First off, I want to be clear, this is not going to be a request for your money, because I know that’s what the title might sound like. This is going to be an introduction to the Polling site that we maintain and hopefully explain how to use it and how we’re using the data. One of the best things you as a reader of this blog and a fan of this cube is to head to The Polling Site, create an account (we do not use your email or share it with third party advertisers) and start voting on cards.
What is NPS?
NPS on the site used to be simpler, but if you want to understand how it’s calculated, it exists on a spectrum from -100% (A bad card) to 100% (A flawless card). Each vote adds the following values to a total:
- Negative: -1
- Slight Negative: -0.5
- Neutral: 0
- Slight Positive: 0.5
- Positive: 1
After summing all these votes, it’s divided by the number of total votes to create an NPS (Net Promoter Score). If you want an idea of scale here, negative cards are generally not making it in without serious consideration, positive ones are more likely to be considered. You should not use this metric as a gauge of how good a card is, it instead should indicate to you the community’s desire for this card to be in the cube.
Elo
This is a system originally designed for calculating relative careers of chess players I’ve adapted for use here. The Elo comparison page will show you two cards, with some options for how the interaction will work, it then makes the Elo comparison calculation and writes new values to our database. Higher Elo is a sign that a card has been deemed “better” by those voting, and if the card with the higher Elo wins, in general the two cards will move less, though if the “underdog” wins, the movement will be greater. You can google more in depth explanations of the system if you really want to dig in.
How these numbers are used by the Pauper Cube Committee
We’ll every so often see folks asking “what NPS is needed to get a card into the cube?” in the discord. I need to make this abundantly clear, we do not autoinclude anything based on the NPS score, and I would urge you to view these as community opinions that we will take under strong advisement rather than metrics that we need to use. That said the committee will often treat a positive NPS as the first requirement to have a card in the “maybe” pile when making updates, though it is not a strict requirement. When looking for cuts, we’ll often look at the NPS to see if users have a more negative view on certain cards.
Ok, so how can I help?
Glad you asked dear reader! I’d love to say “just vote on every common ever made” but that’s just not a reasonable ask. There’s 5 digits of the things and plenty are just not worth re-litigating if they’re good enough. Instead, we’ve implemented the “retirement” system where if a card has both a low NPS and a low Elo score, it is retired. As it stands we’ve been in the realm of 1500 cards for the past year or so of this grand experiment that aren’t retired. So if you’ve got time to kill, vote on every card that isn’t retired here. Now I hear you telling me, “Omni, that’s still way too many cards, isn’t there a way I could vote that’s got the most pertinent impact on the cube as it exists now?”. Glad you asked, the best thing you can start by doing is giving us your opinion on the cards currently in the cube and the cards that have been released at common since the last update. These are the places where your input is the most helpful to us pushing forward, though again, that full completion is something that really makes the data we have to work with much more reliable.
Why doesn’t the site do X, Y or Z?
As of now I am a one man dev team doing this on my spare time, with all the restrictions inherent there. I don’t have plans in the near future to open source the project or onboard new developers, but that’s not off the table. One of the things you can do if there’s functionality you really wish the site had, is join our discord and head to the Polling site feedback channel and share your ideas, if they’re good enough/not incredibly time consuming, they’ll be added to the list. Any more specific inquiries, please feel free to reach out on discord, I love chatting about this little hobby project!
When Update?
This was announced in the discord, but if you missed it, we are moving to a schedule tied to the actual calendar, not the Wizards release calendar. You can expect a spring and fall update for the forseeable future with the possibility that a third update may be added if the committee thinks it’s absolutely necessary.
Thank you all for reading and hope to get your input on the polling site!
PS
This post may update as time goes on to function as a bit of a living document for the polling site.