Group your cards into piles based on your desired criteria. The recommendation is to have at least 10 cards for good unpredictability and at most as many you can comfortably shuffle. The grouping criteria should be based on game mechanical properties. A good criteria could be color identity in MTG or archetype. Consider which categories of cards you want explicit randomness control over and being able to sort them distinctly. You may have as many piles as you wish, but all cards should belong to a pile.
Physically shuffle each pile individually without mixing them. Remember to keep track of which pile is which.
Register each pile into CubeShuffle. Each pile has a specific number of cards and randomness.
This is the chance that the distribution of an individual card from that pile won’t be equally distributed. It means that it may mix with other piles with randomness. Thus for this to have an effect you need at least two piles with randomness. With 0% randomness the pile will be equally distributed amongst the packs. If all piles have 100% then it’s completely random. This can be used to control the predictability of the draft. Modifying the predictability of different piles changes the feeling of the draft. A general recommendation is to have lower randomness on core piles like colors and higher on secondary like artifacts, non-basic lands and multicolored cards. Though this varies on the design of the cube. Try out what works best for your cube!
It should be noted that a 10% randomness for a pile does not mean that 10% of the cards will necessarily be randomly distributed. A 10% randomness means that on average 10% of the cards will be randomly placed in available slots. Each card has an isolated chance of 10% of being randomized. This allows both randomness lower than the pile size to work and prevents anything less than 100% from having definitive certainty. However, thanks to the law of large numbers we can still keep it predictable.
Let CubeShuffle shuffle and prepare your packs! Click the Generate packs button for GUI or execute the CLI command. Below are the configurations available.
You will now be presented with a list of packs. This is a pack pick order list essentially. Each pack lists a number of cards from piles it should include. Thus, to build each pack you just take as many cards from each pile as described. In the GUI versions of CubeShuffle you can mark packs as picked.
This is technically optional, but it ensures that the ones picking the packs has less knowledge of the composition of the packs. The specific cards should already be unknown but the composition of which piles are included can be known. This would otherwise in theory allow a player to pick packs with cards from piles they want. In practice for casual cube drafts this is rarely a problem, but shuffling the cubes should be rapid. What you do is simply reorganize the packs. No cards are mixed between the packs.
Tip: If any players didn’t help out with the picking then it’s time that they pitch in. As they have no knowledge of the card distributions in the piles they can just be moved around a bit.
You now have packs ready for drafting! Hope you have an excellent draft!
Once you are done playing you can just sort the cards used back to their respective pile and keep it stored ready for your next draft.
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