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!

[Paul Hodgson]

Feature idea - can you do a save all changes button on the card list? Having to click the OK button each time I change the type dropdown is tedious...

[Ben Titmarsh]

Yeah what I really want to do is make this Ajax-y.  i.e. just by changing a form value it will send the data to the server.

It's on my to do list!

[ross miles]

i was going to suggest making it Ajax-y but you just got in there before me ...

Ben Titmarsh said:

Yeah what I really want to do is make this Ajax-y.  i.e. just by changing a form value it will send the data to the server.

It's on my to do list!

[Ben Titmarsh]

For all you Twitter types: https://twitter.com/cubetutor

[Ben Titmarsh]

I'm now starting to wonder whether the actual pick number is really relevant at all?  If you pick a card first or 7th it doesnt really matter, you pick it the first time you see it.

I'm wondering whether it would be better to record the cards that were NOT picked in each pack.  i.e. the more times it's passed, the lower down in the pick order it goes.  I believe that both approaches would tend to the same result but looking at ignored picks would give results quicker (at the cost of having to record more data).

Thoughts?

[Paul Hodgson]

Ben - as I'm doing drafts with people's cubes I'm increasingly thinking to myself "why is this card here?" - have I missed something or is there no way to give that kind of feedback on the site? Similar to how Baker setup the build your own set site it'd be sweet to be able to vote up and down or comment on card inclusions to help improve people's cubes :D

[Ben Titmarsh]

Hey Paul - yeah I was thinking something similar myself.  I might actually look at facebook integration so you can login with your FB account rather than you CubeTutor one.  Might then be able to leverage their commenting and liking functionality.  In order to do this I think that every likable or commetable entity has to have it's own page, so not quite sure how it would work.  Might end up just rolling my own version.  Thanks for letting me know that it's a feature you'd be interested in.

[Philip Dickinson]

could be cool to record people's individual picks on their account - could enable interesting 'recommendation' functionality - 

"You've picked [Crucible of Worlds] very highly in drafts - have you considered [Life from the Loam]? [Life from the Loam] is picked [5] picks later on average in this cube compared to [Crucible of Worlds]."

i dunno. matching cards up like that semantically is a bit of a deep data mining headfuck. something simple with just shared words or tags in gatherer could be cool though

[Kieran Symington]

You should link the draft function to the old MODO draft rater you used to have - then you could draft cubes, share your thoughts on the cards, then get mocked by other people for picking Death Cloud.

[Ben Titmarsh]

Interesting idea Phil.  I worry a little when things try to get too intelligent ("I see you're writing a letter") that they actually end up being a little annoying.  CubeTutor is a pacifist right now man!  Although it does recommend card replacements but I think that's fine because the comparison is static.

Also I think that perhaps its more a tool to help the person building the cube than the person drafting it on CT.  I totally take the point that if people enjoy drafting it more that the cube author will end up getting more benefit though.

Something to think on!

I've just modified the ordering algoithm for bots.  I now record which cards are passed in each pack, and the bots take cards with the highest pickCount - passCount first.  pickCount - avePickNumber just doesn't scale at all!  You'll notice a delay at the end of the pack, I will be able to improve this by about half soon, but just wanted to get the functionality out there.

[Ben Titmarsh]

Quick update: Lowest pick charts now up on Analysis page.  White based aggro does not appear to be popular for my online drafters!  This is only really based on data since I put the pickCount - passCount formula live, so there probably haven't been too many drafts in the last 4 hours.

I also think that as these are not real drafts, players tend to be a bit looser and more splashy with their picks, which is fine.

Unsuprisingly, "Kieran Picks" Death Cloud and Talon Trooper are fairly poorly represented!

[Kieran Symington]

Nice, though the picks lists probably shouldn't show cards that have been cut! A lot of the cards on my 'last picks' list will never be seen again.