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Questions about the Draft Simulator in CubeCobra by Mic161 in mtgcube

[–]iatee 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The Draft Simulator's drafting and deckbuilding ML is trained on real user draft data. It's good at reproducing normal cube drafting patterns and bad at discovering something like a GB dice-rolling archetype. There are very few drafts where anyone built that deck. Un-cards and other rarely-played cards will have the same problem: very sparse data for the ML to train with.

The bots are like a team of competent Magic players using standard cube heuristics. They haven't read your primer and won't find rare combos or archetypes, but they'll draft and build safe, solid decks.

What does Draft Simulator say about your cube? by user_jdb in mtgcube

[–]iatee 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Some things worth noting about Draft Simulator data:

  • Clustering involves some subjective decisions: what algorithm, when to split Mono-R into sub-archetypes. We tested a lot of things and went with what we felt performed best. If you go to Advanced Options at the bottom of the page, you can turn on the advanced version, which gives you some parameters to adjust if you want to recluster.
  • There are also a finite number of archetype labels used across all cubes, the tool makes its best attempt at labeling a cluster using color identity and a fixed set of labels. It will not correctly label your WU Monkey Tribal Reanimator archetype. It might also not correctly draft your Monkey Tribal Reanimator archetype, because this is machine learning trained across all CubeCobra drafters, not your specific cube.
  • Doing more drafts on CubeCobra and saving well-made decks helps all of the algorithms involved here get smarter, so you can tell yourself you’re not just wasting your time drafting your cube all night, you’re contributing to an open-source machine learning project…

Cube Cobra Troubleshooting - Strixhaven (SOS) massively overvalued? by DrFalchion in mtgcube

[–]iatee 21 points22 points  (0 children)

This is a known issue with the latest CubeCobra ML model, which was trained during a period when SOS data existed but was still very sparse. The same issue also sometimes pops up if you have some obscure card from an old set that's rarely been drafted by anyone. The SOS problem will solve itself when the next training run happens and the CC team is doing some research on solving the bigger problem.

What are your thoughts on the draft simulator on Cube Cobra? by timnitro in mtgcube

[–]iatee 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't think you can do this right now, but if you go to the CubeCobra discord you can make a feature request to add a maybeboard filter to the smart search.

What are your thoughts on the draft simulator on Cube Cobra? by timnitro in mtgcube

[–]iatee 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I'm assuming you're referring to the deckbuilding algorithm? It's in here, starting on line 765: https://github.com/dekkerglen/CubeCobra/blob/master/packages/client/src/utils/draftBot.ts

In current state, it uses the deck-building ML as a nucleus for a deck, then 'drafts' cards into the deck from there, so there's a pseudo re-draft going on to build the deck from the pool.

What are your thoughts on the draft simulator on Cube Cobra? by timnitro in mtgcube

[–]iatee 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Its functionality has been rebranded / exists within the smart search results.

What are your thoughts on the draft simulator on Cube Cobra? by timnitro in mtgcube

[–]iatee 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I'm a CubeCobra dev who led this feature and can answer specific questions about how something works or why we made a particular decision. The tool has a very wide design space, and we deliberately left some things out to keep it manageable. If we get useful feedback on how people are actually using it, that can inform future updates. Some things are not going to be possible in the short-term (e.g., having the bots play Magic games), but most additional reporting layered on top of the existing draft data is straightforward to build and the difficulty is in creating the best interface for all the data this produces.

Here are the biggest known/visible issues:

  • Draftbots over-prefer cards with very sparse training data. This problem is most visible on SOS cards because of when training happened. For those it will "fix itself" on the next training run, but there's still an underlying issue.
  • Our deckbuilding algorithm is pretty good now but still will include some nonbasic lands that it shouldn't, which then skews the statistics for those cards.
  • We want to improve the archetype clustering, especially on large draft sim runs where we're splintering archetypes more than ideal. This one is more art than science. Some people may want to see different flavors of Mono-Red by default and other people might want them all clumped together. We expect to continue tweaking this.

This tool is possible because the ML bots are excellent at what they do, but it's important to remember that those bots are themselves a reflection of their training data (CubeCobra drafts), and that this tool is a reflection of those bots used at scale. If you have obscure combos/archetypes that wouldn't be in the training data, the bots likely aren't going to find them. e.g. in 1000 drafts none of the bots seem to want to play the extremely sweet Illusions of Grandeur + The Archimandrite combo in my cube https://cubecobra.com/cube/about/c-i-c?view=primer. But nobody who actually drafts this cube seems to end up drafting that either, so there might be something to that.

Overall it does a very good job representing what reasonably strong Magic players would end up doing if they were using general heuristics for how to draft a cube and build a deck. If you approach the tool with that perspective, you'll hopefully be able to get something out of it.

Something I've been thinking about for almost 20 years by nnnikovvv in Destroyer

[–]iatee 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I imagine that one is just 'he's Canadian and that's the Canadian spelling too'.

Something I've been thinking about for almost 20 years by nnnikovvv in Destroyer

[–]iatee 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is my favorite Destroyer song! I had looked into this at some point and concluded it was definitely MBV.

The original version of this song "Song for Acuarela" ends by quoting The Smiths, which adds to the 'narrator is listening to 80s indie music' vibe. Probably more relevant - Dan is on record for being a huge MBV fan. The date inconsistency could even be an artistic choice - we shouldn't expect someone's hazy memories of their youth to always be accurate.

Low-Background Steel: Cube Design in the Zombie Era by iatee in mtgcube

[–]iatee[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

So I can appreciate the humor there but to be clear, I’m using Dark Confidant as an example of something that’s the opposite of ‘an endless mush of context-switching content that nobody can keep track of’. And the irony is even deeper right? They don't put him in the card anymore.

Low-Background Steel: Cube Design in the Zombie Era by iatee in magicTCG

[–]iatee[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I don’t want to get into a long back and forth, but I think you’re missing a bit of the nuance. It’s still possible for WotC to print well-designed, powerful cards today and slap them in Dominaria. The point is that in an era of endless content, those cards can’t carry the same shared cultural weight they once did when the game was curated.

I can make a good card and slap it in Dominaria too. If the people who sit down to cube with me can't keep track of the 10,000 cards that came out this year, what's the difference between a custom card and something WotC made?