Hello. I have noticed over my years in NGA (in the YmtC section) that I have very little understanding of how to balance cards for limited formats. Many of my ideas are extremely challenging to pull off without doing something degenerate there. So I would like to try and learn what sealed environments need in order to be fun for everyone playing.

I really want to see the community put up some sort of design guides for things like this.

this article is a whole is nice, but this section specifically is a checklist style guide for designing commons to be in line with NWO standards http://www.custommagic.space/#nwo

NWO is relevant primarily or exclusively in limited, and helps combat complexity creep I guess, and keeps the game feeling smooth and understandable.

One of the most important aspects for making a limited environment feel good i think is making sure you have defined archetypes with the right amount of synergies. When players are building a deck from a sealed pool, they're going to look for key cards to start with. These cards will usually be archetype-defining uncommons or rares. As an example, if you open up a regisaur alpha, then you're going to immediately start scanning for other dinosaurs, other white cards, and other green cards, and also other cards that synergize with dinosaurs, and then cards that synergize with any of the other cards that are strong picks alongside the regisaur. I would guess that for a good limited environment, you want an average player to be able to build 60-80% of their deck through this process (not including basic lands), and then decide on the rest from the remaining filler cards that don't have as strong synergies with any of their other picked cards. Note that this doesn't mean 60-80% of their cards need to be dinosaur tribal. In-colour bombs and removal are often also often auto-includes at the point that you're comitted to that colour, and then any card that synergizes with specific cards in your deck without necessarily contributing to the big theme of "dinosaur" is potentially an easy pick as well.

Too many synergies runs the risk of players feeling like they don't have any creative space to build their own deck, or could pull them between too many directions at once. Too few and they get lost.

As for actual balance, since the total pool of playable cards is much smaller than in constructed, I think you have a lot more room to decide the balance on a set-by-set basis. Its fine to have one set where pikers are really good and another where they're useless. Playing with the P/T available on uncommons versus commons is then extremely important. If your set has a lot of 2/1s in it, then a 1/3 is going to be a lot stronger than it would be in a different context. Limited is necessarily going to be slower and lower-octane than constructed because players aren't playing the best cards, and are going to include a lot of mediocre cards and cards that don't synergize with their deck. Cards, with the possible exception of commons, are also going to be less consistent, because although the decks themselves are smaller, you're going to be running less of each card, probably even mostly singletons. These things change the balance in a lot of ways that I don't really understand. Removal is stronger, bombs are stronger, games tend to be longer on average, etc. There's a lot of common wisdom when it comes to balancing for limited, but it ultimately only goes so far and the only effective way to fine-tune an environment is to playtest it.

Oh dang, that's a handy link you posted.

A big part of balancing your limited environment is to have a clear plan for each color and their paths to victory. You have to keep in mind that if you have a "swarm the opponent" wincon for one color, you can't give another color a "block any number of creatures" at common or a board sweeper at uncommon.

1) Seems like a very block heavy format, where board states would just become a grind and games would take forever. You have to make sure evasion and non-combat damage to players will be available to end games, and then have some means to keep the format from devolving into "draft the fliers or lose."
2) You have to make sure this isn't just "color breaks for the sake of color breaks." Wizards lately has been pushing flavor as a means to have "evil white dudes" or try to make green seem more aggressive than it is.
3) Inversion of CMC, or P/T, or what?
4) Torment and Judgment played with this. Not sure if MaRo has ever done a drive to work about it or not but would be worth a listen if he has. Ixalan has also touched on this some with uneven representation in the factions.
5) Onslaught Block had a CMC matters subtheme going through it, showed up in the later sets a lot more (8 CMC morph 1/1 is a part of the whole thing) as well as Rise of the Eldrazi being a "Battlecruiser" set with big dudes and ramp.

So to follow up, if you are making a format like example 1, it could also end up being similar to how Rise of the Eldrazi ended up (a lot of walls with big dudes to break stalemates) or even IMA (where blue, red, and green all have a number of walls and blue and red both have wincons that involve walls). Maybe give trample or deathtouch more often than normal? Maybe have more flying-specific removal than you would normally to help balance the power of fliers, or since your creatures will often have lower power than toughness, maybe this is the set where skulk shines.

1) Okay, so give every color both a way around the blockers early as well as a way to crush them completely later in the game.

2) That goes for any format, not just Limited. I think that WotC complained about green/blue being at the bottom of the draft pile though at one point, but that's probably not the case with Merfolk right now.

3) Blue gets the most creatures, then red, black, green, and finally white gets the least creatures. Why? It's a water world, with team magma in the background.

4) , 5) Not helpful because I never played limited with those blocks. Sorry.