Checking a cube against your collection

Getting a list in

• A CubeCobra link. Paste the URL of any public cube and the list is fetched for you. Nothing to download or export.
• A pasted list. One card name per line. Works for a cube from anywhere, a list a friend sent you, or something you typed yourself.

Give it a name if you want to recognise it later. It is not needed to run the check.

What comes back

• How many of the cube's cards you own, and what share that is.
• An estimate of what the missing cards would cost to buy.
• Every card marked owned or missing, so you can see exactly where the gap is rather than only how big it is.

That second number is usually the deciding one. A cube you own eighty percent of can still have a two hundred pound tail if the missing fifth is all duals and fetches.

Why it is not only for cube builders

The tool takes any list of card names, so it answers "how much of this do I own" for anything you can write down:

• A staples list for a format you are thinking of getting into.
• A precon or product list somebody has posted.
• The contents of a collection somebody is selling, before you make an offer on it.
• A friend's deck, to see what you could lend them.

Working through the gap

• Send the missing cards to a wishlist, which totals them properly and gets you to a shop.
• Or add cards you find you do own straight to your collection, which is often what actually happens: a cube check is a good way to discover your collection is less complete on paper than in the box.

Deciding whether to build it

Checking two or three cubes before committing to one is worth the few minutes. Cubes vary enormously in what they assume you have:

• A budget or common cube might be almost entirely cards you already own, and cost you nothing to try.
• A powered or legacy cube can be mostly reprints of expensive staples, where the missing fifth costs more than everything else you own put together.
• A set cube built from one block sits somewhere in between and depends entirely on whether you drafted that set.

The percentage alone will not tell you which of those you are looking at. The cost estimate will, immediately.

Sizes and repeated cards

• Most cubes are singleton, meaning one of each card, and commonly run to three hundred and sixty or five hundred and forty cards so they divide neatly among drafters.
• Where a list does repeat a card, each line is counted, so a cube running ten copies of a common needs ten copies from you.
• Basic lands are usually left out of a cube list entirely, since everybody brings their own.

What counts as owning a card

Any copy, in any condition or finish. A cube is a list of cards rather than a list of printings, so a beaten up copy fills the slot exactly as a pristine one does. If you care which copy goes in the cube, that decision belongs with the physical cards rather than here.

Names that do not match are reported rather than skipped, so a list with a typo or a card in another language tells you which lines it could not place instead of quietly reporting a smaller cube.