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This is a pretty common format called cube.

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

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Hmmm sounds cool, I had heard about this before and since forgotten. I think part of what I would like is to give some of the old and weird cards in my collection some play though, rather than just playing a well known cube- but then if they're too weird they might not work at all together.
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Don’t fret too much about it. I have a cube and it’s mostly a random collection of cards a friend and I had. Just separate the colours into roughly equal stacks and make sure each has a reasonable ratio of creatures to other spells plus a workable mana curve.

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.

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> But at least with old cards you don't have to contend with Sephiroth, the Ninja Turtles, and My Little Pony.

I thought you were joking, unfortunately you weren't. Money really has no taste.

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I loved the Warhammer 40k sets and the LotR sets. Didn't care about the others. Other people loved the FF or Avatar. Different people have different tastes (everybody hated Spiderman though).

The canonical MtG lore is not exactly deep and refined anyway.

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On the other hand, the Final Fantasy set release was the most fun I’ve had at a pre-release event. Personally I’d have preferred Dragon Quest with some sweet Toriyama art, but you take what you can get. I met people who had stopped playing MTG decades ago but came back for the pre-release to see some of their favourite characters. Good conversations. I’ll also say that while in the big scheme of things of course FF MTG was a financial decision, the bulk of it felt like a labour of love in the sense of “how can we translate this FF idea to MTG” with some awesome results. Cards like Overkill¹ and the concept of summons² (a mix of creature and saga). They also made sure there was something for everyone. All FF were represented, go get your favourites.

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...

³ https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Rom

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Check out the Cube Draft format.

https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Cube_Draft

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