EDIT:
That comment probably wasn't very useful. To be frank and on point, your decklist right now is really bad.
The first thing you want to do building any MtG deck is identify a strategy, or way you want games to go. Do you want to try to win fast by dumping cheap aggressive creatures on the board? Do you want to win slow by stopping your enemies from killing you until you get enough mana and a stable enough board to cast a high-impact creature and win? Do you want to dig up combo pieces to go for an early kill?
Right now, your deck is just a pile of unrelated cards.
You have a lot of big expensive top-end creatures, but very few cheap spells to interact with what your opponents do or to cheat those creatures into play early. That means there's a good chance you just die before you get to cast any of those 5+ mana cards. You can fix that by adding cheap spells that act as meaningful roadblocks or destruction effects for opponents' creatures in turns 1-4. You also will probably want to gain some way of drawing cards to make sure you hit lands and have the reactive spells you need to get into the late game. And even most decks that play this sort of control strategy rarely have more than 4 spells that cost 6 mana or higher, even when those 6-drops are unbeatable game-enders like Aetherling instead of Frilled Sea Serpent
You also have a couple random 1-of aggressive creatures. That can also be a viable strategy, but it's not going to work if you only have two 2-power 1-mana attackers - just one random blocker will completely stop your aggression. If you had something like 10+ 2-power 1-drops, with 12 or so aggressive 2-drops, 9 aggressive 3- and 4-drops and some cheap kill spells/disruption, it would be a good strategy to win early.
Make sure your deck has the cards it needs to actually function. For instance, you're running a few Delirium cards with no way of putting Enchantments or Lands in the graveyard. So even if things are going well and you cast a Sorcery, cast an Instant and trade creatures with an opponent, you probably aren't ever going to benefit from those Delirium abilities. Same goes for Madness with no Discard outlets.
You're also going to have some trouble just based on the kinds of cards you're starting with. A lot of those cards have pretty low power levels, and the Skulk mechanic that a lot of SOI's UB creatures were built around is just bad. But just being limited to commons or affordable cards shouldn't limit your deck - the trick is looking for cards that work along the same strategy and that interact favorably with one another.
Not targeted at me, but I'm curious how many people it is targeted toward - I didn't think there were a lot of serious players or collectors who opened boosters for fun or resale.
I would hesitate to add Mill, Infect or Storm cards that don't win the game on their own or contribute to a more general strategy.
Those are almost always terrible - both for the decks trying to build around them, and for the other players who would otherwise see more usable cards in draft
Edit: Likewise for cards with other parasitic mechanics like Lys Alana Huntmaster or Darksteel Forge that only do anything in one specific deck. Thief of Sanity, Imperious Perfect or Bosh, Iron Golem are examples of thematic cards that work in multiple decks while supporting a specific Mill / Tribal / Artifact plan - they have an archetypes where they do a lot, but they can also be jammed in other decks and do something. The less all-in a strategy is, the better it is for a draft environment
Digging through my pile for favorites, I'm realizing how basic my MtG art tastes are - apparently there's a reason people like Terese Nielsen and John Avon.
Time Spiral gets top overall set pick though for picking a mood and really hitting it
What I don't understand is why you think that's a bad thing. Manufacturers bend over backwards and spend tons of money to "compete with themselves." Hasbro wants more products taking up shelf space, and if the long-term consequence is printing and shipping fewer tons of commons, I'm sure they're not going to complain.
Hey, I put some feedback on tappedout, but your deck could use a lot of work. The way it's built, you're going to have trouble casting spells on time.
If you want to avoid consistency issues, start by picking one color or two, pick 8 cards you most want in your deck with 4 copies apiece and 4 cards you want to experiment with or rarely draw and add 1 copy apiece, and 24 lands until playtesting.
I'm still confused because price is a thing we do to ourselves.
We, as a player base, really really like spending cash for cards with little numbers on the top and big numbers on the bottom.
MtG hit that sweet spot of being a collectible and comprising competitive game pieces, where devoted players who started as kids are now making real money in real jobs and are bidding the prices up accordingly.
Fat packs satisfy every reason I bought Starter packs and Tournament packs as a kid, aren't restricted to one set per year, and have the nifty die thing.
I liked the booklet, but wizards.com hosts the same sort of content and more, and I'm pretty sure kids use computers these days.
I don't think Teferi's more egregious than other Modern staples, but he really illustrates the price gradient that's developed with the encouragement of modern design
That said, agree with above; if you're not into competitive organized play, Pauper is a sweet format for the kinds of game I wanted old school MtG to be.
I would skip the common, cycling and maybe tri-colored lands. What your cube looks like now - and what it sounds like with things like Sol Ring coming in - is a real power gap between cards.
That's normal to an extent - in a vacuum Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Wurmcoil Engine and Jackal Pup or Pestermite aren't even close to the same power levels - but they're normalized because those bad cards are part of combos or archetypes where they contribute something important to the game plan.
Right now, your list has a lot of cards that aren't good enough to make retail draft decks, and that don't really have decks for them. Supporting aggro at 360, I want a minimum 5 attacking 1-drops in aggressive colors and at least 10 attacking 2-drops per color. My highest priorities would be shifting the curve down to center around 1-3 mana slots, getting the downright bad cards out ASAP, and then evening out the guilds - I'd give 2 cards per color pair to start, and adjust by taste afterward.
Shocks and checklands are a solid mana base. With the exceptions of ONS/KTK/ZEN fetches and Alpha-Beta duals, you'll get declining benefits from land slots once you have those full cycles, so I probably wouldn't touch lands after that until your colors themselves are better balanced
Keywords for simple things add to the learning curve.
They ease the learning curve when used for complicated but recurring effects like Protection, Bestow, Undying, Monstrous or Suspend that let you clump complicated ideas together.
I'm not sure if Take into Custody crosses that threshold, and it rarely occurs on more than two or three cards per set. Granted, Hexproof also has that profile, but it seems iffy.
Opened a tab with your list last night and came here to say the same thing as LeyShade about CMCs.
Most decks you draft will probably be best with more 2-mana spells than 3-mana spells, and more 3-mana spells than 4-mana spells and so on, and the composition of your cube should support that.
There are a lot of cards bunched up at the higher mana costs. As you refine, that's one of the first things to pare down. It will make more cards playable and will make mana screw less of an issue
The next step would be refining the types of decks you support, whether you want to encourage prolonged mid-range slugfests, all-in janky combos, frequent aggro mirrors, tempo v. control fites, etc.
Like Nahiri 2.0's Eldrazi-specific synergies
EDIT:
That comment probably wasn't very useful. To be frank and on point, your decklist right now is really bad.
The first thing you want to do building any MtG deck is identify a strategy, or way you want games to go. Do you want to try to win fast by dumping cheap aggressive creatures on the board? Do you want to win slow by stopping your enemies from killing you until you get enough mana and a stable enough board to cast a high-impact creature and win? Do you want to dig up combo pieces to go for an early kill?
Right now, your deck is just a pile of unrelated cards.
- You have a lot of big expensive top-end creatures, but very few cheap spells to interact with what your opponents do or to cheat those creatures into play early. That means there's a good chance you just die before you get to cast any of those 5+ mana cards. You can fix that by adding cheap spells that act as meaningful roadblocks or destruction effects for opponents' creatures in turns 1-4. You also will probably want to gain some way of drawing cards to make sure you hit lands and have the reactive spells you need to get into the late game. And even most decks that play this sort of control strategy rarely have more than 4 spells that cost 6 mana or higher, even when those 6-drops are unbeatable game-enders like Aetherling instead of Frilled Sea Serpent
- You also have a couple random 1-of aggressive creatures. That can also be a viable strategy, but it's not going to work if you only have two 2-power 1-mana attackers - just one random blocker will completely stop your aggression. If you had something like 10+ 2-power 1-drops, with 12 or so aggressive 2-drops, 9 aggressive 3- and 4-drops and some cheap kill spells/disruption, it would be a good strategy to win early.
- In general, look at the cards in your deck and ask if they're contributing to the same gameplan. Aggressive cards like Diregraf Ghoul, Sovereign's Bite and Sleep aren't going to contribute to the gameplan of a defensive deck running Wall of Mist, Murderous Compulsion and Frilled Sea Serpent, and vis versa.
- Make sure your deck has the cards it needs to actually function. For instance, you're running a few Delirium cards with no way of putting Enchantments or Lands in the graveyard. So even if things are going well and you cast a Sorcery, cast an Instant and trade creatures with an opponent, you probably aren't ever going to benefit from those Delirium abilities. Same goes for Madness with no Discard outlets.
You're also going to have some trouble just based on the kinds of cards you're starting with. A lot of those cards have pretty low power levels, and the Skulk mechanic that a lot of SOI's UB creatures were built around is just bad. But just being limited to commons or affordable cards shouldn't limit your deck - the trick is looking for cards that work along the same strategy and that interact favorably with one another.Those are almost always terrible - both for the decks trying to build around them, and for the other players who would otherwise see more usable cards in draft
Edit: Likewise for cards with other parasitic mechanics like Lys Alana Huntmaster or Darksteel Forge that only do anything in one specific deck. Thief of Sanity, Imperious Perfect or Bosh, Iron Golem are examples of thematic cards that work in multiple decks while supporting a specific Mill / Tribal / Artifact plan - they have an archetypes where they do a lot, but they can also be jammed in other decks and do something. The less all-in a strategy is, the better it is for a draft environment
Time Spiral gets top overall set pick though for picking a mood and really hitting it
If you want to avoid consistency issues, start by picking one color or two, pick 8 cards you most want in your deck with 4 copies apiece and 4 cards you want to experiment with or rarely draw and add 1 copy apiece, and 24 lands until playtesting.
This looks like it's mostly about ramping into big creatures. I'd start with a green base and a framework of Hour of Promise, World Breaker and Hashep Oasis, Desert of the Indomitable, and maybe splash parts of one other color to use their painlands. One of the problems is the best Eldrazi and Eldrazi enablers are pretty expensive.
There are some budget Eldrazi on the high end you might be able to use - Conduit of Ruin, Endbringer, Oblivion Sower, Artisan of Kozilek, Decimator of the Provinces, and some okay budget enablers like From Beyond, Temple of the False God and Shrine of the Forsaken Gods
WotC isn't going to be put out if they get the same amount of money while printing/packaging/shipping fewer pieces of cardboard.
They're not losing anything "competing with their own product line"; they're trying something that would apply a hatchet to their operating cost.
We, as a player base, really really like spending cash for cards with little numbers on the top and big numbers on the bottom.
MtG hit that sweet spot of being a collectible and comprising competitive game pieces, where devoted players who started as kids are now making real money in real jobs and are bidding the prices up accordingly.
I liked the booklet, but wizards.com hosts the same sort of content and more, and I'm pretty sure kids use computers these days.
The only appeal I see these days is nostalgia.
I don't think Teferi's more egregious than other Modern staples, but he really illustrates the price gradient that's developed with the encouragement of modern design
That said, agree with above; if you're not into competitive organized play, Pauper is a sweet format for the kinds of game I wanted old school MtG to be.
That's normal to an extent - in a vacuum Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Wurmcoil Engine and Jackal Pup or Pestermite aren't even close to the same power levels - but they're normalized because those bad cards are part of combos or archetypes where they contribute something important to the game plan.
Right now, your list has a lot of cards that aren't good enough to make retail draft decks, and that don't really have decks for them. Supporting aggro at 360, I want a minimum 5 attacking 1-drops in aggressive colors and at least 10 attacking 2-drops per color. My highest priorities would be shifting the curve down to center around 1-3 mana slots, getting the downright bad cards out ASAP, and then evening out the guilds - I'd give 2 cards per color pair to start, and adjust by taste afterward.
Shocks and checklands are a solid mana base. With the exceptions of ONS/KTK/ZEN fetches and Alpha-Beta duals, you'll get declining benefits from land slots once you have those full cycles, so I probably wouldn't touch lands after that until your colors themselves are better balanced
Mana Drain, Counterspell, Mana Leak, Miscalculation, Remand, Memory Lapse, Cryptic Command, Force of Will, Mystic Confluence, Force Spike, Arcane Denial, Daze, Complicate, Exclude, Forbid, Sinister Sabotage/Dissolve, Pact of Negation, Supreme Will, Condescend
I think it's pretty interchangeable with any of these:
Deprive, Censor, Prohibit, Dream Fracture, Hinder, Disallow, Power Sink, Dismiss, Syncopate, Scatter to the Winds, Essence Scatter/Remove Soul/False Summoning, Negate, Broken Ambitions, Rune Snag, Commit // Memory
They ease the learning curve when used for complicated but recurring effects like Protection, Bestow, Undying, Monstrous or Suspend that let you clump complicated ideas together.
I'm not sure if Take into Custody crosses that threshold, and it rarely occurs on more than two or three cards per set. Granted, Hexproof also has that profile, but it seems iffy.
Most decks you draft will probably be best with more 2-mana spells than 3-mana spells, and more 3-mana spells than 4-mana spells and so on, and the composition of your cube should support that.
There are a lot of cards bunched up at the higher mana costs. As you refine, that's one of the first things to pare down. It will make more cards playable and will make mana screw less of an issue
The next step would be refining the types of decks you support, whether you want to encourage prolonged mid-range slugfests, all-in janky combos, frequent aggro mirrors, tempo v. control fites, etc.