StimHack Draft Cube: Current Lists (Updated for Earth's Scion)

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83

I think the direction I want to move in for the agendas is twofold:

(1) Remove 3/5 of the Pri Reqs and put Fragments in instead. This will make the deckbuilding process a little more interesting, as you’ll actually get some choices. 5/3s that aren’t TFP, (and Food), are just so shitty they’re not worth including in the packs, which makes me want to include more of them in the base packs. Making the base agendas worse rather than better sounds like a bad idea, but considering adding one 4/2 to the base pack might be a good idea just to help people fill out their 7x2 suite, (which often ends up being supplemented by a 5/3 and an X/1).

(2) Add more agendas in general to the cube, or otherwise just improve their quality. Food and TFP in particular do a great job of mitigating the 5/3 issue while also being totally reasonable picks because of the way they decrease your agenda density. I have to discuss with Anthony on this, but I would like to add 3 Food, bump up to 3 TFP, add the 3rd Beta Test, and go up to at least 2 Philotic. Furthermore, I would like to maxx out on some of the better 4/2s like NAPD and Character Assassination. The value of the good agendas is just too high right now due to scarcity, and it ends up being the case that a lot of people end up with garbage Corp decks because they failed to take agendas super aggressively. Adding some more support to glacier might also help indirectly by making scoring 5/3s more reasonable.

I like Armitage. It’s good enough to see plenty of play but bad enough that you want to avoid playing it a lot of the time, especially since runner decks end up being tight. I don’t mind the breakers seeing very little play, but I still like having the ‘out’ of a shitty breaker to play in case you somehow managed to miss on a specific type.

Private Contracts, on the other hand, is kind of a piece of shit. You end up playing it because you just need non-shit cards in your corp deck, but I think the solution isn’t to remove it. Every other Corp econ card you could play is either too unreliable to consider real econ in an econ light deck, such as PAD Campaign, or is actually good enough that you would rather have it in the cube than the free cards, such as Beanstalk. I think the solution is to keep Private Contracts, but address the issue in another way:

Considering runner decks play 30 cards and corp decks play 34, it’s possible that we should look into adding a card to each of the Corp packs in a draft so you get a few extra cards to fill out your deck. Corp decks tend to build themselves compared to Runner decks in most cube formats simply because of this deck size disparity. I don’t know if anyone else agrees with me, but I personally recommend trying out drafting with 1-card-larger Corp packs. If Anthony likes this idea, maybe we’ll make it an ‘official’ change to the format.

4 Likes
84

Figured this was it. Thinking about it more today, I’m not necessarily sold on the idea. Do people with more experience tend to view Jackson as an insta-pick? Adding more of those doesn’t seem fun. Another idea would be to just give each corp one jackson in the starting back, but not necessarily sold on that.

This makes so much sense to me. Insta-sold on it. Agendas are interesting, because without the starting choices it’s not just “oh I’m screwed because I didn’t get a decoder” but “I can’t actually make a legal deck!” and so you wind up with these big corp starting packs. One solution that crossed my mind was to have a separate “Agenda pack”, but I think it would lead to less interesting choices overall and got dismissed. I think more interesting might be diversify the starting agendas, and beef up the agendas in packs.

One of each shard seems cute; I think that not having all 5/3’s in the starting pack also makes sense, to support different spreads and strategies. Between Private Security Force as an obvious 4/2, @alexfrog apparent choice of Sentinel Defense Programs further up as a starting agenda, it almost makes me want to put House of Knives to get a Meat/Brain/Net trinity, but might be too strong. In any case, given the shard idea I think that 3x5/3, 2x4/2, 1x3/1 might make a good starting spread?

Starts to seem fiddly, though. There’s something to be said for the simplicity of all pri-reqs. But I guess the runner’s side as moved away from this already.

85

Personally I really like the use of agendas like PSF and SDP as enticements to pursue otherwise marginal strategies, but if you’re looking for a blank 4/2, Rebranding Team will be functionally blank as long as there aren’t any Ad Blitzes in the cube. (Of course, you’ll definitely be proxying if you want 7 of them per player.)

86

This is for my reference when I update the cube tonight, but in case anybody else wants it, I thought I’d throw it here:

Changes from Stimhack Cube: Underway —> Old Hollywood:

Corp:
-1 Efficiency Committee
-1 House of Knives
-1 Tori Hanzo
-1 Shipment from SanSan
-1 Rototurret

+1 Explode-a-palooza
+1 Vanity Project
+1 Old Hollywood Grid
+1 Casting Call
+1 Enforcer

Runner:
-1 New Angeles City Hall
-1 The Helpful AI

+1 Drug Dealer
+1 Film Critic

3 Likes
87

Just want to add my +1 thanks for maintaining this. We already have a copy of this cube in Atlanta and it’s a lot of fun. I’m actually building a second one right now so that we can run a few drafts at the SMC Finals in a couple weeks!

88

How are you coming about getting the cards? Are you just buying all of the cards again? I want to build one for my store but I feel like that I’ll just have to spend some $$$ to do it.

89

I bought a set off someone selling their set on ebay, much cheaper than buying retail. Sure, I end up with a bunch of extra cards, but you can never have too many Hedge Funds. Came with 6 copies of Jackson, too. 3 for the cube, 3 for me…

90

Now updated for The Universe of Tomorrow:

StimHack Cube up to The Universe of Tomorrow.

1 Like
91

To make things easy for people who keep their cubes up to date, here are the changes from Old Hollywood to Universe of Tomorrow:

Corp:

-1x Fetal AI
-1x Eve Campaign
-1x Corporate War
-1x Geothermal Fracking
-1x Veterans Program
-1x Firmware Updates
-1x Tech Startup

+1x Accelerated Beta Test
+1x Braintrust
+1x Philotic Entanglement
+1x Explode-a-palooza
+1x Product Placement
+1x Public Support
+1x The Future is Now

Runner:

-1x Plascrete Carapace
-1x Keyhole
-1x Planned Assault

+1x DDoS
+1x Fisk Investment Seminar
+1x Bookmark

7 Likes
92

I just bought 3 cores and data packs off somebody leaving the game for a cube and has anyone made up alternative starters than the pri reqs, etc? I’m using clear sleeves so I can’t use any of my old draft cards to supplement this.

I guess I could go into my constructed stash and pull out the shards and other 5/3s like Restructured Datapool or labyrinthine servers.

However for the runner, I feel bad having the starters be pipeline and force of nature. I did like system crash’s starter of chameleons but I wouldn’t have enough for a 6 person draft.

93

If your players are experienced enough (or if you provide a reference sheet), you can use identities as proxies. So, for example, any corp ID is Priority Requisition, any Runner ID is Chameleon (or, for something more fine-grained, any Anarch ID is Force of Nature, etc).

94

This can totally work. Feel free to experiment with different starting cards!

95

Another solution is to have a pool of PriReqs and only give them to people who need them. No one is going to run 5x PriReq, maybe 1-2 at most. That could help.

1 Like
96

I think there should be a couple Rolodex b/c Oracle May.

97

Okay… I know nothing about the science of forming the card pool for a drafting cube. But my gut feeling is if I put 2 cores together plus one copy of each big box expansion I can have an evergreen cube for 8 players.

How well do you think this will work ? Am I off here ? do I need extras to use as a starting pack ?? any comments will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

98

I have a few questions about cube draft. Supposing my local league wanted to run a cube draft evening, but had more than 8 players that wanted to attend, would I be best served to break the attendees up in two groups of 8 or fewer, have them draft in those ‘pods’, then play swiss as normal from there? Or is there a relatively simple method to bump up the number of cards in the Stimhack cubes to support more than 8 players?

I’m leaning towards having the attendees perform their draft on Meteor ahead of time, to avoid using up valuable playtime on the day - any particular gotchas or things to be aware of with this method?

99

You’d have a cube, but it would probably be a very dismal and unbalanced experience for most players. It could be that the power is very skewed towards one strategy or there isn’t enough variety in archetypes or you have cards that do nothing or a bunch of other things.

Cubes need to be very carefully designed to be optimally fun for all parties involved, and though you could technically draft with that sort of set up, there wouldn’t be many archetypes to draft, and there’d be a hell of a lot of clicking for credits. If you want to make a permanent economically, that’s perfectly fine, but I’d wager there are better purchases than that particular set of cards. Remember, you don’t need to cube with cards currently in rotation, either. I’ve not done this sort of endeavour myself (purchasing a set of cards I intend to solely use as a cube), but I’m sure there are better ways to do it than just throwing together all the expansions. Maybe look at what sort of sets have cards regularly in cubes?

100

Yeah run two pods, then play Swiss in normal for there. You will need to bring two separate cubes, but we’ve done this at our FLGS before and it went great! Remember never to mix the draft pods, though.

Honestly, this might work, but physically drafting the cards is almost certainly more fun for everyone. Table banter and the physicality of having a pile of deck in front of you is invaluable, especially if you’re going to be physically playing with them anyway. This might drive a lot of people away, because putting aside some time other than the time you’re using to play with the cards is probably very unappealing. I’d certainly be less attracted to a draft with this sort of system.

Drafting doesn’t take super long, I’d say about 1h should be put aside for the whole drafting/deckbuilding/sleeving part, and then you probably play 3 rounds of Swiss (draft games are usually faster than normal games, which makes this take even less time). I’ve got full drafts (including the drafting of cards) done in just over three hours, so unless you’ve very very tight time constraints I don’t think you need to worry! The absolute maximum you’ll need is maybe four hours with quite slow players.

101

For those interested: We held a number of drafts with this cube (up through UoT) at the SMC Finals. I was able to stream one of these drafts, including the draft process watching over @Cory_Hockman’s shoulder + 3 rounds of Swiss, and I finally uploaded the playlist to YouTube. You can find it here:

2 Likes
102

Thanks for your feedback