Sunk cost cube, part 2: card evaluation

Once I catalogued all my cards, I was ready to start thinking about what to include in the cube. Sort of.

Card evaluation is hard enough in a draft setting, but now each card was competing with hundreds of others. I wanted to include the best cards in each color and maintain a good balance. But how? I didn’t know how good or bad my cards were, so I couldn’t reliably guess whether a specific card would make it into the cube or eventually get cut. Faced with going through 1088 unique cards over and over until I had the right 360, I needed to find some shortcuts.

Luckily, MtG players love draft simulators, and the aggregate of those draft decisions results in a ranked list of cards for each set. With some copy-pasting and a little spreadsheet voodoo I was able to get a ranked percentile score, within its set, of each card I owned.

This is where I enlisted Deckbox so I didn’t have to sort the physical cards to match their ranking from the spreadsheet. I added the bottom 50% ranked cards and went through them, just in case, on the lookout for any cards that sounded fun or had interesting interactions. When I was done, I’d removed 436 cards from consideration and never looked back.

The top 50% is where I had to put in more thought and get down to real card evaluation. I cut out a lot of older cards, because those sets were overall weak. Maybe it’s a fluke, but one the highest ranked cards from Ice Age is Pale Bears. It’s maybe acceptable as sideboard, but I wanted every card to be viable in the main deck. My one planeswalker was among the cards that I cut because they would have thrown off the balance between colors. Unfortunately, I couldn’t include multicolor at all.

I was getting close, a few more tweaks, and it’d be ready to play.