Obviously, we're dividing it 6 ways, with some room for artifacts and lands. Personally, I don't know how to divide multicolor within itself.

IIRC a normal large set has about a hundred commons (?). For M12 that's 20 of each colour (and one artifact). We're not going to plan an exact skeleton, but what sort of breakdown are we looking at?

I'm not sure how the proportions broke down for sets with lots of multicolour and hybrid.

Assuming 10 lands or artifacts (though we may have no artifacts or add a number of colour-affiliated artifacts, etc), what proportion of multicolour and mono will we have? The same number of mulicolour total as each monocolour (ie. 15 in each colour and 15 multicolour)? The same number of multicolor in each allied-pair as in monocolour (9-10 in each colour and 9-10 in each allied pair)? Is that enough to support deck-building?

I would go with (for common) one of Jack's suggestions. I would do
15 of each color. 15 multicolor, 2 of each allied pair and 1 of each enemy. 5 dual lands. 6 artifacts, 4-5 being creatures to smooth out curves.

If you hit the "Add skeleton" link, on the Generate page there's some sample stats. For Shards of Alara, a set with a heavy multicolour theme, those stats are:

| Shards of Alara | commons | uncommons | rares | mythics | total |-------------------|---------|-----------|-------|---------|------ | White, blue, black, red and green | 15 | 7 | 8 | 0-1 | 30-31, x5 = 152 | Multicolour | 15 | 20 | 10 | 12 | 57 | Artifacts | 6 | 0 | 3 | 1 | 10 | Lands | 5 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 10 | Total: | 111 | 60 | 52 | 13 | 229 ­

Note that there were only 15 gold commons total. That's two for each colour-pair plus one triple-coloured gold common. Compared with fifteen coloured commons in each single colour.

rourke's proposed numbers precisely match the Shards common frequencies. My gut reaction is that I'd like a bit more gold than that, but I fear that even 25 gold commons (four for each allied-colour pair and one for the enemy pairs) might make Limited decks too hard to play.

Unlike in Alara, our multicolor faction is a faction itself, and doesn't "belong" with or to any of the monocolored cards. I think we should keep the division even at higher rarities, which Shards did not do. This might be difficult at higher rarities, but it would feel right.

Shards also didn't have much multicolor because that set was advocating CDE casting costs. You can only have so many of those cards in common. Too many CDs, and the set wouldn't feel triple color. Hence, a bunch of cards that supported CDE (like the obelisks and common tri-lands), but not many CDEs.

I think we have a little more room for play, since we're only adding CDs at common. I did check Ravnica, though, while we're on the subject. Turns out that they only had 13 non-Hybrid multicolor cards at common. With Hybrid, the number jumps to 23. Maybe we should aim for somewhere in the middle? 18 - 20 sounds fine. We may just find that the feel like 5 multicolor cards anywho...

Alex: Thanks, I knew I'd seen that breakdown but I'd forgotten it was there.

After thinking it over, my instinct is still for a much higher proportion of multicolor (up to half the colored commons, somewhere between a normal set and Alara Reborn). If we want people to draft multicolor as an archetype, it seems more fun to have multiple possible multicolor archetypes, with cards that can also be used to fill out a mono deck if necessary.

But I'm not at all sure I'm thinking of this the right way.

Um... wow. That seems quite a scary proposition.

Alara Reborn was only playable in limited because it had four cycles of manafixing or cards usable with a single colour: Fieldmist Borderpost, Sanctum Plowbeast, Glassdust Hulk and Bant Sojourners. That's four cycles of gold cards, 20 gold commons, which spent much of their time in Limited not being used as gold cards at all. I think we definitely don't want to go that far.

But we do have the privilege of using colourless fixing - common lands and signets - alongside the monocolour cards. Hmm... perhaps we could take the gold numbers up a bit.

I definitely don't think we want it up near 50% of the commons though.

OK, I suggest something provisional like for common:

• 5 x color fixing lands
• 5 x color fixing that also does something else (we will probably add more or remove these later when we see how hard it is to play multicolor creatures)
• 5 x artifacts (artifact creatures?) (I'm not at all sure we want these at common, but I think it makes sense to try some ideas early on in case they seem cool)
• 5 x 14 x colored cards
• 5 x 2 x allied color cards
• 5 x 1 x enemy color cards
• 1 x other (why is common always 101 anyway?)

With the understanding that these will almost certainly be tweaked up and down a lot to start with. What refinements would you suggest?

That sounds fine to me, though we'll have to see what we want to do with the artifacts. The evenness of the split does feel like the Aerians are being overwhelmed, though.

I went ahead and generated a skeleton, though I expect it to change a lot. (I think it would be fine to add existing suggested cards that are filling a specific splot to the skeleton (eg. "a common red all-tapped card") but not needed to add suggestions that aren't filling a specific color/rarity role (though we can if we like))