BandaBox 3: Comments

Skeleton | Cycles | Skeleton ver. 2 | Ver. 2 Changes

by Alex:

BTW, it seems that boosters from this set only generate lands at the moment. I'd guess that's because those are the only cards you've got marked as Active. If you want to include all cards in the boosters, I think there are 3 options:

1) Disable "active" status in the Cardset options.
2) Edit each card in the set to mark it as active.
3) Since 2) seems like an enormous undertaking, even pretty fiddly using the import data page, I'd be happy to do it for you as a direct database edit if you want. Just let me know here or by email.

by Shiny_Umbreon:

I only put lands as active because those are the only slots I know for sure as of now. :)

by Alex:

BTW, sorry about all the timeout errors. I fear your usage pattern isn't really quite what Multiverse is designed for. The cardlist is a moderately expensive page to generate because it's reading lots of info for each card in the set, and so I try to cache a copy of it; but each time a change is made to a card in the set, I have to invalidate the cached copy. So repeated edit -> cardlist -> edit -> cardlist cycles will be pretty slow, and hit timeout errors, especially in a set with so many cards as this (815!).

I don't have an immediate solution but I will be bearing these problems in mind when I review changes I can consider to my caching.

by Shiny_Umbreon:

Don't worry. It's awesome that you have such a place to store cards/sets/whatever in the first place. Thanks for that.

I have learned not to load the cardlist repeatedly, though. :P

by Alex:

Heh. As long as you haven't made any new cards or edits to cards since the last time, it ought to be really quick. But if you have, yeah, it'll be pretty painfully slow.

by Shiny_Umbreon:

It's almost impossible not to make a change every second. :P

by Shiny_Umbreon:

So, what you are seeing is a Cube draft format, but designed to be a bit towards what I like. A bit less than half of the cards are totally new, although many of these "new" cards are functional tweaks of existing cards. The point is to make a fun format, not necessarily to use my ideas or mechanics.

The format aims to be:

Representative of Magic. It includes many popular cards, so it still has an "I'm playing with historically powerful cards" like other Cubes, but even the new cards are reminiscent of the game as we know it, both modern and old-school. Going a bit deeper, if you look at the flavor of the cards, you'll find references to most of Magic's characters, sets and planes, from Chandra to Jhoira, from double-faced cards to affinity, from Zendikar to Terisiare.

Varied in the decks it supports. There has been a conscious effort to help players play "what they want". Each one, two and three color combination has at least two different kind of decks to play, plus some incentive for five colors or mostly colorless. The themes are also pretty wide, from modular cards with dredge here and there to dedicated artifact decks, plus at least three different combo decks. Finally, some cards here and there are fun-to-try one-ofs, and there are a few very tiny subthemes that can make the same deck drastically different.

Fun. This is the hard part. I had to balance the known powerful decks with the subtle and less-hard-to-build decks, the number of obviously powerful cards with hard-to-evaluate cards, and the decks that just play cool stuff with the decks that rely on synergy. I also made sure both heavily-monocolored cards and gold cards were splashy enough to make people commit to them. If this was done correctly, the format should be very fun to discover.

Although the format was made to have 17-card boosters, you can still get an idea of what one looks like with the flat booster function of Multiverse. Try it out!

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