Darkness Falls: Comments

Just so the reader knows, I have decided to have no vanilla creatures, as they make draft, and card creation, slightly boring.

If you're trying to make a real set, removing vanillas is a fatal mistake. Without vanilla and virtual vanilla creatures, there becomes too many things going on in Limited for the average player to follow, and that's a bad design.

Good point... never mind. How many vanillas would I make for each color?

For what it's worth, dude's advice is spot on for real Wizards sets, which is what many of us on here try to emulate; but if you've deliberately decided your set is aimed at a rather different audience than typical Wizards sets, you can diverge from those guidelines.

In recent sets, the numbers seem to be about 1 per 50 cards in the set or 1 per 20 commons in the set (5% of commons): 5 in a large set or 3 in a small set. Kaladesh had 6, Aether Revolt had 3; Shadows over Innistrad had 7, Eldritch Moon had 2; Battle for Zendikar and Oath of the Gatewatch each only had 2; Khans of Tarkir had 4, Fate Reforged had 3, Dragons of Tarkir had 5.

Note that the vanilla creatures can still play into the themes of your set, such as artifacts in Kaladesh, wolves in Innistrad, power-4-or-greater in Khans, etc; and show your theme in other ways, such as the two Tarkir timelines' Summit Prowlers.

Bear in mind the related numbers of "virtual vanilla" creatures (those with ETB triggers, alternate costs, etc, but that can be treated as vanilla once they're on the battlefield) and "french vanilla" creatures (those with only common creature keywords). Those go together with your vanilla count to have a big effect on the overall complexity of battlefields using your set.

That... seems high. A typical large set is 250-ish cards and has 5 vanillas total, about 1 in each colour.

Oh yeah, it came up again elsewhere I should be more careful in pointing out that all my comments come from the point of view of what Wizards would print in a Standard-legal set. When first populating a set, I put in one vanilla in each color as an approximation, but then you would want to tweak that based on how it plays and where the complexity is.

Ah thank you. I thought you meant per color.