I pressed about 175 lbs of apples from a local orchard back in October. I've since finished my cider and it's bottled and ready to drink. I know some people think that it needs to sit for months before it's ok to drink, but my tastes arent that picky and I think mine tastes great as is.
back to the point though. I pressed the following varietals and their associated characteristics:
golden and red delicious for a base juice. it's not sweet or tart, it's a very bland tasting apple and very readily available where I live, so getting enough of it to add other things to later down the line was easy.
jonathans were added for tart flavor. granny smiths are great but can quickly overwhelm the tartness. I do love a good tart apple, and the jonathans are tart but not TOO tart to make your lips pucker.
jonagolds are a hybrid apple. they're jonathan apples but crossed wih golden delicious. no joke they're 6-8 inches across when you pick them. They are huge and have the qualities of both brands. very good apple, but juice yield was low compared to original weight.
fuji apples are very tropical in flavor. they were added for astringency (that taste that makes your tastebuds stand on end briefly just before the tart hits you. I like this feeeling more than the taste, but the taste is a good one. Juice yield on these was incredible for me. I got nearly 3 gallons out of one bushel of apples believe it or not.
McIntosh apples... i'm not fond of this apple at all. the smell of them actually nauseates me and the apples themselves are NOT durable at all. I picked about a half bushel of these and transferred them to my home made apple crates for a week to sweat first. most of them ended up being super bruised and damaged. i bet i threw out 10 lbs of rotten mcintosh apples. I'll not use them again. The juice from these is also very bland to me. I'd rather juice up more red/gold delicious varieties for more juice if i needed.
The combination I came up with that I liked was probably more on the tart side, but to each their own. Some people like sweet, some like tart. my recipe is as follows based upon final juice volume, not apple weight:
1 part mcintosh, 2 part fuji, 4 part jonagold, 3 part jonathan, 10 parts base juice (red/gold delicious).
now... having said ALL of that, i took all my leftover juices from my first batch and mixed it together using this formula:
2 part mcintosh, 3 part jonagold, 9 part fuji, and 7 parts base.
The second cider turned out better than the first one did by a LONG shot. I'm here to tell you that the varieties of apples you use do NOT come out in the final product (hard cider). The way you finish your cider (back sweetenting, bottle priming, artificial sweetening, carbonation, spicing) has more to do with the flavor of your witches brew than anything else. i'd say 80% of your product is how you finish it, 20% is the original apple varieties you put in. I'm sure there'll be some disagreement on this but this is my personal experience.
I hope this helps, but there are many books on blending of apple varieties to make the perfect cider. I bought one recently but for the life of me cant find it here to refer to you.
Had i to do it all over again, I would probably ferment each individual variety of apples and then blend them afterwards.