Dekkaru posted to Developer Blog -

We have a very exciting release tonight, with a couple big new features. The first thing I want to talk about is something that's been very widely requested that for the longest time I didn't think was worth building up until recently, and that's per-cube draft analytics and Elo. The difficulty with this, is that in order to have draft data be statistically significant, at least thousands of drafts of a cube need to be done, possibly more, depending on the size of the cube. So, what I decided to do is have per-cube Elo move ten times faster than site-wide, or global, card Elo. This means that a card's Elo will be noisier, but take less drafts to get to it's "correct" value. I also added a toggle button in the cube settings, found in overview, that makes draftbots for that cube use that cube's Elo instead of global Elo. By making this an opt-in feature, I think it makes it more reasonable as new cubes won't suffer from having no way to compare card quality.

With the new draft data tracking, we added a new tab in the analytics page to show a ranking of all cards. This allows you to view each card's Elo, pick/pass ratio, and mainboard/sideboard ratio. Since a lot of drafters don't bother to build decks after the draft, we exclude decks that don't have a sideboard from this calculation. You can also find these fields in other analysis sections, like chart, averages, and pivot chart.

The next big feature I want to talk about is the addition of "Card Packages". These are sets of cards with some unifying theme, such as "Power Nine" or "Fetch Lands". These packages can be quickly added to a cube, and doing so will create a blog entry with a link to the package, and also will tag the new cards with the name of the package. Any user can create and submit packages, and also upvote packages for greater visibility. You can search for packages by keywords, that include the name of the package and the names of the cards in the package, so searching for "lotus" will show you all packages with "lotus" in the name but also all packages with a card that has "lotus" in the name. There's also a system for "approving" packages, which I will manually curate - this will create two lists, one that includes all packages, and one that includes packages I've deemed particularly useful for cube building.

I've also added a new feature for basic cube editing, you'll notice that when adding and removing cards, there is now a checkbox with the label "Specify Versions". If this is checked, the "add" field will autocomplete with the set code and collector's number - so you can make sure to add the correct version to your cube, and not have to worry about going through your list and correcting the version after the fact. The autocomplete dropdown will also have the correct autocard popup so you're 100% sure the card you're adding is the one you wanted.

It's also time for an update that I suppose was inevitable, but some users may not be welcome to: switching from CMC to "Mana Value". This is now the correct term, so that's what we'll use.

New Features:

  • Added analytic for playtest data aggregation
  • Added easy-add "Card Packages"
  • Added a checkbox when adding cards to cube that allows specification of card versions
  • Added the ability to have draft bots use cube-specific elo instead of global elo
  • Added mouseover text to cube preview to view cut-off names
  • Updated front end components to display "Mana Value" over "CMC"
  • Added a cache for sample pack images, significantly improving load times for discord pack bots

Bugfixes:

  • Added back autocard on autocomplete dropdowns
  • Autocard on the remove autocomplete will now use correct versions from your cube