Draft your cube at CubeTutor.com!

[Ben Titmarsh]

I felt this was a big enough feature to announce it on a new thread.  Draft cubes here:

Ben's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/1
Simon's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/5
Tom's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/7
Kieran's Cube: http://www.cubetutor.com/draft/12

You can pick cards and you'll see them on the right as you do so.  You're actually playing againt 7 bot drafters who basically just force two colours each and take the occasional artifact/land.  Each colour will be drafted by at most 3 bot drafters so it kinda mimics what should end up happening in a real draft.  They pick at random a card from their colours.

As usual only minimal testing has been performed, please do report any bugs and let me know what you think!

[Ben Titmarsh]

Haha yeah that was cool.

[Paul Hodgson]

Absolutely, was talking about this with Glenn last night over a few beers. Might be worth us all putting our heads together and helping you come up with a business plan, there's some serious cashola to be made I think.

Philip Dickinson said:

Starting to really gain traction in the community now Ben! I thought it was really cool the other week when that portuguese guy was like "have you heard of cubetutor" and you got to reply "yeah, i made it". Time to start thinking about monetization...

Ben Titmarsh said:

This is awesome: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=517528

[Dan Barrett]

Not sure whether WotC might have something to say about it if you started monetizing heavily, see e.g. Cockatrice - but maybe a better end-game plan is them adopting the site (and you with it!) ?

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

it will depend on how it's done, there are many ways that it can be profitable but that is up to ben really, Paul certainly has a lot of idea's and insight's in to what can be done

Dan Barrett said:

Not sure whether WotC might have something to say about it if you started monetizing heavily, see e.g. Cockatrice - but maybe a better end-game plan is them adopting the site (and you with it!) ?

[Ben Titmarsh]

Advertising would be the obvious choice but Ive never really liked the idea of plastering ads everywhere. I had a great suggestion from someone, get the card links to go to an online retailer! It would treat CT as a kind of affiliate. If the store had extra info on the card like oracle text, other versions etc it would be useful to my users and not too intrusive.

Also had quite a few people asking me to accept donations already. Obviously this isnt a reliable income stream but its nice that peo

[Dan Barrett]

At very least allow donations to cover your hosting bills I guess? It's nice to hear that people are willing to contribute to something they have found so useful/enjoyable!

Also no harm in finding out what the big online retailers would offer you for maybe one small banner/MPU per page plus affiliate links. Worst case you just say no and carry on as-is.

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

Ben this all came about as we were saying what a great job you've done but you've also put in a lot of work and this certainly has options for making money, advertising, linking to cards from shops (would probably have to be several shops as people in the US won't want to see madhouse prices and vice versa), you could also just sell the whole thing.

It's more that you have come up with something that everyone seems to be on board with it's now about making sure your getting the most out of it as well

[Paul Hodgson]

I think the card links is one of the better ways, and less intrusive than ads (although ads for things like ultrapro etc would probably be fine). The angle I was thinking of was that many people are going to be fiddling with their cube list, drafting, seeing how things come together and then tweaking by changing cards around. If it's easy for them to then click through to a comparative list of retailers - i.e. card X is available for these prices from retailer 1, 2, 3, 4 etc and you get an affiliate slice of the transaction. You actually build more useful functionality (users get the cards they are missing at the best price), and make some £££ off the deal.

Hard part will be setting up the affiliate agreements, I know plenty of commercial lawyers who will work for burgers though ;)

[Russell Davies]

Meh, affiliate agreements are trivial, no need to get the suits in on them ;)

Having comparative pricing for cards is an excellent idea IMO, but you might struggle to get people on there. TCGPlayer and MTGPrice both have feeds from some big stores, but they're quite US-centric, and it may be difficult to find stores in UK/Europe who have the infrastructure and technical know-how to provide the data you need.

Needless to say, if you're going down this route I'll be happy to setup a web service/feed or similar from manascrew.co.uk and an affiliate agreement, too  ;)

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

and sexy cuddles obv

Russell Davies said:

Meh, affiliate agreements are trivial, no need to get the suits in on them ;)

Having comparative pricing for cards is an excellent idea IMO, but you might struggle to get people on there. TCGPlayer and MTGPrice both have feeds from some big stores, but they're quite US-centric, and it may be difficult to find stores in UK/Europe who have the infrastructure and technical know-how to provide the data you need.

Needless to say, if you're going down this route I'll be happy to setup a web service/feed or similar from manascrew.co.uk and an affiliate agreement, too  ;)

[Russell Davies]

All part of the service!

[Ben Titmarsh]

Haha. AFAIK most of the European stores dont offer any price API so if you wanted to aggregate prices youd either have to get them to build one or get involved in the horrendous world of scraping.. Really interesting idea though. I think it would certainly be worth going down the geolocation route and providing region specific stores. About 80% of my users are American at the moment.