How do you sort your multicolor cards?

[Eric Chan]

This is a source of never-ending debate within the cube community. Keep the gold cards balanced, or unbalanced? Where do you put the off-color flashback, the Wild Nacatls, the Kessig Wolf Runs? What about those pesky hybrid cards?

It's really more of a bookkeeping issue than a cube design issue at large. But I think that the way a lot of people keep track of multicolor might constrain them from having they best cube possible.

Here's how I do it, cross-posted from a comment I left on Usman's article this week. I'd be interested to hear other people's methods.

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I think the guild model, while useful for its time, has unfortunately locked people into a set way of thinking. As [Usman] pointed out, the losers in the guild model are hybrid cards.

Folks who strictly ascribe to the guild model need to come to the realization that hybrid =/= gold. Gold is harder to cast than mono-color; hybrid is easier to cast than mono-color. Gold needs colors C and D; hybrid needs color C or D. What I'm trying to get across is that hybrid is actually the opposite of gold. The only thing they share is their multicolor designation. Which, for cube purposes, shouldn't matter at all when it comes to figuring out which cards makes the grade. Actual card quality should be the guiding principle there. So classifying them together into one big ol' "multicolor" section is doing hybrid cards a major disservice.

Here's what I do in my ~450 cube (deep breath):

- Each color pair is allowed a maximum of 3 gold cards. These include actual gold cards (Qasali Pridemage), cards with off-color flashback that are only ever utilized with access to both colors (Lingering Souls), non-fixing lands with multi-color activation (Kessig Wolf Run), and creatures that rely on basic land types (I don't run any of these, but Kird Ape is your go-to example). Color pairs can have less than 3 gold cards, but not more. The bar for a gold card to make the cut at all is very high.

- Any and all good tri-color cards make the cut. The bar is exceptionally high for this elite club. I've only got two cards at the moment (Nicol Bolas & Maelstrom Wanderer).

- Any and all good hybrid cards make the cut. The bar is much lower for hybrid, since as we've established, they're easy to cast and the opposite of gold. A card like Curse of Chains, for example, is a serviceable removal spell that's currently in the mix. Fulminator Mage is also included in this model, despite an abundance of actual good Rakdos gold cards.

- The fun part. Establish a "colour ratio" for each and every multicolor card. For two-color cards, they would typically count as half a card in each color: Qasali Pridemage is 0.5 W, 0.5 G. Hybrid cards can be weighed according to how often they appear in their respective decks. Boggart Ram-Gang is 0.75 R, 0.25 G for me. And so on. 

- Tally up colour ratios to get the total color representation across all multicolor cards. After counting the total number of "cards" represented across each color, note which ones are over and under-represented. Cut or add cards from the mono-color sections accordingly. For me, this meant cutting two red cards, and adding back one card each in blue and green.

Whew, that sounds like a mouthful. I doubt anyone actually read through all that. But if you did, and you keep your cube list in a Google Doc, which I assume most people do nowadays, it's actually easier to do this than it sounds.

Most importantly, it removes the shackles off of hybrid cards, which have been unfairly held down in too many cubes.

[Jason Waddell]

Short answer: I don't. 

I'll probably write an article about it someday, but this is a frequently covered topic and I usually find it rather petty and trivial. My approach boils down to "do what makes your cube best". Naturally I have opinions on densities of gold cards and other issues, but that's another topic. 

Pragmatically: I jam hybrids in monocolor sections with abandon, put Kird Ape and Lingering Souls in my gold section. None of these choices really impact which 360 cards I have in my cube, just where I write them down in a .txt file. 

I think, with rare exceptions, trying to perfectly balance your gold/hybrid sections does a cube a massive disservice, and worst of all, distracts the designer from the issues that are actually important. 

[Eric Chan]

Yeah, perfect balance in multicolor sections usually leads to imbalance in the cube design, ironically. Actual limited sets designed by Wizards are never perfectly balanced by color.

I guess the issue is so frequently discussed only because people are being held back by outdated mental models, which have unfortunately become the status quo over the years. That, and most cube designers have some (unhealthy?) degree of OCD.

As you said, the whole topic is petty and trivial; balancing multicolor is not cube design. But ascribing to any kind of strict multicolor balance is an inhibitor to good design.

[Jason Waddell]

Well, as a demographic cube designers seem to get held up on a lot of issues. This kind of cutesy "perfect multicolor sections" spawns from the same rationales that wouldn't ever consider non-singleton design. If you end up with a balanced section or a singleton list, that's fine, but there are often much better alternatives. 

The issue in cube is that there's no evolutionary mechanism to force these mindsets out. If there's a mindset that produces bad constructed decks, well... it tends to get identified. There you also have some "authority figures" who win tournaments and can say "these are bad deckbuilding habits". The lack of any possible objective evaluation of cube designs means that ideas churn much more slowly. 

[Eric Chan]

Wow, that blew my mind. That sounds like a topic for a full blown article, right there.

It's funny that this kind of mindset for cube design exists even inside the walls of Wizards itself. See MTGO cube design. If the "official" cube uses bad design fundamentals, how is the next generation of cube designers supposed to learn their craft?

[worstshacona]

The most important thing when we include a card is that it is the type of card we would like to see played in someone's deck. My favorite gold card is Stormbind.  I basically always want it in my deck, so I include it.  The problem with forced symmetry, just like forced power level, is that we end up including cards we don't actually want to see played in anyone's deck. 

People should fill there gold sections with the gold cards they want to play.  If this creates an imbalance, they should prune cards from the section until the cube plays comfortable.  You should never, EVER add more gold cards to try to fix the imbalance.

However, sometimes we may find that we have a large amount of gold cards that we do want to play, but adding them all would have an undesirable effect on drafting process.  When this happened, our solution was cordon off the gold section of the cube and include a random sub-set of those cards in the draft.

So, for example, let's say you have a 540 card cube.  In this case, you would have 510 card core block, then a 50 card gold section from which 30 cards are randomly included in each draft.

Similar sections can work for other problematic areas where you want high variety, but low concentration.

[Jason Waddell]

I like the "cordoning off" idea. I've considered it in the past but never pulled the trigger on it. I first saw it discussed by Thea Steele w.r.t. Planeswalkers. If I did it, I think I would have one wildcard Planeswalker slot so that different walkers could say hello from time to time. Would be cool to see Tamiyo and Sarkhan in action from time to time. 

[Eric Chan]

Wow. That is a fantastic idea. I'd literally never heard of it until your post, Kevin. There are so many gold cards I want to experiment with, but the bar right now is set impossibly high for any gold card to make the cut. I mean, we're talking about competing with the likes of Bloodbraid Elf, Olivia Voldaren, and Ajani Vengeant here.

I like that it simulates a regular limited environment, too, where you're not sure if you'll open a particular bomb rare, or whether it's even in the mix in your pod. Having perfect knowledge of the cards in a particular draft rewards the cube owner, as well as those who've memorized the list. I don't like having that advantage over my playgroup (though Lord knows I need it), so doing this could level out the playing field in some small way.

[Jason Waddell]

The downside is that it's marginally labor intensive. But eventually your players will get in the habit of sorting their decks post draft. Mine already need 3 piles, what's a fourth?

Plus, I can't say I mind it. I imagine most cube owners love shuffling their cube. I'm doing it right now, after a massive 25 card update. 

[Eric Chan]

Wait. I must be missing something. How come your cube needed three piles?

I..  hate shuffling my cube. Mostly because my sleeves are cheap, and I seem to break more and more of them with my repeated clumsy attempts at randomization. I'd pay good money for a quality shuffler that could handle sleeved Magic cards.

[Jason Waddell]

I am testing an evolution of this concept: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=477469

It never really got any attention on the forums, and the idea was half-baked at the time, but I've put a lot of work into it and it's running well now. The stack has changed a lot, and you now select one card from it after each pack. I don't expect it will become cube cannon, and I may abandon it someday, but it's providing good fun so far. 

[FlowerSunRain]

Basic land, Gold Cards, other cube cards. Its only marginally more work.

[Calvin Chan]

I like the idea of the varying gold pile when most of the gold cards are bombs.  However, when some of the gold cards are archetype support or a solid reward card for being in the colour, I don't like the change in power balance.  Of course in most cubes, gold cards will be the splashy cards that are reasons to go into another colour and the information is hidden so I can see it work.