Tidbit I found on the WOTC site-
Part of the process for balancing Limited that we do is making sure that the top three commons for each color are relatively close to each other, so the colors have reasonable balance. There are plenty of old sets where this did not happen (Urza's Saga and Onslaught come to mind) where one color has something like five of the top ten commons. Spreading out the balance is important, and it means that even if we are wrong on a few things, the overall Limited experience shouldn't be totally out of whack.

But that is pretty much something we can only do after the community card making part of the process is over.

True. I just wanted to mention it before I forgot, get it engrained in everyone's subconscious.

However, since you brought it up already, how are we gonna do it after the community card making process is over? Do we create a vote for top ten strongest commons? Then tweak the rest accordingly?

I don't really know. I don't have much dev experience. I suppose we test until we can all more or less agree what the best commons are, then tweak cards until it's fairly even.

Play play play; playable playable. Run some drafts, figure out what archetypes need help/need less help/ need to be more interesting or more unique. Balancing the commons needs to be not just across colors, but also archetypes; it wont help if every color has the same number of good commons, and three colors' worth of them say "draft enchantment deck!" The commons thing is more something to keep in mind while tweaking cards for the many other reasons they will need to be tweaked, than a "task" that is done at some point.

As far as deciding "communally" how development will change cards; I think a different approach should be used than the piece-mail voting sytem. Maybe having interested individuals submit "portfolios" of multiple changes and describing the goals of the changes. Then people can discuss them and suggest tweaks (such as the community indicating that it is especially important to them to keep a certain common in a certain form), and hopefully a consensus can be reached for a certain portfolio. If there are substantially different portfolios they can be voted on, (or specific lines-of-reasoning can be voted on, similiar to the way the spell mechanic was decided.)

I'm not sure how much the NGA community is actually interested in creating a playable set. A lot of mechanical issues I've mentiond or seen others mention in this thread and other threads don't appear to have an impact on the criteria people set, the cards they design, or the cards they vote for. (How many non-rare flyers do we have now? I haven't been paying attention.) This is shaping up more like "From the Vault: Maraka" than something someone can draft; that's fine if that's what the community wants. If it isn't what the community wants, though, development is probably going to have to make some radical, feather-ruffling changes from what has been laid out even at this point.

I guess I am just offering this criticism as food-for-thought; there are still a lot of cards to make, and maybe the right cards to fix the mechanical issues just haven't been thought up yet.

EDIT: Also prepare to not let your feathers get ruffled.

I'm (maybe surprisingly) 100% behind Knife here, albeit coming from a different direction. The more I think about it, the more I run against the simple brutal fact that the flavor for this set at card level is going to need serious overhauling. The themes of the set, locations, &c., just straight up aren't coming through yet.

It might ruffle some feathers but as Knife says, if this is going to be a cohesive set, mechanically and flavorfully, it's going to need to be smacked with the hammer of development.

The portfolio voting idea is a good one. I don't know that I've ever seen anyone do that before in YMTC but it's an intriguing notion. The same basic logic could be applied to flavor--portfolios of flavor text and name changes and creature type tweaks--with strong results, I think.

Portfolio voting sounds pretty great. I'm very interested in drafting this and I'd much rather have a good finished product than a bad one that has all my designs completely unchanged.

Yah. I was hoping the set would be playable, so no complaints from me.
Not sure how the portfolio thing works though. Is it like checking in code to git?
We should maybe start playtesting once we have a small set worth of cards (~140?).

I wouldn't be surprised if we're almost at 140 now. "The Set So Far" acknowledges 88 cards, and that's at least a few rounds behind and missing the Second Chance cards, etc..

In any case, the first order of business is getting an up-to-date list of cards together. I think Parad might have a local Starstill spoiler, but if she doesn't we can just divide up the threads and trawl through them to reconstruct one.

I really suggest, again, that the wiki be used to compile everything. That way it's not dependent upon one person to fill in the information.

That's probably a really good idea.

Yah. Probably a set list page followed by an alphabetical list of the cards on the wiki would be nice.

I don't see any reason not to do both. Parad can keep the master copy in case something happens to the wiki. The wiki can be our quick and dirty card storage solution.
I don't know how the drft program works, but we should get the set in there as soon as possible. We don't need a full set to feel out the cards.

CKY mentioned a program for online drafting on the development thread and I believe MSE files can be easily? converted to that format. I think there is an MSE file bouncing around here somewhere (I'm waiting on a response from Parad) that I plan on making current. I have no experience playing cards online or playing custom cards online, but am prepared to do the muddling through it required. I may also make an MSE file that has the "complete set" filled out with generic set-skeleton cards because that may help get the feel of the mechanics of the draft.

Storyteller; sure it is kind of like checking in code to git. Caveat: I have never heard of git before. If drafting revealed that a color pair had no archetype and just sucked, I might make many revisions to many cards with the intent of balancing this, and perhaps a pair of people might create a different large set of revisions (or idea for revisions) to fix the same problem, and then we would submit these to some sort of critique. Step 3 remains the elusive "..." and Step 4 is "Have happy consensus!" But the general idea is to have sets of revisions that are approved in one fell swoop. Or that could even be rolled back in dire emergency.

EDIT: Further posts I have about development will be made specifically on the development thread.

I'm pretty sure we're at at around 120 cards; in other words, we're about halfway.

We started on Mother's Day (5/11). It's been two months and eleven days. I calculated when we started that at 12 cards a week, the design phase would take 5 months. So we're on schedule.

I'll update the spoiler now. Sorry I don't do that more regularly.

Also, Shazzeh pointed out that Irondeep Spelunker didn't make it into the spoiler, and that makes me worry that other cards aren't missing too, so I'm going to double-check to make sure I got everything.

The visual spoiler is definitely paying off, because I'm already noticing things just glancing over it. Thanks for assembling it, Parad!

1) The entire set has a ridiculously low curve so far. We've only designed about half the cards, and we have 19 common one-drops, which is one more than the entire Theros set had.
2) There's literally one common creature with flying, Snowblind Haint.

I estimate we should work out how development works soon.

I'm noticing a LOOOT of humans that could, if we wanted to, be altered easily to other races, and a LOOOOT of cards with space for flavor text. That's good, because it means we have a lot of room to start injecting the stuff we've discussed in the flavor thread into the cards themselves.

3) There are only two or three cards at common that care about instants and sorceries so far, Subterranean Scrawlings and Ignite the Ashes. Spellbound Serpent should probably be common rather than uncommon, but that still doesn't give us much.

I'm going to keep the voting open for another 6-10 hours. First of all, there just aren't enough votes yet in the green thread, and second of all, I want to update the spoiler before I close the voting so that people can know what holes they want to fill.