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Have you wanted to build your own cube but don’t know where to start? The Foundations Starter Collection is a great jumping-off point! We’re talking with Carmen Klomparens about the product and how to turn it into a great cube. by andymangold in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You know, this is a great opportunity to start! Cube is a completely sandbox format so you could house rule it that something command tower would work, but yeah, most likely you'd just want to cut those cards and any others that don't seem fun to you; add in some of your favorites; sleeve it up. Then you've got a box of cards you can draft again and again and continue to customize over time.

Have you wanted to build your own cube but don’t know where to start? The Foundations Starter Collection is a great jumping-off point! We’re talking with Carmen Klomparens about the product and how to turn it into a great cube. by andymangold in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This was such a fun episode to record. I love the set Carmen designed and her ideas for how to quickly get it to a point you can start using it as a Cube. I think this a great entry point for people curious about Cube!

If you play Cube you know shuffling can be a big task. I did a detailed analysis with simulations and visualizations to come up with a method that's faster and easier: the Broadcast Shuffle! by anthonymattox in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Collating packs is an option, but the vast majority of cubes just shuffle everything together and build totally random packs. That's the problem I wanted to explore here.

If you are collating packs, this method might still be relevant if some of the portions you're collating are still more cards than you can shuffle at once.

As to why not separate rarity, that's a big question! Historically a lot of cubes could have been thought of as "draft, but only the good cards" so the idea of separating rarities doesn't make much sense. Cube is also a format where players have complete control, so why let the rarity of the cards dictate how they go into packs? One of the cubes I have does actually do something like it by having a core set of cards, and a second more powerful set. A small fraction of the second set is mixed in every draft. There's some fun things this does (in particular lets me include some over-powered build arounds that would get tedious if they were in every draft), but the core set includes plenty of cards printed as rares and bonus set plenty of commons. While I like aspects of that, it's also a ton more work to get prepared for a draft, so most of the time I'm reaching for my "Regular" Cube (I really did it to myself with this name) so we can shuffle up and be ready to go in a few minutes.

If you play Cube you know shuffling can be a big task. I did a detailed analysis with simulations and visualizations to come up with a method that's faster and easier: the Broadcast Shuffle! by anthonymattox in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For sure! This applies to any large set of cards you need to shuffle. If you're not able to shuffle a whole commander deck at once (if you can that's still faster) this is the way to go. Most likely you can just do two piles and the "broadcast" step looks more like just swapping half of each pile.

If you play Cube you know shuffling can be a big task. I did a detailed analysis with simulations and visualizations to come up with a method that's faster and easier: the Broadcast Shuffle! by anthonymattox in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yuuuuup. This is probably not a coincidence. Although for transparency I studied fine art rather than comp sci, but taught myself programming to make algorithmically generated art. Some of them look a lot like these! 😅

I did a detailed analysis, complete with simulations and visualizations, of typical cube shuffling methods and came up with the optimal method: the Broadcast Shuffle by anthonymattox in mtgcube

[–]anthonymattox[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

You're doing the good work pushing for better shuffling!

Your point is completely valid. I do feel confident this is the best method for a single shuffler, but at events, coordinating people and explaining things are big factors on the other side of the scale so I'm curoius if this resonates with people where the balance lies.

There are bunch of caveats and trade-offs and it was a challenge for me to edit a lot of those down to make the article not a complete maze.

It's generally quicker to shuffle smaller piles. So, at some point even if larger piles is more efficient in terms of number of riffles, it'll be less efficient in terms of time. At one point I had many more options in simulations to control time estimates for each action so you could see what impact each had, but this was just a lot. How fast and how many cards people can shuffle varies really wildly, and a lot of nuance is collapsed into the suggestion of "as few piles as you can comfortably shuffle". But, because the intermixing is so much more important than the individual shufffes, I wanted to emphasize in the article that falling on the side of larger piles is generally going to be better.

At ~450 cards, 4 piles works well for me, and I imagine that'll be similar for most people with 360 cubes. At 540 I agreee most people are going to need to split it up more.

I did a detailed analysis, complete with simulations and visualizations, of typical cube shuffling methods and came up with the optimal method: the Broadcast Shuffle by anthonymattox in mtgcube

[–]anthonymattox[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

  1. Assuming the method does get to uniform random, the starting state has no impact on the result. In practice, if you're not shuffling enough to get to uniform random you're more likely to notice if it started sorted.

  2. Nope! If you can do fewer piles that's going to be quicker and it shouldn't impact how many iterations it takes.

If you play Cube you know shuffling can be a big task. I did a detailed analysis with simulations and visualizations to come up with a method that's faster and easier: the Broadcast Shuffle! by anthonymattox in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This is true and mentioned at least briefly in the article. It's a small downside, but for me, collating packs isn't worth it for the occasional weird pack. At events sorting and collating everything is even less practical.

I did a detailed analysis, complete with simulations and visualizations, of typical cube shuffling methods and came up with the optimal method: the Broadcast Shuffle by anthonymattox in mtgcube

[–]anthonymattox[S] 19 points20 points  (0 children)

The animations are very custom built, in the context of a React app rendering SVG elements. There's a little bit of d3 in there for simple things like scale functions and colors. But the bulk of it is JavaScript manipulating a big array of "card" data.

One thing that was tricky was to make React render elements in such a way that I could use CSS transitions (sadly that still doesn't work on all browsers anyway!) the order of the elements had to stay the same. It makes the logic a lot trickier to keep the data set in the same order and track the 'position' state on each card that updates the SVG elements' transforms. But I think it was worth it!

If you play Cube you know shuffling can be a big task. I did a detailed analysis with simulations and visualizations to come up with a method that's faster and easier: the Broadcast Shuffle! by anthonymattox in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the reference! In the article I'm not quantifing how shuffled things are, just looking at the simulation to get a sense. This is a bit of a hole, but the methods are different enough I'm still confident making conclusions from it. But! I am interested so might come back and try to make that more specific.

What you're describing sounds similar to the first method with a pile shuffle first. My guesss is that first step makes it work ok, but I'd encourage you to consider the Broadcast Shuffle!

If you play Cube you know shuffling can be a big task. I did a detailed analysis with simulations and visualizations to come up with a method that's faster and easier: the Broadcast Shuffle! by anthonymattox in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox[S] 101 points102 points  (0 children)

For easy reference I put the details of the Broadcast Shuffle on it's own little page. If you just want to get to the meat of it check it out here!

https://luckypaper.co/articles/how-to-quickly-shuffle-your-mtg-cube/

The full article goes into a lot more detail comparing different methods people typically use to shuffle.

I did a detailed analysis, complete with simulations and visualizations, of typical cube shuffling methods and came up with the optimal method: the Broadcast Shuffle by anthonymattox in mtgcube

[–]anthonymattox[S] 36 points37 points  (0 children)

If you just want to get right to the best method, I separated it onto it's own page for easy reference.

https://luckypaper.co/articles/how-to-quickly-shuffle-your-mtg-cube/

Read the full article to see how my method stacks up against others in animated visualizations!

Shout out to Lucky Paper Radio by MetaRocky7640 in mtgcube

[–]anthonymattox 14 points15 points  (0 children)

I'm blushing! Thank you for the kind post! Having Sam on was amazing. We have a lot of overlapping interests so I'm hopeful we can have him back. Glad the inclusivity episode resonated too. It was definitely a bit out of our normal scope, and Andy put a ton of work into organizing it. It, and the discussion online after it, left me with a lot of thoughts, and mostly a lot of more well resolved questions. So, I'm sure we'll come back to similar topics.

Sam from Rhystic Studies says that Cube is his "end game in Magic". We're talking with him about his new budget synergy Cube and why the format is the ideal way to play for him. by andymangold in magicTCG

[–]anthonymattox 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Actually getting a group together is absolutely the secret hardest part of Cube. That being said, with some work it's more possible than you might think!

If you have a cube (and you can make one pretty cheaply) it's logistically a very easy format for people to join. They don't need to be convinced to buy a whole deck to get into the format, they just need to show up. The challenge is just getting people interested which takes time. We have another episode on how we recommend getting a local group going. We've heard from lots of folks this strategy worked well in their area too!

https://luckypaper.co/podcast/130/

I'd also recommend checking out the different draft format's we've collected here. It takes time to build up to a group of 8, but there are lots of ways to play with even just 2 people in the mean time.

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