Feyd_Ruin wrote: ↑4 years ago
darrenhabib wrote: ↑4 years ago
Interestingly there is actually not much from stopping from
eventually using this website to run the algorithm, as the cards are a database and its possible to assign the points to them. If that makes sense its no different to how other attributes get assigned like ratings.
There's quite a few questions that have to be well answered for this.
Who assigns the ratings and how?
People have different feelings on cards, so I would guess something community driven, but it only works if you get a lot of responses and throughput.
Without being presumptuous, or actually asking for specific functionality, I'll give you my "perfect world" scenarios.
Because this data is specifically for
rating commander decks using the pokken algorithm, it would only be a
moderator that assigns point values. Realistically me & pokken, because we are the ones who are investing time into the idea.
Yes it will be subjective and biased. Obviously the point is to make points as realistic and balanced as possible (as we can think of), but its just not possible to put it entirely into a public pool to assign values initially because you need a starting point.
Now that's not to say over time that polls are not put out to try and balance point values, part of the fun will be less subjective results and that more aligned with the populace.
But it will never be a public thing like the ratings system we have.
At the end of the day, the disclaimer is that the algorithm has been designed by individuals. It is pokken algorithm and not a public designed system.
Are the ratings per card, or do they look for 2+ card interactions?
Flash is a perfectly balanced card with no power level issues or degenerate interactions,
unless you flash in certain creatures. Then it becomes the bane of cEDH. I know people who run Flash as generally nothing more than a
Quicken. Even "abused" with something like
Thragtusk would generally be accepted by most as just a cool 2 card interaction. But then
Protean Hulk...
Flash is a good example, but far from the only one.
Titania's Song is a great defensive card, but mixing it with
Mycosynth Lattice can be game crushing.
Rings of Brighthearth is run to power level commanders with abilities all the time, but goes infinite with
Basalt Monolith really fast.
Palinchron vs Palinchron and
High Tide. The list goes on.
So I'm going to approach this in the much bigger picture I have for the website. I've already hinted at you at some functionality that would be great to have with the website and that is having relationships between cards.
The idea is that anybody can build up relationships between cards.
You will have different relationships as well. X has a relationship to Y in a Z type manner.
Z might be "Similar to" so a thesaurus type relationship.
Z might be "Combos with", so these cards have synergy together.
So specifically Z could be..
- Similar to
- Better than
- Worse than
- Combos with
- Referenced by
I'm sure we would come up with more, but as long as they are just considered attributes, any number of different relationships could be added to in the future if wanted.
Somebody might say can we have a "nonbos" (maybe "Conflicts with") relationship added, and the way its coded is that the answer is "yeah sure, no problem".
My vision is that the public can build up the relationships between cards. It might be that an additional layer of "approving" the relationship is needed by a moderator, just so that a bot or user doesn't do silly things to reference cards.
Then on top of this a "numbers" can be assigned to these relationship.
X=Flash
Y=Protean Hulk
Relationship=Combos with
EDHPoints=60
Only a moderator can assign the points value.
Now this
doesn't cover X has a relationship to Y that has a relationship to A, etc. What I'm saying is that once you go past two cards relationships, the idea becomes much harder.
It might be that in order to build up N numbered relationships we need to introduce a way to group cards into a list instead of just X with Y.
So I'll just give an example of a really convoluted 5 card combo;
Griffin Canyon +
Conspiracy +
Candelabra of Tawnos +
Karn, Silver Golem +
Bubbling Muck.
So I feel like from a systems point of view you'd want to create an ID to reference to create a relationship between cards.
RelationshipID = "GC_C_CoT_KSG_BM".
Relationship = "Combos with"
EDHPoints=5
Then you'd be able to create an array of cards within that RealtionshipID;
Griffin Canyon
Conspiracy
Candelabra of Tawnos
Karn, Silver Golem
Bubbling Muck
Feyd I'm literally babbling out loud, but hopefully you'll see where I'm coming at from a universal approach to card relationships and how much can come out of it.
It would be cool from a users point of view that you can even show them card combinations (relationships) given their deck list.
Say they have
Karn, Silver Golem in their deck list, you can look at up card array relationships and suggest cards that are combos with it.
This is really next level stuff from a Magic website point of view. You might have a cards in your deck that have quite a few relationships with the same card and so you can see these numbers and it will be a revelation that it combos with so many cards in your deck.
If you have 3 different cards that have a relationship to a card not in your deck, then its going to be a real flag for you to consider it.
Assuming we have to answer the last question with "yes", how complex do we go, and who drives all this data?
Do we go three cards deep? Four? Who lists all of these and rates their competitiveness?
These are the main three that need answered first. Please know these aren't rhetorical "why it can't happen" questions. If we can come up with strong answers, it makes it possible. The coding and math is actually the easy part to me. The database it's run against seems the hard part.
I guess I've tried to answer these with the previous question.
But as far as driving the data, it either comes off a database or
more realistically because its unlikely you have the time to do an import system, a moderator puts these numbers in.
Now even though I've said the public as a whole should be able to create relationships between cards, as I'm personally looking to build up an infinite combo relationship of cards, I would do a lot of these myself. It would be me literally going through a spreadsheet adding the relationship to the website and ticking off as I go. So I would personally trying to do as many of the "Combos with" relationships.
And I would be assigning numbers for the point allocations to these for EDH "competitiveness" as I go, no matter how flawed and biased the numbers are.
Please don't take this request as gospel, its all hearsay at the moment, but it definitely gets the ball rolling as far as looking to the future.
Plus pokken and I would be building the algorithm (and dataset) outside of the website initially anyway, so don't feel a burden of "you must do this" in order for any traction on this idea to be done.