Power Cube is back on Arena and as wild as always. There’s lessons to take away from designing high powered cards and formats. Also make sure to stick around for our fun new game of “B or F?” where Peter has to guess whether a card is 60% winrate or 50% winrate in Power Cube data from 17lands.
Our “B” or “F” game
(cooler name pending…)
The game here is guessing whether a card is a “B” (17lands win rate above about 57%) or an “F” (win rate around 50% or below). Here’s the ones Peter guessed:
- Makdee and Itla, Skysnarers
- Winds of Abandon
- Upheaval
- Underworld Breach
- Shadowspear
- Scythecat Cub
- Griselbrand
- Night’s Whisper
- Talisman of Creativity
Scryfall gallery of other cards mentioned
Topics and Tidbits
- the pure love between a man and his draft format
- Arena prize structure pushes you towards consistent aggro decks
- three one drops cut from arena cube v1 to v2
- This is the first time we’ve had a ton of data about a cube
- Powered cube is 2 turns faster than the fastest retail draft formats (turn 6 vs turns 8-10 for retail)
- Only really large amounts of cube data can give you any results
- Your friends or local play group aren’t going to hammer the good deck like players in an online queue will
- The more challenge a format is to draft, the more addictive it is to finally have it work
- The presence of famous combo cards will imply the presence of its partner combo pieces
- “My Atraxa commander deck isn’t the strong kind of Atraxa deck I swear!”
- The shrine deck being bad kinda makes it more exciting to draft… Power cube stacks many of those decks into one format
- NumotTheNummy shoutout
- aggro vs combos vs midrange
- Good counters can suppress all-in ramp and combo
- How many retail draft sets had an emphasis on picking lands at the right time?
- Can you have so many lands that fixing is free?
- Part of the cost of being explosively fun is also being exploded on
- The “just draft and autoplay the games” dream format
- The draft phase is a more chill and hopeful than the games
- Commander games might be more unfair than even power cube, but people still love it
- Tim yet again talking about commons in the Play Booster era
- Peter talking about Mom again
- Early commons/uncommons test drafts of a set can be missing the spark of fun
- Hard to extrapolate any legit power level info about a cube just playing it once or twice
- Our new game: Is this Power Cube card a B or an F in 17lands data?
- If you have a catchy name for our B/F game, let me know!