretty comparable power wise on average in cube, I tend to prefer the Sol Ring. If you are not concerned about locking yourself into a colour Time Walk and Ancestral Recall compare well too. Even the Mox have archetypes that want them more than they want Lotus.
The things that were generally under drafted were much harder to pick out due to the way in which I am able to manipulate the statistics. Ideally I need the filter function to apply to the stats as well as the cards, ideally I would also be able to exclude all cards not contained within specific cube lists too. Perhaps I can do these things already and I am just to dumb to know how! Anyway, Strip Mine is under drafted. It might not be the most under rated and drafted card but it is the best card that is in any significant way under drafted. Given how well people assess the value of remaining open and how much people love an iconic power card I am shocked to see Strip Mine with such a relatively low pick % at just under 18%. In an unpowered cube I think Strip Mine is categorically the best first pick you can make. It goes in almost any deck and it is oppressively good in some decks. It is brutal against a lot of decks and bad against nothing. If you could quantify how open a card was and how powerful it was then multiply those things together you would find that Strip Mine has one of the highest values possible, only really beaten by the power stuff like Black Lotus and Sol Ring. I think Strip Mine is too good for unpowered cubed and have banned it from mine but most don't do this and when I am playing those I snap pick the thing! It is still a top pick in powered cubes too.
Lastly, but given the themes in this essay, not at all unsurprisingly, we have things like Soldier of the Pantheon, Satyr Firedrinker and other low power low cost cards. These sorts of things are preumium in some of the best archetypes and can be used in a pretty wide array of decks. Of the examples I gave this is especailly true of the Soldier who I find useful in a number of archetypes and not just the aggressive ones. Like dual lands these cards are not exciting. I can very much see the temptation to be picking things like Brimaz over a one drop but unless you have loads of one drops already, it is late in the draft and you have very little on three as well as some good synergy I suspect that the generic one mana 2/1 is the right pick over the clearly much more powerful Brimaz.
It is not just the aggro decks where you need to pick up those cheap low power, low impact filler cards. Yes, aggro decks should pick up all the Elite Vanguard/Rakdos Cackler style cards they can but midrange and control decks need a certain amount of cheap on theme cards too. Stuff like Satyr Wayfinder, Renegade Map, Coiling Oracle, Chromatic Star, Ash Barrens and so forth. Being a good cube drafter is a lot about knowing when to take the weaker card. There is no question that Vurdurous Gearhulk is substantially more powerful than a Wall of Blossoms. I would never take a Bloss first pick first pack while I may well take the Gearhulk in that situation. That being said, as the draft progresses there are numerous reasons I may well choose to take the wall over the bomb. The most common one is simply that I already have three+ plenty powerful enough five drops I would happily play to which the Gearhulk is only a mild upgrade while I still have gaps in my two slot that need filling. Perhaps I feel overly weak to early aggression. Perhaps I have a Recurring Nightmare themed deck and desperately need a card like Wall of Blossoms to efficiently and reliably get and/or keep things going. Sure, Gearhulk is nuts with a Nightmare but then a lot of cards are, especially the big ones. The Nightmare is the bomb, you don't need another bomb to win, you need to ensure your bomb in hand is going to work well. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that Gearhulk is better with Nightmare than the Wall because of the power of the Gearhulk. Another example of this sort of thing is with a Jitte vs a Talisman. Now it would have to be a pretty poo pack for me to take a Talisman first pick, I would certainly never take it over a Jitte which, despite how much I loath the card, is a totally fine first pick. Now, let us say I actually first picked a Wurmcoil Engine and was presented with a the choice of Jitte vs a good Talisman for the second pick. Odds on I am not going to have a deck that wants to play the Jitte AND the Wurmcoil. My best overall value from my picks is to take the Talisman as it is a very likely card to play with a Wurmcoil. I could take the Jitte and risk a wasted early pick so as to keep more options open. That is also fine but picking the Jitte and the Wurmcoil and then just ramming them in the same deck, whatever it may look like, is awful.
Most of the things I get wrong are due to personal bias and assumptions. These stats may not be the truest of stats but they did give some good evidence that the source of other peoples errors is the same as mine!
Interesting theme, but what you say overall is not that surprising. It just seems that the skill of Tutor drafters is average to mediocre. But I think you would be disappointed by MTGO statistics, because I saw Strip mine will so many times. People unduly thinks that this seems to think it is only playable in a specific deck with land recursion.
ReplyDeleteCheers. I was not shocked by my findings certainly, I felt a lot like I was just repeating things I have said many times before in this article. The quality of MODO cube draft has gone up immensely over the years, it was like taking candy from a baby the first time they ran it out. You get good games now. I was hoping to see some of this improvement borne out in the stats but as I don't know how bad the stats looked a few years back I can't really comment, they just didn't look quite as on point as I had expected given the amount of improvement I had seen in the drafting, playing and building of MODO cube decks. Lets just hope that when I revisit this topic in a few years time there will be some measurable improvement to backup my observed improvement in the community.
ReplyDeleteI also think that for the most part people cube in rather particular ways. Either you are casual and you cube a lot or you are a serious player and you use cube as a way to relax and break up the testing. Very few people play cube exclusively in a non-casual manner like myself. I have done so much of all the types of cube that making a 2/1 on turn one is just as exciting as flopping out a Black Lotus. My objective is finding the best ways to cube while for most people they just want to have fun and do the things they can't do in standard or limited. My idea of fun is finding and refining the optimum archetypes for the cube meta. Other people enjoy making a speedy 11/11 or drawing vast numbers of cards. It is this different objective towards playing the cube that makes me so surprised at the stats, I have an unusual perspective. Fun is a subjective thing, I encourage people to cube for fun but I can't really advise on what will be fun for other people so I will just stick to advising people on how to improve their win% in cube!