have built new sites from 1 page to 250 pages
Sites with 40 to 100 cross link pages do best at the beginning.
When there are fewer than 20 pages, the keywords anchor do not have enough links.
More than 200 pages on a new site seams to cause a dilution of page rank.
I have found the best approach is to start with 50 pages and grow to 500 over a year.
http://www.poker-prince.com started with 20, it now has 63 pages plus 35 PDF files.
http://www.pokerpadre.com is new with about 60 pages.