General Need Help with the Design Skeleton of a Cube.

[Eric Chan]

Yup, silasw has the right idea. In a format packed to the gill with guilds, what you'll actually end up with is primarily three-colour decks, not two-colour decks. By drafting three colours, you have access to three guilds' worth of goodies, which is a lot more appealing than only being able to play one tenth of the many gold cards on offer.

In general, I find that heavy multicolour formats tend to revolve around three-colour decks, whether we're talking about retail limited or high-powered cube.

 

[Passthechips]

Should I assume you've already read this article? http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cube-design-declassified-information/

You seem to be fighting against natural draft dynamics here. There's going to be 10 guilds for 8 players (will you even have that many?), but you want one-guild decks to be the norm. It's probably not going to happen. If players just pick one guild each with no overlap, you have the most boring draft ever, plus the other two guilds' cards will never get picked. If there is some overlap, then even more multicolor cards will go unwanted.

While this is probably true, I think the fact that most of the multicolored being confined at rare combined and with hybrid cards, faux-multicolored cards (like Ribbons of Night in the common/uncommon slots can enforce a 2 color theme while making drafting interesting as a whole.

Though you're probably right, I'm probably trying to push too hard against 3 color strategies, and probably should just allow them to happen naturally. I guess the ideal would be to try and prevent 4/5 color good stuff decks from happening, which is probably more realistic.

 

[Eric Chan]

Even in the unlikely scenario that your only gold cards slot in at uncommon and rare, the fact that they'll be at a higher power level than your commons will entice people to play and splash as many of them as possible. Given that people naturally gravitate towards powerful rares and uncommons in retail limited formats, I think that your drafters won't want to let all of the good cards pass them by just so that they can stick to one guild.

This tends to be the nature of heavy multicolour formats. Ironically, it's the limited formats without a focus on gold cards that tend to produce two-colour decks.

So, it's easy. If you really want people to build guild decks - just strip all the gold cards out!