General Build Our Own Draft! Taking signups!

What power level do we aim for?

  • Best of Magic/"Unpowered Cube": In an alternate universe, some of the best cards in MTG history.

    Votes: 4 44.4%

  • Current Standard: Could Wizards print it today? Potential Standard staples.

    Votes: 6 66.7%

  • Limited Style/Peasant Cube: Keep it simple. Mostly commons/uncommons with a few rares.

    Votes: 4 44.4%
  • Total voters
    9
silasw

silasw

Hey guys, do you like making custom cards? Great! Build Our Own Draft (or BOO Draft) is a format where 8 players each design 45 cards, we put everyone's cards together into a custom cube, then draft it!

This format's been around for a while. Here are some articles about it:
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/10716_The_BOO_Draft_Happeneth.html
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/11101_SCG_Daily_5_How_To_Draft_Your_Thing.html
http://www.mtgsalvation.com/articles/15543-the-bootacular-booxperience
But I want to see how Riptide handles a format like this. :)

Use Magic Set Editor to make cards. (http://magicseteditor.sourceforge.net/) Card templates can be found here: http://msetemps.sourceforge.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?&t=144
After everyone's 45 cards are finished, each person will send their set to another person for power level and wording review. I'm sure you guys are all good at card evaluation, but we all tend to miss things without a second set of eyes.
I haven't figured out how to draft the cards yet, any ideas? Worst case scenario, we can do a slow draft on the forums, or I can put on my coding hat and work on a solution.
We'll play games on Cockatrice. (http://www.woogerworks.com/) There's a way to import MSE card sets and images into Cockatrice.

Design guidelines:
  • Keep colors balanced. If you'd like to make more cards in certain colors so you can flesh out a theme, inform us in this thread. Other people can change their color balance to balance everything out.
  • I set up a poll for the general power level to aim for.
  • There's no guarantee that anyone will make things like mana fixing, artifact/enchantment removal, aggro creatures, etc. If you're worried there won't be enough of something, make some yourself! Or just make an encouraging post in this thread.
  • No more than one planeswalker per person. Too many planeswalkers can be a real drag, and they're pretty damn hard to balance too.
  • Please put art on your cards, because that makes the experience much better. Don't forget to credit the original artist too.
Please only join if you're willing to commit to making the cards, finding art, and finally drafting online on a Saturday or Sunday. I expect this to take 1-2 months overall, but given that a lot of you are experienced card makers, maybe it can go much quicker.

Signups:
1. silasw
2. anotak
3. Lucre
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
 
silasw

silasw

Lucre said:
What will be required of me?
Click to expand...

45 custom cards, I won't specify the specific colors or types, but please make an equal amount of each color within the 45. The cards all need to have art. You'll also need to look over someone else's 45 to catch any blatant brokenness. I would really like it if you could draft with us online too, but that isn't strictly required.
 
Lucre

Lucre

I love this idea and I will help you, what is my time line and how much am I allowed to badger other contributors about the powerlevel and themes in their output?

Also Lucas wants to know if we should be creating only 45 cards or if we should make a whole bevy of them and then only 45 will be selected.
 
silasw

silasw

2 weeks after we get all the signups seems pretty sufficient. I'll leave it up to you to pick your best 45. If you want to make extra, then we could possibly use them to fill slots if some people don't finish.

Badgering about power level is encouraged, other stuff is fine too, although by the time we get to the reviews it would be difficult to change major themes.
 
Lucre

Lucre

Anyone interested in discussing themes, mechanics and power level with the this forums resident ogre?
 
Lucre

Lucre

sooo.... I'll put together some broad strokes thematic ideas and maybe we can pair em with good enabling mechanics or complimentary abilities and even flavor themes.
  • Converted Mana Cost Matters
  • Lands Matter
  • Threshold / Graveyard Density
  • Hybid / Multicolour Themes
  • Monocolour Themes
  • Tribal
  • Spell Triggers (Arcane, Storm, Prowess kinda remind me of this stuff but doesn't need to limited to non creature)
  • Modal Spells and Creatures
  • Power / Toughness Counting

So you know I've had ideas for a couple of sweet sets so far that I'm not planning to hold yall too but maybe they'd be good exemplars.

Ghost World Explorers
- Dig X (Reveal the top X cards of your library, you may put one on top of your library and then put the rest into your graveyard)
- Threshold Seven
- Recover
- Spells and creatures that trigger when they hit the graveyard to be exiled/shuffled for some effect.

These all encourage you to play with your graveyard but most of them can work at cross purposes at times, graveyards are too easy of a thing to develop and attack in most formats and you don't want to make it all progressive graveyard all the time with occasional damning grave hate card thrown in to balance. Give it some natural ebb and flow so you don't end up making the game very weird like in OTJ.

Shadowmoore Theros
- Devotion
- Spell Permanents
- Hybrid Spells and Permanents
- Split Cards and Fuse
- Slow Velocity Card Advantage (death triggers, regrowing effects)

This would create incredibly deep packs for each colour and pair given how many picks would me para-colourless. The idea behind focusing on spell permanents like seals rather than trick themes or pants is that devotion feels like it has more give and take. When you crack your seal of doom you are effecting what your 5 drop devotion guy can do, but probably also your opponent's. Staggered access to +cards through raise dead effects and conditions would allow you to rebuild your devotion after it's been lost but not usually get to an insurmountable amount. The high number of hybrid cards would make off colour devotion somewhat easier to trigger. Devotion cards should all resemble each other in rarities if that means having a fixed devotion number for a trigger or having the same converted mana cost because a lot of the format will revolve around capitalizing on these numbers.

Does anyone have any ideas not listed above? Does anyone know something that pairs incredibly well with those themes?

Quick Ideas:
CMC 1 Matters, CMC 6+ Matters, Kicker, Land or Graveyard theme.

Cycling, Morbid, Threshold

Tap and Untap stuff, Tribal?, On-board unlocked tricks and bonuses
 
silasw

silasw

Devotion and hybrid are two of my favorite mechanics for sure. Devotion and CMC matters stuff could be interesting with a lot of alternate-casting-cost cards. Suspend?

I hope we don't make too many endless recursion cards. I don't like repetitive game states caused by things like dredge and buyback. I guess powerful artifacts/enchantments can be somewhat guilty as well though...
 
Lucre

Lucre

Like Dredge is kinda heavy on the repeated game states problems but I don't think a card like

Corpsenatcher {3}{B}
Creature - Imp U
Flying
When Corpsenatcher enters the battlefield return a black creature card from your graveyard to hand.
2/2

Covetous Mage {3}{U}
Creature - Human Wizard U
When Covetous Mage dies draw a card.
3/3

Half Elven Sage {1}{G/W}
Creature - Human Elf Cleric C
Sacrifice Half Elven Sage: you may return an artifact or enchantment from your graveyard to your hand.
2/2

Lurking Visp {2}{B/G}
Creature - Insect C
Deathtouch
2/2

Roadside Prowler {2}{R}
Creature - Beast C
While your devotion to red is 3 or more Roadside Prowler has haste and intimidate.
3/1

{R}
Sorcery
Deals 1 damage to target creature or player. If your devotion for red is 3 or greater instead deals 3 damage to target creature or player.

The idea is I want you to be trading a lot to keep people off of their high devotion and to make use of your card advantage routes and because of that you'll probably be using your mana a lot of the time so the cards you draw will be just as releant as what you can rebuy. You can see that it's gonna be kinda weird to expect to get tiyr corpsenatcher to trigger on your actual 4th turn often and like double boost your devotion/ boardstate but if you're trading a lot you'll probably maintain and find ways to capitalize.

I'll have to look back at my freaking logs with Bootman and Anotak about this but I remember rambling to them about such concepts and having a lot of sample cards for them for that set. I don't think these ones are of the same sort of power level I was going for before except maybe the prowler and the sage.

If you mean the threshold themed set I don't think that set would feature much recursion, I think grave triggers and recover would account for most of that and that would be pretty deliberate.

CMC Matters might indeed work well with devotion but I'm not sure how much I like that with cost changers unless we are doing something truly weird. A set where tonnes of spells are inexpensive but can be kicked to get bigger sounds really cool to lulu
 
silasw

silasw

Okay, clearly there aren't enough people on Riptide to fill this up to 8.
1. We could just make a 180 cube with 4 people.
2. I could get a 4th and we could each make 90 instead of 45.
3. I could try to recruit people elsewhere.
4. I could just try again some other time.
Opinions?
 
anotak

anotak

i'm "reprinting":
Flame Javelin, Miscalculation

here's a little bit of a tidbit, draw what conclusions you will:
Magus of the Grid, Magus of the Shackles, Magus of the Altar, Magus of the Gauntlet, Magus of the Crucible

also "current standard" is winning the poll so i'm roughly aiming for that tho a few are under/over to spice

i have 6 of each color, 5 artifact, 10 fixing lands

if we need more cards than 45 each i'm probably gonna move in a different direction with the 2nd batch to spice
 
Lucre

Lucre

anotak said:
i'm "reprinting":
Flame Javelin, Miscalculation

here's a little bit of a tidbit, draw what conclusions you will:
Magus of the Grid, Magus of the Shackles, Magus of the Altar, Magus of the Gauntlet, Magus of the Crucible

also "current standard" is winning the poll so i'm roughly aiming for that tho a few are under/over to spice

i have 6 of each color, 5 artifact, 10 fixing lands

if we need more cards than 45 each i'm probably gonna move in a different direction with the 2nd batch to spice
Click to expand...

can you give me themes will be besides cycling and 2/r
 
spicewitch

spicewitch

I'd like to chip in a few cards, but I don't think I can commit to 45. I can submit maybe 10 or 20 and, the more experienced players can axe half of em because I'm a nub.
 
spicewitch

spicewitch

I think those "Suspend v 2.0" cards, discussed in Re-Making Magic episode 8, would be a fantastic inclusion. Aka "Warp" as it's currently called. I like most of the stuff in Dreamscape, too.

Warp%20Wing.jpg


The stuff from that set still needs tweaking and testing though. Most of the Warp cards need to be a little more powerful.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top