Shift the focus to how players experience reality, rather than persuing some kind of objective reality. Whatever perspecive you adopt for a card/cube/wedge/shard/deck/guild there are numerious other perspectives that players can apply to it. If you go to different communities, they might have a set perspective on an object, but understand this is a product of that community, and that community's collective experiences, biases, etc inform it. It may (and in many cases probably won't) translate over authentically to your drafters. This is why Jason can run 6 branstorms and its the greatest thing ever, while I run it and my drafters just scratch their head. Its why I can run Karoos and my playgroup drafts them, while Kirb's group just has them float to oblivion. No one is
objectively right or wrong here--we aren't measuring plate tectonics--its just that you're in a very interpretation based realm, which is what makes the game fun in the first place.
But now everything can be anything, and anything can be everything, its total chaos, and you've fallen into a postmodern existential problem. Grillo you're a jerk
Well, this is where we bring in the wedges, shards, and guilds. From this complete jumble and mess, we want to pull some element out that we can hold above everything else. Something that shimmers and shines for the drafter (something first pickable). This gives us a hierachy, and now we can have some consistency, some form, some structure to keep everything from being an unreleatable mess. Its our drafters that will ultimately determine what these are, but we can guess, and we can lay out a framework, about how we think our playgroup will experience reality.
Thankfully we have some guideposts here, and as the designer we kind of know our drafters. Its a magic
community and you have a magic
playgroup, we even have several different
forums where people talk about cards endlessly, and how they feel about them. You have your own memories about formats, decks, and cards, and how people reacted to those. We want to tap into that. Most importantly you have your friends, and that relationship, so you can kind of guess what they will like or not like, and you always have that resource to tap to keep you from going to far out into something no one can relate to, or which will be dull.
For example, we kind of know, that when someone looks at red card combinations, they are going to be biased towards aggressive archetypes to some degree. This is just because of the way magic formats have been made for the past decades. So when we lay out a blue print for our Red based shard/wedge/guilds, we can kind of anticipate that this is going to happen. So we can pull that characteristic out and use it as a standard to at least partially figure out what kind of cards should be populating red (and by extension suggest what should be in the other colors).
When you can identify what people are predisposed to expect from each color or pair, that rapidly reduces the design complexity down to something manageable. Having that relationship with your drafters, learning their expections, their biases, and how they view individual cards, is priceless, because thats the lens for how they will interpret your format, good or bad. Meet them where
they're at, now where you think they should be, and just talking with them is the easiest way to do that.
The hardest thing about cube design is the infinite options, and the infinite ways cards can fit together. The guild/shard/wedge design is first there as a tool to help you manage that complexity, and also second to help the drafter manage complexity during the draft (they have the same potential problem with fresh packs if there is nothing to direct their gaze--you don't want people sitting there staring at the pack likeits made of white noise).
The way that this was dealt with traditionally is designers would just pull out power max, and set that as the sacred thing at the top of the pyramid. And thats fine, and better than nothing. It fits in with the consumer bias that they've been conditioned to after years of playing this game. However, its also one dimensional, expensive, limits what you can do, and can only ever make one thing. Power max can be self-defeating, however, as it demands you run more and more powerful cards, which means you end up replacing weaker cards that the drafter still has an emotional attachement to (or it warps the way those cards play in an unsatisfactory manner). Its that spot of the familiar that you can tap into, and have greater liason to be creative. Even if you're doing something radical, there should be something familiar they can latch onto, to direct the draft.
Literally, all that I do is write out the shards/wedges/guilds, and try to come up with two viable decks (decks with sufficent density of cards from the print pool). If you go through that exercise, its hard, and its unlikely you'll complete it on the first, but thats also fine. The important thing is that you're reducing the complexity down to something mangable, and now you can start populating those colors in cube tutor, with cards and interactions that you have reason to believe will be well recieved, based on your memory, and what you know about your drafters. Every iteration of the cube, you gain a better understanding of what your drafters are being drawn to, what the cube wants, and how you can better make tweaks to facilitate those patterns.
Than from there its just trial and error, and talking with your playgroup. In a small group, it can take 6 months to properly evaluate the performance of a cube, but thats fine, as long as people are having fun (which they should---WOTC already did the
really heavy lifting with the mechanics and card design, you're just moving the furniture around). Like most things, it dosen't come fast or easy, and if you want something, you have to put the work in, and experience the ups and downs and stick with it.
So thats a hard post to read, but there you go. Its an ontological problem at the end of the day. Looking at it from the lens of guilds/shards/wedges is the most sensible way to think of it, given how many magic players already do that, with the emphasis on the guilds. For better or for worse thats how they experience the game, I think.
