What, what? Return of the 'Rare 6'?

I just mean the ability to put "8C/5U/1R/1L" or something.

Mmm. I considered this back when I was adding boosters in the first place. Then I remembered Planar Chaos's booster pattern (basically five rarities across the six frames: one of the uncommon slots had a 3/4 chance to be Planeshifted Uncommon and 1/4 chance to be Planeshifted Rare) and I thought there's no way I'm going to be able to implement a customisable booster distribution powerful enough to set that up. But just because I can't go utterly to the limits of complexity, doesn't mean I can't create something. I'll give it some thought.

Maybe just "give me any N cards, regardless of rarity" for starters? :)

more flexibility in booster contents would be sweet, i agree

It occurs to me that "15 Commons" should be a choice, at the very least, for those making cubes without commonality.

Oh, that's a very good point. Yes, the booster functionality is currently useless for cubes. And cube-makers are among the most prolific users of the unspecified rarity, so ignoring rarity would be better than restricting to commons.

Right, I'll see what I can do.

Added a flat-rarity option for cubes. I'm still planning to add the more customisable control later.

Thanks a lot.

Any luck with the more customizable control?

Not so far, no - I've been focusing on other things. What kinds of boosters would you like to be able to generate?

Stuff not dissimilar to the Time Spiral block boosters in the way they had two separate runs of cards (normal and -shifted)... I'd like to be able to do something like that for Homestuck: The Gathering, where there'll be a Human run and an Alternian run, or with the races of "Lock"/"Stock"/"Barrel".

Or, as the “card” itself says, boosters other than 15 cards long?

Hmm. Splitting print runs would be pretty tricky. The only ways that occur are:

• Add tags to cards. Allow cardset creators to specify that portions of the booster should come from cards with or without a particular tag (and of a particular rarity).
• Implement decklists, and allow cardset creators to say that portions of the booster should come from particular decklists.
• I guess I could have another "special details page" like Skeleton and Front Page for specifying print run categories...

Note to self: This issue will become a lot more urgent when Multidraft can do more than just generate boosters. I need at least to provide a way for Cube-style sets to specify that their default boosters should ignore rarity.

CH says "a set where booster is ["anything", "anything", ...], and each card has a field "slot": "anything" would cause Multidraft to give you a flat distro."

I know it isn't what Hálian would prefer, but he/she could make two separate sets and duplicate a number of cards into those two sets. This wouldn't be a reasonable solution if Hálian was looking to make five different booster packs, each with their own focus... but it at least seems like a reasonable answer to the temporary problem at hand.

Though, this does raise the question of whether making a feature that duplicates cards is wise. I think we had another discussion on that somewhere, but I'm not sure.

I'm a guy. ;)

Ha! Fair enough. I remember Googling 'Hálian' to see if it was a boy or girl name. I got your account on Multiverse. :p

What is Multidraft?

At the moment it's a service that creates boosters from any Magic card set or any set here on Multiverse. The plan is that it'll allow a number of players to do drafts of any Multiverse set, and probably any printed Magic set as long as that's not risking the attention of WotC's legal department.

Tappedout's draft simulator and Drafts.in haven't yet attracted legal trouble, so I think we're in the safe. Worse come to worse, there'll always be Isochron

While we're waiting for the Draft Feature there's also LackeyCCG and Cockatrice. I've done two drafts of the Goblin Artisans custom set Tesla, on in summer 2013 with LackeyCCG, and one in summer 2014 with Cockatrice.

I don't know how much control you need. I have seen a document about random pack generation in Lore Seeker, which lists the following possibilities:

• Simulated collation: Make a list of cards (possibly with duplicates), and then cut it at a random point and select cards starting from that point.

• Naive algorithm: Pick ten common cards (with no duplicates), three uncommon cards (with no duplicates), and one rare or mythic card (in the list of cards to select from, put rares twice so they are more likely than mythics).

• taw's algorithm: Like the naive algorithm but replace five of the ten common slots with color-locked slots; only common monocolored cards of a specific color appear in each slot. This way it is guaranteed to have at least one common card of each color.

• Reuben's algorithm: Use the naive algorithm, and then check for the criteria; if they are not met, then try again. The criteria are: at least one and at most four commons of each color, at least one common creature, and at most two uncommons of a color.

• Nonbasic land slots: Some sets use a nonbasic land slot instead of a basic slot; there are different weighted probabilities for different rarities.

See MSE documentation about pack types to see what capabilities MSE has.

TeXnicard has a flexible system that supports all of the Lore Seeker possibilities, and more; it also has the possibility to associate a 8-bit "auxiliary value" with each card in the pack (which can be used for whatever purpose you want, such as to indicate shiny cards).

I would expect probably Multiverse would never be flexible enough, although some of the possibilities listed might be implemented, maybe.

I haven't seen Isochron before; I looked and it seems that there is unfortunately no protocol documentation, so would have to be figured out from the source code instead. A reimplementation of both the server side and client side might be made to support use with other software and other operating systems, including more flexible random pack definition. But for using the existing Isochron implementation with programs other than MSE (if you do not need the more flexible random pack definition), the file format that lists the cards seems to be easily enough to do.

Just chiming in to say I'm using the "Random regardless of rarity" as a nice way to browse through cards in my set to get an overview.

­Booster slot options has a bit more discussion, in which zzo38 lists basically the same options again.

I listed them again because I had forgotten that I had already written it on here; I did not mean to repeat myself.

I agree the "random regardless of rarity" option is good to look at random cards. (For my own cards, I use my own software, but for other people's cards, this feature is very good for this and I am glad it is implemented on here.)

The possibility to allow specifying the random seed might be useful perhaps for a Rochester draft, and you can then use IRC or other methods of communication to specify which cards you want to pick up. (If you are doing other kinds of drafting, this method might not work.)