Cube Set

[Chris H.]

I apparently broke the download by including the wrong files in it.

I admit that while I have been busy, that I was also curious to see the cards included. So I downloaded the archive. It looks like you accidentally included the cards.txt file when you meant to include the common.txt file.

When you created this cube, how many cards were there supposed to be, in common, uncommon and rare?

[GandoTheBard]

I don't remember the exact numbers of commons versus uncommons but the ratio was about 2:1. Not terribly precise and I never did get around to changing the rarities to make some of the commons uncommon. When I get my dad's USB kit Ill try and retrieve the old files and fix the download. For now its just broken. Sorry bout that...been a bit hectic lately.

[Rob Cashwalker]

I just wanted to chime in about the idea of 'cheating'.

You certainly CAN manipulate a card pool and then draft it with your friends. That's the whole point of a Cube. Take your best/favorite/most fun 500+ cards and put into a box. Then randomly pull out groups of 15 cards for each booster need for the draft. Then you all draft.

We all know that the AI doesn't handle all the cards in the full card pool. If you remove those cards from the pool, then you and the AI are on nearly even ground. Now the ONLY excuse you have for winning is your skill, not because half the cards the computer had sat dead in its hand because canPlay_AI() returned false.

Similarly, we want to develop set of cards with even color and rarity distribution for the generation of quest pools. For this, the cube set wouldn't be so good. The AI doesn't need to care about this pool, but the human doesn't want to feel shafted by the fact that we don't have lots of spells and blue isn't represented very well in general, because the computer can't react to spells, and most of blue is reactive. (counterspell) Now, Rares and Dennis have tried to add hacks to give extra spells, and extra blue in the pool. But if the quest pool started with an even distribution, then the hacks aren't necessary.

I like to play with the computer AI using random constructed decks against my own creations.... Gando likes drafting. The great thing is that MTGForge is flexible enough to allow any card pool you want to play with.

I for one, fully support Gando's efforts to create a card pool that he has the most fun playing. That's what Magic's all about, having fun.

When I played the Star Wars flight sim X-Wing, I was part of a "clan" (Red squadron, there was also blue, gold, green and rogue; all of which was back on Compuserve's flight sim board) we had to submit flight recordings and our pilot files (game save point) after completing the various levels. If you modified your game, (increased max speed or turn rate) the flight recording wouldn't playback correctly on an un-modified game. So cheaters were outed easily.
(The flight recording only recorded your initial position and then subsequent keyboard/mouse/joystick input, plus certain game events; then playback would re-render the entire game with those inputs provided. Many games with recording features do this. But if the event was triggered by your position, during playback your position wasn't where it was when recorded because of the modified game file.)
(I only mention this as an example of REAL cheating. Modifying your game environment for your own personal fun is fine by me, and after I finished the game in "stock mode" for the purposes of the squadron, I went back to the beginning to play again with "experimental upgrades")