You can grab a list from somewhere like cube cobra. Buy the cards, or use an online draft tool or print a bunch of proxies and play. Its a fun way to play with cards that are just sitting in bulk boxes and play without having to buy a whole booster box
Play a few games and you’re bound to start finding combinations of cards you never thought of before. Then after a while you can tweak it if you find something is too unbalanced. For example, in an earlier version of my cube, enchantments were disproportionately busted, so we removed some and added some more removal.
One house rule we have is that if you pick a dual land (we just have the cheap ones), at the end of the draft you can exchange it for another from outside the cube that matches the colours you’re actually playing.
I thought you were joking, unfortunately you weren't. Money really has no taste.
The canonical MtG lore is not exactly deep and refined anyway.
I didn’t attend the TNMT pre-release but had fun speculating on e.g. what colour each turtle would be. Within the constraints, I think they got it right (even if Sneak VS Ninjutsu is unnecessary complexity). I’m curious about Star Trek too. I can imagine four or five legendaries for Rom³ (a secondary character) alone and they could all coexist.
So yeah, they’re doing it for money and I do think there are too many of them, but at least they’re not half-assing it every time and are letting the designers really work with the possibilities. There’s only so much you can do with a generic fantasy setting.
¹ https://scryfall.com/card/fin/109/overkill
² https://scryfall.com/search?q=%28type%3Acreature+type%3Asaga...