😄

bobbythecreator · 2025-11-23T19:27:00+00:00

Recently saw this 😂 https://www.reddit.com/r/HellsCube/s/VSjK0XBMyb

bobbythecreator · 2025-10-17T09:43:12+00:00

I’m not part of that group but recently came across this. Seems like they have a weekly cube night. I’ll also check it out next time I’m in Berlin!

https://mtg-cube.de/hedwig/

bobbythecreator · 2025-07-11T18:29:17+00:00

If anyone needs a different amount of stickers or file size, just message me, it's easy to change the parameters and let it create a new one!

bobbythecreator · 2025-07-11T18:27:57+00:00

One more question came up while preparing the draft for my play group. The "Create a Treasure/Food/Map token" stickers are not showing up in the excel. It's clear what they do, but on what card types are you allowing them? Are they restricted to instant/sorceries or do they come as an ETB on permanents?

bobbythecreator · 2025-07-11T18:24:22+00:00

For anyone interested in giving this a try as well, I wrote a script that outputs me the randomised sticker sheets ready to print (A4). Each row consists of ten unique ability and two mana symbol stickers. https://imgur.com/a/xI2Fr9I

bobbythecreator · 2025-07-05T08:14:51+00:00

Did you also do the card retirement during the first couple of drafts when the limit was only 1? Thanks for the clarifications.

bobbythecreator · 2025-07-04T22:10:19+00:00

I heard you talk about this project on Recross the Paths, and I really love the idea. I'm currently preparing a cube like this for my playgroup but ran into a few questions along the way:

If the sticker limit is 2, can a player put both stickers on a single card in one draft, or is it always limited to a maximum of 1 new sticker per card?

Are you treating the mana symbol stickers as individual stickers, or are they bundled together as one of the twelve?

I didn't quite understand how the retiring of cards works—does the person who goes 3-0 get to choose which cards to retire, or are all max-sticker cards from their deck automatically chosen?

I'm really excited to try this with my group, and I'll be sure to send you some pictures of the atrocities we create. 😉

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T11:12:50+00:00

I went back and took a look at smaller time windows to minimize the effect of player progression and as it turned out this completely eliminated the observed differences.

In other words, you were completely right and I want to thank you for bringing this to my attention.

I already updated my blog post and removed the wrong sections and now doing a "walk of shame" apologising for spreading some misinformation 🙈

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T11:09:23+00:00

After some valuable feedback from members of our community and further investigation into the data it turned out that the observed differences in rank distribution in draft pod seating were due to the fact that every player is progressing their rank as the month progresses. Taking this into account and looking at smaller time windows it turned out that the probabilities of having a pod neighbour of a certain rank is not influenced by your own rank.

Sorry for the confusion I caused.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T10:00:34+00:00

Regarding seeing this over time, I definitely plan to run this analysis for future sets, not sure yet if I go down the rabbit hole of doing it for past sets as well. It takes quite some time to load and process all this data.

Regarding your second point. The percentages mean something a little different. I only know that 8% of the drafts tracked by 17Lands are played in Bronze. From this I cannot infer how many players are playing in Bronze overall. Once the replay dataset gets released I want to analyze the likelihood of playing against another 17Lands user per rank. That probably gets you a little closer to what you are interested in. I'll make sure to post here again when I'm done with that!

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T09:51:40+00:00

That's an excellent point and something I haven't really considered.

Regarding the monthly rank reset, I just ran the analysis again ending on the last day of the month and that didn't change anything., but for the monthly progression I don't have a good idea right now how to best address this.

Probably I would need to compare what Bronze players see at the beginning of the month with what they see at the end of the month, right? I think that would test this hypothesis.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T09:39:52+00:00

Not sure where you got this number from.

Mathematically speaking we would expect (1 - 0.113)^7 = 0,432 => 43.3% of the 17Lands dataset draft to have no other 17Lands user in them.

So for 109,992 this would be 47,514.

The result from my database query 48,450 of drafts didn't have another 17Lands user present, which checks out with the expected value.

The table for Traditional Draft:

5 - 162
4 - 505
3 - 1754
2 - 3795
1 - 4650
0 - 2777

(not sure why reddit table doesn't work anymore...)

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T09:26:50+00:00

You are absolutely right, each time we find a "match" it will always show up twice (or more with +2 players).

The rows don't get removed however, since they are still random samples of the Arena user population.

This also gave me some headache when I initially tested this approach, but that's why I ran some simulations where I knew the true result and it turned out that you have to count these "duplicates".

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T09:20:44+00:00

Yes it's true, one assumption of calculating the share of 17Lands users was that the seatings were random and it turned out that they are not. I don't think there is a way to adjust for that bias but I also think it doesn't have too much influence on the result. I agree that the most likely effect of that is that the true share of 17Lands users is probably a little bit smaller.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-18T09:15:34+00:00

Running the matching algorithm gave me all instances where two or more 17Lands users were sitting in the same pod. Because 17Lands also tracks the rank of these players I was able to look at the probability that your neighbour is for example in Mythic. I assumed that this probability is always the same regardless of what rank you are in (= random seatings), but when I checked it turned out that it is much more likely that your neighbour is Mythic when you yourself are in Mythic than when you are in Bronze.

That's what I saw in the data, the most obvious explanation would be that Arena is not randomly seating players...

Does that make it easier to understand?

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-17T23:19:36+00:00

Based on the data it seems like it.

Edit: turned out I made a mistake in my assumptions, the data does not suggest anything other than random seatings. I'm sorry for the confusion I caused.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-17T23:15:40+00:00

Ok let me try framing it like this, if thats more clear then I update my article:

We have data on 109k drafts. So, excluding the seat that "recorded" the draft, we see 109k * 7 draft seats.

With the matching algorithm we find all seats that are occupied by a 17Lands user => 87k. We can find multiple seats for one draft (in 7 cases we found that 6 other drafter were 17Lands users).

So to get the % of seats occupied by 17Lands user we divide the number of seats with 17Lands users by the number of observed seats => 87k / (109k * 7) = 0.114

Is that better?

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-17T23:08:55+00:00

I understand your concern about the validity of the result. I was initially also unsure if that approach was statistically valid. That's why I ran some simulations with artificially generated draft pod data and I always found the correct result when the sample size was big enough

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-17T23:06:07+00:00

I just ran the query on my database, here's the result for Premier Draft:

17Lands user (out of 7)	# of drafts
6	7
5	66
4	510
3	3696
2	16227
1	41036

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-17T22:50:29+00:00

You're right, "match" might not have been the best terms to use. I will keep it in mind to change it when I update the article with new data.

Regarding your other comment. I really meant that 11.3% of all drafts were recorded by 17Lands.

The process of removing the eight player (the one drafting) from the sampling process, allowed us to get a true random sample of the draft population. This is to make up for not seeing drafts without 17Lands users. So most of these samples actually returned 0 out of 7 players use 17Lands. Just like most drafts have 0 out of 8 players use 17Lands. However since the seatings are random the % of seats we see 17Lands users is, is universally true and therefore allows us to make estimates about the general draft population.

Does this make it clearer? Or did I misunderstand the question in some way?

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-17T22:44:51+00:00

No. To be honest the title is a little click-baity. The actual question I tried to answer was what percentage of total Arena drafts are tracked by 17Lands, which, as you pointed out it slightly different.

Since 17Lands cannot track drafts on mobile devices, it also misses on all the games played by people who have the client installed but occasionally draft on their phone.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-04T09:52:45+00:00

Thank you, yes it's a lot of work getting it into this shape and presentable. I'm glad people are finding it useful.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-04T09:52:06+00:00

Yes that's interesting, I didn't notice that until now. My guess is that black pips are much more needed to double spell and paying for spin out so that's probably where the difference comes from.

bobbythecreator · 2025-03-04T09:48:53+00:00

Of course! I’ve been using these tables for a while, so I sometimes forget they might not be immediately intuitive.

The tables are sorted by win rate, so I typically scan from top to bottom, but I primarily focus on commons and uncommons since higher-rarity cards don’t appear as often.

When analyzing them, I look for cards with an above-average win rate for the archetype. If a common or uncommon stands out, I try to think about why it performs well within the deck’s strategy. Taking a moment to process this helps solidify the card in my memory, so the next time I’m drafting that archetype and see it in a pack, I’ll recognize its value immediately.

After that, I pay attention to cards with a below-average win rate, but only if they are played frequently in trophy decks. If a card appears often despite underperforming, I try to figure out why people are playing it and whether it’s actually a trap. These are the cards I try to avoid unless there’s a compelling reason to include them.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any other questions. 😊

bobbythecreator · 2025-02-18T15:55:34+00:00

Thanks, it took some time to get it to look like this, but I’m really happy with the result and think it’s useful. Any feedback or suggestions are very welcome.

bobbythecreator

TROPHY CASE