Limited Resources: Cube Draft ft. Rashad Miller

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Limited Resources




You can follow Marshall on Twitter @Marshall_LR
or check out the Limited Resources podcast at lrcast.com

You can follow Rashad Miller on Twitter @RashadMiller

 

  2. Everytime you play the cube, you are rewarding the greedy people behind the awful awful prize structure. Don’t do it.

  3. First of all, thanks to Marshall and Rashad for the videos.
    Now, a personal message to kezzerdrix: I have read similar comments whenever there was a cube draft posted. I didn’t check but I suppose that at least some of them were by you. Let me try to put things in a different perspective.
    Whenever we as content creators play the cube and record it, we generate value by creating enjoyable content. First and foremost, we are rewarding all the people that enjoy watching our videos. The value — and I don’t mean this in a purely monetary sense — created by that far outweighs the investment.
    You and everybody else is free to play cube drafts or not. Even for those that don’t for whatever reason, our recorded cube drafts are a great way to passively experience the joy of cube drafting.
    Last but not least, boycott calls like yours are an attempt to make a personal decision a group decision for no good reason. Just like we respect the decision not to play cube you should respect the decision to do so. Just because a product is not right for you there is no reason to offend those that think otherwise.

  4. Every time you play cube, you are rewarding yourself with the awesome awesome experience of cube. Please do it.
    Seriously, we have all seen the comment before, we all know the comment, perhaps people should stop telling people how much money their fun is worth?

    Onto the draft: I LOVE wildfire and fully condone this draft. It is however, in my experience, not a good archetype: you need to get a good wildfire deck and draw reasonably/quite well to do well with it, as opposed to say, GU ramp/goodstuff where simply powering out whatever a turn or 2 earlier can simply win you drafts. That hasn’t stopped me from pseudoforcing it time and time again, however :-).

    The deck seemed to lack a couple of things, mostly card ardvantage engines: the only ones you had are a random bit blast and your finishers. Without those, a problem arises that you have to wildfire to not lose but still do not really come out on top. Planeswalkers and enchantments which survive the effect or some (blue) draw can really help there. Getting the mix just right is hard however and then you occasionally still run into horrible match ups, the deck is kinda bad, but heh, I just love it.

  5. So sad to see gargadon not getting mentioned.
    Play Wildfire and sacing all your lands in response is like the absolut best you can do :(

  6. Any sane person would boycott mtgo cube due to the current prize structure’s.

    If not, their an idiot, sorry.

  7. Drafting the cube online should be seen more like going to the movies. But if you are good, a cube draft will last longer and therefore is more fun than seeing a movie. Especially if you rally up some pals. Also, playing MtG in general is good value, because you need to use your brain to really have fun.

    Sure, you could go somewhat “infinite” if you’re doing RtR all day, but what’s the point?

  8. I normally dont comment, but I felt like this opinion needs to be voiced as well. I love watching the cube drafts, all the various incarnations of cube draft videos are my favorite out of all the drafting videos. You get to make evaluations, and compare cards from sets that would not normally appear in limited together, if not for cube. Thanks for the videos.

  9. M1G3, he could have floated mana in response to the wildfire, and then let it resolve, and made 2 angels, and you’d have been super screwed.

  10. Cube draft is my favorite video content, by far.
    I don’t play it myself online, but I am glad that content makers do.

    Also, classic “their an idiot”s.

  11. “Their an idiot” ha!

    I don’t think your deck was very good. You didn’t have the critical mass of artifact mana or card advantage to make it consistent. In any game you don’t draw thran dynamo or basalt monolith your deck doesn’t actually do anything. I think Marshall plays better without Rashad but I still like the 2 man drafts as its intresting to see different styles clash.

  12. Have to voice the same thing people before me did:

    Although I won’t play cube because of the lack of funding myself, watching it is intertaining and MtG should _not_ be a tool to make money or rewards only, but mainly to entertain, (see the word “game” attached to this one) and if you get entertainment out of something you put money in, there is full value right there.

    So yes, there are no monetarian prizes to be had from cube drafts, but there is entertainment, something Simon already said.

    Regarding the draft:
    The idea was fun, but you had nearly no early aggression, and when you finally made your big plays you could only topdeck because you had to burn everything else. Some blue carddraw could easily solve the problem, and cube has some of the best carddraw there is. Double wrath in one game is pretty funny though :D

  13. Simon, your comment made a ton of sense. You, as a content producer, surely do receive more value from the cube than you do from the awful, terrible, and quite frankly unethical prize support.

    However, you lost the argument in the last paragraph. Boycott calls, are by definition an attempt to make a personal decision a group decision. And they are usually for the greater good.

    Would you say that “It’s my personal decision to support South Africa even though they have apartheid?”

    Would you say “It’s my personal decision to eat tuna, even though it kills dolphins, because the company isn’t willing to raise the price by 5 cents a can?”

    Boycotts only work when they are group decisions, and that only happens when the reasons for dissatisfaction are communicated. Do not be condescending towards Kezzedrix.

    You did a great job in your post, but you lost it all in the last paragraph. You already stated why you receive more benefit. But you are, to use common parlance, the 1%.

    I also think that Kezzedrix’s comments need to be posted in every cube videos, in the hopes that Wizards can see it, and finally stop screwing over its customers who pay for VIRTUAL CARDS THAT DON’T EXIST.

  14. I usually love your content, but I was not a fan of this particular draft.
    It felt as if neither of you were “in the driver seat”, which in turn led to misplays with a deck already difficult to pilot as this is which in turn made this difficult to watch.

    On the contrarary your draft with josh or john loucks( or somthing like that ) was pure gold.

    This could have been there with tighter play and more direction.

  15. Watching you turn a mountain into a wormcoil engine is possibly the funniest thing you’ve done in a video for this site. Thanks for creating such wonderful moments.

  17. Any thought to siding in Engineered Explosives or Masticore in r3 to deal with his annoying two drops and tokens?

  18. Good draft, fun archetype.

    One big thing though, gargadon is the BEST creature you can have for this deck in cube.
    How both marshall and rasha think it doesnt synergize well just baffles me.
    Being able to get full value out of your sacced lands is exactly what you want with gargadon.

  19. @1/2 Kezz 1/2 Simon

    Theoretically there doesn’t need to be a reward from Cube-Drafting at all. As I stated before, it is a mechanism to create entertainment, not money! And since no one forces you to play it, where is your problem with this policy?

    I can understand that the not-so-recent-anymore downgrading in winnings from cube drafting has created a negative feedback, but again, no one forces you to follow that! If you don’t want to spend the money for “nothing” (in your opinion, leaving the entertainment aside), then just don’t. There is no penalty for it.

    In conclusion: If you are disappointed with the rewards, then file your complaint against MtGO, or in a dedicated forum post, but not in every cube draft video there is. Because the reward from this, in my eyes entertainment, is something relative, and if you can’t see it, then don’t try to take that from others who do.

    I think that was at least part of Simon’s point. And “I’m starting a boycott so it is okay to force my opinion on everyone else” isn’t a good point in itself, because who defines the “greater good”? How do you know your opinion is that?

  21. I didn’t play cube during holidays because of bad pay out, but didn’t it get worse now ? I just noticed you get absolutely nothing real for winning a swiss cube draft; was that also the case at christmas cube ? Or did wizards just get enough encouragement to even go deeper in ?

  22. About your draft choices, i would have picked up seething song when we had chance because it seems like the perfect fit for this deck-> powers out a helkite on t3 etc.

    Also, you should give more consideration to gargadon. you can sac everything before you wildfire, and then hit for 9 with them having no board at all

    just a suggestion, thanks!

  23. 100% with Simon and EdwardGein. If you don’t want to cube because the prize structure sucks, don’t do it. That’s your choice, but don’t try to push your opinion on others just because of the choice you make. Not everybody plays magic for money and prizes. Sure its a nice incentive but that’s definitely not why 99% of magic players got into the game. We play because it’s fun and we aren’t generally concerned with a proper prize structure. So Kezzerdrix, quit with your stupid hypocritical posts because you’re the one being greedy with your inane comments on all cube videos. And it’s ‘they’re’ in that context… Not ‘their’. Idiot, sorry.

  24. Cube is my favorite draft format and I am very happy I get to play it online. The prize structure allows me to play more Cube if I do well, which is a fine reward for a phantom event in my opinion.

    If one is going to insult people online, one should be careful not to misuse one’s conjuncted pronouns…because than there knot combing a cross vary we’ll too the other “idiot’s” on the sight.

  27. Wanted to say I always watch but never comment – I love all MTGO Academy’s videos and cube is awesome. Also Gargadon would have been the sweetest in that deck!

  31. I play swiss cubes, and I consider $2 for a few hour’s entertainment pretty good value. Sure, I can’t go infinite like other formats, but most limited is pretty low EV. I play to have fun, and cube is awesome. I’ve managed to save up 48 cube tickets (you get +6 for going 3-0 and -2 for going 2-1 in swiss) so I might play some single elim to try to get boosters.

  32. Well these comments have yanked the fun right out of watching those entertaining cube videos – I know let’s all refuse to read the comments of MTGO academy videos from this point on. Everyone swear right now – “this will be the last MTGO academy videos I read from this point on.” We should also all agree to never point out one’s grammatical mistakes again in comments, because I for one am tired of having to proof my comments before posting them. Of course if we have all banned reading the comments, we won’t notice the grammatical mistakes, but of course, if we have banned the reading of the comments, we probably won’t be making any replies to comments ourselves, unless we are posting blind to the comments without reading, which is also a totally annoying habit some people have. That’s it, I am never reading MTGO Academy video comments again – whose with me (although I’ll never know from your replies to my comments because I will never read them)?

  33. I would like to mention that the post made by “kezzerdrix” are from 2 different people, only the first one and this one made in this comment section is by me, the others are from some random troll.

  36. Just wanted to note that in round 1, game three, when you wildfired when he had all his mana up to make two angels, he could have floated four mana, let wildfire resolve, and then made the angels.