Generally speaking, when you're trying to calculate a probability, the best way to think about it is to count the number of ways the thing you want can happen and divide by the total number of ways anything can happen.
So in this case, if you have X lands and want to draw exactly k of them, there are (X choose k) ways to pick the lands (where (X choose k) = X!/(k!(X-k)!)) and (60 - X choose 7 - k) ways to choose the non-lands. The total number of possible hands are (60 choose 7), so the probability of getting exactly k lands is (X choose k)(60 - X choose 7 - k) / (60 choose 7)
Other ones that I've enjoyed: Shadow Era and Hearthstone are the big 2, but I'm partial to Spectromancer though it's not a true CCG. The recent Card City Nights was a lot of fun too and has the advantage of being pretty cheap. Ascension is a deckbuilding game, but the iOS port is phenomenal if you're at all interested in that kind of thing.
So a couple of friends and I (4-5 total people) have been playing games together on Friday nights for 5ish years. We've played a bunch of magic (FNM for a little and cube for a couple years), some other board/card games, a couple random games for a night each, and a fair amount of League of Legends recently. We've had the issue that people have wildly different skill levels, so League (and cube) haven't always been that great. In addition, we're splitting up in the next couple month (three of us have found other opportunities and are moving far away), so it'd be nice to be able to continue when we're apart.
We were looking for a good cooperative game to try out, preferably PC, though another digital system or a physical game would be fine. We were talking about our dream game: something like World of Warcraft's dungeons, but without all the grinding, other people, or other stuff - just interesting content that we tackle as a group and have fun. We talked about Diablo, but there isn't really that sense of tackling a dungeon so much as everyone just doing their own thing and it's more grindy than session-based. I realize I'm kind of describing Dungeons and Dragons, but DM'ing is a ton of work, there's a fair amount of initial ramp up required, and it'd be tougher to play long distance.
Other cool competitive games where we can play as a team would be appreciated as well, but preferably ones that play well even with people of completely different skill.
I'm excited to announce my first game for iOS - Dream Quest. It is, as the name indicates, a roguelike deckbuilding game. What does that mean? Explore dungeons (or forests, seas, crypts, or others), fight monsters, and earn loot (but avoid death!) as in a standard roguelike. But combat is a very simple card game and loot comes in the form of cards - for example a Slice card deals a small amount of damage and lets you draw a card, but a Dice card deals massive damage based on the number of Slices you've played.
There's a video that one of my testers put up on youtube showing his first couple runs on a recent build:
I'm currently looking for some beta testers, on PC, Mac, or iPad (no iPhone version right now, though the plan is to have it for both). If you're interested, please send me an e-mail at DreamQuestGame at gmail dot com or a PM here.
That makes sense - it seems like a small but relevant upside and one that's hard to quantify. You can also do a better job of splitting up separate effects - with FoF, opponents can split removal vs counters (for example) and then actively play around whichever they you chose, whereas with this you can make put one in each pile and make it much harder to play around.
Conclusion: In a general sense, this draws 2.4ish cards worth of power as contrasted to 2.6 from Fact or Fiction. If you don't care about land at all and all your spells are equal in value, it draws just under 2.1 cards worth of power as contrasted with 2.9 from FoF. Much, much nerdiness follows.
I rarely post, though I tend to read (and enjoy!) these forums quite a bit during spoiler season, but this thread confuses me a lot.
On the surface, this card isn't terribly hard to evaluate: you look at 5 cards, split them as evenly as you can on power level and then are handed the weaker one. If you could always split perfectly, this is about the same as drawing 2.5 cards. For the sake of discussion, I'm going to assume you and your opponent are valuing cards the same (this is, of course, not always true, and probably slightly in your favor, but the effect should be fairly small except in that it makes the card more fun to play). So you are incented to split the piles as evenly as possible.
In general, this is exactly the same game as Fact or Fiction, except here, when you can't make an even split you get penalized and with FoF, you get rewarded. Let's assume the average power level of a card in your deck is 1. Then you should expect to get around 2.5 points of power, minus some amount for the times you can't split evenly, as opposed to FoF where you get 2.5 plus a little bit. The question of how much a little bit is is interesting, but it's generally less than .5. Under reasonable assumptions, it's about .1 (so FoF is about 2.6 cards, this is about 2.4 cards)
So this draws between 2 and 2.5 cards worth of power and FoF is between 2.5 and 3 (ish). Note that there is a mill attached to this, which is generally an upside.
There are some interesting cases to consider. If the power level of your deck is completely flat, this is exactly the same as drawing 2 cards (plus the mill). If the power level is incredibly spiky (say 1 card is worth 40 points and the rest worth 0), this is worth nothing (the wrath scenario). Lastly, if land is worthless and your spells are all pretty close to even, you should expect to draw a little better than 1 spell (about 1/3 of the time you draw 2), which works out to just over 2 cards worth of power, assuming 24 spells, 16 lands (17 or 18 lands is close to the same and the numbers are prettier for 16).
By comparison, FoF is worth 3 vs 2, more than 0 vs 0, and 2.9 vs 2.1 in those cases
Basically the point is that the theory conforms to intuition: you draw just worse than 2.5 cards with it because you can't always split well. In the case where you don't want land, it's harder to get a good split (3 spells, 2 lands is tough to split), so the value goes down to just over 2 cards.
The number above for 2.4 cards comes from assuming your deck is distributed as a continuous uniform distribution. I then just simulated it, assuming perfect information and the same valuations for both players.
@Eidolon: I'm confused as to where your numbers are coming from. If we take a continuous uniform distribution for power level in our deck, I simulated that you get just under 2.4 cards worth of power (assume average power level of a card is normalized to 1). You say that you used a discrete uniform distribution, but I'm curious as to what your range was. For example, in [1,5], there's no split at all that's worse than 2:3 (the usual worst splits are big, big, big, small, small or big, small, small, small, small, but here those are fine). From reading your post, you seemed to have a theoretical (rather than simulated) justification for your answer - my statistics training is probably not up to yours, so I'm very interested in your process since I needed to simulate for the general case (for the 40% land, 60% spell, flat power level, it's easy to get 2.08 with straight theory, but in general I don't know how to do it without simulating)
@synergy people: I'm honestly confused as to what kind of synergies people are seeing commonly in their splits. Someone mentioned always getting "a pile of cards that always work together", which seems pretty unreasonable to hope for unless we're counting "Island, Cryptic Command" as a combo. You don't have a ton of control over the split since the cards are just the top 5 of your library, so it's not a Gifts Ungiven-type thing. I think if you're using the card hoping for synergy beyond "Counterspell + Lightning Bolt is sweet synergy since one kills little things and the other stops big things" you're going to be sadly disappointed most of the time. Do your decks really have so many awesome synergies that you're going to have 2 disjoint pairs of synergistic cards among your top 5? Or is it more like with divination where your deck is full of sweet cards, so pretty much any pair of cards in your deck works well together?
That said, I definitely agree with the point that this is a reasonable card draw spell. It's somewhere a little better than inspiration in terms of card draw if you don't want lands, with milling upside and, in my opinion, it's fun to resolve. In fact, if your deck looks like a uniform distribution (basically you value lands to some extent and you have more and less powerful cards in your deck), it's actually closer to Fact or Fiction than to intuition.
There are some pretty juicy targets for Notion Thief, but not sure if enough. Sylvan Library, Brainstorm, Faithless Looting, Consecrated Sphinx, Yawghmoth's Bargain, Wheel of Fortune, Memory Jar, Prime Speaker Zegana, Looter il-Kor etc. Sounds fun
Just for the record, I don't think it's very good against Consecrated Sphinx. In fact, I think it's the other way around. If they have a Consecrated Sphinx and you draw a card with this guy out, you lose the game.
You draw a card, Sphinx ability asks them if they'd like to draw 2. They say yes, this guy replaces both draws and you draw 2. Each of those draws trigger sphinx and they keep choosing "yes" on the may. This guy isn't a may, so you just keep drawing and drawing and die.
That said, otherwise I agree with you. The idea of using it with Wheel of Fortune makes me really happy, though that's probably not enough to actually cube it.
I have a powered 450 and an unpowered 240 (very unpowered - no tinker, no moat, no balance, and so on) and the preference splits exactly down the middle for my group. Is there a difference? Yes, certainly. Are they both fun? I think so.
Between those two cubes, I'm actually unconvinced that the powered one is faster (in the sense of average game length). In fact, I think they're pretty close, though I don't have any real data. The powered one definitely has faster games, but also slower ones since decks from a 450 are somewhat clunkier.
The main pro for the powered cube is awesomeness. The powered cube has a lot more sweet plays than the unpowered one in terms of doing something that just makes you say "wow, that's unfair". You have games that have someone wildly up against a spunky underdog and that creates excitement. You also have much more ability to make cool decks that can just break games in half.
The main pro for the unpowered cube is consistency. Games are close - a far larger percentage than even in constructed magic could easily go either way. Most games come down to playskill, to deck building skill, and draft skill rather than draws or even archetype matchups. That's not to say there's no luck involved - it's magic, after all, just that there seems to be way lower variance. There aren't the same broken plays that you see from a powered cube, but often little subtleties or cute interactions that you've never noticed can be exactly what you need in order to win which are fun in their own way.
I also think it's worth saying that I don't feel like an unpowered cube should just be a powered cube without the power. That's a totally reasonable way to do it, but adding power creates a snowball effect. With power, you have crazy artifacts, which encourages the tinker deck, which leads to huge monsters, which encourages ramp and reanimate, which encourage each other, along with more ways to cheat out huge monsters and so on. These archetypes are by no means unique to a powered cube, but my group found that when we pulled the power (20 cards, not just the 9, including a fair amount of the fast mana) from our old 500 card cube, it wasn't nearly as much fun. There were a huge number of cascading effects from pulling the power that we hadn't considered. So I really believe that powered and unpowered cubes are somewhat different beasts and that they create different, but equally enjoyable atmospheres.
I've been very happy with my 240 card list (though I'll apologize that it's not up here). I Winston 4-5 nights a week with my fiancee and we've been doing it for about 6 months.
That said, you have to be very careful making the list since Winston drafting doesn't really play the same way as normal drafting and it's very important to focus on things like mana curves both for your deck and for your cube. I'd really suggest if you go the 240 route to either find a 240 you like or design one from scratch; I think going from a 360 and cutting 120 won't work out the way you hope.
Sorry, Eidolon, I don't think that part was very clear.
My point was that the cost of picking a card in Winston is very low, so if there's a large variation in power level of cards, it's very possible that the two decks will be wildly different in power. It's easy to imagine a situation where both players are in WR aggro, for example. If the first stack is Black Vise for player A and he takes it happily and replaces it with Goblin Patrol, his deck will be much stronger than that of player B who still reasonably happily takes the patrol. But he didn't spend anything taking the Vise; he just happened into it.
This is in contrast to a normal draft where player B will have gotten picks of comparable quality - sometimes it doesn't quite work out, but the variance is much, much lower.
So if your Winston stack has a wide variation in power level, your decks will end up much more random in quality than with the same variation in a normal draft. That's why we play neither Goblin Patrol (far too weak) or Black Vise (too strong) in our 240 - we're ok with some variation (Dark Confidant and Dauthi Horror are both in, for example), but I think there's value in trying to make sure the cards are fairly close together in power level so that choices become more about finding the right card for your deck than about flipping up the more powerful cards in your piles.
In case it's helpful, I've attached formatted versions of the txt files from Eidolon's zip file - they're the html file with the same name in the zip file. I've also added my 240 card cube list in case it's helpful to you.
I've been doing a ton of 2-man cube drafting for the last ~6 months with my fiancee, first with my 500 card cube and then for the last 6 weeks or so with my 240 card cube, about 5 times a week. The main thing is that you know what your target is - 2-man lists and 6-8-man lists are pretty different.
For our Winston/Winchester list, we cut most of the power and broken cards, particularly artifacts and highly splashable things. They tended to take away from the fun and skill of the draft - when you happened to flip an Ancestral Recall into a stack you snap took it and it would often win you games. We also tried to standardize the power level of the cards much more than in the 500 card cube- fewer picks between Black Vise and Goblin Patrol, for example (neither of which is in my 240 card cube). This means that in general decisions are made based on what deck you want to play - you worry about getting three-drops and making sure you have reach rather than simply "what's the best card on the table". The idea of a pick as a resource isn't really there in 2-man drafting either - the cost of taking something awesome is much lower. As a result, power variation in a normal draft is a good thing - some cards are first picks, some are 10th picks and generally people get a vaguely similar amount of each. It also makes it easier to draft, helps with passing signals, and makes early picks feel more exciting. In 2-man, though, getting first pick quality cards is just good luck and there's no mechanism that really balances both players getting similar amounts. So we felt that a big power difference among cards just made you feel bad when you wanted to take the stack that would fit your deck but the power stack was just so much better. It also made your opponent feel bad when you got 3 moxes and a lotus and they ended up with nothing.
The actual draft format we use is 120 card Winston or Winchester depending on the night - while 120 cards is a little high, it gives you solid decks and it tends to give you a pool that pretty closely resembles (at least in terms of cuts you have to make afterward) a normal draft deck. 240 cards is a pretty good number for this - it means you have half the cube out at any given time which gives you some consistency but also a fair amount of variance. It's about the same amount of variance as drafting 6 players in the 500 card cube, so I've been really quite happy with it.
As far as actual cards, I highly recommend good mana fixing. We just run the three main cycles (dual/shock/fetch) as well as two manlands in the gold section, but that's a pretty high density of quality fixing at 240. If you go up to 360, I'd recommend adding a full 10 more fixing lands - mana-fixing is critical in two-man drafts since your opponent will take your fixing accidentally. In normal drafts, it's rare that if you're first-picking lands that you'll miss your Tropical Island, but in a 2-man it's actually really common since it might just be in a pile with Goblin Guide. Decks without fixing are slower and less fun to play (since not casting your spells is pretty depressing), so I'd recommend making sure you have enough.
Otherwise, the only real advice I can give you is to play your list and be open to changing it around. Most of the lists on the forum are great places to start and you probably won't go wrong just picking one arbitarily as long as you're open to tweaking it to suit your preferences. You may decide you really like having power in your list and the crazy swingy (but often awesome) games it creates. Or you may decide you want to push aggro or control a little harder. But the only way to know these things is to play it and see how it goes. Good luck - 2-player cube is the best board game out there!
I actually disagree with the statement that 360 is the minimum. I feel like that's born out of tradition rather than reason - the number comes from the minimum for 8-man drafts, but if you know that you'll never have to support 8, it doesn't really matter. I currently have a 240 that I only use for 2-man drafts (along with the 500 that I use for my normal 6-8 man drafts) and I've been really happy with those sizes. If you're mostly going to do 4-man drafts, that uses 180 cards a time (assuming you do normal pack sizes or, more reasonably, something like 5 packs of 9 each). 270 should easily provide enough variance for you. 270 also allows (exactly) for 3 players to do a sealed deck (each player taking 90 cards). It doesn't allow for 4 (you'd need 360), but you could do 4-man two-headed giant (210 cards), draft, or use smaller sealed pools.
As for the appropriate ratios of removal, counters, creatures and all that, Eidolon had an excellent post a while ago that I can't seem to find. The recommendation of looking at cubes of various sizes is a good one - I'm happy with those ratios in my 500 (though I think I have 1 too many white sweepers), but take a look at some of the smaller cubes as well, particularly those with lots of discussion (since those have generally been around the longest and so have been tuned a lot). The other suggestion is to look at real Magic sets - Wizards' R&D has been tackling the same problem for limited for a long time. That's a little trickier since you have to account for rarity and also specific cube factors such as the fact that counterspells are more important in cube because the number of things that have a large effect on entering play is so much higher than in normal limited. Even so, it should be something of a guide.
When I started a couple years ago, I just entirely stole the list from one of the cubers on this forum (which at the time was 500 cards) and just proxied the ones I didn't have. After playing that for a few months, I started to get a sense of what I liked, what I didn't, and how to tweak it without damaging the underlying fun parts. As far as starting out, that'd be my recommendation - find a list you're happy with and either proxy it or use close substitutes for cards to get a feel for how things work. Then you'll be able to make educated decisions to move forward and create your own list that you and your group will be happy with.
Using the low cost on TCGPlayer (so if you wanted to go out and buy the cheapest edition of each card in the cube right now), it's $1339.60 (though that is using the cheapest version of each card, not the cheapest version in a modern face; I'd guess they're pretty close, but I don't have any real data to back that). If you only want the cards that cost at least $10, it's $852.08 (with the same caveats).
Stoneforge is weird among highly synergistic cards in that her targets are also very, very early picks. All 5 of the swords, jitte, batterskull, and skullclamp are, if not always first-picks, high choices even without the Mystic (and that's 2/3 of the equipment - the rest is very good but not quite as crazy as those). So Stoneforge plays nicely with cards you already want to have, so it generally doesn't matter if you get it late.
On the flip side, of course, it's harder to get her targets since they're so good. On balance though it seems to be worth the risk in my experience - even if she's just a squire that tutors for the one sword you got and then puts it out for cheap and dodges countermagic, that's still a fantastic card.
So in this case, if you have X lands and want to draw exactly k of them, there are (X choose k) ways to pick the lands (where (X choose k) = X!/(k!(X-k)!)) and (60 - X choose 7 - k) ways to choose the non-lands. The total number of possible hands are (60 choose 7), so the probability of getting exactly k lands is (X choose k)(60 - X choose 7 - k) / (60 choose 7)
Other ones that I've enjoyed: Shadow Era and Hearthstone are the big 2, but I'm partial to Spectromancer though it's not a true CCG. The recent Card City Nights was a lot of fun too and has the advantage of being pretty cheap. Ascension is a deckbuilding game, but the iOS port is phenomenal if you're at all interested in that kind of thing.
We were looking for a good cooperative game to try out, preferably PC, though another digital system or a physical game would be fine. We were talking about our dream game: something like World of Warcraft's dungeons, but without all the grinding, other people, or other stuff - just interesting content that we tackle as a group and have fun. We talked about Diablo, but there isn't really that sense of tackling a dungeon so much as everyone just doing their own thing and it's more grindy than session-based. I realize I'm kind of describing Dungeons and Dragons, but DM'ing is a ton of work, there's a fair amount of initial ramp up required, and it'd be tougher to play long distance.
Other cool competitive games where we can play as a team would be appreciated as well, but preferably ones that play well even with people of completely different skill.
Thanks in advance!
I'm excited to announce my first game for iOS - Dream Quest. It is, as the name indicates, a roguelike deckbuilding game. What does that mean? Explore dungeons (or forests, seas, crypts, or others), fight monsters, and earn loot (but avoid death!) as in a standard roguelike. But combat is a very simple card game and loot comes in the form of cards - for example a Slice card deals a small amount of damage and lets you draw a card, but a Dice card deals massive damage based on the number of Slices you've played.
There's a video that one of my testers put up on youtube showing his first couple runs on a recent build:
And a couple of images from the game:
The Warrior
A Rogue in the Crypt (Screenshot)
I'm currently looking for some beta testers, on PC, Mac, or iPad (no iPhone version right now, though the plan is to have it for both). If you're interested, please send me an e-mail at DreamQuestGame at gmail dot com or a PM here.
Thanks!
I rarely post, though I tend to read (and enjoy!) these forums quite a bit during spoiler season, but this thread confuses me a lot.
On the surface, this card isn't terribly hard to evaluate: you look at 5 cards, split them as evenly as you can on power level and then are handed the weaker one. If you could always split perfectly, this is about the same as drawing 2.5 cards. For the sake of discussion, I'm going to assume you and your opponent are valuing cards the same (this is, of course, not always true, and probably slightly in your favor, but the effect should be fairly small except in that it makes the card more fun to play). So you are incented to split the piles as evenly as possible.
In general, this is exactly the same game as Fact or Fiction, except here, when you can't make an even split you get penalized and with FoF, you get rewarded. Let's assume the average power level of a card in your deck is 1. Then you should expect to get around 2.5 points of power, minus some amount for the times you can't split evenly, as opposed to FoF where you get 2.5 plus a little bit. The question of how much a little bit is is interesting, but it's generally less than .5. Under reasonable assumptions, it's about .1 (so FoF is about 2.6 cards, this is about 2.4 cards)
So this draws between 2 and 2.5 cards worth of power and FoF is between 2.5 and 3 (ish). Note that there is a mill attached to this, which is generally an upside.
There are some interesting cases to consider. If the power level of your deck is completely flat, this is exactly the same as drawing 2 cards (plus the mill). If the power level is incredibly spiky (say 1 card is worth 40 points and the rest worth 0), this is worth nothing (the wrath scenario). Lastly, if land is worthless and your spells are all pretty close to even, you should expect to draw a little better than 1 spell (about 1/3 of the time you draw 2), which works out to just over 2 cards worth of power, assuming 24 spells, 16 lands (17 or 18 lands is close to the same and the numbers are prettier for 16).
By comparison, FoF is worth 3 vs 2, more than 0 vs 0, and 2.9 vs 2.1 in those cases
Basically the point is that the theory conforms to intuition: you draw just worse than 2.5 cards with it because you can't always split well. In the case where you don't want land, it's harder to get a good split (3 spells, 2 lands is tough to split), so the value goes down to just over 2 cards.
The number above for 2.4 cards comes from assuming your deck is distributed as a continuous uniform distribution. I then just simulated it, assuming perfect information and the same valuations for both players.
@Eidolon: I'm confused as to where your numbers are coming from. If we take a continuous uniform distribution for power level in our deck, I simulated that you get just under 2.4 cards worth of power (assume average power level of a card is normalized to 1). You say that you used a discrete uniform distribution, but I'm curious as to what your range was. For example, in [1,5], there's no split at all that's worse than 2:3 (the usual worst splits are big, big, big, small, small or big, small, small, small, small, but here those are fine). From reading your post, you seemed to have a theoretical (rather than simulated) justification for your answer - my statistics training is probably not up to yours, so I'm very interested in your process since I needed to simulate for the general case (for the 40% land, 60% spell, flat power level, it's easy to get 2.08 with straight theory, but in general I don't know how to do it without simulating)
@synergy people: I'm honestly confused as to what kind of synergies people are seeing commonly in their splits. Someone mentioned always getting "a pile of cards that always work together", which seems pretty unreasonable to hope for unless we're counting "Island, Cryptic Command" as a combo. You don't have a ton of control over the split since the cards are just the top 5 of your library, so it's not a Gifts Ungiven-type thing. I think if you're using the card hoping for synergy beyond "Counterspell + Lightning Bolt is sweet synergy since one kills little things and the other stops big things" you're going to be sadly disappointed most of the time. Do your decks really have so many awesome synergies that you're going to have 2 disjoint pairs of synergistic cards among your top 5? Or is it more like with divination where your deck is full of sweet cards, so pretty much any pair of cards in your deck works well together?
That said, I definitely agree with the point that this is a reasonable card draw spell. It's somewhere a little better than inspiration in terms of card draw if you don't want lands, with milling upside and, in my opinion, it's fun to resolve. In fact, if your deck looks like a uniform distribution (basically you value lands to some extent and you have more and less powerful cards in your deck), it's actually closer to Fact or Fiction than to intuition.
Just for the record, I don't think it's very good against Consecrated Sphinx. In fact, I think it's the other way around. If they have a Consecrated Sphinx and you draw a card with this guy out, you lose the game.
You draw a card, Sphinx ability asks them if they'd like to draw 2. They say yes, this guy replaces both draws and you draw 2. Each of those draws trigger sphinx and they keep choosing "yes" on the may. This guy isn't a may, so you just keep drawing and drawing and die.
That said, otherwise I agree with you. The idea of using it with Wheel of Fortune makes me really happy, though that's probably not enough to actually cube it.
The token counts itself, so you'll get a 1/1.
Between those two cubes, I'm actually unconvinced that the powered one is faster (in the sense of average game length). In fact, I think they're pretty close, though I don't have any real data. The powered one definitely has faster games, but also slower ones since decks from a 450 are somewhat clunkier.
The main pro for the powered cube is awesomeness. The powered cube has a lot more sweet plays than the unpowered one in terms of doing something that just makes you say "wow, that's unfair". You have games that have someone wildly up against a spunky underdog and that creates excitement. You also have much more ability to make cool decks that can just break games in half.
The main pro for the unpowered cube is consistency. Games are close - a far larger percentage than even in constructed magic could easily go either way. Most games come down to playskill, to deck building skill, and draft skill rather than draws or even archetype matchups. That's not to say there's no luck involved - it's magic, after all, just that there seems to be way lower variance. There aren't the same broken plays that you see from a powered cube, but often little subtleties or cute interactions that you've never noticed can be exactly what you need in order to win which are fun in their own way.
I also think it's worth saying that I don't feel like an unpowered cube should just be a powered cube without the power. That's a totally reasonable way to do it, but adding power creates a snowball effect. With power, you have crazy artifacts, which encourages the tinker deck, which leads to huge monsters, which encourages ramp and reanimate, which encourage each other, along with more ways to cheat out huge monsters and so on. These archetypes are by no means unique to a powered cube, but my group found that when we pulled the power (20 cards, not just the 9, including a fair amount of the fast mana) from our old 500 card cube, it wasn't nearly as much fun. There were a huge number of cascading effects from pulling the power that we hadn't considered. So I really believe that powered and unpowered cubes are somewhat different beasts and that they create different, but equally enjoyable atmospheres.
That said, you have to be very careful making the list since Winston drafting doesn't really play the same way as normal drafting and it's very important to focus on things like mana curves both for your deck and for your cube. I'd really suggest if you go the 240 route to either find a 240 you like or design one from scratch; I think going from a 360 and cutting 120 won't work out the way you hope.
My point was that the cost of picking a card in Winston is very low, so if there's a large variation in power level of cards, it's very possible that the two decks will be wildly different in power. It's easy to imagine a situation where both players are in WR aggro, for example. If the first stack is Black Vise for player A and he takes it happily and replaces it with Goblin Patrol, his deck will be much stronger than that of player B who still reasonably happily takes the patrol. But he didn't spend anything taking the Vise; he just happened into it.
This is in contrast to a normal draft where player B will have gotten picks of comparable quality - sometimes it doesn't quite work out, but the variance is much, much lower.
So if your Winston stack has a wide variation in power level, your decks will end up much more random in quality than with the same variation in a normal draft. That's why we play neither Goblin Patrol (far too weak) or Black Vise (too strong) in our 240 - we're ok with some variation (Dark Confidant and Dauthi Horror are both in, for example), but I think there's value in trying to make sure the cards are fairly close together in power level so that choices become more about finding the right card for your deck than about flipping up the more powerful cards in your piles.
I've been doing a ton of 2-man cube drafting for the last ~6 months with my fiancee, first with my 500 card cube and then for the last 6 weeks or so with my 240 card cube, about 5 times a week. The main thing is that you know what your target is - 2-man lists and 6-8-man lists are pretty different.
For our Winston/Winchester list, we cut most of the power and broken cards, particularly artifacts and highly splashable things. They tended to take away from the fun and skill of the draft - when you happened to flip an Ancestral Recall into a stack you snap took it and it would often win you games. We also tried to standardize the power level of the cards much more than in the 500 card cube- fewer picks between Black Vise and Goblin Patrol, for example (neither of which is in my 240 card cube). This means that in general decisions are made based on what deck you want to play - you worry about getting three-drops and making sure you have reach rather than simply "what's the best card on the table". The idea of a pick as a resource isn't really there in 2-man drafting either - the cost of taking something awesome is much lower. As a result, power variation in a normal draft is a good thing - some cards are first picks, some are 10th picks and generally people get a vaguely similar amount of each. It also makes it easier to draft, helps with passing signals, and makes early picks feel more exciting. In 2-man, though, getting first pick quality cards is just good luck and there's no mechanism that really balances both players getting similar amounts. So we felt that a big power difference among cards just made you feel bad when you wanted to take the stack that would fit your deck but the power stack was just so much better. It also made your opponent feel bad when you got 3 moxes and a lotus and they ended up with nothing.
The actual draft format we use is 120 card Winston or Winchester depending on the night - while 120 cards is a little high, it gives you solid decks and it tends to give you a pool that pretty closely resembles (at least in terms of cuts you have to make afterward) a normal draft deck. 240 cards is a pretty good number for this - it means you have half the cube out at any given time which gives you some consistency but also a fair amount of variance. It's about the same amount of variance as drafting 6 players in the 500 card cube, so I've been really quite happy with it.
As far as actual cards, I highly recommend good mana fixing. We just run the three main cycles (dual/shock/fetch) as well as two manlands in the gold section, but that's a pretty high density of quality fixing at 240. If you go up to 360, I'd recommend adding a full 10 more fixing lands - mana-fixing is critical in two-man drafts since your opponent will take your fixing accidentally. In normal drafts, it's rare that if you're first-picking lands that you'll miss your Tropical Island, but in a 2-man it's actually really common since it might just be in a pile with Goblin Guide. Decks without fixing are slower and less fun to play (since not casting your spells is pretty depressing), so I'd recommend making sure you have enough.
Otherwise, the only real advice I can give you is to play your list and be open to changing it around. Most of the lists on the forum are great places to start and you probably won't go wrong just picking one arbitarily as long as you're open to tweaking it to suit your preferences. You may decide you really like having power in your list and the crazy swingy (but often awesome) games it creates. Or you may decide you want to push aggro or control a little harder. But the only way to know these things is to play it and see how it goes. Good luck - 2-player cube is the best board game out there!
As for the appropriate ratios of removal, counters, creatures and all that, Eidolon had an excellent post a while ago that I can't seem to find. The recommendation of looking at cubes of various sizes is a good one - I'm happy with those ratios in my 500 (though I think I have 1 too many white sweepers), but take a look at some of the smaller cubes as well, particularly those with lots of discussion (since those have generally been around the longest and so have been tuned a lot). The other suggestion is to look at real Magic sets - Wizards' R&D has been tackling the same problem for limited for a long time. That's a little trickier since you have to account for rarity and also specific cube factors such as the fact that counterspells are more important in cube because the number of things that have a large effect on entering play is so much higher than in normal limited. Even so, it should be something of a guide.
When I started a couple years ago, I just entirely stole the list from one of the cubers on this forum (which at the time was 500 cards) and just proxied the ones I didn't have. After playing that for a few months, I started to get a sense of what I liked, what I didn't, and how to tweak it without damaging the underlying fun parts. As far as starting out, that'd be my recommendation - find a list you're happy with and either proxy it or use close substitutes for cards to get a feel for how things work. Then you'll be able to make educated decisions to move forward and create your own list that you and your group will be happy with.
On the flip side, of course, it's harder to get her targets since they're so good. On balance though it seems to be worth the risk in my experience - even if she's just a squire that tutors for the one sword you got and then puts it out for cheap and dodges countermagic, that's still a fantastic card.