General CBS

[Seeker]

There are 60 commons in DIS (I don't know where you found 57, both the wiki and scryfall say 60)

huh. neither do I, because I know I got 57 from some search query... oh, I had "is:firstprint" included because I was reusing a previous query for something related to this, so the count omitted Seal of Fire, Seal of Doom, and the reprint that everyone obviously remembers, Thrive from Prophecy (I had no idea this was a reprint until I started looking yesterday)

Each booster pack contains 11 commons. Since the same booster pack cannot contain the same card twice (I think), this is not 88 repetitions of a 1/60 chance, but 8 repetitions of a 11/60 chance. So the probability of having four or more Aquastrand Spiders in a RGD draft is around 4.22%. Having exactly four is around 3.52%.

no duplicates is true - excluding foils, which I'm fine with - so yeah, that actually does make it 8 bullets at 11/60 per bullet, significantly easier!
(actually now that I think about it, with 60 commons in the set there's either not a short printed common [2x60 = 120 and discard 1 filler] or there's a single overprinted common averaging C3 per sheet vs all else C2)
(assuming DIS is like other sets from that era the sheet is 11x11 = 121 total. it's impossible to find pictures of old uncut sheets on the internet these days but I'm confident in that)

This will make around 275 cards in total if you do a curated list: each common goes in 3 copies but maybe the ones you feel like are more important and playable in the draft environment can go to 4 copies (or even 5! maybe for the bouncelands only) each, while the unplayable ones can go down to 1-2 copies or even be removed (even though I would keep at least 1 copy of each common). Same for the uncommons: for each one you put between 0 and 2 copies depending on how much you like it, and the same for the rares between 0 and 1. I would aim for a total of around 175 commons, 80 uncommons and 20 rares (?)

if I had 5 of each Karoo, every draft I'd end up with the deck from my favorite Magic "strategy" article ever where he has 11 Karoos and 4 basics
to readers who want to not miss my favorite joke in that article: keep your eye on the Dromad Purebreds...

but in general I think aggressive curation is going to be the only physically feasible way to do it... although you can't possibly make me want even a single copy of Street Savvy or, closer to the playability line, something like Caregiver.

debating cutting all the random land destruction subtheme that I guess must have been aimed at Karoos? I guess Rolling Spoil can stay, that one's got other upside, but the rest, they just hated fun! or they hated Stone-Seeder Hierophant specifically (ever cast an 8-drop on turn 5?!)

 

[ravnic]

Thinking of building a cube intended to replicate a retail draft environment. (Original Ravnica block, 05-06, so I did the math accordingly below.) A bit more curation, but mostly in the rares which don't much matter for this question. Is there preexisting math for how many copies of a C/U/R you "should" have in your population to feel like eight packs out of a retail booster box?

I did a lot of useless calculations, people who don't care can skip to the end:
Scryfall says there's 57 commons in Dissension.
A draft is 8 packs * 11 commons each (ignoring foils replacing one back then) => 88 commons from a pool of 57 => 88/57 = 1.54 copies per draft in expectation (if uniformly distributed, see justifcation below)

But, picking the easiest example to find in the format:
Takuya Osawa's PT Prague 2006 winning draft deck had 3 Aquastrand Spiders
plus Big Oots's deck (does anyone else even remember that was Rasmus Sibast's nickname?) had another.

If commons are uniformly distributed*
*and they should be, we know a maximum of 1 common is underprinted per set
**one can safely assume that you can start anywhere in the print run fragments contained within the pack whether it's an AB set or an ABC set or whatever (lethe.xyz does not have collation info for the original block)
Then this is a binomial distribution since we're selecting "with replacement" from an infinite pool, so we expect to see 4+ copies of "a given fixed common, so in this case specifically Aquastrand Spider" just under 7% of the time.

But there's 57 commons so that's actually "0.93 chance to not see 4 Aquastrand Spiders" and then there's 56 other commons...
But but this is not actually indepdendent because of print runs - if we fail to see 4x Spider we also know that we have a noticeably decreased chance of seeing 4x of either of the 2+ commons next to Spider anywhere on the sheet...

And you can see why I'm asking! (It's because I'm dumb)
Is it just "X of every common of the small sets and Y of the large set, less for uncommons, shrug and ship it?"
Do people typically use more complicated distribution methods than shuffling together three sets and hoping it works out?
Any information much appreciated, I know this is a thing people have done before but I don't know if anyone actually cared enough to crunch numbers!

I was at this point, more or less, but I decided to go for a more curated environment for two reasons: 1. the juice didn't seem worth the squeeze with how much math and preparation you had to do and 2. I never like how impossible it was to draft a focused guild deck in the full block format. I considered to just copy triple RAV, but then figured out a solution with guild modules that allowed me to include all ten.

I don't want to stop you, it could be a cool project. But I think you don't need Street Savvy and Zephyr Spirit in the packs to make Skyknight Legionnaire and Vedalken Entrancer good (enough).

I also would recommend to avoid Glare of Subdual, it's broken and takes much longer to kill than Flame Fussilade.

 

[Seeker]

I don't want to stop you, it could be a cool project. But I think you don't need Street Savvy and Zephyr Spirit in the packs to make Skyknight Legionnaire and Vedalken Entrancer good (enough).

I also would recommend to avoid Glare of Subdual, it's broken and takes much longer to kill than Flame Fussilade.

Strongly agree on the first point.

Second point: miles ahead of you, I've cut:
Glare of Subdual (for that reason)
Windreaver (beatable, but expert players know exactly how it works and less enfranchised players will misplay to the point of activating it to death, so let's not do that)
Skeletal Vampire (again, beatable, but miserable to play against and not fun to play with to compensate for that)
Pride of the Clouds (this has the Proclamation of Rebirth problem where Forecast was just an AWFUL mechanic, I don't want a game where one player is spending four mana on this and the other is spending four mana on Selesnya Guildmage every single turn blah blah)
Ursapine (not actually power level, but it grinds combat to a screeching halt. its only virtue is killing you quickly and I don't need that in a cube environment.)