DirkGently wrote: ↑4 years ago
I'm working on a cube and had a few questions:
Sure thing! I really haven't been able to draft it in quite some time, and I have at least a year's worth of cards to try and find room for, but I'll give it a shot.
-how has colour balance been? Do people actually play RW at a similar rate to, say, UG?
Pretty much what you'd expect in regular Commander. All the colors are evenly represented, so random distribution is going to determine what colors show up in the actual draft. But in terms of actual play rate, the "weaker" colors tend to get drafted less. Ideally this will be less of a problem as Wizards makes those colors weaker.
-150 is a lot of colourless artifacts, even artifact synergy sets like kaladesh have a lower as-fan for artifacts. Was that intentional, and how has it impacted the draft?
This wasn't entirely intentional, and it also wasn't something I've looked for in terms of impacting the draft. To the best of my recollection it hasn't felt like it skews things. My goal was to ensure that players would have enough mana fixing, have options for padding a weak draft, and also to have sources of colorless mana for the few Eldrazi cards which require colorless mana.
-how has the fixing been?
No complaints so far.
-do you deal out all 68 commanders, or am I misreading? How have you found that method to be? Any commanders that show up too frequently? I was thinking of 100 commanders, but packs of 5 so the same options aren't always available.
Each player gets five packs of 15 cards: 14 cards from the 900 and one "Commander" card from the 68. Since I at least 10% of the 900 cube are legendary creatures as well, there has never been a problem getting a general and building a deck. I think one time a player was worried that they would have to do a generic general (such as a 3/3 for 3 BUG if you tried building a Sultai deck but didn't draft a general), but they ended up getting a deck in the end.
-did you build any intentional themes into the cube, or just top commander cards?
Sort of. Obviously I started with all the staples and broken cards, followed by all the banned cards which work in a draft format because you're not building around them exclusively or they are just broken. Then I tried to pick Commanders which supported different or multiple archetypes so you weren't just chosing between three different generals that all did the same thing (with varied success at that). After the staples and banned cards were added to the cube, I used the remaining space for cards which supported multiple archetypes and random cards that scream Commander and don't get played normally (like
Baton of Morale. The only other theme I tried to force into the cube was Stax.
[/quote]