Drafted Onder's Cube again. I really like your format, and I think its a really good example of tasteful customs, as there isn't such a density of them to overwhelm the drafting experience. I also really like some of the thematic directions (counters!) and multi-color cards are always fun, especially when the focus is on some of the sweet tri-color cards we don't get to really experience. Energy is a great mechanic, and counters overlaps naturally with it. Thats a pretty nice wedge/shard structure to play with.
But I do think the mana base is an issue, and hurts the overall experience. This is a lot of the same issues I was running into with the min/max experiment until I finally swallowed my pride and went up to 13% fixing. 50 at 450 is 11%, and thats assuming that someone is willing to treat a three color card as a modal fixing pick (which I found hard to remember). 11% fixing density was giving me a lot of inconsistency in the draft experience, and that was with a focus on two color decks.
Last draft I didn't have lands to enable a splash, and than this draft...
Pack 1, there was no fixing, and my picks lead me to a G/W deck, than pack 2, there was fixing, but it was all U/R fixing, so I started to panic and pivot over, than in pack 3 there was
tons of fixing, which I gobbled up (but GW fixing only later in the pack).
The draft ended up feeling like I was assembling a sealed pool, and than I was just good stuffing a deck together during the build period. In this case, the draft wasn't a particularly interactive experience (and oddly enough, the last one wasn't very interactive either for different reasons, as the limited fixing put me on rails drafting G/W which happens to be mostly counter focused cards).
You can really see the indecision in the 4 drop picks, where I clearly had no idea what was going on, and was taking speculative picks on the basis that I was going to have to pivot on a dime in pack 3 depending on what fixing I saw. In the spot I was in, the fixing was putting me in a position where I was essentially having to restart the draft every pack, and of course, that nullifies wheel cards, creating more of a sealed deck or grid experience, where I am grabbing first or second picks.
To expand on that, when you get up to the 4 slot or bigger, you tend to have a lot of independently good cards, while in the 1-3cc slot, there is more of a clustering of low power synergy cards (this incidentally is why
Daghatar the Adamant is going to have a hard time slotting into a deck) meant to serve as enablers. When you're having to pivot around the draft, cards that have dismal floors (like
aethertorch renegade or
visionary augmenter) can't really be considerations, since those strategies require a fairly early color focus to obtain mechanical density (and will prob be picked up on the wheel).
You can run lower land percentages, but you'll pay a price in draft consistency, and that seems especially unfortunate in a format intending to enable sweet 3 color combinations and synergistic decks.
As an aside,
Metallurgic Summonings also seems fairly absurd. I'm not really sure how you beat a resolved copy of it. Its probably the best card in the format by a mile.