text:
Why does Wizards of the Coast print terrible MTG cards?
I understand that there needs to be a wide variety of power levels in Magic: The Gathering. Even bad cards will see play in limited formats, some because they fill a specific niche (flying removal, fat colorless flyer, providing a counter to certain decks), and others because those decks can't afford to be too picky. However, some cards are just unforgivably terrible. I'm talking about cards that you would only run in sealed if you had absolutely no other options:
Mindless Null: Black 2/2 for 3 with a big disadvantage
Defensive Stance: literally does nothing in exchange for you getting card disadvantage
Merfolk of the Depths: Would still be bad if it only costed 5...
Archangel's Light: 8 mana just to gain some life and put cheap cards back into your deck. And it's a mythic rare....
There are many more examples, but I think these best illustrate my case. Obviously I'd rather have these cards in the game than not have them at all, but I feel like Wizards of the Coast could have made Magic a more enjoyable game just by keeping the flavor and making all of these cards a tiny bit better...yet they didn't. Why?

Part of me feels that while this may not be an exact duplicate, it touches on the same issue http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/6352/why-do-cards-have-different-rarity-levels-in-magic-the-gathering

http://www.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr5 - I doubt you'll be able to get a better answer than MaRo's.

Besides general reasons, it's been explicitly stated that Defensive Stance (and Evil Presence) were included in New Phyrexia because Blue and Black were doing a little too well for R&D's tastes.

This is also kind of related: http://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/6195/is-there-any-way-to-rehabilitate-the-junk-rare-lost-in-the-woods

For commons and uncommons of any 'modern' set the answer will pretty much always be "that color was too good in draft testing"

Defensive Stance exists as infect-hate. A lot of infect creatures are 1 power pingers.

There are some very good arguments as to why all but three of the reasons Mark Rosewater gives for having bad cards are bad arguments, even from other game designers, but this isn't really the place to argue that. The only answers you can get to your question are the things the Magic devs themselves say, or money. You will never really know for certain, because this is a question about intent. If you don't like it, all you can do is make/hope for a game that doesn't have bad cards and is still considered well designed.

Actually, on that note, a game designer by the name of Sirlin covers his opinions on this exact issue about halfway into his article on balancing multiplayer games, and is currently designing a game that addresses this (and some other issues). http://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-2-viable-options.html

Regarding your "and it's a mythic rare" comment: rarity has less to do with power level or "good-or-bad"ness as it does with "How often do you want this to show up in draft?" Archangel's Light is an incredibly powerful card in draft. You probably have six or seven cards in your graveyard when you cast it, so that's a good 12 or 14 life, plus you're going to have a good chance to get your best bombs back. Is it on the same power level as a Grave Titan? Not even close. But you don't want it showing up in draft very often.

If you actually want to see a real do nothing card check out Darksteel Relic.

I already posted a link to Maro's article, but here's his summary:

By definition, some bad cards have to exist. (The most important reason.)
Some cards are “bad” because they aren’t meant for you.
Some cards are “bad” because they’re designed for a less advanced player.
Some cards are “bad” because the right deck for them doesn’t exist yet.
“Bad” cards reward the more skilled player.
Some players enjoy discovering good “bad” cards.
Some “bad” cards are simply R&D goofing up.

I agree with his "most important reason" very strongly.  If all cards were created equal or almost-equal, then skill-intensive deckbuilding formats such as draft would come down to the luck of the draw, rather than card-analysis skills, a lot more often than they should.

Missing one important one: "Some bad cards teach players about bad cards" - which is different than ones for bad players.

@corsiKa I don't think those are different at all. What other purpose would bad cards serve for a less advanced player than teaching them what cards are bad?

@CrazyJugglerDrummer They're very different. Some are actually meant to be bad cards. Others are meant to actually give players that "aha!" moment as to why they're bad. The two are very different with very different intentions.

@CrazyJugglerDrummer I should note that the idea of a "learning card" came from a conversation with MaRo that occured over a decade AFTER he came up with the list that ended up in sunneversets' post. Whether he just forgot about it at the time, or came up with the idea afterward I don't know. I've asked him if he knows the example he gave me then; I don't recall exactly which one he gave.

@corsiKa That's a cyclic argument. We put X in the game to teach people that X exists in the game. That's bad design.

There are some cards like Chimney Imp that appear to have been deliberately overcosted (there's no other possible explanation, surely?) just to teach players that just because a card costs 5 mana, doesn't mean it's worth 5 mana...

@AlbeyAmakiir No, not exactly. As Maro points out Terror is a better card than Shatter. But Terror was put in the Mirrodin block, which makes it a horrible card because almost everything is an artifact. He did this specifically to make people realize that they have to actually think about the cards. He printed a bad card not just to have a bad card but specifically to make them learn.

Terror's not a bad card through.  It's a great card... until your opponent is mono-black or mono-artifact.  Any card can be situationally good or bad.

@corsiKa The question is about "unforgivably terrible" cards. As in, ones that are objectively worse than other cards. We're not talking about cards that are better in some sets than others.

An updated link

Tom LaPille, When Cards Go Bad, Part 2, a followup to the first When Good Cards Go Bad article thesunneversets linked, has a few more points that haven't been fully explored yet.
###Some cards aren't fun when they're good.
Here he uses the example of Scrambleverse, which has really cumbersome and complicated mechanics, explaining that it is costed very high so that it doesn't get played often. The only people that play it are the people that really want to.
###Limited needs to be balanced.
I think Limited play is the biggest reason there are "bad" cards in modern MtG. From the article:

…there was a meeting when both blue and black were doing much better than we wanted in our playtests. Lead developer Aaron Forsythe decreed that we needed a weak blue card and a weak black card. None of us came up with a blue card that was weak enough, so Aaron created Defensive Stance to fill the hole.

So while Defensive Stance does have some narrow infect-hosing mechanic, it was basically created just to keep blue drafters in New Phyrexia in check.
###Draft needs to be human-processable.

Drafting is a complex enough task already without every card being extremely close together in power, so we include plenty of cards of widely differing power levels so that the right answer can be a little bit less ambiguous. This doesn't simplify the task of correctly identifying those power levels—a challenging task in itself!—but it does make deciding between correctly-identified power levels a little bit easier.

Imagine if every card in a pack had the same power-level. I have a hard enough time deciding between two or three similar power-level cards in a draft. If all cards had a similar power level, each decision becomes stressful and agonizing. Drafts would slow to a crawl. If there are some "last pick" cards and definite common "bombs", it makes the draft a bit more smooth and manageable.

"Imagine if every card in a pack had the same power level" - I think anyone who's cubed can empathize with this agony. :-) Which do you pick: Ancestral, Mox Ruby, Tinker, or Library of Alexandria?

I can imagine... it is called powered cube

An updated link

It might be worth noting that Archangel's Light was specifically designed to be at a "safe" power level because it was designed very late in development, to replace a card that was turning out to be rather broken and couldn't be salvaged. R&D don't have an infinite amount of time to balance each set, and they'd rather leave some cards at a safer power level than risk pushing them up to a level where they can't tell if it might be bad for the health of the constructed format.

Apparently Archangel's Light wasn't so much broken as simply "didn't work" within the rules framework (e.g. created rules inconsistencies that would cause serious issues for the overall game).
But this is a really good answer. Apparently the current head developer has cautious attitude to "pushed mistakes", preferring unplayable to HELLA BUSTED.

In addition to the other answers, most cards are designed with limited in mind. Creatures are never dead cards in limited, especially if you are short on creatures in your Simic deck (in Gatecrash limited) or don't care about blockers (i.e. the mindless null).
We can also see that certain cards are played in Wizard's Future Future league, where they playtest standard decks with the sets that haven't come out yet and those "unplayable" cards have homes there, but when they release to a wider audience find that the power level they thought was there, just wasn't with the wider sample size.

Unforseen interaction. I have looked at the comments on gatherer for each of your examples and have come up with specific instances where they would interact positively.
Defensive stance seems to work pretty well with:
Aura Gnarlid
It could be useful against weenie infect/wither/deathtouch creatures
Mindless Null: is immune to lure/forced blocking and at the same cost as scathe zombies.
Merfolk of the Depth: Suprise blocker that can trigger your evolve cards.
Archangel's light: I can see this really pissing off someone playing a mill deck. It would also combo decent with threshold cards.

Woo! Scathe Zombies. What an awesome card...

@ire_and_curses And Walking Corpse laughs manically. Not quite as much as Diregraf Ghoul but close!!

The vast amount of MTG packs are cracked for limited play, because of this the vast amount of cards are designed for the format that cracks the most packs, ie limited.
Only a handful of cards in regular release sets are designed with constructed play in mind, if you look at it from WOTC point of view constructed play just simply does not promote the cracking of packs in the same manner that limited does and it is in the cracking of packs that woTC makes money.
With that in mind you should realise what the charm of limited play is really. Limited is a format where you are confronted by a selection of bad and mediocre cards and are expected to make decks from a weak selection of cards. You have to make good decks from bad cards. This is both hard and very rewarding and brings a depth of gameplay that many other tcg's lack.


text:
How is 6-player Diplomacy (no Italy) different from 7-player?
The most common way to play 6-player Diplomacy seems to be by having Italy's units hold every round and disband instead of retreating. How will this affect the balance and feel from the 7-player game? Which countries will be most affected? In general, how should each country change its strategy?

The biggest beneficiaries of Italy's absence from the game are its two immediate neighbors, France and Austria Hungary. All other countries lose by comparison, but especially Germany.
In a seven player game, I would rank France behind England, Turkey and Russia, because of France's vulnerability. Without the threat (and check) of Italy in the south, France becomes the strongest country.
Austria-Hungary, Germany and Italy are neck-and-neck for the three weakest countries in a seven player game. Without the threat of Italy, Austria-Hungary is now equivalant in power to Turkey, Russia, and an England weakened by the new French power. Meaning that Germany is left alone at the bottom. It is a case of "misery loves company.
I once played Austria-Hungary in such a game. Did well on the eastern front, balancing Russia and Turkey, but France walked away with things in the west. After the game, "England" (a very gifted first-time player) pointed out that he, Germany and I should have combined against France; and that when my fleet was ejected from Tunis, I should have "retreated" it to North Africa instead of the Ionian sea, to support his entry into the MidAtlantic Ocean.

source: Stack Exchange

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

sort: votes


text:
Does the fact that my deck is aggro mean I should add or remove land?
Say I have a deck where the only win condition I'm trying to win the first few turns. Would I want this deck to have a different number of lands than a control deck that is looking to win later in the game? An extra land or two could help me play my spells more quickly, but it would also mean that I would have fewer spells to play.
Can any general conclusions be made about the number of lands in an aggro deck vs. a control deck? Or is it so dependent on the deck and format that this is impossible?

I wonder if it would be appropriate to mention format. Vintage, Legacy, Modern, etc. All have access to different card pools. An aggro deck in Vintage with access to moxes is going to use fewer "land" than an aggro deck in Standard.

@user1873 It wouldn't hurt, but I think the principles apply regardless of format (though in limited it's mostly just the distinction between playing, e.g., 16 lands and 18, not nearly the variance of other formats).

Generally it's less about whether your deck is aggressive or not than what your deck's mana curve looks like - the two are very closely correlated, but they're not necessarily the same thing!  It's probably  fair to say that the 'average' deck through Magic's history has run about 24 lands, with aggressive decks a little lighter and control decks a little heavier - but with quite a bit of variance.
By and large, the rule is 'the lower your curve, the fewer lands you need' - for instance, the very mana-hungry Esper control decks in Standard (which generally want to be able to hit their first seven or eight mana drops so they can cast Sphinx's Revelation for a lot) will run 26 lands or even 27, whereas aggressive and low-curve red decks often drop down to about 22 lands.
For an example of a deck that's not specifically an agressive deck but still runs land-light, look at the so-called aggro-control decks whose goal is to try and get just one or two threats out there and then proactively protect them and which run very low land counts.  Some of the versions of Delver decks in the pre-Return to Ravnica standard environment are a perfect example of this; they were shaving down to 19 or 20 lands.
The Gitaxian Probe Delver decks (and similar tempo decks in formats like Legacy) also showcase another factor: the more cheap (and particularly 1-mana) card drawing spells a deck run, the more it can shave its land counts.  This is because by playing card draw spells it'll almost always be able to cast, the deck is effectively running one or two more 'virtual' lands - but note that this can be dangerous, because turns that would normally be spent playing threats often have to be spent searching for additional mana instead.  (And this explains why Probe in particular was so strong, since it didn't stunt development in this way.)
Another factor is whether a deck can make good use of 'land spells' or not.  A card like Nephalia Drownyard, for instance, isn't just a mana source to let a control player cast Supreme Verdict or Sphinx's Revelation 'on time', it's also a win condition for the deck, and so it encourages 'overloading' the land count since it doesn't diminish the threat density (which is the usual hazard of running too many lands).  Even more aggressive decks can take advantage of utility lands to boost their count while still keeping plenty of action; cards like Hellion Crucible, Kessig Wolf Run and Gavony Township are perfect examples of this kind of effect.

Here's a bullet-point list of things to consider:

What's your curve look like?
Which spells do you absolutely need to play "on time"?
Does your deck have a way to look at more cards than one per turn (e.g. card filtering or card draw)?
Can you win if you "brick" a few times, drawing lands you don't need?
Do you have a use for "excess" land cards or other mana sources?

Generally aggro decks end up running fewer lands than other decks because they have lower curves. Now, yes, being able to cast Hellrider on turn 4 is important, but missing it is not nearly as devastating as drawing land after land after land when you just need to topdeck a burn spell or creature to finish your opponent. Nor to do you want to have to mulligan just because there's not enough "business" in your initial hand.

In general, no. There doesn't seem to be any normal range for aggro decks versus control decks (not to mention combo decks like dredge that run little to no land). Famous aggro decks have run anywhere between 20-25 land, and Control runs about the same.

The 25-land example in the article is playing 4 Rishadan Ports, 3 Dust Bowls, and 2+2 Tectonic Breaks. It's an outlier in the same way that Legacy Lands (with 40-ish lands) is.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/


text:
What are the different rarities of tokens in Magic: The Gathering?
Anyone who has opened a decent amount of MTG boosters will notice that they get much more of some tokens than of others. I understand that this comes from varying needs for them, because far fewer people are going to need a planeswalker emblem than need a spirit token, but are there different rarities for tokens like there are for regular cards? Or does each token in a set have its own unique frequency of occurring?

I couldn't find an official answer, but I can make an educated guess based on how cards are produced in general.
Cards are printed in big sheets and then cut out and randomized. These sheets are grouped by rarity. You print sheets based on the desired ratio of rarities in the final product, e.g. 1 rare sheet per 10 common sheets if the two sheets are of equal size.
Sometimes, more than one copy of a cards is on each sheet. For instance, early sets, particularly the small sets which tried to simulate three rarity levels with only two print sheets, had multiple copies of some cards -- this is why Camel is listed as "Common 5" in some collector guides, or why Knights of Thorn is an "Uncommon 1" (functionally a rare for The Dark). For a more modern example, consider mythic rares: mythics don't get their own sheet; instead the rares sheet has two copies of every vanilla rare and one of each mythic.
This is undoubtably how the ads and tokens sheet is arranged as well: all of the ad and token cards are printed on one sheet, but there are multiple copies of the "common" tokens and few copies of the "rare" ones. For example, a whole sheet of around a hundred M13 ads and tokens might contain twenty goblins and only one Liliana emblem. The exact mix of cards is likely to vary from set to set, but you can get a good idea of the rarity of "rare" tokens if you know the overall sheet size.

I've seen it suggested that token rarity is proportional to the rarity of the least rare cards that produce those tokens.  So you would find many more of a token that is produced by a common card, than a token which is only generated by a Mythic.
Seems like the actual policy hasn't been made public by Wizards, but it seems like this would be a sensible route to take, and it's probably a good rule of thumb to work by, in terms of whether a given token is likely to be easy or hard to come by.  No one seems to have provided compelling evidence that it doesn't work something like this; though of course there will always be people who have opened boxes with anomalous token distributions in.  Isn't that just how opening boxes of Magic cards works?

This sounds like it should be the way it works, but anecdotally at the prerelease I ended up with many Horror tokens (generated by an Uncommon cipher card,) and only one Frog Lizard (generated by a common instant.) Perhaps in that case they upped the number of Horror tokens printed because the effect is repeatable?


text:
How has the rise of limited formats affected MTG set design?
One of the great thing about playing limited is that you have to work with what you've got, no matter how bad it is. This means that even some of the worst cards will occasionally see limited play even if they would have zero chance of making it into a competitive constructeddeck. I assume this has had a strong effect on how Wizards of The Coast designs their cards (especially commons), but I'm curious as to how designing a set for limited AND constructed formats as opposed to constructed only has affected their choices.

What sets were the first to be influenced by the rise of limited formats?
How did/do limited formats affect the design of MTG sets and cards?

IIRC Mirage block was the first to be designed with limited formats in mind, and that was released in 1997, so it's going to take someone with a good memory to describe in any detail how limited affected the design. (Or good Google-fu, I guess - I'm sure there are some discussions about it on the web)

@DavidZaslavsky, agreed. I do remember a comment by Maro that the card Rolling Thunder reminded them never to place an X spell (a damage one at that) in the common slot.

This question would require an essay to answer, and Wizard is really the only one in a position to answer. At best, we could give you a link to something Wizard posted. Since noone has provided, I'm voting to close. Why don't you ask Wizard directly?

@ikegami I disagree. Part 1 has already been answered in the comments, and I wouldn't be surprised if a brief essay or article exists that someone could link to and summarize. I'd also imagine someone with a long history of MtG experience could throw some pretty reasonable guesses out there.

@shujaa, I wouldn't be surprised either. And like you said, the best we can hope are some guesses that sound reasonable. So what are you disagreeing with?

@ikegami I disagree that the question should be closed because a perfect answer is unlikely.

I remember the rise of "common-only" decks around the time of the Mirage block. I'd say that around that time Wizards started making sets that had a greater variety in the common section of the block so that a random grab of cards from the block could still be a decent/playable deck. I remember Vision being one of the popular sets for the good commons. Of course this is greatly based on my personal experience and therefore highly subjective.

While this discussion could be interesting, I feel it's not appropriate here, in my opinion. As per the FAQ: "You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Chatty, open-ended questions diminish the usefulness of our site and push other questions off the front page." This question is the very definition of "open-ended". It belongs in chat.

If you want to find answers to #2 I recommend browsing the archives of Mark Rosewater's Making Magic column.

Can't answer number one but there have been a number of articles published regarding number 2. When designing sets Wizards takes a serious look at the rarity of each card and its effect on limited. Its okay for a mythic rare to be completely, off the wall busted in limited (though they do try to avoid it) because the odds of pulling that card will be so low that it won't have much effect on any given limited tournament. Odds are even in a tournament with 16 people and 3 packs per person that card might not show up at all. The odds are even lower that that specific mythic will show up more than once and even lower still that the same person will be able to get it more than once.
Uncommons and especially commons on the other hand are a different animal. Its a common occurrence in drafts for players to have multiple copies of common and an uncommon cards and for multiple players to have copies of those cards thus the power level of these cards in relation to the rest of the limited environment needs to be more closely tested. Similarly because the bulk of all limited decks will be commons and uncommons wizards needs to make sure of a couple of things.
First they need to make sure that certain roles are filled by the commons and uncommons. This is the reason there will always be some form of common creature removal, common mana fixing (espescially true in a multi color oriented set) and likely some form of common draw and common non-creature removal. It is also one of the reasons that every set will contain common red burn, common blue draw, common green creature pump, common white weenie cards, common black discard ect.
If the set has a new theme or mechanic to it, as most sets do (I can't think of any in recent years that don't) Wizards also needs to make sure those themes and mechanics appear in some form or fashion at the lower rarities and that there is synergy among the cards at those rarities.


text:
Preventing early elimination from ruining someone's first game of Diplomacy?
I'm planning a game of Diplomacy with my friends for this weekend. The problem is, none of us have ever played before, so I'm trying to fill the gaps in my understanding so that our inexperience doesn't reduce the fun.
One of the issues I'm worried about is someone getting eliminated, or practically eliminated, early in the game. I'm not sure how often eliminations happen in the game, but I really don't want to ask someone to reserve four hours of their time to play, only to have them get taken out of the running very early and have to watch the rest of us play. Note that I'm not opposed to someone getting eliminated, but to someone not having fun because they were eliminated.
How often do early eliminations happen in Diplomacy? Do you ever find player elimination to be a problem? What, if anything, do you do to reduce the potential negative impacts of player elimination? What tips would you give a group of noobs with regard to eliminations?

Not a huge Diplomacy expert, but my experience of the game is that newbies are more likely to be shocked by the game going on for hours and hours and hours than they are by "being eliminated quickly".  I take it your group isn't filled with jerks who will savagely pick on  one player as soon as they scent blood in the water?  Diplomacy can feel like a really mean and spiteful game as its main method of getting ahead is the well-timed double-cross, but then it's usually kind of in the interest of the other players to help the betrayed player get revenge...

Like Ry4an said, it is pretty much guaranteed that some people will be eliminated (or nearly so) early on.  You'll want to make people aware of this at the beginning, and set some expectations going in of how people will react (ie Is it OK to just give standing orders for 1 or 2 units and leave? Is it OK to proxy control of units to another player and leave?  Are eliminated players allowed to listen in on negotiations between other players?)  You might want to have other games on hand so that eliminated players can entertain themselves during the negotiation phase and check in on the Diplomacy game occasionally if they're interested in the final outcome.
Another option that I mentioned here is to plan to play several mini-games with pre-determined ending years.  You won't get the full end-game experience, but several shorter games with some time to debrief in between might be a better first Diplomacy experience than one full game with a number of eliminations.

The game will most likely contract from seven players down to six or five within the first 6 turns, with someone hitting zero SCs in Fall 1903.   The first people eliminated will probably be pretty bummed, but usually not so much at the game as at the person they trusted, who stabbed them.
You could arrange to make the first eliminated player become the adjudicator for future orders.  That helps everyone and keeps them in a position to learn more about the game with everyone else.

Let the first eliminated player be the Judge for the remainder of the game - assuming you don't have a Judge already and the player understands the rules well enough.  The Judge can keep and enforce official time, adjudicate the orders, resolve disputes.
Once there are two or more eliminated players, start a second game.  Poker maybe.  Just overhearing the action can be sorta fun.
Team play!  Eliminated players can serve as Ambassadors for remaining players and be hired or fired, or defect, at any time.  (Spy games!) Ambassadors may not submit orders.  As such, this is actually not a rule change or house rule, because nothing in the rules as they are prevents such a thing.  (Now if Ambassadors can submit orders, that's a whole other thing entirely, and would require very specific and clear house rules.)
(For email games where seasons last multiple days)  Ratings Wars!  The "Europa" news magazine releases an issue twice a year, publicly (all players receive it).  Eliminated players become columnists, who receive adjudications, interview the remaining Powers and publish their columns in Europa each season.  No one is required to talk to columnists, and columnists are not required to interview players.  (Who needs sources?)  If there are multiple columnists, each player may optionally cast votes (up to one vote per owned center) to the columnists in any combination they choose along with their seasonal orders.  Europa is then published alongside the adjudication.  Columnists have their own meta-game competing for votes.  This could affect the "real" game quite a bit.

Players can be eliminated in two ways. 1) They get "wiped out," losing all of their supply centers and pieces. 2) They are surrounded and about to get wiped out, so they resign by declaring "civil disorder." Their piece remain on the board until eliminated, and they can't move, but other players can "support" individual pieces located in cities to prevent them from being captured by a third party.
Elimination usually takes time (at least two or three game years), but is part of the game, so people need to learn this. If everyone is new, there may be a lot of back and forth that will prevent people from being eliminated quickly. And even after elimination, there is an incentive for people to stick around: 1) to see others get eliminated and 2) to learn from the experience of others.
One way to greatly reduce the chances of your new players' being eliminated early is to have them draw separately for the corner countries that are less likely to get eliminated. In Diplomacy, Should You Have Separate Country "Draws" For Players of Different Experience?
Once these players have drawn their countries, you can have a full draw for everyone else.


text:
When is it advisable to take Blue cards in the first age in Seven Wonders?
I've played several games of Seven Wonders now, and I'm still figuring out a lot of the strategy. I've learned that every card has its place and advantages, but the one group of cards that seems most useless is the blue cards in age 1.
It's not that the blue cards in Age 1 are bad, it's just that the other alternatives seem better. If you can take almost any brown, gray, or yellow card instead it seems like it's almost always a good idea to do so because the will help you get more points for every single turn in the future instead of just being worth 2 or 3 at the end of the game. If I can take a green card instead of a blue I'll usually do it unless I'm really short on money and have to pay my last coins for it. I'll also usually prefer red over blue in the first round because they usually give you close to the same point value at the end of the round as well as help you win future wars.
If you don't need the extra 3 coins from discarding or are planning on using them to get some Age 2 blue cards I can see them being valuable. But won't you usually be able to use the money to get something much better? And isn't it usually a better idea to focus on getting resources so you won't need to use the free-construction benefit? When is it a good idea to pick the Civilian Structures in the first Age?

A good question to ask yourself here: does everyone in my playgroup have the same distaste for blue cards that I feel?  If so, if they're predisposed to ignore them in favour of "cooler" cards, you could easily make a killing by snapping them up.
I will agree that something like the Pawnshop (3 victory points, that's it), doesn't seem like an exciting card, though it could make for a perfectly acceptable last or second-to-last pick: better than nothing right?  But stuff like the Altar or Theater, which are the first stages in the Altar-Temple-Pantheon and the Theater-Statue-Gardens chain, may be deceptively good.  2 victory points for a pick doesn't seem great.  12 or 11 points (respectively) for 3 picks is slightly better.  Are you playing a resource-light game where something like the Pantheon will be way out of your reach in Age III?  Then Altar could prove a much better pick for you than some other random nonsense.
Remember that every time you pick a resource, it costs you a pick.  Is picking up 3 resources better value for money than getting 12 easy points from the Altar, Temple and Pantheon chain?  You're already 12 points down, pick for pick, due to your concentration on resources, so you'd better hope you can make plenty of profit out of spending them...
I wouldn't want to praise the blue cards too highly: resources are the backbone of the game and you definitely don't want to end up in a situation where you have nothing to do in the final Age apart from discarding for coins!  But an experienced player who understands the chains, and which early picks can get you valuable later picks for free, can definitely make a tidy profit.  Just make sure the players with all the resources don't buy "your" upgrades out from under you to screw you over!

I agree for the most part, but I wouldn't describe picking an early blue as 12 easy points as you have to actually be passed those cards first. That's not too hard in a 3 player game, but in a game with 5 players there are good odds that you might never even seen the corresponding blue cards you're looking for. And if you're opponents are skillful enough, they might just deny you the card in the first place.

@Crazy: Hence the first line of my answer.  If other players like collecting blue cards, then you don't want to be fighting for them.  I actually played a 6-player game of Seven Wonders last night and picked up a couple of first round blue cards: but when I noticed that a couple of other players at the table were also collecting them, I abandoned that line of play pretty fast.  But if everyone else is fighting over military or science or what have you, a blue strategy is very much on.

I agree that it is pretty rare for taking these to be right, although I have to say I would usually prefer taking one to taking 3 bucks unless I know I will have money issues.  There are a few circumstances, however, when it makes some sense.

If you start with a rock resource because of your wonder, or happen to have built a rock resource, and are not planning to build more rock, consider the 3VP blue with an upgrade path to the 2nd round blue that costs 3 rock.
If you are going science-heavy, planning on using upgrades more than resources, taking one of the upgrade-able blues may give you more options in the 2nd age.  For example, if you are heavily buying manufactured goods and not buying basic resources, being able to upgrade to  (basic-resource-heavy) blues may help.  Of course, you only buy these as a fallback plan, but it is a case where you could prefer them to resources.
You are using a pure yellow card strategy and are not buying resources - then you'd prefer a blue to a resource.  Early, while you are still poor, play a free blue rather than spending 2 bucks on a resource from your neighbor, as you will need that cash later when you can spend it more efficiently.
You see that you can force your neighbor to build resources (or do badly in the game) because both you and her other neighbor are going resource-lite.  Then build a blue (helpfully passing her the resources), and make sure to build a trading post pointing in her direction.

As other answers have pointed it out, it really depends on what you're doing with the game, and what others are doing.
For example - building brown and grey cards is a great strategy if your neighbors aren't, because then they'll buy them from you. If they are... then maybe you should consider just buying theirs.
Reds are an easy eighteen points... so long as your neighbors don't build them. If they are, then you might want to consider spending your turns building something else.
Blues, like any color, will rarely win the game in and of themselves, but can be a huge hand in doing it - think 20-30 points.
You're right that the 2-3 points probably aren't a game winning amount (though remember that you could have got 10 points from blues, just from Age I ) - their value is definitely far more in the free upgrades.
Certainly what I recommend is: in most cases, if you're going to build Age I blues, build them with the intention of building the Age II and Age III upgrades because that's where their real value is. If you're not planning on building the upgrades, I'd suggest that build browns/greys or yellows would be better instead.
I would suggest that your strategy is bad if trashing blues for cash is an optimal move.


text:
I have the Alhambra base set only, in which order should I buy the expansions?
I have the Alhambra base game, and now I'm curious about the expansions:

In what order would you suggest I buy the expansions?
What does each one add to the game?
How do the added components affect the gameplay?

Feel free to comment about any of them that you have as I know not many people may not have all of them.

You can actually get all of them in an "Alhambra Big Box" format, which I would highly recommend as a cost-effective purchase... though of course this isn't much help to people who already have the base set!  I'll answer this question and tell you my thoughts on the ones I've played with at some point soonish...

Here are summaries of five of the Alhambra expansions with links to detailed video reviews by Tom Vasel. He gives opinions on which ones are the best and which ones are not worth it. I've included some highlights from each video. I recommend watching and deciding for yourself. All quotes are from Tom Vasel.
Expansion 1 "The Vizier's Favor"
Alhambra Expansion 1 Review
On BoardGameGeek rating as of 2012-11-09: 6.09/10
Overall

Expansion one is my least favorite of the five expansions  … if I was buying the expansions separately I think I would skip … as part of the Big Box, fine

"The Vizier's Favor" allows players to buy a token out of turn once with exact change. May refresh the ability at the cost of all their actions on a future turn.

Ok … would use occasionally, but not one that I would get too attached to

"Currency Exchange" cards are shuffled into deck, can be taken instead of a currency card. Can be used to allow use of currency of one color for a different color as shown on card.

I like this module … best module from the first expansion … a lot of fun … would play with these much of the time

"Bonus Cards" cards that show specific buildings are dealt secretly to each player at beginning of game. During scoring if you have built the building shown on your card you may reveal it to count as an extra building of that type.

By far my least favorite of all the modules for all the expansions … for the most part [it never matters]

"The Workers Huts" new building tiles that are placed in stacks beside board. You may take a hut for free, but are limited to three per player. During scoring is worth as many buildings as the number of adjacent buildings of the same color.

An expansion I use all the time

Expansion 2 "The City Gates"
Alhambra Expansion 2 Review
On BoardGameGeek rating as 2012-11-09: 7.11/10
Overall

If you only get one expansion … then expansion two by far is the best one

"The City Gates" cards are shuffled into the deck, may be taken when revealed. Allows you to place a gate token over walls to ignore them when building.

If you find yourself hemmed in and you need to add more tiles, this is an excellent expansion in that regard … really cool pieces … a module that I really like

"The Diamonds" new currency shuffled into the deck, essentially wild cards, can be used as any currency, but cannot be combined with regular currency.

I really enjoy the extra currency. This is another module that I really enjoy and it's one that I will almost always stick in the deck.

"The Characters" several characters are shuffled into the deck, when one is revealed there is an auction for character. The bids must be single color currency. Each character grants owner special abilities.

Something I like using, I won't use it all the time … it adds special powers to the game

"The Camps" camp tiles are added to the bag. Must be placed with wall adjacent to a wall of your alhambra. During scoring you get points for each tile in the row or column indicated by the camp.

My favorite module, I almost always play with this module because it adds a lot of enjoyment even though it's a simple change …

Expansion 3 "The Thief's Turn"
Alhambra Expansion 3 Review
On BoardGameGeek rating as of 2012-11-09: 7.03/10
Overall

My second favorite expansion … the main reason is the coin module

"The City Walls" cards are shuffled into the deck, may be taken when revealed. If taken you will place walls onto a tile already on the board as indicated by the card.

There's an module in expansion four … this is a good combination with that … I use City Walls sometimes … it just feels a little fiddly

"The Thieves" cards that show a a specific currency are dealt randomly to each player at the beginning of the game. You may play the card out of turn to take a currency of the indicated color.

It's okay … but it has a limited amount of uses.

"The Change" coins in each currency are placed into a bag. When you buy a tile, if you overpay for every two currency you overpay you may draw one coin from the bag. Coins may be used as one currency of the indicated type.

This is super fun and makes it into almost every game I play … neat idea

"The Street Trader" a market tile allows you to place meeples on tiles you build under certain conditions. During scoring sets of different colored meeples are worth points.

An interesting idea but changes Alhambra to a huge degree … it feels very convoluted … it takes away from everything else

Expansion 4 "The Treasure Chamber"
Alhambra Expansion 4 Review
On BoardGameGeek rating as of 2012-11-08: 7.10/10
Overall

I like the fourth expansion almost as much as I like the third … some decent ideas in this expansion

"The Treasure Chamber" different colored treasure chests are placed randomly in lots of four on a treasure chamber board. You may use your turn to pay 8 currency of any color to buy a lot of treasure chests and place them on buildings in your alhambra of matching colors, extras are discarded. During scoring the player with the most treasure chests earns points.

I like the treasure chests, it adds a lot to the game without making it too complicated

"The Master Builders" cards are given to the players and added to the deck. They can be used as three currency of the indicated color, or can be used to take an extra realignment action.

I like having all the extra threes in the deck … it's not the greatest of the modules but it's a good one

"The Invaders" In each scoring round a card is revealed to show which direction invaders will attack. Tiles that do not have walls in the direction of the attack lose points. Scout cards help to learn the direction of the impending attack.

It's a neat idea, and yet one of my least favorite of the modules … everyone gets so worried about the attacks and the points they take off aren't really that big of a deal

"The Bazaars" bazaar tiles indicating three colors and a currency are added to the bag. When they are revealed they may be bought with exact change of the currency indicated. At the end of the game the bazaar is worth points based on adjacent buildings matching the indicated colors.

I really enjoy it because it allows you to build your alhambra bigger … they encourage diversity … I really do enjoy playing with [this one]

Expansion 5 "Power of the Sultan"
Alhambra Expansion 5 Review
On BoardGameGeek rating as of 2012-11-09: 7.04/10
Overall

Should have stopped while they were ahead, I almost want to call this the convoluted expansion … I'm not a huge fan of expansion five … there's some neat things in it that I can use … it seems like they're running out of ideas

"The New Score Cards" new score card tiles allow for building colors to be valued randomly for each scoring round.

This adds some variety … I like this, it makes you look ahead … a good expansion, one I use quite often

"The Power of the Sultan" a sultan card and die allow for a tile of a specific color to be taken for free.

A bit of forward planning … it feels kind of odd … it's not one that I want to use very often … the amount of work put into it doesn't seem to be worth the payoff

"The Caravanserai" a card can be purchased that can be used for different, increasingly valuable currencies each turn.

Like a constantly recharging currency … not as great as you might think because while it's reusable it does take a while to [gain value] … despite all that I like it … not one that I would use all the time

"The Art of the Moors" playing matching tiles can lead to points at the end of the game through some complicated mechanics. Also has some tile reference cards that are useful regardless of expansions in use.

In essence, a very convoluted … way to score the tiles by numbers in addition to scoring them by colors … I don't really know what to think about that … too complicated

Could you perhaps mention some of the important points from those videos? Besides making your answer useful should the videos disappear, it'll also keep us from having to spend half an hour each watching the videos in order to figure out the actual answer to the question.


text:
What can I do to ensure that my friends' first game of Arkham Horror with me is as awesome as possible?
I bought Arkham Horror about 2 months ago and have played 2 practice rounds by myself. I'm confident I know all the rules and understand the game well enough to be able to explain them. However, I love the atmosphere in Arkham, and I really want to give my first time players the best possible experience and make the it more than just a game to them, but a role-playing experience.
I've figured out that I'm going to run the game as a sort of dungeon-master. I'm still going to play, but I will take charge of reading the mythos and encounter cards, and will frequently sprinkle in some actual description of what is happening. For example:

As you walk into Ma's Boarding House, the terrible sinking feeling of evil you've been feeling fades away as you see the good friends of yours that have stuck it out thus far. However, you can't help feeling a terrible regret that you will eventually have to leave the shelter of this kind place and go back into the cruel world beyond it's doors.

You tried to evade the fire vampire as it passed by sneaking into an alleyway and lying down next to a dumpster, but it was able to feel the fear beating in your heart and quickly turned to look at you with a gaze that penetrated far deeper than just your eyes and unleashes a blinding ball of fire at you.

I feel like its these bits of flavor text that really make the game 'come alive'. However, I've been considering taking things a bit further and giving the players some choices that they wouldn't have if we were just playing strait Arkham Horror:

(I draw an encounter card to see what
  would happen if the player decides to
  have an encounter). As you as you walk
  up to the door of the Silver Twilight
  Lodge, you start to feel incredibly
  insignificant as you stare at the
  arched doorway and the tall spires
  atop the roof. Do you go in, or try to
  gather more information?
(player) I'll try to get some more
  information.
(Me) Okay, what does your investigator
  do?
(player) uh...Put my ear to the door
  and listen?
(Me, narrating) You can discern one
  voice in the distance, possible
  conducting a ceremony. However, it is
  far and distant, and you might be able
  to use the distraction to snoop around
  a bit.
(player converses with friends) I think I'll open the door carefully.
etc. etc. etc.

Has anyone here ran a game of AH like this, giving players more options than the game normally would (Perhaps they might get a combat bonus if they were able to use water against the fire vampire in the previous description...)? I've played D&D, but I've never really been the DM before. I'm considering playing a scenario like this one to enhance the experience and give me a bit of structure to build off of.
Any other advice about creating a good role-playing experience in AH, or general advice about introducing people to the game? I'll gladly read and up-vote any suggestions or shared experiences. :D

Sounds like you are about ready to run a (tabletop roleplaying) game of Call of Cthulhu!  I'm sure there must exist essays on how to be a good CoC Keeper that would very much apply to running an Arkham Horror session in this way... I'll keep my eye out.

Yes, this might work better over on RPG.stackexchange, but I'm not sure.  Maybe folks will have good answers here.

I think getting Cthulhu to show up in person would be pretty awesome.

I second the notion that what you want to do is play CoC. And I know you just got AH, but my RPG group has really embraced Mansions of Madness as an RPG-in-a-box experience much more than they ever did AH. MoM has the Keeper-vs-Investigators aspect you're trying to inject into AH and is built around creating cohesive narrative in a way that AH just isn't. Still, I'd like to see an edit here post-game that lets us know how it turns out.

I've done something similar for some of the games of AH that I've been in. Not to the extent of adding theme/flavor into the cards and allowing playing input during encounters though; I only read encounters and mythos cards for them.
To start off, I'd be wary about pulling out all the stops to create an involved role-playing AH experience for a group's first game. Even if there is someone present that knows all the rules, there will still be rule misunderstandings, one-off nuances that need consideration, and re-explanations requested, which will break the thematic stride that you're striving to establish. But more importantly, (and this partially depends on how large the group is) games can take a long time. My group has played Arkham at least a hundred times (sounds a bit ridiculous to me, but we've been playing over 4 years), and we still have games that run into the 4+ hour mark. This can be a bit long for new players that don't know what they're getting into, and inundating the game with extra theme (along with this being people's first game) will only make the play time longer. My advice would be to get your friends to enjoy the game and understand gameplay better before going for a fully immersive experience.
That all said, here's what I did when I ran as the 'Keeper'. The first thing that ruins Arkham for new players (besides game length) is how vicious the game has the potential to become. I've found that a nice way to control the difficulty of the game is by drawing two or three mythos cards rather than one every turn, and the pick the one you'll put into play. This helps prevent the same gate from monster surging 4 times in a row and flooding the streets with things the players can't handle, as well as allowing you to give the game a quick boost by throwing the players a curveball if they're doing too well (drawing someone through a gate, destroying some clues on the board, moving some monsters directly in the path someone was planning on taking, etc.) In the future, it could also allow you a little leeway in picking headlines to enact if you're looking for a thematic progression. You can do the same for Arkham or OW encounters as well. For the encounters, one way of working towards the RP experience with going to the full extent that you described (allowing the players to invent their own responses) is to not tell the players what happens should they pass/fail until after they've rolled/spent clue tokens. In my group however, I've noticed that this can irritate some players. After they've played a number of games where they know the entirety of the encounter before making the check, they aren't keen to give up that slight advantage for some extra perceived theme. Anyways...
You could even do the same with monsters; pick specific monsters that you want to throw at people. McGlen have a particularly close match against a Shuggoth earlier? Now there's one back for round 2! It's also a good way to make sure the board isn't flooded with particularly weak/strong things and ensure that the Dhole gets his requisite board time.
The scenarios that were released for the Arkham League are good for a continuous campaign of sorts; the 'stories' from one game to the next are loosely tied together, but that's about it for theme. There are some extra gameplay conditions that the scenarios will throw in there, but that may just confuse new players if they expect those rules to be in subsequent games.
In short, make sure your friends enjoy the game for what it is before adding things to it (helping them to realize this if necessary of course...). All of the flavor and theme in the world won't make someone enjoy this game if they just don't like the mechanics in the first place.
Good luck!

First, there is an amazing condensed rule sheet at http://www.headlesshollow.com/freebies_games.html. Page 2-3 will help you to quickly explain the rules (use the official rulebook for examples and clarification). I printed multiple copies of page 12, so other players could easily reference them. The last couple pages help to simplify game mechanics by putting them on the board.
I've played with a soundtrack off of groveshark while playing. Some of the existing playlists are excellent, and occasionally the music will change as a monster surge occurs, an epic battle, or devastating mythos card. This adds to the sense of urgency, madness, and the overall feeling that the game is malign.
When playing with new players, I usually choose Azathoth. Sure, the instant defeat is daunting, but he has very limited power during gameplay (plus you skip battling the ancient one until people have mastered the check system).
The best thing to do is make sure that you have the check system down perfectly and can quickly determine the number of dice needed, number of sucesses, etc. Tell the player that they need to roll X dice and get Y 5s or 6s (and adjust what you say for curses and blessings). This also helps if you can get other experienced players.

As a novice player (I've played once with friends, some of whom had no prior experience either), one thing about Arkham Horror that was something of a challenge was figuring out what was possible or advisable (or both). One advantage to running an RPG-ish version of AH is that you can actually take some of that burden off the players, depending on how you want to run the game. Rather than letting newcomers getting bogged down in how-many-spaces-is-X-from-Y, narrating it can help them decide what they actually want to do ... it might be easier to say "That looked like a smallish shape, I'll see if I can track it down" than to say "Which of these is weaker, do you think? And should I try to purchase another item? Or where did you want me to go again? Which gate?"
One thing you'll definitely need is time! If you can book an entire evening, you'll have more time to spend on the atmosphere and the narration. Get them interested in the background as well as the gameplay, and chances are good they will come back for more. (We haven't scheduled another session yet, but that's been more of a time issue than anything else.)

I would recommend a soundtrack of creepy music, played at lower-than-normal volume, so it lurks just at the threshold of the players' awareness.  You don't need to run Arkham Horror as a full-on tabletop roleplaying experience to create an atmosphere (though if you feel up to it, I definitely think you should go for it!)... just a little extra attention to detail and atmospherics can instantly get the players into the right frame of mind to have a memorably sanity-blasting evening.
(I'd say dim the lights too, but Arkham Horror probably has a lot of text that people will need to pore over, I don't want to permanently ruin everyone's eyesight!)


text:
Learning to build multi-color decks in Magic
I'm a MTG noob, and currently I've only built single-color decks. However, I want to explore the art of building decks that use cards of multiple colors.

What are the advantages of a multicolor deck? Why do people decide to build them? What goes into the process of deciding which colors and cards to combine? Do people decide to build a red-green deck and then find the best cards to use, or do they decide on the kind of cards they want and later figure that red-green would probably give the best results?
Do multicolor decks usually have an equal amount of lands and spells of each color? Or can you have one primary color and one secondary color? Which is more efficient/better and why?
How can I choose what spells of each color to add so I get color-screwed as little as possible? If all my creatures are of one color, and I don't get any land of that color, I'm in trouble. Likewise, if I have a lot of spells that require multiple mana of one color, they will be harder to cast in a multi-color deck than in a single color one.
What cards become more/less valuable in a multicolor vs. single color deck? Obviously cards that can generate mana of different colors become more valuable and cards that require lots of mana of one color become less valuable for starters. How can I take maximum advantage of cards that are better in multicolor decks and avoid those that are weaker?

The other answers have explained pretty well what the advantages of a multicolor deck are, but I think I can add something on this point:

What goes into the process of deciding which colors and cards to combine? Do people decide to build a red-green deck and then find the best cards to use, or do they decide on the kind of cards they want and later figure that red-green would probably give the best results?

It depends on what level you play at. A beginner might very well decide to make a deck of a specific color combination, and then perhaps be guided toward a particular strategy by that choice of colors - for example, choosing to play red-green kind of pushes you toward playing a deck with strong creatures and burn spells, or blue-white would push you toward a control deck with counterspells, white removal, and a few flying creatures.
But at higher levels, people don't think that much about colors when building a deck, at least not right at the beginning - for one thing, even once you choose a color or colors, there are still many thousands of cards to pick from in those colors. Pro deck designers usually build around a specific card, or more often, a specific combination of two or three cards, which typically sets the color scheme for the deck. For example, the Exarch-Twin deck that's currently popular relies on Deceiver Exarch (blue) and Splinter Twin (red), which requires that the deck is going to be blue-red. Or Valakut decks need Primeval Titan, so they pretty much have to be green-red (unless you have access to Prismatic Omen, but that's a different story). The Tempered Steel deck from Scars of Mirrodin Block Constructed is an example of a deck whose color (white) was set by a single card - of course, that was only possible because the cards that Tempered Steel works well with happen to be colorless.
In some other cases (actually this is pretty common), you might start out with one or two cards and begin building a deck around those cards' color(s), but then you discover that the deck doesn't work very well without a certain kind of effect that you can only get in a different color. A good example of this is Pyromancer Ascension. You could, in principle, build a mono-red deck around that card, but in order to get the enchantment active, you typically need to find and cast two copies of two different cards - for example, two Lightning Bolts and two Shocks. That's not likely to happen before your opponent kills you, unless you have a way to filter through your deck looking for multiple copies of spells - and that's where blue spells like Preordain come in. This is why Ascension decks are blue-red, and in fact why a lot of different decks (like the Puresteel Paladin/equipment combo deck) like to add blue, even when you might not think it's necessary.

+1, excellent current real-world examples of why some popular multicolour decks had to be the colours they are.  It's sometimes quite hard to articulate exactly why some colour combinations don't work - R/G, U/W, and to an extent U/R are popular draft combinations, but there seems to be a general consensus that, for instance, B/W is generally pretty bad, and I think it would take me a while to put into words exactly why!

Actually, I didn't even think about addressing draft decks! But I guess the idea is similar, in that whatever bombs or early removal spells you get generally set your colors. It's a good point to bring up about how certain color combinations work better than others. (Honestly, I don't think B/W is quite as bad as some people give it credit for, as long as you're paying attention to what kinds of cards actually go in your deck and not just picking whatever comes by in those colors.)

1.
Generally, multicolour decks are built because there is some synergy between the strategies and strengths of the two colours which makes them stronger together than separately as mono-color decks. For example, red/green decks are popular because the removal of red helps the large efficient creatures of green hit the opponent. Blue/green decks use the mana acceleration of green to fuel the card advantage of blue. A white/red deck swarms the opponent with small creatures more reliably as white gains some removal and red gains some resilience. Blue/black is always popular for "control" decks, as black has the creature and card removal, and blue has the spell counters and card drawing.
It's a bit to broad a question to ask how to choose what colours to build a deck around. When building decks for a standard or limited tournament, it depends greatly on the current "metagame" — what decks are doing well in tournaments and how to counteract them or exploit them.
2.
See above. It really depends on the metagame. In general, a two-colour deck will have their colours fairly equally split. Sometimes a third colour will be splashed in. Some blocks even encouraged four or five colour decks, as they had powerful cards that kicked in when you had more mana available.
3.
Two-colour decks, even more than one-colour decks, rely on using mulligans wisely. Generally you will avoid using many cards that require two of the same colour mana. If you do, they will probably be the big "finishers" in your deck.
Many multi-colour or mana-fixing lands and spells are available in most environments. Really, building a competative two-colour deck is not an issue. Be careful not to overload too much on mana-fixing spells and artifacts. These cards help you get the mana you need, but they won't win the game by themselves.
4.
I think the answers to #1 apply here. You want to look for cards which enhance the strategies of each other, and not even concern yourself so much with colour until you build your mana base.
I think it's best to learn by taking apart and tinkering with other successful decks to see how they're made. A good resource for this is the Top Decks weekly column at Wizards.

(1) Each of the five Magic colours has its own strengths and weaknesses. (Historically, blue had fewer weaknesses and more strengths than any of the rest, which led to some wags dubbing Island "the most broken card in Magic", but things are much more balanced these days.)  A mono-coloured deck is liable to be very good at doing one, narrow thing, but only at the exclusion of versatility.  Quite often, mono decks roll over and die to "colour hoser" cards, or just simple strategies they can't deal with.  If you're a red burn deck, you may simply not be able to deal with copious amounts of lifegain, and you have absolutely no way of dealing with any enchantment once it hits the table.  Adding in another colour helps you shore up your weaknesses, at the expense of some of the single-minded purposefulness and drive.
(2) This completely depends on the objectives of your deck, but: a two-colour deck with a 50/50 split probably leaves you with an acceptable chance of drawing both the colours you need.  A four colour deck with an even split of spells of all its colours sounds like an unholy mess of mana issues.  In practice, a lot of multicolour decks are heavy green, due to green having far the best mana fixers.
(3) See above: I'd start with a heavy green deck with Birds of Paradise, Rampant Growths, cards like that that enable you to grab whatever other colours are needed by the cards that you draw.  Failing that, you're going to have to get good at assembling complex mana bases with dual lands, fetch lands, colour-fixing artifacts and so forther.
(4) Dual lands are probably the holy grail of multicolour Magic: unfortunately the ones with the least significant drawbacks are often rare, and often quite expensive to obtain.  (See also, the rare and very sought-after Birds of Paradise.)  It's all about the manabases really and I wouldn't worry about anything else to start with.  You're right though that cards with more than a couple of coloured mana in their casting costs are probably a pretty bad idea to coexist in a multicoloured deck, though I've seen some incredibly greedy pro decks enabled by the Lorwyn "Vivid" lands plus Reflecting Pools, so anything is possible in the right environment...

First, I total agree with what everyone has said and also want to add a couple more things.  Once you have decided on your 'main' cards (1,2 or 3) to build your deck around, have 2, 3 or 4 of those cards in your deck.  The same thing goes with your supporting cards, I may not put 4 of the same support card because you want them to support in ANY situation.
Second, I don't think anyone said this, Yes, the first times you play ANY deck, not pre made, is a trial and error and you may end up starting over.
Lastly, in multicolour decks, I love artifacts.

Be careful picking what artifacts to include in a multicolour deck. You want ones that are cheap, and that you can rely on throughout your game. For instance, Navigator's Compass is a very cheap card that can essentially give you any colour mana you want (and it gives health!). Terrarion, however, is only a one-time use and therefore should be avoided. Here are some good artifacts for a multicolour deck:
Prismatic Lens
Chromatic Lantern
Pillar Of Origins (I've seen this work really well in Sliver decks)
Ixalan and Rivals of Ixalan have Pirate cards that produce artifacts that give any colour mana to your mana pool. Cards like Trove of Temptation and Captain Lannery Storm give a steady flow of these. Attaching Prying Blade to a creature that has a lot of evasive abilities like shadow or flying can also provide a good stream to pull out the big creatures.
Also, going back to Pillar of Origins earlier, there are cards such as Manaweft Sliver and Gemhide Sliver which are really useful when pulling out expensive Sliver cards such as Sliver Legion and Sliver Queen out. I can also see this working quite well for a rainbow Changeling deck, if you can find good enough Changeling cards to pull one together.

all_licenses: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
What computer games based on Magic: The Gathering are there?
I've had a ton of fun playing an old version of Shandalar on my PC. The computer opponents are great and I love the card antes and everything, but there's only around 600 cards and the rules are somewhat out of date (you get a mulligan ONLY if you got no land or spells).
Are there any newer MTG computer games? I have these preferences:

I do NOT want online play. I know there's plenty of places for that, but it's not what I'm looking for.
As many cards as possible. 600 sounds like a lot, but at this point I've pretty much seen all of them, so there as many new things in the game.
True to actual MTG rules. I don't want an RTS or anything, I want to play real Magic, just against the computer.

I know there's a list here, but many of those come nothing close to my conditions. If I need to I'll ask on gaming, but I thought I'd try here first as I don't know how many people there actually play Magic.

You should definitely give "Wagic: The Homebrew" a shot. It's pretty much what you are looking for. It has over 8000 supported cards, a shop system and an extensive list of AI opponents.

FWIW, this would be a question to ask on Gaming chat, not on the site itself. Game-rec questions are prohibited per the FAQ there. (Something else you should add to your list is an AI that can handle many cards in play: the old DotP locks up if you have more than 10-12 creatures in play. The combinations are too much for it.)

Maybe you should rethink the online aspect.  I know you specifically said you don't want that, but MTGO meets both of your other requirements beautifully and you can always find an opponent.

As a funny twist, there was "Lambda: The gathering" spin-off with a twist as a task for ICFPC 2011.

If you enjoyed Shandalar, then the spiritual successor is Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012
Download the demo. It hits all your points, just ignore the online play option.

The new Duel of the Planeswalkers games are at best the spiritual successor to the Shandalar Duel and online play modes. It's little more than an expensive advertising campaign (expensive for the buyer) for MtG and MtG:O, and it has absolutely nothing on the still great Shandalar campaign mode and deckbuilder.

@Hackworth, DotP is definitely a limited experience compared to MtGO or IRL Magic, but it's comparatively cheap and offers quite a large number of hours of Magic play against AI opponents who give at least an appearance of knowing what they're doing.  It's not everything I could imagine wanting out of a digital Magic game.  It's still a good game and excellent value for money - compared to the competition!

It sounds like what you're looking for is basically a Magic artificial intelligence. Magic is a complex game so creating an AI to play it is pretty difficult. That being said, it has been done (well, attempted); I have memories dating from probably 5+ years ago of playing against a computer opponent in some program whose identity I forget. The computer wasn't all that good though. (I wasn't all that good back then, and it didn't take me long to learn to beat it reliably)
From the list you linked to, under the section "Independent and freeware adaptations" there are a few listings that mention AI being included. I'd suggest you take a look at those if you haven't already, although I wouldn't expect too much because, as I said, it's a very difficult problem... even more so because Wizards tends to crack down on independent developers using the Magic brand.


text:
What's the difference between the different Bohnanza expansions? How do they change the game?
My friends have grown to love Bohnanza for its simple rules and constant negotiations, so I've grown curious about the expansions. Here are a few of the higher ranked:

Bohnaparte
high-bohn plus
ladybohn
mutabohn
several more here

Here's my questions:

What does each one add to the game?
How does each change the strategy and gameplay?
How does each one change the overall feel of the game, in terms of competition, complexity, etc.?
Which are your favorites and why?

Any other differences or recommendations would be awesome. :D

I can't answer your question in its fullness, as the only one of these expansions I have played is Bohnaparte, and it was once and a couple of years ago!  But I can tell you what my impressions of that were...
Bohnaparte constitutes a pretty drastic reworking of the Bohnanza game (to use a topical example, it's on a par with how Zooloretto expands on Coloretto).  Instead of a simple bean-farming game, you are now playing a Napoleonic wargame!  Albeit a simple, cartoonish one.  You lay out a map with areas of varying strategic import, and you now have to conquer it with your bean-troops, as well as growing beans in the usual way to maintain your economy.
At the time, I wasn't really a fan.  It didn't seem to me like a particularly deep wargame, or a particularly logical extension to the Bohnanza theme.  However, I do recall some nice mechanics: I believe the "valuable" beans (like Red) are weak in combat compared to the "common" beans (like Blue) - so it was a lot less clear which were the best beans: do you put a premium on combat or economic profit?  On the minus side, I remember the scoreline of our game being very close, and the result being basically decided on one player getting an extra turn over me due to the vagaries of the seating order.  That is probably true to the spirit of the original Bohnanza, I guess, but I remember being quite miffed at the time!
I guess if you play a whole lot of Bohnanza, to the point where you're getting jaded, Bohnaparte will certainly inject fresh interest into proceedings!  But I did think it was more of a novelty expansion than a must-purchase.  Unless your two favourite things in the world are the Napoleonic era and Bohnanza.  Then you should almost certainly buy it without delay!

What an odd sounding expansion!  Unfortunately, that last sentence does register with me.  They may not be my two favorite things, but they're on the list!

It is odd.  I'm a bit worried I may have underrated it, because I had a negative reaction to it the one time I played.  I wouldn't want to put you off trying it if silly Napoleonic bean-warfare sounds like just your thing!

I can only answer for High-Bohn. They add new beans, but more importantly both add other things too.
High-Bohn adds facilities you can buy for money that has special beans on the other side. For example, there are facilities you can only buy with red beans. These facilities add new rules for you to use, like adding another field for only one sort of beans, changing the beanometers for some types of beans, give additional bonus at the end of the game, add a storage for the cards you draw for trade and so on.
Ladybohn adds female beans, that change the beanometer if placed on top.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/


text:
How do the various expansions for Arkham Horror change the game? In what order would you recommend buying them?
Currently there are 7 different expansions for Arkham Horror, and I'm need some advice as which to buy.

How does each expansion change the game?
What new components does it offer?
In what order and in what circumstances would you recommend buying it?

Feel free to list whatever information you can on the expansions you have, as I realize that very few people will have 7. :D

I'll list the expansions in the order they were released, and give you some basic information and my experiences with them.

Curse of the Dark Pharaoh - The first expansion, a "small box" expansion that just adds new cards.  Out of all of the expansions, this one (currently) adds the smallest amount to the game.  It adds a few new mechanics in the Exhibit Items (which are a different class of Unique Items), being able to be locked out of a neighbourhood, and the benefits and detriments.  There's a revised version coming out during the summer of 2011, so if you were planning on getting it, you may want to consider waiting until then, as it will completely replace the old version.
Dunwich Horror - This was the first "big box" expansion that adds to the board.  It also adds 8 new investigators, 4 new Ancient Ones, and some new mechanics (Injuries and Madnesses, conditions, Vortex Spaces, Stalkers) and monsters and whatnot.  It's a pretty fun expansion, in my opinion.  The Dunwich Horror itself is a fun encounter, and the new location fits in well and adds to the board well.
The King in Yellow - Another "small box."  It adds Heralds (which are kind of like mini-Ancient Ones that add debuffs or other challenges to the game, you know, if things are going to easy for you) and persistent Magical Effects.  It also adds Blights, and has a cool Acts and Yellow Sign mechanics, which can really amp up the intensity of the game.
Kingsport Horror - A "big box" that adds to the game board again, and also comes with new investigators and Ancient Ones.  It also includes some new mechanics, like Rift gates (movable Gates), Epic Battles (which are cards that add a little more structure and excitement to battles with the Ancient Ones), and Guardians (the opposite of Heralds, these provide mechanics and buffs to help the investigators).  While I like the Guardians and the Epic Battles, Kingsport itself is incredibly annoying.  You pretty much have to have at least one investigator up there, running around doing the equivalent of busywork to keep Rifts from popping up keeping it under control.
The Black Goat of the Woods - A "small box" expansion that introduces Difficulty cards (things too easy last time?  Play at a harder difficulty as described by these cards), Corruption (effects triggered by other effects in the game, like monster movement), and Cult encounters.  You can even join the cult.  I wasn't a big fan of this box, but I know a lot of other players love it.  I just didn't find it really added anything to the game.
Innsmouth Horror - This is my favourite expansion.  It's a "big box" that adds to the board, as well as adding new investigators, a whole whack of Ancient Ones (8), two more Heralds, the aquatic movement mechanic, and Personal Stories, which are a lot of fun.  They're kind of meta-game missions for each character that can add some cool mechanics or enhance a character if successfully completed... or really hinder a character if failed.  They can detract from the main goal of the game, however, so you have to be careful.  Innsmouth is an interesting place with its own mechanics that don't feel like busywork like Kingsport.  The Ancient Old ones here are also quite interesting, with their own mechanics and challenges.
The Lurker at the Threshold - The latest "small box" expansion, this adds Gate tokens with new mechanics that replace the existing Gates in the game, Relationship cards which can change how your investigator relates to the other investigators in the game (in both positive and negative ways), and the Lurker at the Threshold herald, who can be a help or a hinderance.  He likes to help you succeed at casting spells... but there may be a price to pay.  If you don't tend to play spell casters, it's also completely ignorable.

Spring 2011 will see the release of the Miskatonic Horror expansion, which is a big box expansion that adds to all of the other expansions.
As for which to get, if you can only get a few, I'd recommend Innsmouth Horror, the King in Yellow, and Kingsport Horror, if only for the Epic Battles.
I have all of the expansions to date, and have played them all pretty extensively (except for the Black Goat of the Woods), and they all have their pros and cons.  I would starts with those three, however.  You can play with all of the expansions at once, but be prepared that you will have a lot of things to keep track of.  Not to mention that you'd need a very large table and that the balance would require a large number of investigators.

Did you test Miskatonic Horror?

+1 for Innsmouth! Those personal stories really add to the game, creating some conflicting priorities and a lot of roleplaying oportunities for people who play this board game without min-maxing

It's worth adding that there are two versions of Curse of the Dark Pharaoh. The original release was an excellent addition, as it added the highly thematic exhibit card class. However it suffers from dilution in an all-in game, as the chances to draw encounter which refer to the Exhibit items severely diminish.
The revised version of Curse of the Dark Pharaoh adds a special encounter to the streets and will not suffer from dilution. It's an excellent purchase.
More significantly, though, you should not overlook the possibility of using fan created content in your Arkham Horror game. Whilst there are plenty of articles of questionable quality, there are also a good number of custom expansions which add a great deal to the game and are of quality at least equal to anything that FFG has produced. This link contains links to the best of them, but for my money you should try The Door To Saturn, Lovecraft Country Horror or the Arkham Nightmare as your first experience of fan created content.

Hello Jacob, welcome to the site.

I would recommend getting Dunwich Horror first because of it's Injury and Madnesses cards. The add much to the variety of the game.
Second I would probably get Kingsport since the Epic battle cards give much needed variety. The first time we played it we managed to beat the GOO and the last possible moment. This is the only time I have every experienced a gaming table to spontaneous start applauding :)

Just my own Experience.
I bought Innsmouth Horror first because I want a large expansion and more investigators, personal stories also make base game's investigators more complex. I bought Dunwich Horror and Curse of the Dark Pharaoh Revised Edition later, they all added to the game early. My next target is Miskatonic Horror and The Lurker at the Threshold. Too may boards will make game more complex and last longer, but the expansions' expansion and new gates will make old rules more fun. My final target is get them all, but I'm not at a hurry.


text:
How should I change my usual draft strategy in a Two-Headed-Giant draft?
I have done several drafts with my drafting group, but we recently elected to try the next one as Two-Headed-Giant instead of a 'normal' matches. How should my drafting strategy change to reflect this? How should my team determine what decks to play? What strategies from 'normal' MTG-drafting apply and do not apply to a THG draft?

In short, in a THG draft there are 4 teams of 2 players each, at the beginning of each round, each team (not player) gets a booster, chooses 2 cards from it, and then passes it to the next team. There are 6 rounds instead of 3, so there still ends up being 3 boosters per player. Each player then builds a deck from the cards their team has chosen, and then the matches are played. Communication between players regarding strategy during the draft is acceptable at any time as long as it is public (no passing notes)

Many strategies get better or worse in Two Headed Giant. These are the same as what changes in regular sealed.
Much better:
Alternate win conditions are typically stronger as their thresholds don't change with the number of players. Making one player run out of cards in their library will cause the team to lose. Similarly having one player win the game, say with Felidar Sovereign, will cause the team to win.
Poison used to be a very strong strategy, see the Sliver Kids wining the PT, but that is no longer true. Previously just one player had to be dealt 10 poison for the team to lose, a rules update has changed it to the team receiving 15 poison.
Each Opponent effects are much stronger as well. Gray Merchant of Asphodel is the poster child for this type of card. Already strong in regular sealed and draft, the card is very overpowered in every format with more than two players.
Much worse:
Aggressive Creatures are not nearly as important in Two Headed Giant as in other formats. The increased options for an opponent to block back them much decreases value in attempting to overrun an opponent early. As does the 30 life that needs to be dealt with, it's very hard to build two decks to deal 15 damage each before the opponents can stabilise.
How things change completely:
Colour Choice. In Two Headed Giant it is likely that a team will play all 5 colours. At the minimum you'll be playing 4 colours, splashing the 5th in one of the decks is very easy. In original Ravnica block I won a 2HG draft where we played 7 colours. This means you don't want worry about what decks you are playing too early. Just take the best cards for the first 2 or 3 packs, then start to worry about filling out good curves and making decks in the second half of the draft.

As far as changing your strategy goes--it really depends on which sets you are drafting as well.
A sliver based draft strategy can be quite powerful in 2HG, if that's an option.
And then you have to ask exactly what you and your partner's game plan is going to be--it may be in your best interest to build one very good deck and mediocre one, for example.


text:
Relative amounts of luck in MTG limited formats?
While I haven't played very much, I've noticed there seems to be slightly more luck in sealed than in draft. In draft, skill can prevail by recognizing bombs/archetypes, observing what colors are available, stealing good cards from your opponents, etc, while in sealed you are just forced to work with what you have; if you are stuck with mediocre rares and no good uncommons that fit with your general color pool, you're probably going to do slightly worse against somebody without these initial disadvantages no matter how skilled you are at deckbuilding.
How much luck is present in the 3 popular limited formats? Which have the most and least luck involved in determining the winner of individual matches and tournaments? In which is it easiest and hardest to win when you are the superior player?

NOTE: by 3 limited formats, I mean booster draft, 6-pack 40-card sealed, and 4-pack 30 card sealed. Feel free to include information on other limited formats if you like but these were the ones I'm most interested in addressing.

This seems... rather subjective.

I dispute that 4-pack 30 card sealed is a "popular limited format", given that I've never seen it happening in nearly 20 years of playing Magic.  Maybe it's a new format gaining traction in tough economic times, where 6 boosters are hard to afford, though...

@thesunneversets While it's not played live at all, AFAIK, it's one of the more popular formats on MTGO, and tournaments and 2-man matches seem to fire almost constantly.

@Steven - hmm, interesting! It's still pretty new, though, right?  I guess it does sound like a pretty great way of opening packs.

Is 4-pack 30-card sealed even a sanctioned tournament format outside of MODO?

You pretty much answered this question already. While I haven't heard of 4-pack 30 card sealed yet,I would say this is the format that is the most dependent on luck. A single bomb in a 30 card deck has a much larger impact than in a 40 card deck, for 2 reasons:
1) With 4 packs, opponents have a lower chance to equalize a single bomb of yours with at least 2 solid rares of their own, simply because they only get 4 rares instead of 6.
2) Assuming the average game runs for at most 15 turns, you get to see 22 cards of your deck, ignoring cantrips and library/graveyard manipulation: That is ~75% of a 30-card deck, and only ~55% of a 40-card deck. So you have a chance of up to 75% vs. 55% to draw your bomb in a game. Or stated differently, to get your bomb with a 50% chance in any given game, you need to draw only 15 vs. 20 cards, again ignoring library/graveyard shenanigans.
Obviously, this applies to every participant, so it all averages out in the long run, and it comes down to skill again. But in the 4-pack format, I would expect the standard deviation in deck strength to be significantly higher than for 6 packs, or, to answer your question, the luck factor is highest in the 4-pack, 30-card deck sealed format.

Cool. Can you provide some insight on how much luck there is percentage wise in each format? I know % of luck isn't really a real measure and I might not have been clear enough, but I'm curious as to how much luck plays a factor overall. Also, is there substantially less luck in draft than sealed, or only slightly less?

That is hard to say. Rigorously comparing 6-pack sealed vs 4-pack sealed is possible, because you can easily compare probabilities. Comparing Sealed vs Draft involves a lot more hand-waving because everything changes. You don't have perfect information about the pool from the beginning, you get to draw from a much smaller overall pool, and your choices affect everyone, as everyone affects your possible choices. So it's hard if not impossible to put meaningful numbers into that comparison. Qualitatively, I fully agree with your conclusion that Draft has the largest relative skill component.

@CrazyJugglerDrummer I do not believe that there is a way to objectively quantify that.

I think it's rather self-evident that 6-pack 40-card sealed, has less of a luck component than 4-pack 30 card sealed. As mentioned by @Hackworth, you're much more likely to see a rare bomb in a 30-card pack than a 40-card one.
It's definitely going to be hard to judge, but I wouldn't overestimate the gulf in “luck” between 6-pack sealed and draft. There are some considerations:

Certainly sealed and draft require slightly different skill sets. A good drafter might not be a good sealed deck builder and vice-versa. Yes, there's a lot of overlap in knowing how to choose good cards and build a deck, but a good drafter will know how to signal and read signals when drafting, and a good sealed deck builder will know how to adjust his deck between games.
Consider that a sealed deck pool is twice as big as draft. Each player is passing around three packs compared to getting six packs to build a sealed deck. Assuming you're reading signals perfectly, you might be able to get “better” card pool in 2 out of 5 colours from three packs than just a random selection of 5 colours in six packs, but I believe this depends on the sets you're drafting. But, if the number of synergies in commons is large, or the depth of card quality in the set is relatively large, it's conceiveable to be just as likely or more likely to be able to build a competitive deck with any random six packs than it is to draft your best from three.
Don't underestimate the ability to tune between games. It's far more likely to swap out an entire colour — or even two — in sealed, or to change the entire deck archetype (say from aggro to aggro-control) than it is in draft. So if you realize after the first game you've run into a bad matchup, you might be able to change your deck from paper to rock and beat the scissors you encountered.

In conclusion, all Magic games of course have some element of luck. The effect of luck can be mitigated through skill in deck building, card selection, adaptation between games, and knowing when to mulligan. My intuition and experience leads me to believe that 3 pack drafting might have a very slight edge in mitigating the luck factor, but the difference between that and 6-pack 40-card deck sealed is really hard to judge and might not even be evident.
The very best sealed deck players might be just as good at mitigating the luck as the very best drafters. I've looked for sites with statistics on player win percentages but haven't found any yet…

In an 8-person draft pod, you'll see 243 cards (15 + 14 + 13 + 12 + 11 + 10 + 9 + 8 for the first eight packs, three times). So your sealed pool is bigger than your draft pool, but drafters see more cards.


text:
Where can I practice MTG draft online and actually play against my opponents for free?
I've been having fun practicing drafts on draft simulators like this one, but sometimes I'd like to actually be able to play with the deck I built. Since all of the other players on these simulators are Bots, I have to be content with always wondering if I actually drafted well or not.
Are there any ways to do this on the computer? All I really want is the ability to be able to draft and then play against my opponents without having to pay every time; I don't really care if they are human or not, but I'd prefer it if they were actually decent at the game if they are bots. I also don't care about the creating a virtual collection as I have all the pictures of cards I could possibly want on this cool little website.
I know there is Magic Online, but it's my understanding that it is far from free, so unless somebody knows of a way I can draft as many times as I want on MTGO without ever paying a dime, it does not meet my requirements. Am I doomed to never being able to get any experience similar to MTGO without shelling out a decent amount of money every time I want to play? Or is there some way to practice realistic drafts complete with swiss rounds online without paying a continual monetary upkeep?

At the risk of offering an unpopular opinion, this question is effectively asking 'is there a way for me to pirate the draft experience?' - whether you're a fan of their choice or not, Wizards has chosen to make the draft experience a 'pay' one.  While there aren't great online options for it (there are some, but not great ones), you could always cube live if you want the draft experience without the draft costs...

@StevenStadnicki Not that I'm offended, but I don't think the word "pirate" really applies to the draft any more than it does any other form of unofficial online play.

@Gordon you should accept bobsbeenjamin's answer since this problem is (now) completely and fully solved, by WOTC

You can draft at CCGdecks.com, tappedout.net, or drafts.in, and the free client Cockatrice is excellent for playing.

You can use Magic Workstation.
It works well and you always find player of different levels.

I know this question is extremely old by online standards, but I'm adding an answer in case anyone that doesn't know about Arena stumbles on this question in the future...
Answer: Wizards of the Coast now offers an option to draft and play against real opponents, possibly free. Magic: Arena (sometimes referred to as MTGA or just Arena) is freemium software that has a realistic free-to-play path, similar to Hearthstone. There are plenty of YouTube videos and podcasts that will help you "go infinite" with drafting, and you should be able to at least draft once a week if you just play a few hours per week to grind out the rewards.

Check out magic-league.com.  They have a community of gamers who use the above-mentioned tools (MWS & NetDraft) to  do free drafts and sealed deck games.  Its a good way to connect with outher ppl looking to draft and play.  They use IRC channels to organize the drafts:
http://magic-league.com/play/chatroom.php

Netdraft is free. It is unfortunately a bit of a hassle to set it all up (find opponents via mIRC, opening your firewall...).
http://netdraft.wikispaces.com/

The open source http://xmage.de/ program is exactly what you need! Draft and play with full rules enforcement, just like MTGO, for free.

What fraction of time over (say) the past 2 years has the most recent Standard set been available to draft on XMage? The vast majority of draft players want to play the most recent set, not one from 6+ months ago.

MTG Mirror.com is a free draft/sealed simulator. You can also use UnTap.in, another free site, to test the decks you made to see if they're any good

I can't find untag.in; can you provide a working link?

it's actually untap.in