I want to make an Alara themed cube using cards from the three block sets. I was thinking that I would make it big enough to support a full sized 12 player pod and make it non-singleton with 3/2/1 C/U/R&M distributions of the cards I include. I might eventually branch out to Alara based cards from core sets and supplemental products, but don't want to mess with that yet. To support 12 drafters I need at least 540 cards, and I think cutting about 1/3 of the cards at each rarity will get me in that ballpark.
I was hoping to get some advice from more experienced cubers on where to go from here. Does my basic plan seem solid or does it need some kind of revision? What are some good guidelines on what to cut and what to leave in? I've played with several different cubes, but this will be my first time making one.
Check out draft bestiare's alara rankings, and maybe transfer + combine them in a spreadsheet, so you can view the relative positions of popular draft cards, by set. Once you have decided on the appropriate numbers of common, uncommon, and rare "slots" in each of WUBRG + multicolored, you can start pinning down the cards you want to include, keeping in mind stuff like curve, access to fixing, etc.
Just a bit more advice I thought of: if and when you start planning this cube, make sure to resist the temptation to make it too gold. Most Ravnica cubes I see (including the early draft of my own) have way too high a percentage of gold cards, relative to mono colors. If you take a look at the % of gold cards in most (successful) multicolored retail sets (Old Rav, RtR, KTK, etc), you'll see that they usually run, at most, 25% gold stuff. Most Ravnica cubes I see on cube tutor go 50% or even more. Granted, fixing is usually a lot better in a cube than a retail set, but a 50% or higher gold cube will result in a ton of dead picks during the draft.
My main reason for bringing this up is alara being a shard set, there will be a lot of tri-colored cards to chose from. Only a few should probably be included in the final cube.
That was one of my concerns, particularly because of Alara Reborn. By my rough math about 50% of the cube will be Shards, 25% Conflux, and 25% Reborn if I follow the formula in the OP. That would come out a bit lower than a full block draft, which is 33% Reborn. Fixing should be pretty abundant between borderposts, trilands, shard fetches, obelisks, and miscellaneous fixing. Incidentally Naturalize will probably be main deck material precisely because of all these rocks just begging to get broken.
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I was hoping to get some advice from more experienced cubers on where to go from here. Does my basic plan seem solid or does it need some kind of revision? What are some good guidelines on what to cut and what to leave in? I've played with several different cubes, but this will be my first time making one.
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."
My main reason for bringing this up is alara being a shard set, there will be a lot of tri-colored cards to chose from. Only a few should probably be included in the final cube.
"Personally I love high-riak, low-reqars gambles. Life's best with a decent amount of riak. And f*** reqars."