I'm building a Battle Box / Danger Room!

There's a description of my specific plans for the Battle Box below the format description.

Format description:

The goal of a Battle Box is to provide players with games that don't have mana flood or mana screw, and in which most of the cards are approximately the same power level. This means that the games will typically be decided by the decisions each player makes.

Each player starts with 10 lands that are "outside of the game" from which they get to hit their land drops. These lands should generally be 5 of the original basics and 5 taplands (such as guild gates or gainlands), and each color should be represented on two tap lands. This means that each player has the ability to create up to 3 mana of any color. Wastes may be a good 11th land if you want one, or you want devoid to be a thing in your box.

Usually you won't put any more lands in the battle box aside from the ones "outside the game" that you start with. That way, every turn you will draw a spell.

All of the other cards (usually between 200-400) are shuffled up and either put into a central library or divvied up among players for their own libraries. I will probably divvy them up.

Usually, you either change your starting handsize to be lower than 7 or increase your maximum handsize to more than 7. In the early game, your hand won't shrink from land drops, so you're far more likely to have too many cards in hand if you don't have a 1 or 2 mana card. Additionally, starting with 7 spells and drawing a spell every turn can just be way too many spells for your mana. I'm planning to start with 4 cards in hand but keep a maximum hand size of 7.

Common tips for battle boxes:

• Strong one mana spells combined with strong early spells that have double color costs can force people to make interesting choices about what lands they play first

• If a card ends up seeming more overpowerful than interesting, it might be a good cut candidate

• Most spells above 5 mana will end up being significantly more powerful than those beneath 5 mana, and you're guaranteed to be able to cast them on curve / as soon as you draw them. I plan to avoid most spells above 5 mana as a result.

• Looting is not as close to drawing a card as it often is, since you won't draw excess lands. However, you will be drawing low CMC cards, so it can make it so all of your spells cycle. I would recommend, if you include one, to make it one that costs several mana to activate. (I'm planning to avoid them. Abomination of Gudul might make it in with the KTK common 3-color morph cycle, but probably not.)

My box:

I'm building my box out of a lot of commons and uncommons from the past few years of drafting, as well as scattered other cards I thought would go well with them. I'll be putting in a few mechanics that force people to think about what they might be facing down, such as morph.