An Awkward Conversation - Mythic Rarity

Yeah, don't worry - Mythic Rare is a PR thing, and not something you really need to consider for your fan set.

If you ignore Mythic Rare, the other three rarities actually have a definite purpose for drafting:

• Common cards are going to make up the bulk of your card pool when building your deck. As such, they need to be broadly useful and to support multiple archetypes.
• Uncommon cards are in the sweet spot in terms of how many you'll grab, so they should be set up so that you can build your deck around them.
• Rare cards do should flashy, bomby stuff, because you're probably going to end up with 1-2 of them while drafting.

They have no purpose for constructed decks.

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On the other hand, Cubes rely on every card being roughly equal, so it really depends on what you're designing.

Yes, there is.

Unfortunately, "Wizards of the Coast wants to create chase cards so that they can milk money out of the whales in their audience" isn't really applicable when you're designing a fan set that you aren't selling.

As for the Sol ring argument, it's power is absolutely rare or mythic rare level, but it's also a boring card so that doesn't really fit the mythic philosophy. Now it exists in some weird limbo where it's way too powerful to be uncommon, but not at all interesting enough to be at higher rarities. Since it's essentially a default card in every commander deck, it's just a failed card design all around. Another example I could give is Brazen Borrower. Powerful card, but super boring design that doesn't feel mythic at all. To me, that's a design fail, not a rarity fail. Then there's Uro, who is comfortably in the "wtf were they thinking?" category.

I think it's a mistake to base your own mythic designs on a corrupted vision of a money making organization. If you make your custom mythics in the spirit of what they were supposed to be, I think there is still a place for them. I try to make my mythics fun or unusual rather than just busted. That said, I think the strongest argument against them is what was said above about having extremely rare swing cards in draft that make for a busted and unfair play environment.

The problem with the bolded bit is that cards in a cube are supposed to be roughly equivalent in power by design. Having a handful of cards in your cube that are better than the rest of them makes the process of drafting into a game of grabbing the mythics, which wrecks the balance of the whole thing. You shouldn't need to go "oh, this card is worth a second look" in a cube, since the whole point is that every card is worth a second look.

Seriously, Mythic Rares exist to push packs. Let's say you're cracking packs from Ikoria, and you're looking for one specific card of each rarity. By cracking one pack, you have roughly an 8.5% chance to find the Common you're looking for, a 3.7% chance to find the Uncommon, a 1.6% chance to find the Rare, and a 0.8% chance to find your Mythic Rare. If you want to beat a 50% chance of finding that one Mythic you're looking for, you have to crack 83 packs. And, to enable this kind of behavior, Mythic Rares are designed to be pushed, or flashy, or weird.

Remove that requirement, and Mythic Rarity becomes basically a sticker that you slap on a subset of your rares because they're extra exciting or whatever. Which raises the question of why those cards got more creativity poured into them. Why do you feel the need to mark roughly 5% of your set as special? And why would you waste that effort on a group of cards that most people won't see? Someone who buys three packs for a booster draft has less than a 1-in-3 chance of pulling a single Mythic Rare. Why not make your Rares cool and flashy, because that person is guaranteed to see three of them?

EDIT: Sorry if I come off a bit strong, it's just that I got more and more annoyed as I dug into the math. Don't even get me started on how Shadows Over Innistrad and Eldritch Moon had another, independent 1-in-8 chance of replacing a common with a second rare/mythic.

I think that would make drafting a much weaker experience unless you set out from the start with this pack arrangement in mind.

Currently, a group drafting a set can expect to collectively see 240 commons, 72 uncommons, ~21 rares, and ~3 mythic rares. That means that it's likely that they'll see each common roughly twice. On top of that, it's likely that they'll see almost every uncommon, half of all rares, and a fifth of all mythic rares in the set. Let's simplify that and make the ration 2 : 1 : 0.5 : 0.2. This is kinda important because it's how you keep drafts fresh.

With the kind of pack you're thinking of, the draft group would see 120 commons, 120 uncommons, 72 rares, and 48 mythics. If you wanted to maintain a similar level of how often a given card shows up, your set would have to have ~50 commons, ~120 uncommons, ~144 rares, and ~240 mythics. You have a 564 card set, and more than a fifth of those cards would have to be flashy, unique effects. That set would have 16 sets worth of mythic rares in it, and sounds like a nightmare to design.

If you maintained the same proportions as a recent WotC set, however, you'd have a ratio more like 1 : 1.5 : 1.5 : 3. I dunno about you, but I'd get pretty tired of seeing every mythic card multiple times.

EDIT: Also, because I had to.