How are we going to design the custom cube?

It looks like there are only five of us. Which is ok. Mirrodin Besieged was designed by five people also. It was handed off to a development team of five more people. But no reason we can't do both design and development. The huge benefit to having a small team is it's easier to get to know one another. And I know from MTGs that we are all mature enough to not get hurt feelings over an argument of which card is best.

The way design normally works is that the design team creates roughly 3-5 times the number of cards they need for the set. Development takes those cards and starts playtesting with them. Tweaking numbers and whittling things down till they down until they have honed there set.

Is this the methodollogy we want to do? Because right now that seems to be the methodology we are going about. Just creating and seeing what sticks.

The other option (that I see) is we design to fit holes from a base skeleton. This has the benefit of being much quicker. But we will probably miss things that a much longer development cycle would lead us to. If this is the system we are going to use, we need to decide what system we are going to go about to get a card to go from the General Card Discussion to a Single Card Discussion to acctualy in the set.

So the question is, how are we planning to do things around here?

I imagine as a card becomes more popular or more discussed we can make a new thread. I do think that the general discussion is quite ineffective so far and could be dismissed (draw a card too!).

I cannot wait to put these cards into MWS or similar stuff because it just looks too fun.

Part of making sure the designs work well, is making sure that there is a sort of guide or consensus on how we want each color to play. What themes or mechanics we want to make sure to hit, what to avoid, etc. Having power guidelines is probably useful. And we're generally good at keeping things reasonable, but sometimes it's useful just to have it written down that "no creature should feel better than X existing card."

I would like to be a part of the idea creation and tweaking process, but I will probably have no time to actually test cards in practice. I should be pretty good at tweaking things (i.e. making ideas) for power level or needed mechanics during all parts of the design process, however. So if a card needs help or nerfing, I can give ideas.