Modern Horizons 3 Cube Update

Modern Horizons 3 Cube UpdateBy captainawesome | 1 week ago

Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Modern Horizons 3 cube update for The Awesome Cube. Modern Horizons 3 is the third in a series of sets that focus on direct to modern cards. Because they are bypassing standard, these sets have a higher overall power and complexity level than you'd normally see in a regular retail release. It should come as no surprise then, that both Modern Horizons 1 and 2 featured a bevvy of cube staples, numerous fringe playables, and even more cards that were worthy of discussion. Modern Horizons 3 is no different, as there are a ton of cards that are worth consideration for the cube.

Between the varied cube landscape and the wide swath of interesting cards in Modern Horizons 3, I could conceivably discuss nearly every card in the set in some context. As such, I'm going to try to avoid making suggestions for cube play at large. I find the sweeping generalizations much less helpful than focused changelog discussions. After all, it's easy to say that a card is "good enough" for cube, and much more difficult to identify which card it should replace. In doing so, I will limit all discussions to within my personal cube, The Awesome Cube, whose list you can find in my profile. Hopefully the community finds these discussions as beneficial as I do.

Before we get into the changelog proper, I just wanted to touch on a couple of the main themes of Modern Horizons 3. As I stated in my mechanics articles, I don't currently support either energy strategies or MDFCs in my cube. As such, I'm not going to be covering the many cards that fall into either of these categories in this changelog discussion. I have included energy cards in the past that don't require additional energy to function, and I nearly always have to field questions about whether there are additional ways to generate energy. Players are often disappointed when I tell them no, and they are discouraged when I assure them that a card can pull its weight based on the energy it generates alone. While I think there are several cards that fit this description in Modern Horizons 3, I'd rather just abstain from the mechanic completely if it's consistently confusing players when it's seen in a draft.

I also won't be discussing MDFCs or cards that have colorless mana requirements, and I have no intention of considering these for inclusion moving forward. MDFCs are simply too onerous to play with, and I haven't found that the game play and flexibility they provide make up for their various frustrations. And yes, this does extend to MDFCs with lands on the backside, as I was rarely impressed with their performance during their initial inclusion following Zendikar Rising. I also don't have enough reliable ways to generate colorless mana, and changing that would require wholesale changes that would not functionally improve my cube makeup. For more detailed reasonings and analysis of these mechanics, reference my Modern Horizons 3 mechanics article series where I cover every single mechanic printed in the set.

With that out of the way, let's jam!

White

I cut Skymarcher Aspirant, not because players were unable to receive the city's blessing, but because the payoff of gaining flying was the only upside on an otherwise boring card. Ocelot Pride provides a much more exciting payoff if you're able to ascend, fuels its own ascension through token generation, and serves as both enabler and payoff to key synergies in the process. As a 1/1 for , Ocelot Pride will not be able to attack through opposing blockers very deep into a game, even with first strike enabling some attacks. Fortunately, its ability to create Cat tokens is linked to you gaining life, and not it dealing combat damage to the defending player. By combining it with other sources of life gain, you can create Cat tokens without involving Ocelot Pride in combat at all. Of course, with the addition of anthems, equipment, and +1/+1 counters, there are plenty of ways for you to enable attacks of its own too.

Ocelot Pride is a natural fit in any deck other than , which lacks both ways to gain life and take advantage of tokens. The other color combinations provide a wide variety of synergies to support or take advantage of it, with those able to generate other tokens providing even more exciting lines of play. Since Ocelot Pride's ascend ability creates copies of every token that entered play that turn, you can make not only an extra Cat, but any Treasure, Clue, or other creature tokens you were able to generate as well. Whether you are playing it on curve and attacking through an X/1 blocker, or relying on your synergies to enable attacks or go wide, Ocelot Pride has a high floor and an immense amount of upside for only a single mana. It has the potential to snowball if your opponent doesn't interact with it, but there are enough ways to do so that it shouldn't prove too frustrating so long as players are abiding by the rules of engagement.

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I'm always excited when we get a new blink enabler for the cube, and Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd definitely fits the bill while also serving as a generally desirable creature for any proactive deck. While she does need to attack to blink a nonland permanent, there are a couple of things working in her favor that mitigate this restriction. First is that while she needs to attack, she doesn't need to survive the actual combat. If you want to attack her into blockers because losing her is worth getting an extra trigger off of your Cloudgoat Ranger, you're able to do that. Secondly, by targeting an opposing creature with her ability, she can exile it before it can be declared as a blocker. This can enable attacks for herself and/or your other creatures. Lastly, while you do need to untap in order to enable her first attack, having flash allows you to minimize the amount of time your opponent has to interact with her. Savvy players can play her alongside reactive spells or sneak her into play when the opponent fails to keep up at least two blockers.

Phelia's ability to accrue +1/+1 counters after a successful attack not only synergizes with cards that care about counters, but it allows her to scale with the game when cast on curve. Whether it allows her to trade with a better creature or attack through something she previously would have traded with, it just makes her more generally playable even when you aren't abusing her blink synergies. Of course, if you do abuse those synergies, she can be outstanding, especially when you are doing it with permanents that just entered play, creating some truly explosive turns.

The Magic Origins planeswalkers are among my favorite implementation of DFC technology to date, as they are thematically fulfilling, mechanically interesting, and powerful enough to actually see play. Modern Horizons 3 brings another cycle of TDFC planeswalkers that shows the evolution of five different characters from legendary creature to planeswalker, and they are just as satisfying as their predecessors. The twist with this cycle is that while each creature only costs one color of mana to cast, they also have at least one ability that rewards you for playing a second color. How impactful and important that feature is compared to the rest of the card ultimately determines where that card is most appropriately categorized in the cube. Some retain playability in any combination of colors that include their base color, while others are really only justifiable in one specific color combination.

Ajani, Nacatl Pariah represents 3/3 of stats across two different bodies for only two mana. That alone is enough to interest aggressive decks that are able to take advantage of going wide with creatures, and being able to transform into a planeswalker if another cat dies raises its ceiling significantly. Creating a 2/1 Cat Warrior goes a long way towards enabling this transformation independently. This is critical, because there aren't many cats in my cube; a grand total of 7 after the Modern Horizons 3 update is complete. Attacking aggressively with your 2/1 puts pressure on your opponent with a creature that you don't mind parting with. While your opponent technically has the option between taking damage and giving you a planeswalker, aggro decks will generally be fine with either outcome. You can also force the issue directly by playing with sacrifice outlets in either or , allowing you to transform at your own discretion. You can even blink it to create more cats, making it easier to transform while retaining board presence for the planeswalker to take advantage of. Even if your opponent uses a removal spell on Ajani itself, you're left with a 2/1 token and have accrued card advantage in the process.

As far as planeswalkers go, Ajani presents an interesting set of abilities whose initial sequencing that will hopefully become less prescriptive over time. The lack of cats in my cube essentially guarantees that you will always start by activating his 0 ability to create a Cat Warrior. Getting a Massive Raid trigger if you control another permanent is a completely absurd upside, especially considering that the ability itself creates a creature before this resolves. While this is a strong push into , Ajani, Nacatl Pariah presents enough upside as an aggressive creature to allow for wider playability. Having a one-sided Cataclysmic Gearhulk trigger an as ultimate is ridiculous when stuck in a board stall, and you can use it without losing your planeswalker the turn after he enters play if you +2 immediately. It's even better when behind, but it's likely that your opponent would be able to either kill or disrupt him before you untap in those cases. Regardless, the ultimate being cheap enough to actually consider just provides another layer of strategy to an already powerful creature and planeswalker.

I pushed back on including the cycle of one mana basic landcycling cards from The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth longer than I probably should have, but I've come around after seeing them perform exceptionally well in other environments. My initial hesitation was mostly centered around the colorless nature of the cycling cost, as I was worried they would only be played in decks that had absolutely no intention of casting them for their base effect. I also wasn't thrilled about utilizing a slot in the cube on cards like Street Wraith, that are only included in decks to reduce the total number of cards. What I hadn't considered is how much opportunity for synergy these cards provide once they are sent to the graveyard. I'll discuss this in more detail with each card, as the actual synergies vary between colors. There was also an interesting development in how we play with my cube that subsequently opened up a couple of slots that weren't previously available. Regardless, I always appreciated their ability to ensure early game land drops and potentially fix your mana, even if I'm not playing as many typed nonbasic lands as most cubes.

Eagles of the North is far and away the worst in this cycle, as is least able to take advantage of cards being in your graveyard. That said, the inherent benefits associated with cycling it are greatly appreciated in decks looking to consistently hit their land drops, even if you have to spend a mana in the process. This can easily be substituted for a basic land in these decks without running the risk of drawing too few lands. As an actual creature, it does improve your attacks on the turn it enters play, slotting in most naturally in mid-range decks, even if nobody is going to be excited about actually casting it. I also really wanted to give it a trial run alongside the rest of the cycle, as it most closely aligns with the play patterns I was uneasy about.

Out

Cutting Mother of Runes obviously has nothing to do with it not being powerful enough, as it's among the most powerful cards in the entire cube. It's the type of power it leverages that's the problem. The window of interactivity players have once Mother of Runes enters play is simply not long enough to promote satisfying gameplay. Once you're able to untap with it in play, the entire game revolves around her in a way that can be very frustrating. While some decks have ways to deal with her cleanly, most decks have to rely on baiting her controller into activating her with multiple removal spells in hand. Alternatively, pressuring an opponent to the point where they need to activate her mid-combat has also been effective. Regardless, you need to commit multiple resources into dealing with her, and they need to be sequenced in just the right way. This can be so distracting that players forget about winning the damn game, as all of their attention is on getting her off the board so their interactive spells function as intended.

For a cube that is designed around promoting interactive gameplay, Mother of Runes is a clear outlier that does not align with the cube's design principles. The only reason she lasted as long as she did is because I have a certain amount of nostalgia associated with her. I was really hoping that the size of my cube would provide a buffer for her, ensuring that she did not show up as often as she would in smaller lists. Alas, it's gotten to the point where players start groaning when she enters play, which has forced my hand for the good of the playgroup. I take solace in the fact that I still have Giver of Runes in the cube, as she cleans up many of the worst play patterns of her predecessor.

Seasoned Hallowblade is another card that I'm cutting in spite of how effective it is. While conditional indestructibility is a much less egregious case of dissuading interactivity than protection on demand, it does lend itself to similar frustrations. Being tied to discarding cards mitigates how often players can leverage it in theory, but the threat of activation is often enough to prevent you from actually having to commit to it. Players can force your hand to an extent, but running your removal and creatures headlong into it just to force discards is not a sustainable strategy. Fortunately, there are enough ways to deal with this that it's not a complete brick wall in the way that Mother of Runes is.

Seasoned Hallowblade by itself has not been an issue, it's just felt a little redundant in combination with both Adanto Vanguard and Guardian of New Benalia, which have both been more satisfying implementations on the same general design. I've been a part of several drafts where a player has has two or three of these cards in their deck at the same time, and it's just felt extremely repetitive and frustrating to play against. I also don't want these to be a feature of every single aggressive deck, something that has generally been the case with so many of them in the cube at the same time. As Adanto Vanguard is a unique design, and Guardian of New Benalia provides additional upside in addition to the base design, it makes the most sense to cut Seasoned Hallowblade.

Legion's Landing has been in and out of my cube so many times I've lost count. I keep putting it back in because it's one of the more interesting one mana aggressive plays in , at least when compared to the various Elite Vanguard variants. Despite its many trial runs, I've just never been that impressed by how it actually performs. Much of this has to do with how little it justifies itself as a TDFC. The story of vampires colonizing Adanto, forming The First Fort, and increasing their numbers has strong thematic and mechanical resonance, successfully tying it to the plane of Ixalan. The actual play patterns just don't replicate the design of the card though, as players so rarely actually create Vampire tokens with it, even if they are able to transform it successfully.

This is fairly common for cards with activated abilities that require mana, as decks rarely run out of actual cards to play. The prospect of spending your entire turn creating a single Vampire token just isn't that appealing compared to what else you can be doing with your mana. Even when it does perform as one imagines, I wouldn't exactly call it an exciting card. Legion's Landing succeeds as a redundancy that is necessary for aggro decks to function, it just doesn't do enough to distinguish itself in a way that justifies including it as a DFC.

I'm a huge proponent of the Conspiracy product line, and the "draft matters" cards in particular. When taken early in a draft, they can guide you forward in identifying both open colors and potential synergies. They are among the only cards whose value can be entirely dependent on when they are actually drafted in a pack. They even allow you to take unique actions during the drafting process that makes that draft memorable. Being able to keep players engaged once they have identified which colors are open and have settled into their lane increases a formats longevity in a very satisfying way.

That said, these cards are also intrinsically linked to the traditional drafting process and are unable to provide any tangible value outside of those confines. Because of time constraints on play sessions, my small playgroup hasn't actually drafted my cube in quite a long time. Instead, we play an alternative format that these cards are not functional in. Every single time players see one of these cards in their pool, they have to return it to the box and replace it with something that actually works in our preferred format. As much as I want to say that my cube will be drafted again at some point, it seems silly to keep these cards in the list when they cannot functionally be utilized. As such, I'm starting the process of replacing them with cards that players can actually put in their decks.

The first casualty of this new design constraint is Lore Seeker, a card that I whole heartedly recommend to cube designers that are open to including these cards in their cubes. Being able to open a brand new pack and select the best card from it is incredibly powerful, regardless of when it's actually opened. It's especially satisfying when you open it as part of an otherwise underwhelming pack, as you immediately get another crack at the roulette wheel. It's one of the few effects in Magic that actively excites every single player at the table, because they know they are going to have an extra opportunity to improve their deck. While some players may focus more on the value lost in being on the opposite end of the table when it's drafted, my playgroup has always focused on the fact that it's opened at all.

The only real frustration I've experienced playing with Lore Seeker is not having a clear idea of how to integrate the new pack into the existing draft. The card simply states to "add a booster pack to the draft" and "it's drafted this round", which can be interpreted in different ways. I've had players insist that the new pack is drafted in sequence with the existing packs. Others have wanted it to be drafted alone and to completion, only returning to the pre-existing packs afterwards. I suppose it doesn't really matter as long as the entire table is in agreement, but it's always a discussion, and reading the card does little to alleviate this confusion.

Ironically, the somewhat vague wording actually works in the favor of creative designers, as Lore Seeker does not specify what type of booster pack to use. While some designers opt for random packs from their cube, others open brand new set boosters, and yet others curate special packs specifically for this purpose. Regardless of how players utilize Lore Seeker, the experience it creates is powerful, unique, and immensely satisfying, provided that you actually draft your cube in the traditional method.

Didn't Make the Cut

As much as I love the combination of bestow and Doomed Traveler, Indebted Spirit is probably a better fit for a peasant cube than mine. Paying to grant a creature +1/+1 and afterlife 1 just isn't costed at a rate that is competitive with the other cards in . At to bestow and cast, I'd be much more interested in leveraging it as a way to enhance an attacking creature, or as a way to machine gun Blood Artist triggers in combination with a sacrifice effect. As it is though, you're just going to have better things to do with your mana on most turns. The base rate of Doomed Traveler hasn't been competitive for years, and being an enchantment doesn't contribute any additional synergies in my cube, which might have raised its floor if it did.

Eel Umbra was one of my favorite expressions of the umbra armor mechanic when it was first printed in Rise of the Eldrazi because of how many different ways it could be used. You could flash it in as a combat trick to either kill a creature or protect one of yours from a removal spell, or you could just play it at the end of your opponent's turn to change combat math on the fly. Dog Umbra is also a multipurpose aura, except it also gives you a legitimate reason to target an opposing creature as opposed to your own.

Being able to leverage Dog Umbra as either a Pacifism or Withstand Death offers significant flexibility in how to plan your turns. It improves the playability of a narrow card type and makes for a generally excellent retail limited card. Unfortunately, the amount of bounce and sacrifice in cube has rendered Pacifism effects somewhat obsolete, as your opponent simply has too many avenues to accrue value from your removal spell. That doesn't even account for the creatures that provide value independent of combat through activated and triggered abilities. Failing to grant any bonuses to power and toughness also dampens the excitement quite a bit. While Dog Umbra can't compete at the power level necessary for inclusion in my cube, I did want to call out the sweet design.

Metastatic Evangel is a more natural fit in than either Evolution Sage or Cankerbloom were in when they had their failed trial runs. This is important, because proliferate was unable to serve as an adequate payoff without being able to rely on a body that was a natural fit in any of 's core strategies. The lack of dedicated +1/+1 counter synergies meant players rarely had anything to proliferate, unless they were fortunate enough to draft a couple of planeswalkers. With the inclusion of cards like Luminarch Aspirant, Simian Simulacrum, Ornery Tumblewagg, and Siege Veteran, among others, I feel more confidant in my cube's ability to properly support proliferate, particularly in the color pair.

My main sticking point regarding Metastatic Evangel is that it doesn't trigger when creature tokens enter play. I understand that this is a necessity to avoid degenerate combos, but it creates a lot of awkward sequencing in the deck specifically due to the amount of tokens those decks generate. The fact that the deck where proliferate is most likely to be useful is also the one where Metastatic Evangel's inability to trigger on tokens is most visible means that players are constantly going to be reminded of its limitations. Historically, this has resulted in players resonating negatively with a card because of these connotations as opposed to celebrating what it's able to actually accomplish.

While this is easily overcome if the base rate of the creature allows it to excel when the ability is not functioning, it's been a long time since anyone has been excited about a Blade of the Sixth Pride with upside. I'd rate this as roughly equivalent to Accorder Paladin, a card that performs quite well in the same general shell of decks. I don't want there to be a glut of relatively interchangeable creatures at two mana like we used to have at one mana, so I'm not looking to include both of them. Players have been happy with Accorder Paladin, and I think it's a cleaner fit in the decks that actually want to run it.

I've never been a huge fan of Ghost Quarter effects in my cube due to the relative scarcity of appreciable targets. I want players to be able to cast their spells, so including cards that punish a player for playing Sunpetal Grove isn't exactly something I want to promote. I do feel it's important for decks to have a way to deal with creature lands, but that has been successfully managed by cultivating an environment where board presence and interaction matters. The only other lands in my cube are Shelldock Isle, Takenuma, Abandoned Mire, Volrath's Stronghold, Boseiju, Who Endures, and Blast Zone. Takenuma, Abandoned Mire and Boseiju, Who Endures both have channel, and provide no additional upside once they are put into play. Volrath's Stronghold is on the short lit of cards to be replaced, and Blast Zone is actually being removed as a part of this update. This is all to say that the triggered ability on White Orchid Phantom isn't something that I find particularly intriguing.

White Orchid Phantom is well above the curve as a flying Knight of the White Orchid, but I'm not looking to add two mana creatures with multiple colored pips back into my cube. These creatures strongly promote monocolored strategies, and lose a considerable amount of value when you are unable to play them on curve. I've been very satisfied with the ability of my aggro decks to curve out more consistently since I started removing these types of creatures from the cube. As such, the bar for inclusion is much higher than it used to be. These creatures need to provide upside that makes up for the instances when you are unable to cast them on curve, and as I explained, Ghost Quarter isn't the type of upside I'm interested in.

Didn't Make the Cut

Free spells have a long history of being completely busted in various formats due to their ability to bypass the mana system. They've seen decent representation in cube, although there have been both successes and failures. Modern Horizons 3 introduces the flares, a cycle of instants and sorceries that require players to sacrifice a nontoken creature of the same color to cast the spell for free. The fact that the sacrificed creature must match the color of the spell prevents you from simply pairing these with recursive creatures, as doing so actually decreases the chances of you being able to cast these spells for free.

Flare of Fortitude is a wildly expensive protective spell that only provides value if you control creatures. Being able to cast such a situationally powerful spell without having to hold up mana to do so is the main appeal of the card. Unfortunately, unless you are playing it in response to Wrath of God, sacrificing board presence for this effect kind of defeats the purpose of it. The next best scenario would be using it to blow out an opponent during a complicated combat phase, but those rarely happen in cube. You can always use it to protect your best creature from removal, but that would certainly not be worth an entire card. If my main goal is to have insurance against mass removal, I'd much rather play Unbreakable Formation and Selfless Spirit, as they provide other benefits when you aren't facing down that exact scenario.

This would all be made easier to swallow if had a preponderance of disposable nontoken creatures, but it lacks ways to recur its creatures from the graveyard. While it does have creatures like Novice Inspector, they don't exist at a frequency that makes me feel like this would be reliably satisfying. This is especially true because most decks have a way to make them profitable after they no longer have serviceable attacks on their own.

Angelic Aberration has the potential to upgrade all of your early game or utility creatures into Serra Angel facsimiles when it enters play. This represents a very real upside that puts you in position for an alpha swing on the following turn, even if they kill Angelic Aberration itself. With 44% of the creatures in the cube, and 59% of the creatures in alone, qualifying for this ability (before you even consider tokens), virtually every single deck will have a plethora of creatures to upgrade. The problem is that at six mana, I'd like to see something that isn't so reliant on you having an existing board state.

Angelic Aberration isn't an army-in-a-can creature like Cloudgoat Ranger or Hornet Queen, because the tokens need to come from somewhere. As such, it doesn't add to your board presence, it merely enhances your existing one. It's also not acting as a Craterhoof Behemoth, since none of your new creatures can attack the turn they enter play, giving your opponent a full turn cycle to either draw into a Wrath of God or kill you outright. By the time an aggro deck is able to cast Angelic Aberration, their opponent is either so close to dead that this is excessive, or they've already stabilized, mitigating the amount of value you would be able to accrue from this anyway. It's probably at its best in a or token deck, but there are a ton of existing ways to either push damage or bleed your opponent out of their remaining life total. Angelic Aberration is a cool design, with a really sweet utilization of iconic lore, it's just not the type of card that typically excels in cube.

Monumental Henge is the first in a cycle of nonbasic lands with activated abilities. These lands enter tapped unless you control another land with the appropriate basic land type: in this case, a Plains. Since this counts lands like Temple Garden and Scattered Groves, it's not too difficult for these to enter play untapped when you need them to. The opportunity cost of putting these lands in your deck is therefore very small. The opportunity cost of having them take up a slot in the cube is significantly higher though, especially when they are rarely activated. I've recently put a greater focus on restricting nonbasic lands to only those that fix mana and/or provide bonuses that are regularly taken advantage of. If the ancillary benefit of a land is only relevant in 5% of games, then I'm just not going to include it in my cube any longer. I'd rather those slots go to cards that players are actually excited about drafting and playing, instead of those that provide theoretical upside.

Monumental Henge provides you with a five mana Board the Weatherlight trigger, an effect I would not consider particularly useful in cube, especially at twice its original mana investment. It's certainly not something I would ever imagine wanting to pay for multiple times in a game. Not only is the failure rate way too high considering the exorbitant cost, but the payoff of drawing a card just isn't worth spending your entire turn on. Paying five mana for the privilege of casting History of Benalia, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, or even The One Ring, on the following turn is not something that excites me. The whole advantage of Board the Weatherlight is that you have a realistic chance of casting whatever spell you draw on the same turn, something you likely won't be able to do with Monumental Henge. I'd have to be leaning pretty hard into some sort of historic combo deck for players to be interested in activating this, especially with how little instant speed interaction you can play alongside it in proper.

Blue

Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student is by far the best one drop creature in my cube because of her ability to play offense, defense, and provide synergistic upside if she remains unchecked. Having flying not only increases the number of profitable blocks she has, but it enables her own ability by making it more difficult for opponents to present blocks of their own. While she won't be dealing any damage when she attacks, being able to create a Clue token every time she does should interest any deck regardless of strategy. Hard Evidence sees consistent play on the back of being inexpensive card advantage that protects your life total, even in decks that don't care mechanically about it being a sorcery. While Tamiyo's value comes on a delay, the ceiling is obviously much higher.

Like Ajani, Nacatl Pariah, Tamiyo contributes to her own transformation simply by playing with her. After all, drawing three cards in a turn becomes trivially easy once she has generated a couple of Clue tokens. Whether you are sacrificing multiple Clue tokens, combining one with a loot trigger, or casting Frantic Search or Chart a Course, there are a lot of ways to draw three cards on the same turn. You can even cast Brainsurge to transform her on your opponent's turn or in response to a removal spell. This can be accomplished the turn you cast her or several turns later, depending on how long you want to take advantage of her as a creature. Regardless of your intentions, it's important to note that her transformation is not optional, and will occur whenever you draw your third card in a turn. Players need to pay attention to this while she is in play, lest you inadvertently transform her when you'd actually rather leverage the creature.

Once transformed, you'll likely find yourself alternating between using her +2 ability to Jace your opponent's creatures, and using the -3 ability to Call to Mind something when you have enough loyalty. While this ability provides a marginal upside if you return a card in this way (adding one color of any mana), it's not enticing enough to actually pull drafters into . After all, you're much more likely to return a instant or sorcery to your hand than a one, both from a card quality and availability perspective. While I wish the ultimate was more interesting than merely drawing a ton of cards, it's certainly an option, since it only takes three turns to build to. Jace, Architect of Thought has shown how impressive their shared ability can be in protecting both your life total and planeswalker loyalty, and Tamiyo increases in loyalty twice as fast while activating it.

Whether you are creating Clue tokens every turn, stymying an aggressive start by your opponent, or protecting your life total while trying to maximize the amount of cards you draw, it's exceptionally easy to accrue far more than a single worth of mana out of Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student.

Brainsurge is a three mana Brainstorm that lets you draw and keep an extra card. I've never been a huge fan of Brainstorm in my cube because there aren't enough ways to shuffle your library in such a large list. This prevents players from being able to increase the quality of their draws as well as their hand, as shuffling away excess lands or uncastable spells is one of the main appeals of the card. Players would often keep a bad hand, Brainstorm on turn one, and then become frustrated when they weren't able to draw into any lands. Knowing that they would not draw lands for the next two turns intensified this frustration, something that being able to shuffle your library on demand would have remedied. While this is clearly not the best use of Brainstorm, it happened enough that I just removed the card entirely.

Brainsurge costing three mana actually remedies this situation entirely by simply not being castable on turn one. Players can rely on Sleight of Hand, Ponder, Preordain, and Consider to smooth their early draws and allow Brainsurge to serve its intended role of just being generically efficient card draw. While it can't provide synergy upside by filling the graveyard like Frantic Search or Thirst for Discovery, it provides more direct card advantage that's more generically playable. I loved playing Foresee and Careful Consideration in the past, as digging four cards deep was almost always enough to draw you into something relevant to the current board state. It was just a question of mana efficiency, as there are only so many four mana cards I can run that provide nothing but sheer card draw.

I was pretty skeptical of Occult Epiphany during my initial evaluation of it on the grounds that it didn't actually provide any tangible card advantage unless you were able to discard enough cards of different card types. I've always found draw X, discard X effects to be somewhat underwhelming in general, and idea that you were unlikely going to be able to create more than 2-3 Spirit tokens to be disappointing. After all, how often is a single Spirit token going to be worth discarding a card you want to cast. I figured that discarding a land and one other card type would be relatively free, but you'd find difficulty accruing value beyond that, let alone justifying it at higher values of X.

It wasn't until I saw it compared to Midnight Haunting, a card that I have quite a lot of fondness for, that I started to pay more attention. I believe I was getting distracted by how poorly it scales with your mana, instead of realizing that it's just a solid role player at lower values of X. Playing this for three mana to sculpt your hand and make two Spirit tokens is a completely reasonable play at instant speed, and this has the potential to do quite a lot more than that if you combine it with graveyard synergies. You can even create multiple Spirit tokens on a single discard if you discard a card with multiple card types. While this won't be the norm, it's just another interesting gameplay wrinkle that Occult Epiphany provides, and there are enough of them that I feel I need to at least give it a trial run.

Lórien Revealed was the most appealing of the five one mana cyclers from Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth, so it's an easy inclusion now that I'm trying out the rest of the cycle. Like Eagles of the North, which is too expensive to play on its own merits, every single deck would be happy to have a sorcery speed Jace's Ingenuity if they draw it with enough mana to actually cast it. In addition to improving your mana base and overall consistency, cycling it adds fuel for delve, Snapcaster Mage, Haughty Djinn, Torrential Gearhulk, etc. without having to wait until you are able to cast it normally. Being a spell that players are going to actively want to cast when possible goes a long way towards alleviating my concerns about it being something that exists only to be cycled, like Boon of the Wish-Giver.

Out

I've noticed recently that I probably have too many two drops in that draw cards and/or loot, as players are starting to cut variants during the deck building process. I'm currently playing Malcolm, Alluring Scoundrel, Rona, Herald of Invasion, Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Ghostly Pilferer, Faerie Mastermind, Duelist of the Mind, Ledger Shredder, Mercurial Spelldancer, and Moon-Circuit Hacker, but I've noticed Wharf Infiltrator being cut most often. This is due to its underwhelming form of evasion and how rarely players are willing and able to create Eldrazi Horror tokens with it.

Skulk, as I explained in my mechanics review article, can be a frustrating form of evasion because every single deck plays some amount of creatures with 1 power. Whether they be tokens or utility creatures, there's always something that can be thrown in front of a creature with skulk to prevent it from attacking. This inconsistency limits how often Wharf Infiltrator can actually trigger its abilities, something that's especially frustrating on curve, when you should in theory be most able to trigger it reliably.

Wharf Infiltrator typically holds the most value in graveyard-centric decks that play a lot of recursive creatures, as those decks are most apt to have creatures they want to discard. However, even in those decks, players just have better things to do with their mana than make a vanilla 3/2 token. There are also a lot of circumstances where players just want to discard excess lands instead of a creature that they can potentially cast. In fact, the most common situation where players are discarding creatures is also the time when they are least likely to be able to afford to pay for the activated ability: when they are struggling to hit their land drops. In these cases, Wharf Infiltrator is attacking with worse evasion, dealing less damage, and providing less overall impact than other creatures of its ilk.

Search for Azcanta was added to the cube when I was still kind of excited about DFC technology, and transforming cards was a novel experience as opposed to simply being a hoop players had to jump through. The flavor of searching the sea for the lost ruins of Azcanta, and eventually discovering it and plundering its riches, is wonderfully realized both thematically and mechanically. Unfortunately, it's been far too slow and low impact to justify the complexity.

As seen with Thassa, God of the Sea and Lifecrafter's Bestiary, scry 1, and in this case surveil 1, on upkeep take far too long to provide tangible value. Not only do you have to wait an entire turn to surveil for the first time, you then have to wait another turn to actually benefit from that trigger. That is assuming, of course, that you surveilled a card to the graveyard, otherwise you waited multiple turns just to look at the top card of your library. Having its transformation be tied to threshold rewards players for aggressively milling cards they reveal, which helped it serve as an enabler for graveyard strategies. When played alongside other enablers, its not that difficult to attain threshold over the course of a couple turns, but the payoff you receive for doing so has been very underwhelming.

Once you transform Search for Azcanta, you not only lose access to its repeated surveil triggers, but you can only accrue additional value by putting more mana into it. The payoff for doing so, a conditional Impulse at twice the cost, isn't even capable of guaranteeing a return on investment. I've never seen anyone actually activate this ability, and the idea of someone activating it multiple times is ludicrous, as doing so largely prevents you from casting any other spells, including the one it draws you. Turning into a land that can tap for has actually been more relevant, which isn't the kind of upside players imagine when they sign up for playing with a DFC. I'm much happier playing Brainsurge, which provides immediate, guaranteed dividends, even with the loss of synergy potential.

Unlike Monumental Henge, Hall of Storm Giants does actually get activated from time to time, despite its onerous activation cost. The problem is that the gameplay it creates is both repetitive and unsatisfying. While Celestial Colonnade and Cave of the Frost Dragon are both likely to monopolize all of your mana whenever they are activated, having a form of evasion at least propels a game towards its conclusion. Even if you only activate them once a game, you're usually dealing damage to your opponent, forcing them to block with a meaningful creature, or they are preventing you from dying to a creature with flying.

I've seen players activate Hall of Storm Giants three, or even four, turns in a row and fail to deal any damage to their opponent at all. Yes, this resulted in their opponent having to chump block every single turn, but they were able to weather the loss of board presence until they drew enough mana to pay for the ward cost alongside a removal spell. The combination of being unable to push damage and being difficult to kill contributes to a repetitive game state where one player continuously activates it but fails to actually further their own game plan. Hall of Storm Giants provides players with a mana outlet when they're flooding out, but it rarely uses that mana as effectively as other creature lands do. I'd almost rather run Faerie Conclave if I was going to run a creature land, as at least that allows you to cast a spell alongside it and deal chip damage on certain board states. It's also more generically playable, as Hall of Storm Giants is largely restricted to control and ramp decks, as those are the only decks capable of reliably reaching the seven mana required to activate it.

Cogwork Librarian is one of the most deceptively powerful cards in the history of my cube. While part of that can be attributed to players needing to understand that you don't actually run it in your deck, the ability itself is very easy to undervalue. The combination of "wasting" a draft pick on this, and then having to put it back in a pack for someone else to benefit from, leads to players largely ignoring it during their first couple of drafts with it. It's only after actually realizing that you can take two cards out of the same pack, and then seeing a pack where that is beneficial, do these players have a lightbulb moment. Cogwork Librarian asks something entirely unique of your drafters, and leads to some immensely exciting moments once they learn to respect it. Like Lore Seeker though, it just doesn't work outside of the confines of a traditional draft, and seeing as how we haven't done that in over a year (and haven't missed it either), it seems irresponsible to keep it in the list collecting dust.

Didn't Make the Cut

Strix Serenade is an obvious reference to Swan Song, a card from Theros that significantly underperformed on the lofty expectations that many players had for it. I've never been a fan of cards that provide your opponent with a token creature in return for destroying something they control, regardless of how efficient the removal spell is or how seemingly irrelevant the replacement creature is. There's simply too many ways to accrue value from having a creature in play. Whether you are sacrificing or tapping it for value, chump blocking, double blocking, or simply attacking your opponent, it nearly always provides more value than players anticipate. The hope, of course, is that whatever value it does accrue pales in comparison to the problematic card you originally answered. This largely depends on the actual cube you are playing, as the value of a Bird token will change drastically based on the environment that surrounds it.

In cubes that are running extremely powerful artifacts that you want to be able to interact with as early as turn one, and whose decks typically eschew retail limited style creature combat, Swan Song is going to be much more desirable. The odds of a Bird token changing the course of a game where players are trying to cheat Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play, combo out with Splinter Twin, Laboratory Maniac, or storm is generally pretty low. My cube is designed to promote creature combat and interactive gameplay, and that Bird token is going to be much more relevant regardless of what deck you are playing with or against. As such, I'd rather play any of the conditional one and two mana counterspells that don't provide your opponent with immediate board presence, even if they are unable to counter a spell every now and then.

I'm a big fan of Welkin Tern's with upside, so it should come as no surprise that I'm playing quite a few of them in my cube. While the upside can vary in nature, it needs to be something that triggers reliably and that furthers your actual game plan, whatever that may be. Emrakul's Messenger creates Eldrazi Spawn tokens whenever you draw your second card on a turn, regardless of whose turn that may occur on. Whether it's through looting, planeswalkers, creatures entering play, or actual card draw spells, has enough ways to consistently draw cards that I'm not worried about whether or not you can trigger this ability. I'm just not in love with the actual payoff it provides for triggering it.

doesn't really have a way to profit from making creature tokens beyond attacking and blocking with them, so Eldrazi Spawn tokens are going to be either chump blockers or, more preferably, mana acceleration. The problem is that I don't think tempo decks really want that as much as the card advantage and opportunities for synergy that other Welkin Tern variants I'm currently playing provide. Whether they are serving as payoffs for spells or discard outlets for reanimator, my evasive two drops all serve some sort of archetypal support in addition to their base function. The decks that would appreciate the extra mana ramp, typically or control decks, are much less interested in attacking with a Welkin Tern. If you could guarantee it would trigger every turn, or whenever it dealt combat damage to an opponent, I would be much more on board. I just don't think creating an Eldrazi Spawn token every other turn is going to move the needle in a way that compares favorably with the competition.

Serum Visionary is the latest three mana creature that draws a card (plus) when it enters play. I've tried or considered most of these cards in my cube over the years and I've found that the quality of the creature matters just as much as the quality of card advantage it provides. Sea Gate Oracle was replaced because it really only interested control decks looking for something to chump block with. Tome Raider didn't provide enough pressure to keep up with similar cards in tempo decks. Cloudkin Seer, on the other hand, is a better mix of aggressive creature and card advantage.

Serum Visionary replaces itself immediately and improves your next draw, but it comes at the cost of playing a creature that holds no real value in proactive decks. lacks the equipment and anthems that frequent aggressive decks, and it lacks ways to make use of utility creatures like and can. Its best utilization undoubtedly comes by blinking it, but the choke point in those decks is finding efficient ways to blink things, as they have no shortage of exciting creatures with ETB effects. Aether Channeler, for example, has an even worse body than Serum Visionary, but it makes up for that by providing far greater strategic versatility. That's the kind of thing that these cards need if they want to compete in cube alongside more objectively powerful cards.

Didn't Make the Cut

Dreamtide Whale represents my favorite part of these Modern Horizons sets: creative designs that find interesting ways to combine mechanics that don't normally appear in the same format as each other. Leveraging proliferate as a way to maintain counters on your fading or vanishing creatures is an interaction that normally only comes up in cube, and Dreamtide Whale presents you with this opportunity so long as you, or your opponent, cast multiple spells in a turn. While you can cast it as early as turn three, you can also wait until you can follow it up with another inexpensive spell to immediately put a third time counter on it. This gives you an extra turn to not only take advantage of the creature, but to continue to proliferate. Unfortunately, proliferate is at its most awkward in , as it just doesn't generate counters on permanents like and can unless you are relying on planeswalkers, which don't really need the additional assistance to be impactful. Without that synergy providing dividends, Dreamtide Whale is really just an oversized beater, which is also a little at odds with what is trying to do in cube.

Cube has largely moved away from playing oversized stat monsters that provide no value outside of itself attacking and blocking. Serendib Efreet was the last one that I felt really good about, as flying allowed it to retain playability in various types of decks. Incidentally, I had to read Dreamtide Whale about fifteen times before I realized that it doesn't have flying (something that the artwork could have made a bit more clear). Even if I was still in the market for a creature like this though, the idea of more vanishing or fading in my cube makes me physically ill. Players have demonstrated time and time again how uncomfortable they are keeping track of these abilities, as they nearly always require rules explanations when experienced. As the only synergistic upside it's able to provide is tied directly to vanishing, and having to deal with the mechanic for a longer time, it's just a poor fit both philosophically and mechanically.

While Flare of Fortitude lacked a truly impactful and desirable effect that players could confidently mainboard, Flare of Denial offers one of the most fundamental effects in 's color pie: countering a spell. I've played my fair share of, cancel variants over the years, but it's been a while since I was happy about running one. The only variant I'm still running is Force of Negation, a Negate variant that can also be cast for free under the right conditions. That made the list on the back of largely not having to pay the three mana to cast the spell, something that I think is going to be more difficult to accomplish for Flare of Denial.

This is because is among the worst colors in cube at satisfying the alternative casting cost requirement of sacrificing a nontoken creature. I simply do not run enough disposable creatures to feel confident that players will control one while trying to cast this spell. More often than not, they will have to sacrifice something of actual value, and while that may be worth it depending on what you are actually countering, I would want there to be a synergy upside that exists. People are going to draft Flare of Denial and expect to see more Aether Channeler than Chrome Host Seedshark, and I'm just not sure that's going to be the case. If I was still running a number of interchangeable Cancel variants, and players were glad to cast them at their base rate, I would be much more apt to give Flare of Denial a trial run.

Nulldrifter is a larger, colorless Mulldrifter with annihilator 1 that costs more mana to hard cast. This attempt to make Mulldrifter more imposing in combat is hardly worth the additional mana investment, as it betrays the main appeal of the card. Like my earlier discussion on nonbasic lands, the only reason I run Mulldrifter in my cube is because players regularly take advantage of both modes. While it's certainly been a popular value reanimation target, I also regularly see players hard cast it and successfully leverage the evasive body. Instead of finding a relative balance between hard casting the creature and evoking for a Divination, this iteration will nearly always be evoked. Instead of being a cross archetype role player, Nulldrifter is largely reliant on being cheated into play, limiting which decks would even be interested in playing it significantly. This is despite being colorless to cast, which doesn't actually make it more appealing in a wider array of decks because you lose access to the modality entirely if you play it outside of .

Black

While I was happy with the gameplay that Plumb the Forbidden provided, the wording on the pseudo-replicate ability was needlessly complicated, especially on what was a simple card in practice. Eviscerator's Insight provides similar gameplay with much cleaner wording while providing additional artifact and graveyard synergies in the process. It doesn't increase the broad playability of the effect, since pretty much every deck is in the market for either tokens or recursive creatures, but it does make it play more nicely with surveil and self-mill. You can't cast it without sacrificing something anymore, but that happened so rarely that it's hardly going to be noticed or missed. It just shifts the risk associated with casting it from life loss over to being a casting contingency.

Accursed Marauder finally accomplishes what Plaguecrafter and Demon's Disciple made strides toward, serving as a Fleshbag Marauder that's difficult for your opponent to play around in cube. Instead of focusing on the rare occasions when your opponent controls no creatures, Accursed Marauder prevents players from sacrificing tokens to its effect, thereby ensuring that any sacrifices made are more meaningful. This is an excellent fit in cube, where creature tokens are plentiful and players play to the board by design.

While sacrificing a creature token was one way to break parity on these effects, your opponent also being able to do so reliably increases the risk associated with these creatures. They're almost unplayable if your opponent controls a single Soldier token, as they simply do not provide the right kind of contingency plan in my cube. After all, I don't think I've ever seen someone sacrifice a planeswalker or discard a card to Demon's Disciple or Plaguecrafter, respectively.

Accursed Marauder puts an even greater importance on synergizing with recursive creatures, doubling down on cards that are already extremely desirable. Fortunately, costing two mana goes a long way towards making Accursed Marauder more generally acceptable as an on rate spell. This allows it to curve beautifully from creatures such as Gravecrawler to mitigate fast starts by an opponent. Whether you are leveraging the creature portion or sacrificing it to its own effect, it's a lot easier to stomach a card when its floor is Cruel Edict, a card with historical significance and that's just below rate.

I'm not exactly sure when we are going to reach critical mass of Blood Artist variants in , but we keep getting playable versions of that effect and I'm going to keep adding them until I notice players cutting them from their decks. The main knocks against Marionette Apprentice are that it doesn't trigger when your opponent's creatures die, and it doesn't gain life as part of its effect. Zulaport Cutthroat and Vraan, Executioner Thane have demonstrated that these effects are sustainable even when they are only triggering on your own creatures, so long as your deck is built to support them. After all, the majority of the triggers associated with these cards come from your own deck anyway, and they largely work in conjunction with other, similar effects. Having your opponent contribute speeds the clock up and makes them more explosive, but it's not a requirement, so long as the rate and effect justifies the rest of the card.

Not gaining life is a little different, as these decks tend to be grindy, winning through attrition and slowly bleeding their opponent out over the course of several turns. Gaining life as part of these triggers helps offset the fact that none of these cards block particularly well by buoying your life total while your opponent tries to race your triggers. Fortunately, Marionette Apprentice creates a Servo token that can either chump block or be sacrificed for value, triggering its ability in the process. The significance of this cannot be understated, as it's more self sufficient than other creatures of its ilk, especially on curve. While you can technically forgo the Servo token in favor of making the base creature a 2/3, giving up a life loss trigger and second body does not seem worth it under most circumstances.

Marionette Apprentice adds one more unique wrinkle in that it triggers when your artifacts die as well. While this will mostly trigger on Servo, Clue, and Treasure tokens, it's an appreciated synergy that I'm consciously looking to integrate into my cube at higher densities. It also buffers the loss of not triggering on your opponent's permanents to some extent.

Emperor of Bones might be my favorite card from Modern Horizons 3 because of the synergy upside and interesting play patterns it provides across every single color combination in . This is despite its relatively high level of complexity. Much of this complexity revolves around the lack of rules text on both adapt and finality counters on any of its printings. I've tried to be more conscious of keyword complexity creep recently, making sure that I try to include versions of cards that include rules text whenever possible. After all, it's nearly impossible for every player at your table to remember every single keyword from across Magic's long history, and it only becomes less likely as more keywords continue to be introduced. So while I would have preferred the rules text to be printed on the card, I understand these abilities well enough that I'm not going to disregard it on principle.

As Emperor of Bones accrues +1/+1 counters, whether from its own adapt ability or from elsewhere, it corpse dances the creatures it exiles. While the finality counters are supposed to prevent you from targeting the same creature repeatedly, they only function when the creature dies, allowing you to bounce the reanimated creatures back to your hand for additional value. They also serve as perfectly acceptable sacrifice fodder once they've attacked, opening up additional synergies.

There can be some awkwardness if you are unable to exile a creature with its ability, especially on curve, but you can always just attack as a 4/4 on turn three, relying on your other +1/+1 counter enablers for triggers later in the game. I don't expect that to be the base experience though, as there are plenty of ways to force creatures into the graveyard independent of combat. There's also some tension associated with exiling some of your own naturally recursive creatures. Fortunately, most of these creatures aren't ideal targets for this type of one time reanimation anyway. This leaves you free to not only hate on your opponent's graveyard synergies, if they have any, but focus on reanimating more meaningful creatures with your limited triggers.

Out

For discussion of Plumb the Forbidden see Eviscerator's Insight, above.

Pack Rat has been undeniably effective as a removal check for your opponent that demands an actual Wrath of God if it's not dealt with immediately. The ability to go wide while going tall makes it nearly impossible to deal with through single target removal spells or through combat, especially the longer the game goes on. After all, since players draw a card every turn, they never really run out of fuel to create more copies. The problem is that while it can be effective, the gameplay is repetitive, prescriptive, and generally does not lend itself to an enjoyable experience for either player.

Because creating Pack Rat tokens makes each of your Pack Rat creatures bigger, you're heavily incentivized to do nothing but discard cards to create tokens. Every spell you cast and land you play concedes one Pack Rat that could have been created, thereby delaying your ability to overrun your opponent with tokens. Having graveyard synergies in your deck is almost irrelevant because you very quickly start discarding cards indiscriminately, and the only way they become relevant is if your opponent answers every Pack Rat in play. There isn't much incentive to draft around it, there's no tension or strategy when regarding it during deck construction, and the gameplay is the same every single time it's cast. For a cube that's designed around creating a fun, interactive, and diverse play experience, Pack Rat just hasn't been a satisfying experience.

I originally added Booster Tutor as part of my exploration of Un-cards in my cube and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm now in the process of removing all of them. I've never been the biggest fan of Un-sets and Un-cards in general, but I had heard so many good reviews about Booster Tutor specifically, that I felt like not giving it at least a trial run was beginning to border on stubborn ignorance. Now that I have, I can comfortably say that it rarely provided anything resembling an enjoyable experience.

While there were a couple of areas of concern, the main one is that constructing a new pack every time someone cast it resulted in more frustration than fun. Players just did not want to pause their game while a pack was being collated, and while you can technically use any pack you have on hand, nobody wanted to open a random Hour of Devastation pack when they could have cards from the actual cube. I know some curators prepare custom packs ahead of time just in case they are needed, but I'm not putting that amount of prep work into supporting a single card. It's simply not worth the hassle.

Once the pack was prepared and inspected, choosing a card from it provided inconsistent results, since 70% of the cards in the pack were completely uncastable in their two color deck. While players were sometimes able to leverage a Treasure token to increase the number of relevant cards to choose from, that was rarely by design. While the card drawn was nearly always worth the mana spent to cast Booster Tutor, especially at instant speed, it was rarely worth the headache associated with supporting it. This was doubly true because it's such an independently powerful card, that exists separate from the other cards in your deck. There's no way to plan around any developed synergies, as you merely hope to reveal something of value to the current game state. Seeing players grimace when casting Booster Tutor was the final straw, as players simply were not having fun with the card, and at the end of the day, that's more important than anything else.

I added Tenacious Underdog as a way to provide backdoor support for aggressive decks playing as a secondary color, thinking it would also be played in grindy decks as yet another recursive creature. In practice though, the combination of the mana and life required to reanimate it was prohibitively expensive for aristocrat decks looking to churn through multiple recursive triggers. This left it as an aggro only card in a color that lacks a primary aggro deck in any of its color combinations. While , and can all support proactive aggro or tempo versions of their respective decks, it's not the default experience for any of them. This leaves Tenacious Underdog in an awkward spot where it lacks the cross archetype functionality that originally appealed to me, and I'm not a fan of creatures that only see play in aggro.

I've never been a fan of Tarmogoyf in my cube because it just doesn't grow as quickly as it does in constructed without unfettered access to fetch lands and one mana spells. Without the ability to provide any value outside of combat, you're often left with a very underwhelming creature on curve, and one that holds much less value when played later on in a game. Barrowgoyf scales in the same way as Tarmogoyf but has two relevant keywords to ensure that it's always relevant in combat, even when the graveyards aren't full of cards. Deathtouch is particularly useful because you can leverage it as a way to trigger its ability that mills you equal to its power. Even if you don't hit a creature to return to your hand, you are filling your graveyard to both enhance its stats and enable you other synergies.

Unlike Tarmogoyf, Barrowgoyf doesn't need to be gigantic to impact a game both offensively and defensively. My cube's inability to reliably fill graveyards early in games actually makes me feel better about its higher mana cost, as it's base size is likely going to be slightly larger than Tarmogoyf simply because it comes down at least one turn later in the game. As an individually powerful card that enables graveyard synergies, Barrowgoyf should fit into most decks without needing to put a heavy focus on self-mill or delirium support.

Warren Soultrader is a free sacrifice outlet that creates Treasure tokens that will fix your mana and/or ramp you while serving as an enabler for artifact synergies. This is a huge addition for the aristocrats decks as they can often offset the life loss with life gain triggers from Blood Artist variants. While going infinite with Gravecrawler or Forsaken Miner and Blood Artist is going to be something that appeals to some players, it's not what I want the base experience to revolve around. As such, I am keeping my eye on the play patterns to determine how often that happens and how easy it is to interrupt. Thankfully, Blood Artist is already a significant target for removal, which helps players incidentally play around the combo even if they don't know it's present in their opponent's deck.

It's difficult to describe how significant it is that this ability does not require mana to activate, as we've seen with Kels, Fight Fixer that even a single mana can interrupt sequencing and be difficult to pay for when needed. Being able to sacrifice a Gravecrawler and a Zombie token to ramp out a Grave Titan on turn four is an insane curve, putting an immense amount of pressure on your opponent without really costing you anything in terms of lasting board presence. The ability to turn any creatures targeted by removal into a Treasure token essentially forces your opponent to target Warren Soultrader with many spells that provide an additional bonus when they resolve. This is a lot of synergy and raw power for a three mana creature with relevant creature types, and I'm excited to play with it.

Troll of Khazad-dûm is uniquely suited to excel among the one mana cyclers because of 's ability to Reanimate it once you send it to your graveyard. Whereas Eagles of the North and Lórien Revealed can fix your mana or serve as a late game spell, this has the potential to provide both effects as early as turn two. While it doesn't provide any bonuses outside of combat as a creature in play, it does present a four turn clock and is basically unblockable. I've been very happy with Waker of Waves in a similar role, and I expect Troll of Khazad-dûm to perform even better since it doesn't require a second color to take advantage of these synergies.

Out

I knew when I added Summon the Pack that it was more fun than functional, largely due to its onerous mana cost and inability to guarantee a return on investment. That said, I never really saw it "whiff" during its time in my cube. Yes, there were a wide array of outcomes that ranged from dropping a ton of value creatures to demanding a concession on the spot, but it never produced less than worth of mana in creatures. Unfortunately, this sample size was quite small because players simply chose not to include the card in their decks the vast majority of the time. This is to be expected for an 8 mana spell that cannot be reliably cast for less mana. There aren't really any decks outside of that would be able to reliably reach that mana threshold, and even in that deck I saw it get stranded in hand more often than not.

Summon the Pack also ran into the same problems that plagued Booster Tutor, as players were not excited about the act of crafting a new booster pack. The experience of obtaining a new pack is so integral to the experience for both of these cards, and if players aren't enjoying that aspect of it, there's no point in playing with them at all.

Plague Engineer is a bit of a weird card in that it doesn't really support any particular strategy, and it doesn't have any specific synergies to take advantage of. It's a decent attacker and blocker solely because of deathtouch, making it more of an annoyance than anything actually threatening. Its creature type specific-Night of Souls' Betrayal ability can keep tokens and small creatures off the board, provided they share a creature type, but the amount of value it accrues feels incredibly random and matchup dependent. In practice, it's been mostly a foil for token aggro decks, offsetting anthem effects even when it can't outright kill particular creatures.

My real concern with Plague Engineer though, is how much mental upkeep it demands from both players. Because creature types do not matter mechanically in my cube, every single creature needs to be inspected carefully to determine if it is affected by Plague Engineer's, effect. Even if you only cast it to offset a Lingering Souls in their graveyard, it still affects Staff of the Storyteller and Tithe Taker, which is easy to overlook since players are not in the habit of caring about creature types. The longer it remains in play, the more difficult it is to remember what creature type was named, and while you can use small pieces of paper as reminders, I've never been a big fan of cards that require that sort of maintenance workaround. I'd much rather this ability be an enters play effect, even if it makes the card less powerful, as it would make it much easier to play with.

Backup Plan was one of the easiest cards to undervalue that I've ever put in my cube considering how much it rose your win percentage simply by being in your draft pool. As someone who mulligans more than the average player (or so it seems), I greatly appreciated being able to have two cracks at keeping a good opening hand. While it goes way up in value in combo decks, or those looking to curve out as early as turn one, it mostly got used as a way to reduce mulligans, to great success. Unlike the rest of the "draft matters" cards, Backup Plan is pretty easy to replicate through use of house rules regarding mulligans. It's not something that I'm looking to implement at this time, but I've been pretty happy using the "old-school" mulligan method of just giving players another starting hand if they have all or zero lands.

Crabomination adds to the ever growing list of cards that provide synergy upside with artifacts, and since it's a theme that I plan to continue expanding on, I do expect the emerge ability to get better over time. Right now, it's going to be difficult to emerge it with any sort of consistency, as most of the artifacts that decks play are tokens they create. Fortunately, this is an excellent reanimation target and a massive threat even if you cast it for its mana cost. Being able to cast the best card among your opponents graveyard, hand, and top of library for free nearly assures that you are going to hit something impactful. The fact that it's also performing random graveyard hate and discard raises the floor significantly, as it's providing a utility function aside from the value obtained from casting the spell for free. Etali, Primal Conqueror demonstrated how fun these types of effects can be, and I expect similar results from Crabomination.

Spymaster's Vault satisfies my requirements for being a nonbasic land that doesn't fix for mana much better than Monumental Henge does. It's much less expensive to activate, and has an ability that enables multiple supported synergies (graveyard and +1/+1 counters) while serving as a payoff for a third (aristocrats sacrifice). It becomes relevant whenever any creature dies, regardless of which player controlled it, so long as you control a single creature. Since creatures die to removal, through combat, or by being sacrificed nearly every single turn, I can easily see this being activated multiple times a game, every game it's in play.

Even if its activated multiple times in succession, it does not promote a repetitive game state or monopolize your turn or mana. I was very high on connive when it was first printed in Streets of New Capenna and I was disappointed that there weren't more playable cards to be considered for cube. Much like surveil, it provides more opportunities for interesting gameplay decisions than looting while rewarding players for being proactive about their board presence. The only question is whether or not connive 1 is worth the activation cost, and I'm erring on the side of trying it out considering how high the ceiling and floor of the card are once you surround it with the proper support.

Out

Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools is very good at flooding the board with tokens and drawing cards, but more than half the text on the card is completely irrelevant outside of Commander. Cube is complicated enough as it is that this sort of additive distraction causes issues, dissuading people from playing with the card and lowering the general enjoyment when it is played. While this was always a consideration that lay at the core of my design principles, I'm glad I now have empirical evidence as to the kinds of useless text on cards that players find frustrating. For example, players easily ignore the background on Gut, True Soul Zealot because it's not integral to the design of the card. Tevesh Szat, on other hand, is designed in such a way that it highlights these annoyances, constantly drawing attention to the fact that they do not function as intended.

The play patterns of planeswalkers revolve entirely around the use of interconnected abilities. Each ability is costed in such a way that it fits together with the other abilities, creating a set of patterns that guides how players activate the abilities. Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools builds towards an exciting ultimate that justifies it having two plus loyalty abilities. Players choose how quickly to build towards it, but they are always building, regardless of how they are sequencing their activations. Without being able to use that ability in cube, the sheer amount of loyalty actually becomes a barrier to enjoyment for both players. Opponents are quickly dissuaded from interacting with it in combat, while its controller begins to question why they're even tracking loyalty in the first place. I'd rather use my limited space for planeswalkers on designs that actually utilize the entirety of the card.

Volrath's Stronghold allows you to treat your graveyard like a custom toolbox that grows in variety the longer the game continues. Doing so requires you to play a land that can't tap for colored mana, a mana investment on activation, and for you to concede your draw for a turn. Despite the cost, repeatedly playing your best creatures and nullifying most of your opponent's removal is often going to be worth it. I just wish the play patterns weren't so repetitive and difficult to interrupt.

I play virtually no land destruction in my cube by design, so utility lands like Volrath's Stronghold are extremely hard to destroy once they are in play. Because of this, I don't play a lot of nonbasic lands that provide ongoing value outside of creature lands, which can be killed with removal like any other creature. This card is particularly problematic because it creates a static game state, where you don't draw new cards and instead just recycle the same creatures turn after turn. While that's not always the experience, it's been so enough of the time that it's become a bit of a groan test for my play group, even when it's not being activated.

That's not to say that Volrath's Stronghold is necessarily a power outlier, as there are plenty of game states where you cannot afford to give up your draw. This is often when you are behind, or when the creatures in your graveyard don't actually get you any closer to winning the game, despite offering a modicum of value. Determining when and how to activate it takes a lot of skill and can be rewarding. It just lends itself to repetition so naturally, and I've had my fill of playing with it.

Didn't Make the Cut

Despite its relatively simple premise, I find Lethal Throwdown to be one of the most difficult cards in the set to read and understand. In practice, Lethal Throwdown requires you to sacrifice a creature in order to destroy a creature or planeswalker. If you sacrifice a modified creature, you draw a card. My point of contention is that the rider specifying why sacrificing a modified creature is an option lies at the very bottom of the card, beneath the spell's effect. While I understand the need to do this from a templating perspective, it makes the additional cost extremely confusing. The first thing that goes through your mind while reading it is, "why would I want to do that?". While the answer lies on the card, it doesn't flow in a way that facilitates understanding. I have to read the card 2-3 times every single time I see it in order to get the full picture, and that's just not conducive to longevity in cube.

From a gameplay perspective, providing an upside if you sacrifice a certain type of creature does not address the main problem with Bone Splinters. This problem, of course, is that needing to sacrifice a creature at sorcery speed in order to cast it is simply too restrictive. Even when you do control a creature, there's no guarantee that it's one you can afford to sacrifice to resolve the spell. Bone Shards gets around this by allowing you to discard a card instead of sacrificing a creature, providing synergy upside in the process. Since you draw a new card every turn, Bone Shards is almost never stuck in your hand. Lethal Throwdown has synergy with modified creatures, but it does not address the problems that kept Bone Splinters out of the cube in the first place.

Unlike Tarmogoyf and Barrowgoyf, Nethergoyf only counts those cards from among your own graveyard, which dampens its ability to grow even further. Costing one mana lets you play it earlier, but it's not going to hold much value when your graveyard doesn't have any cards in it. It's probably best leveraged as something you can double spell with later in a game, although a smaller Tarmogoyf isn't exactly something I'm excited about playing. I'm certainly not excited about exiling cards from my graveyard, likely shrinking it in the process, to escape it back into play. Nethergoyf needs an environment with heavy delirium support in to ensure that both iterations of it are able to be satiated. You also need to be in the market for "large" vanilla creatures in your section, something that just doesn't align with any of my core strategies.

Ripples of Undeath serves as an efficient way to fill your graveyard while providing the opportunity for direct card advantage in the process. Because both abilities reduce your clock quite significantly, this is really only desirable in proactive graveyard strategies that are looking to use the card advantage as a way to end the game as soon as possible. That's quite a niche requirement in my cube, where graveyard decks tend to be grindy and win through eventuality.

The single life loss from Phyrexian Arena felt like a real cost in these decks, especially against proactive opponents, and I can't imagine that paying three times as much life is going to perform better, even if you do obtain more card selection. Needing to pay to draw the card further complicates matters, as it makes it more difficult to actually cast the extra spells you are drawing, particularly if played on curve. Sylvan Library retains its spot in the cube due to its explosive potential and the novelty it provides in , a color that lacks as much access to direct card draw. does not need to go out of its way to gain access to these effects, especially when it's an awkward fit in the decks that would be interested in the primary synergy.

Didn't Make the Cut

The lack of overt combo support in my cube has resulted in tutors serving more of a toolbox function than cards that outright win the game for you. Instead of tutoring for Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker or Tendrils of Agony, players can search for a key piece of interaction or board presence. This lowers the ceiling on tutors significantly, and while I'm still playing them, I don't view them as an integral part of any particular strategy. This is all to say that the barrier for entry on tutors is higher than it may be for other cubes. The Creation of Avacyn lets you tutor for a creature and put it into play, but the time and cost it takes to do so puts into question whether it's even worth casting in the first place.

The obvious way to exploit The Creation of Avacyn is to tutor for an expensive creature, because that accrues the most value once you put it into play without having to pay its mana cost. However, doing so costs you the largest amount of life, and since this provides no board presence until two turns after you cast it. This puts you under an enormous amount of pressure against any proactive opponent, as well as providing them with multiple turns to draw into an answer for whatever creature you tutored for.

While you can also tutor for a noncreature to avoid losing life, particularly when behind, you then have to pay the mana for that spell in order to cast it. Any toolbox solution you happened to be hunting for needs to still be playable and relevant two turns after you tutor for it, and that's going to be far too late under most circumstances.

Flare of Malice is by far the easiest alternate casting cost to pay in the Flare cycle because of the plethora of naturally recursive creatures in . Unfortunately, much like Flare of Denial, you basically must cast Flare of Malice for its alternate cost for it to be reasonably competitive. After all, the effect it provides is both redundant and comes at a base mana value that is twice what one would expect to pay in cube. Not only are these other removal spells less expensive, but they are more able to kill what you want to kill.

Forcing your opponent to sacrifice their most expensive creature or planeswalker will answer a problematic permanent, but there are going to be plenty of instances where it's not killing what you actually need to. Edict effects often make up for this by being able to answer creatures with shroud, hexproof, indestructible, ward, protection, etc., but I'm not playing very many creatures with those abilities. I'm already playing both Snuff Out and Slaughter Pact as removal spells that can be cast for free, and I'd rather not add to or replace these cards with another of the same ilk when it provides less control and a more conditional casting requirement.

Shilgengar, Sire of Famine feels a bit like a planeswalker as it accrues value over time while building to a game ending ultimate ability. Unfortunately, without any other ways to accrue Blood tokens in my cube, you're going to be entirely reliant on activating its sacrifice ability to reach that ultimate. Sacrificing six creatures is unlikely to happen over the course of one or two turns, even when taking tokens into account, so you'll need to sacrifice an Angel in order to make it happen in a reasonable amount of time. This, and the onerous mana requirement to actually activate that ability, largely limits Shilgengar to decks proper to fully utilize it.

That doesn't mean it's unplayable in other decks, it's just going to be relegated to slower, less explosive performances. In these decks, you're almost certainly going to win the game or have Shilgengar die before you're able to activate its ability. While you then have some leftover Blood tokens to craft your hand, it does feel like a lot of the card is wasted potential. Free sacrifice outlets are premium in any aristocrat deck, but five drops need to be impactful on the turn they enter play, and Shingengar drags its value out across too many turns to compete with other creatures in that slot.

Red

Char has been a staple in my cube for years due to its ability to kill creatures with 4 toughness and deal damage to an opponent directly, something that's still a bit of a rarity in without needing to satisfy a secondary condition. Ghostfire Slice provides the same effect, at the same cost, and removes the 2 damage you take when you cast Char. Additionally, you can cast it for if an opponent controls a multicolored permanent. While this isn't something you can control, and therefore provides no synergistic upside, it is an exciting cost reduction that doesn't qualify as targeted hate. This is a pretty straightforward upgrade on a classic cube card that still serves an important purpose.

Detective's Phoenix has finally given me a card with bestow that I can be excited about playing with. Chandra's Phoenix was a fine role player during its time in the cube, and while this can't reanimate itself, it can enhance an existing creature from your graveyard. Collect evidence 6 is expensive enough that it's difficult to continuously chain bestow triggers, which would feel both repetitive and oppressive. That said, if the creature you bestowed were to die, you not only receive a conciliatory Chandra's Phoenix, but that creature goes to the graveyard to fuel future bestow activations. This allows it to scale with your game state while serving as a functional creature you don't mind losing if played on curve.

The threat of activation Detective's Phoenix presents while sitting in your graveyard is significant, forcing your opponent to respect it even if you aren't planning on bestowing it. After all, granting a creature +2/+2, flying, and haste for a single mana can turn any creature into a threat as soon as it enters play, especially in decks like that are capable of playing larger creatures. It's especially devastating on creatures like Hero of Bladehold and Krenko, Tin Street Kingpin that are balanced around giving your opponent a brief window to prevent them from taking over a game. This allows it to be solid in every proactive strategy, although it becomes more explosive in decks capable of filling their own graveyard. There are a lot of different ways to leverage and sequence Detective's Phoenix, and I'm excited to see how it performs in my environment.

Ever since I cut Flametongue Kavu, I've been missing the role it served in the cube, particularly since it was unique among the four drop creatures I'm currently playing. Pyrogoyf provides a similar function while having a little more survivability in combat, provided there are enough card types in all graveyards. Like Barrowgoyf, paying more mana for a greater overall effect actually makes these cards more consistent in my cube, as the extra turn or two to put cards in graveyards makes a huge difference. I expect Pyrogoyf to be a 3/4 or 4/5 pretty reliably, and the ceiling is significantly higher.

The main upside on display here is the ability to hit any target with its ETB ability, as it's never going to lack a target regardless of how much damage it's dealing. While Flametongue Kavu never actually had to deal damage to itself, there were plenty of times when being able to deal damage to an opponent or planeswalker would have been significantly better than dealing it to a creature. The gains extra value when it's being blinked or reanimated, as even 3-4 damage adds up quickly when multiplied. I kind of wish it didn't grant that ability to other Lhurgoyfs at all though, as it adds unnecessary, and distracting, complexity that will be very difficult to actually take advantage of. While I don't think that taints the card per se, I wouldn't be surprised if others just opted to play Flametongue Kavu for the simplicity and consistency instead.

Out

For discussion of Char see Ghostfire Slice, above.

Shrine of Burning Rage was a key part of the mono aggro and burn decks that used to be the default strategies when playing during the early stages of my cube. Players would largely ignore it entirely after playing it, hoping it would survive until they were able to kill their opponent outright. Since it accrued multiple counters a turn in decks that put all of their equity into reducing their opponent's life total, it usually only took a couple of turns to become really threatening. I found that it rarely targeted creatures though, as players both had difficulty keeping up to use it reactively, and they could not afford to deviate their limited resources away from actively killing their opponent.

The current iteration of my cube has moved away from not only monocolored support but also burn as an archetype. While it's still possible to draft a burn deck, I no longer play cards whose sole purpose is to support that strategy. As such, it's been a long time since anyone was happy about seeing Shrine of Burning Rage in a pack. Without the ability to reliably put multiple counters on it per turn, it just ticks up too slowly to effectively pressure an opponent's life total. If the activation cost was cheaper then you could more easily use it as a Seal of Fire, but it's just not realistic at that activation cost. This definitely feels like a sacred cow that should have been removed a long time ago.

Purphoros, God of the Forge is the last of the original Theros Gods to leave my cube, and it's for the same reason that I cut Thassa, God of the Sea, originally: it just never becomes a creature. Devotion has been very difficult to support in my cube over the years due to the lack of monocolored support and my purging of many two and three mana spells that require multiple pips to cast. The decreased strain on mana bases and subsequent increase in overall consistency have resulted in much better gameplay, and it's been well worth the devaluation of devotion as a mechanic. This means that Purphoros, God of the Forge requires you to control 3-4 additional nontoken permanents to resolve and remain in play, something that just has not been commonplace.

Without the ability to turn into a creature, Purphoros exists as a build around enchantment that comes at a premium cost. There have been a number of successful token decks that used it as a synergistic base, and very few of them ever activated the pump ability. This is because simply casting their creatures often produced more damage than paying to pump would. It exists independent of combat, cannot be disrupted with interaction outside of decks, and it clocks an opponent so quickly that it only takes a couple of turns to do so. These decks were often better off protecting their life total and playing to the inevitability Purphoros was able to provide, especially against proactive opponents.

This inevitability creates a tension that would be a lot more effective if players were able to reliably interact with it, something that being indestructible makes very difficult. Its inability to turn into a creature actually makes it more difficult to kill, as cards like Path to Exile can no longer target it. Exiling enchantments is such a niche effect that it starts to feel like a form of protection, as certain colors just do not have that ability within their color pie. I wish the Impact Tremors ability was on a different card that was better optimized for cube play, as there is simply too much unused complexity for me to feel good about playing Purphoros, God of the Forge.

While I was generally happy with Torbran, Thane of Red Fell from a gameplay perspective, it pushed and required monocolored strategies more heavily than my cube was able to support. Sawhorn Nemesis is a much easier to cast version of the same card, except all damage dealt is doubled instead of increased by 2. Like double strike, this ability get progressively more powerful the more damage is dealt at a single time, and its generally better with larger instances of damage, whereas Torbran was at its most efficient when combined with tokens and small instances of damage.

Like Torbran, Sawhorn Nemesis does not improve the survivability of any creatures you control, it only increases the damage they deal. This allows your opponent to trade with them in combat instead of having to chump block literally everything. It also works with damage dealt from noncreature sources such as planeswalkers and burn spells, allowing you to trade up on mana and damage with nearly every effect in your deck. While this isn't necessarily a "win-more" effect, it's certainly not worried about synergy or being creative, as its sole focus is to bring the game to a conclusion sooner rather than later. There's real value in that, particularly in smaller doses. I wouldn't be surprised to see it get replaced in favor of something more interesting and synergistic, but I want to give it a trial run since I have a four drop in mind to cut anyway.

Oliphaunt should largely mirror Eagles of the North in the various aggressive versions of decks, as they are likely going to have difficulty reaching the six mana required to cast it. That said, it's actually quite a good fit in , which I would expect to have some form of mana acceleration by default. Like Troll of Khazad-dûm, it's also an excellent card to reanimate in the decks. It's even castable in slower versions of , despite not being naturally synergistic with anything they are trying to do mechanically. Regardless of where it is drafted though, I expect it to be able to successfully smooth mana bases and opening hands while providing late game utility, just like the rest of the cycle.

Out

Rampaging Raptor has been perfectly functional as an aggressive four drop creature regardless of which deck is playing it. The combination of trample and haste results in it being fairly easy to ensure that at least some damage is dealt to an opponent the turn it enters play, thereby triggers its ability if relevant. If there isn't a planeswalker in play though, it isn't really providing any value other than being a generically aggressive creature, which limits its versatility significantly, which was one of its main drawing points. While players have paid to pump it's power periodically, it hasn't felt like something that changes how the card is evaluated. It's just too expensive for an ability that does nothing other than push a couple of extra damage. I like Rampaging Raptor, but it's been more Ulvenwald Oddity than Hellrider, and that's been a little underwhelming.

Rampaging Raptor is the third Hellrider variant I'm currently playing alongside Headliner Scarlett and Hellrider itself, and it's the only one with miscellaneous flavor text on it. While ignoring the word "battle" on a card isn't difficult once you know it's irrelevant, the question of whether there are any battles in the cube for this to deal damage to is going to be asked until then. The existence of battles affects an environment enough that it should change your drafter's card and format evaluations simply by seeing the word on a card. Since I'm not supporting them as a card type, it's much easier to just forgo running cards that reference them as well.

Worldknit served as an extremely unique and fun build around that allowed players to do something completely different with their cube draft. Instead of trying to identify the open color, it allowed players to simply draft the best card for their desired strategy from every pack, regardless of color requirement. While this isn't the default experience I'd want to have during a draft, it can be incredibly fun every now and then, particularly because it required players to play with every card they draft. This puts an added emphasis on making each pick count, as every single one will dilute the overall product. It did get a little bit awkward when seen midway through packs 2 or 3 though, as players had already committed to their strategy by that point. Most players were not willing to scrap their streamlined vision when it meant including the chaff they had received earlier in the draft. Again, since we aren't really drafting as often anymore, these kinds of cards just aren't utilized as intended, making them easy cuts.

Didn't Make the Cut

While I've been really happy with Accorder Paladin as an aggressive two drop that supports token strategies, it's definitely on the low end of two drops. Battle cry is entirely reliant on your ability to develop a sustained board presence, and it can be an awkward play on curve, when you are unlikely to control creatures capable of benefitting from it. This lends a lot of importance to it being a Blade of the Sixth Pride, as it at least represents three damage on its own.

Reckless Pyrosurfer has similar play patterns except that it represents 2 damage the turn you cast it, and its battle cry ability is conditional. I've never liked cheap landfall creatures like Plated Geopede and Steppe Lynx that are unable to provide lasting value into the later stages of a game. These creatures are really only good on curve, and that's when Reckless Pyrosurfer's battle cry ability is at its least effective. Even when played on curve, you're unable to pump anything with its ability until turn four unless you played a one drop before it. In order to reach its ceiling, you need to play it after you've establish a board presence and then follow it up with lands to fuel its ability. These play patterns just aren't conducive to consistent or reliable performances, and I don't expect Reckless Pyrosurfer to be anywhere near competitive in cube because of it.

There aren't a lot of solid defensive two drop creatures in to support the more grindy, value oriented and decks. I was initially excited about Party Thrasher being one of those because of its ability to block effectively while providing ongoing card advantage at a discount. It wasn't until I read the card a few times that I realized it's merely offering card selection at a discount unless you're able to parlay discarding a card to your advantage. Despite this, it does come packed with potential synergies that can increase its ceiling. It allows you to convoke any cards cast from exile, including those exiled with other cards, an ability that does show up from time to time on various cards.

It's a little awkward that the decks most able to take advantage of convoke, and , have the fewest noncreature spells and are least in the market for an Ageless Guardian. It also doesn't work with any reactive spells in or , since you're limited to casting them on your own turn. Its best use is casting planeswalkers, but it's otherwise quite difficult to take full advantage of its abilities since they don't seem to work all that well together in any particular deck. It's also rather slow, as you won't be able to use its abilities until the turn after you cast it. This makes it much less appealing when drawn off curve, when you'd otherwise be able to use it to double spell out of nowhere. Party Thrasher has some positive synergies and is a cool and unique design, it's just not a very cohesive card and falls in the middle of most color combinations and deck strategies.

Dualcaster Mage is the closest we've ever gotten to a playable Fork variant in cube, and that was largely because it provided at least some value when that ability was irrelevant. The main problem with Fork is that whatever spell your opponent is casting eventually resolves as intended. While you can kill their creature by casting Flare of Duplication on a Doom Blade, your creature still dies. Your opponent always accrues whatever value they were originally going to accrue. Add in the fact that it can only target instants and sorceries, and you have a spell that has a very narrow window where it truly shines.

Being able to cast the spell for free doesn't make it easier to find scenarios where it's effective, it just lets you capitalize on ones as they occur. I'm still not convinced it's worth a slot in any player's deck, let alone the cube at large though. This isn't helped by the fact that the base rate is almost laughably bad, especially considering my experiences with Dualcaster Mage. The only upside this does have is that it is an inherently fun effect, unlike the somewhat boring Flare of Fortitude that's both undesirable and poorly costed. It's not enough to get Flare of Duplication into the cube, but it's somewhat surprising we still haven't seen one that's all that exciting to actually play with in cube.

I had to read Arena of Glory far too many times to really understand the value that it provided through its exert ability. Basically, all it does is give a creature haste without changing the amount of mana you could produce during that turn. It neither ramps you nor sets you behind on mana, something that was not immediately apparent to me through reading the card. It does, of course, set you back one mana on the following turn. Whether that is worth using the ability is going to depend entirely on the board state and creature you are granting haste to at the time.

While I love the design space of exerting lands for value, I don't place a ton of importance on granting haste on its own. Rhythm of the Wild and Invigorating Hot Spring have spots in the cube because they grant haste and modify creatures, thereby creating new attacks that may not have existed beforehand. This added utility is crucial to making these effects on rate, and Arena of Glory is entirely at the mercy of the evolving board state. It also requires you to actually cast a creature in addition to paying the two mana to use the exert ability. This greatly limits the creatures you could even grant haste simply from an availability of mana standpoint. I'm not interested in using a cube slot on a land that's going to sometimes let you give your two and three drops haste.

Green

Malevolent Rumble is the most pushed we've ever seen a Grapple with the Past variant, as it provides selective card draw, a way to mill yourself, and board presence all for two mana. Increasing from three to four cards makes a significant difference in your ability to draw something needed and meaningful, as does expanding the range of targets to include any permanent type. It's particularly good with planeswalkers, which almost never have a mechanical benefit for being in your graveyard. Playing to the board alleviates the risk incurred in taking a turn off to set up your game state, which was often exploited by aggressive opponents. Making an Eldrazi Spawn token is particularly good in decks, as you can use it to chump block, ramp you on a future turn, or leverage it as a way to cast a second spell on the turn you cast Malevolent Rumble. It's a huge upgrade over Grapple with the Past, and I'm looking forward to future iterations in this vein.

Fanatic of Rhonas has been excellent as an early game blocker that doubles as a mana producer when needed. It's been trivially easy to both control a creature with 4 power and make use of the extreme mana acceleration it provides. Getting it into the graveyard has actually proved more difficult than expected without a sacrifice outlet, but eternalize has been a very reliable and effective payoff for doing so. Whether it is doubling as a blocker and mana dork, or threatening to attack as an actual threat on board, Fanatic of Rhonas has been an excellent addition to any deck regardless of strategy.

decks are able to most profitably leverage eternalizing, both through mill and sacrifice effects to get Fanatic of Rhonas into the graveyard. makes excellent use of the intense ramp it provides when ferocious is active, and and have a multitude of ways to enable that ability organically. Being playable in multiple builds of decks is pretty much a requirement at this point in cube design, and this is an excellent example of a creature that is able to do just that.

Springheart Nantuko is another extremely interesting implementation of the bestow mechanic, as its landfall ability does two very different things depending on whether it is bestowed. When in play as a creature, it creates an Insect token that can either be used to preserve your life total or benefit from the various anthem and +1/+1 counter enablers in the cube. When bestowed, it creates a token copy of the creature it's enchanting if you pay when the ability is triggered. If you do not pay that cost, you will instead create an Insect token. While I don't expect players to ever hard cast Springheart Nantuko, it's a nice consolation prize for when your bestowed creature leaves play. Unfortunately, the templating on the landfall ability leaves a lot to be desired, as it can be quite confusing to read and understand. It's an exciting enough payoff that it's not a deal breaker, but it's disappointing to see such an imposing wall of text on an otherwise outstanding card.

Because there is so much equity tied up in successfully making a token copy, you'll usually want to wait until you can bestow, trigger, and activate the landfall ability all on the same turn. This can happen reliably as early as turn four without acceleration, allowing for some pretty obscene curve outs. It's even more powerful as the game progresses, allowing you to make copies of even stronger creatures at a reasonable cost. After all, bestow allows you to enchant any creature in play, meaning you are able to make copies of your opponent's creatures, as well as your own. The effect will usually justify the investment on a single resolution, softening the blow of missing additional land drops. badly needs more interesting creatures that promote unique play patterns, and Springheart Nantuko delivers in spades.

Six is another creature that promotes unique play patterns, and it does so while serving as both an enabler and payoff for graveyard strategies. Six is a defensive, grindy creature that allows you trade lands in your hand for permanents from your graveyard. Retrace has always been a mechanic that lends itself to repetitive game states when printed on instants and sorceries, as they go to the graveyard immediately after you cast them. Permanents are much more tolerable in this respect, as they require additional synergy or interaction before they can be retraced a second time. This goes a long way towards allowing Six to be a fun, interesting, and powerful value engine, particularly in graveyard decks.

Being a three mana Giant Spider is an excellent baseline for Six, as it allows it preserves your life total while you develop your graveyard and mana base when played on curve. Having four toughness aids in this, but it also allows it to survive burn spells and attacking into opposing boards to trigger its mill ability. I've yet to have an attack that didn't mill something beneficial, whether it be lands to discard or permanents to retrace. Being an enabler, a payoff, and a functional creature allows it to excel regardless of board state or stage of the game. It's particularly threatening late in the game, where graveyards often contain one or two key permanents that demand an immediate answer from an opponent. Six has been excellent in its limited reps so far, and I can't imagine cutting it from the cube any time soon.

Out

For discussion of Grapple with the Past see Malevolent Rumble, above.

Wall of Roots may be able to play defense while ramping more effectively than Fanatic of Rhonas on the turn you cast it, but it very quickly gets outclassed as the game progresses. In addition to being unable to provide offensive pressure or explosive potential at any point in a game, consecutive uses of its ability actually makes it unable to block profitably. Despite appearances, you very quickly have to choose between the ability to block or accelerate, which feels more frustrating than if you just had to tap it to generate .

I also despise the use of -0/-1 counters, which are not only antiquated, but interact extremely awkwardly with +1/+1 counters, as they do not offset like -1/-1 counters do. This requires you to track both counters simultaneously, which is unnecessarily messy and confusing, even if it does grant you additional instances of ramp. Fanatic of Rhonas provides a facsimile of value on curve while serving as a much more synergistic, interesting, and flexible creature as the game progresses.

I had imagined Bramble Familiar as a much more playable Tooth and Nail variant that actually provided value if you drew it before you were able to develop your mana. The ability to cast it on turn two and continue playing the game without taking an effective mulligan made it much less volatile to play with, and therefore ultimately more satisfying. Being able to return the creature to your hand provided versatility, but proved to be extremely resource hungry considering the limited scope of the ability. Paying , discarding a card, and losing a creature in order to cast Fetch Quest raised the bar significantly on what you felt good about cheating into play. Even hard casting it resulted in disappointing targets from time to time, as you just can't afford to pack your deck full of 6-8 mana creatures without diluting your overall curve and sequencing potential. Instead of searching for a more playable Tooth and Nail, I think I'm just going to eschew these kinds of ramp payoffs in the future in lieu of more palatable designs.

The best army in a can creatures like Deranged Hermit, Deep Forest Hermit, Cloudgoat Ranger, and Angel of Invention create multiple tokens in addition to the base creature. The creatures can then be leveraged either offensively or defensively depending on the board state, making it difficult to interact with through single target removal spells. This provides a modicum of value in case the main creature were to die before you can take advantage of its additional synergies. Biogenic Ooze only creates a single 2/2 creature token initially, and while they collectively grow over time, it requires additional mana investment to do so. This makes it heavily reliant on remaining in play over the course of several turns to accrue its intended value.

Putting so much equity into the base creature makes it difficult to utilize it in combat until it has gained a few +1/+1 counters. After all, trading aggressively not only prevents you from generating more creature tokens, but it stops all of your Oozes from accruing +1/+1 counters. It's also much less exciting to reanimate or blink since much of its token generation is tied to putting additional mana into it. This activated ability isn't easy to use either, as it requires three mana to pay for, likely monopolizing your entire turn in the process. The ceiling on Biogenic Ooze is very high, and it provides a much higher ceiling than either of my current similar creatures in this slot. It's just very dependent on things going perfectly, and it occupies too much of your time and too many resources to be considered efficient or reliable.

I've been very happy with both Cultivate and Kodama's Reach as generically playable ramp spells, but having two functionally identical cards in my cube is always a little disappointing, even if they are needed for redundancy. Flare of Cultivation is a Cultivate that you can cast for free, and the only downside is that it costs double to cast normally. I actually don't think this is as big of a drawback as it may appear at first glance considering the importance of Llanowar Elves variants in . It's worse in 3-5 color soupy decks, since they need to be base to reliably cast it, but I've never worried about making those decks worse before and I'm not going to start now. Decks that are base and splashing a third color shouldn't be too affected by this swap, especially considering that Kodama's Reach remains in the cube as well.

Actually casting the spell for free is doable, and you'll often sacrifice a Llanowar Elves for the express purpose of making your mana ramp more reliable and protected from removal. This doesn't actually put you any farther ahead on board though, and I'd prefer not to do that unless I need to, like if having my Llanowar Elves killed before I untap would lose me the game. It's much better value to sacrifice a value creature like Satyr Wayfinder or Eternal Witness, as they've already served their purpose by the time you sacrifice them.

One of the biggest risks associated with playing mana ramp is the requirement to take a turn off from impacting the board to do so. This allows you to accelerate simply by sacrificing a utility creature while still using all of your mana every turn. I'm interested in seeing how that changes the normal play patterns, or if this just gets cast as a "bad" Cultivate 75% of the time. If that's the case, I wouldn't be surprised to see this get swapped out the next time they print some variant on mana ramp.

Like Troll of Khazad-dûm, Generous Ent is made better simply by being in a color that's naturally able to leverage it as an actual creature. not only has a bevvy of ways to leverage cards once they go into the graveyard, but it's always looking for things to ramp into that don't actively make opening hands worse. It's less aggressive than the other creatures in the cycle, having both reach and making a Food token, but it's excellent as a generic value creature regardless of strategy.

Out

For discussion of Cultivate see Flare of Cultivation, above.

I had originally included Blast Zone as a safety valve against token strategies in case they started to go wider than most decks were able to handle with conventional blockers. This never really materialized as something players needed to be concerned about though, as the existing enablers and answers have created a pretty good balance. Blast Zone is too mana intensive and narrow to serve as a viable main deck option in any deck, especially when it actively makes your mana worse. I don't really see the point in playing sideboard hate cards for strategies that aren't actively causing problems, as it's just taking up a slot in the cube for a card that nobody actually puts in their deck.

Didn't Make the Cut

While I acknowledge the importance of providing players with viable ways to answer problematic artifacts and enchantments, Collective Resistance fails to provide the kind of upside that would entice me to actually play it in my main deck. Naturalize is nearly always a proactive spell that players cast because something in play needs to be dealt with. As such, you can't often wait around for the opportunity for protecting your creature to be relevant. This makes it very difficult to organically maximize what this spell offers. Instead of blowing out your opponent by countering a removal spell and destroying a critical artifact and/or enchantment, you're much more likely to do one or the other. While that's not inherently bad, it's also not very mana efficient or exciting. This is what cards that lack inherent synergies need to provide if they are going to be anything other than sideboard cards that players don't value very highly.

Birthing Ritual is a Birthing Pod variant that you can both cast and benefit from as early as turn two. The catch is that instead of searching your entire library for a creature to upgrade, you only select from among the top seven cards instead. This makes it much more of a generic toolbox card as opposed to something you are looking to abuse combos with, as you can't guarantee a return on investment even with a proper deck build. Fortunately, you see these cards before you choose a creature to sacrifice, allowing you to not only change your selection on the fly, but decline the trigger altogether depending on what is revealed.

This allows for maximum flexibility, but also prevents you from being able to actively strategize around your activations ahead of time. Determining which creatures are expendable and which need to be sacrificed is now very difficult. You can no longer rely on vertically chaining a single creature towards an actual goal. Instead, at the end of every single turn you simply see what happens and hope to accrue value from it. You still gain an advantage with a proper knowledge of your deck list, but it's no longer a requirement like it was with Birthing Pod. Incidentally, I actually think this last note will often be an improvement, as players rarely have comprehensive knowledge of their own deck in my experience.

While I'm fine with how Birthing Ritual functions conceptually, it's kind of a nightmare to resolve practically. Looking at the top seven cards of your library and comparing them against the creatures you have in play every single turn gets monotonous very quickly. Much like Sensei's Divining Top, it's an effect designed to trigger repeatedly over the course of many turns, and it drags the pace of a game down to a similarly glacial crawl. The value players accrue from the ability pales in comparison to the cost that actually resolving it takes on player enjoyment. I have no desire to force my players to sit through this every single turn over the course of an entire game, especially since it doesn't actually propel a game towards a conclusion with any sense of urgency.

Eladamri, Korvecdal is a blend of Elvish Piper and Vizier of the Menagerie, two cards that never really solidified a role in my cube. My cube lacks the traditional targets for cards like Sneak Attack, Channel, Show and Tell, etc. in favor of creatures that decks can actually hard cast somewhat reliably. This makes it much more of a value proposition, which lowers its ceiling significantly. Vizier of the Menagerie never took off because of how difficult it was to reliably sequence the creatures that were on top of your library with the spells in your hand. While you accrued card advantage, you also frequently struggled to use all of your mana every turn, especially when your opponent's board demanded a specific line of play that didn't align with the top of your library.

This is all to say that I'm inherently skeptical of the combination of abilities that Eladamri provides, especially when it comes at such an exorbitant activation cost. Being able to cheat creatures into play on an empty board without developing your mana was the main appeal of Elvish Piper, and needing to control two creatures in addition to Eladamri delays when this ability is possible to activate. I do like that you can tap creatures with summoning sickness, allowing you to chain together creatures from the top of your library and hand in a way that maximizes your mana. It's just difficult to organically plan for that, and I expect that doing so will involve subpar lines of play on average. This is another card with a very high ceiling but that's also very swingy and will struggle to provide consistent value that matches expectations.

Like Monumental Henge, Shifting Woodland offers an expensive activated ability that can only provide value conditionally. The difference being, of course, that you can't even activate Shifting Woodland unless you have delirium, something that should be fairly easy to accomplish by the time you have five mana. Having delirium also organically enables its ability to become a copy of a permanent in your graveyard, as it's impossible to attain it without having a permanent in your graveyard in the first place. Of course, this doesn't mean that you have anything actually worth paying five mana to copy.

Copying lands and planeswalkers provides little to no value of any kind since you won't have enough mana to activate any useful abilities on lands, and largely can't activate planeswalkers' abilities at all without loyalty counters. Copying creatures has always been an underwhelming prospect since so few of them generate their intended value through combat. Instead, they provide either immediate or ongoing value turn after turn that is difficult to justify paying five mana to obtain. While there are definitely cases where activating Shifting Woodland is beneficial, the vast majority of the time you are just going to have better things to do with your mana. Much like the rest of the cycle, it's just too niche to justify a slot in the cube.

Boros

I absolutely love how Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath has played out in cube, as the escape cost has proved to be relatively easy to pay for exactly one time per game. That's exactly how often I would want players to be able to use it anyway, lest it create repetitive play patterns and acts as a creature that can only be dealt with by exiling it. Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury is in a color combination that has a much more difficult time organically filling its graveyard, as it lacks the looting and self mill synergies in . Having the baseline be a three mana Lightning Helix makes up for some of this, as it actually impacts the board in a meaningful way. Regardless, I've been able to pay for the escape ability with some reliability, allowing it to act as a removal spell that provides late game inevitability to great effect. While it doesn't promote any specific synergy or archetype, it is genuinely exciting and performs well in any deck.

Out

There should be no question that Lightning Helix is a card that is good enough for cube play, it just doesn't accomplish any of the design goals that I'm focusing on for my gold section. I want to my gold cards to provide a unique, synergistic function that players cannot gain access to through playing monocolored cards. Ideally, these cards show players what a given color combination can do mechanically, including supported archetypes and synergies. I don't want them to merely function as redundant removal spells, regardless of how efficient they may or may not be. I'm still not in a place where every color combination aligns with this design philosophy, but I'm making strides towards getting there.

already has access to an abundance of burn spells that are efficiently costed. The only thing that makes Lightning Helix unique is the ability to gain life which only holds value in aggro mirrors and the infrequent control decks that use it as a way to buffer their life total. While I love it in those circumstances, it just doesn't feel unique, special, or exciting the vast majority of the time. I will say though that as we move away from doing traditional drafts as our default way to cube, Lightning Helix does get better, which is something I'll be discussing in my next article.

Dimir

Psychic Frog is a mix of two classic gold cards that have fallen by the wayside in my cube, Shadowmage Infiltrator and Psychatog. The first was cut due to the difficulties associated with being a saboteur in cube, while the latter was cut because of its reliance on being paired with Upheaval, another card I'm not running anymore. Pairing the saboteur ability with conditional evasion and the ability to permanently enhance its power and toughness makes it more self sustained and lines up better with modern creatures in the cube.

While Psychatog had the ability to end a game with a single attack, especially when backed up by removal and counterspells, it often only attacked once because of the amount of equity that went into making it relevant in combat. You feel the cost associated with pumping it much more when every single deck in the format plays to the board consistently, as it is unable to attack or block profitably without digging into your limited reserve of cards to discard or exile. The threat of activation is much more prominent when every trigger leaves behind a permanent +1/+1 counter. You're also much more incentivized to make value attacks when you can potentially draw a card. This produces lines of play that are much more threatening and satisfying, particularly in my own environment, which was organically hostile to Psychatog.

The potential of being blown out by a removal spell remains, so thoughtful deck building and sequencing is still important to maximizing Psychic Frog. This means surrounding it with graveyard synergies and/or putting it in a more proactive deck that doesn't have a use for excess lands. Regardless of strategy, the floor is very high as a two mana creature that acts as a free discard outlet. Especially on curve, where you often won't have to discard anything to attack through early game blockers due to the threat of activation. After all, discarding two cards makes it a 3/4 that replaces one of the cards you lost when it hits your opponent. It won't gain flying very often, but it's nice to be able to threaten it in the late game when you may not have as many cards to discard anymore. Psychic Frog supports multiple archetypes simultaneously while providing an exciting reason to play its colors, and I love that it's playable in the tempo deck that lacks clear guideposts.

Out

Siphon Insight is definitely more fun than good, as drawing cards from your opponent's deck is always less good than drawing them from your own, and the odds of whiffing from a sample size of two cards is uncomfortably high. Using flashback doesn't alleviate this problem either, it merely gives you another opportunity to reveal something exciting. Being able to play a land is critical to it being playable at all, but it still feels like quite a let down when you have to do so. I had added it as a way to support graveyard decks, but players largely weren't interested in playing it and I can't completely blame them. Psychic Frog is both more interesting and powerful while retaining the archetypal support structure I was seeking in the first place.

Golgari

Wight of the Reliquary has been excellent in its limited play both on curve and off since being added to the cube. Vigilance allows it to leverage its above rate body, which is commonly a 3/3 or 4/4 at minimum, while threatening to turn any of your other creatures into a land at instant speed. Whether you are trading in tokens or recursive creatures, using it in response to removal spells, or using it as a combat trick, it's been something that opponents have to take into account. The lands it tutors for have been important too, as always has things to do with its mana. It's a synergistic blend of abilities that feels powerful and satisfying, and it's one of the better gold cards in my cube.

It's certainly been better than Fiend Artisan, which is smaller by default and requires mana to use its sacrifice ability at sorcery speed. You just gain so much interactivity and freedom being able to activate it whenever you need to, and the upside of finding lands has actually been better than finding a diminutive creature. Any interest I may have had in chaining together value creatures went by the wayside once I realized how prohibitively expensive doing so becomes.

Out

For discussion of Fiend Artisan see Wight of the Reliquary, above.

Didn't Make the Cut

While Grist, Voracious Larva is yet another design and flavor success, the requirement to actually transform it requires an extremely specific interaction that is going to be difficult to achieve with any reliability. Transforming Grist basically requires you to pair it with , as there are very few other ways to reanimate creatures from your graveyard. The grindy nature of both the creature and planeswalker on display lends itself much better to the various recursive creatures in as opposed to reanimation spells proper. After all, the planeswalker itself matters very little once you have a Griselbrand or Vaultborn Tyrant in play well ahead of schedule. Instead, it helps you gum up the board and dissuades your opponents from attacking on the ground while doing very little else of substance.

I've spoken before about my dislike of planeswalkers with linear play patterns, and Grist is going to do exactly one thing almost every single turn it remains in play: create a an Insect token that may have deathtouch. The middle ability badly needed to be something that tempted you away from using the +1 repeatedly, and Naturalize just isn't going to be something you need very often. The ultimate doesn't even deviate from this design, as it simply makes more, albeit better, Insect tokens. Ophiomancer has shown how impactful maintaining a single 1/1 creature with deathtouch can be, and making one every turn just isn't the upside I'm looking for on a planeswalker. I think Grist, Voracious Larva is a good card with a strong design, it's just doesn't promote play patterns that I find particularly rewarding.

Gruul

I cut Bloodbraid Elf because I found that the best thing you could do was to cascade into either a value creature or removal spell. While this was functional, it lacked the visceral excitement that was supposed to define the mechanic. Bloodbraid Challenger costing five mana actually makes it a much more exciting card, as it increases the amount of cards you can cascade into to include four drops. Jumping from three to four mana introduces a number of significantly more impactful cards, notably planeswalkers.

Whiffing on your cascade was doubly disappointing when your Bloodbraid Elf immediately traded in combat, something that it nearly always did. Bloodbraid Challenger is a little bigger, but the real draw is the escape ability that promises a second chance at cascading into something exciting. It's harder to be disappointed with your first trigger when you have the promise of redemption on the horizon. The fact that it's a natural addition to the Fires archetype works out perfectly. There's a good chance that any creature you cascade into can also attack immediately, which puts a lot of pressure on your opponent.

Out

Rhythm of the Wild and Invigorating Hot Spring are key to making the Fires deck function as intended, so I doubled down on the synergy in order to maximize the playtesting reps. While I'm loving the performance of the deck in general, I've come away less impressed with Rhythm of the Wild. This is due in part to the underwhelming "can't be countered" clause, which really dissuades interaction in a way that I find dissatisfying. Having one creature with the ability in your deck isn't too big of a problem, but having your entire deck disregard that form of interaction was frustrating, and made it feel more like an anti- hate card at times. The fact that it's completely irrelevant against any non- opponent doesn't help matters.

Granting each of your nontoken creatures riot has played out fairly well, but missing on tokens has been extremely relevant. It's also somewhat low impact compared to Invigorating Hot Spring which grants both effects, albeit on a limited basis. I'd absolutely be in the market for a pushed version of Rhythm of the Wild, as I like the redundancy it provided in the Fires archetype. I just wish it was a more complete package, as this isn't quite providing the experience that I wish it did.

Izzet

Ral, Monsoon Mage is a Goblin Electromancer that not only makes your instants and sorceries cheaper, but it has a chance to transform into a planeswalker every time you cast one during your turn. I'm usually not the biggest fan of overt randomness, specifically flipping coins. However, being able to control whether the ability triggers at all by adjusting when you cast your spells not only allows for strategical freedom, it also allows you to simply ignore it if you are finding more value in chaining instants together at a reduced cost. The actual transformation being optional helps too, as you'll never lose your creature when you don't want to, even if you're casting sorceries instead. There are going to be times when you need to transform him and just cannot win a coin flip though, and the damage from lost flips will add up.

Once transformed, Ral's play patterns are likely going to revolve around maximizing the amount of times you can activate his -2 ability, as it provides by far the biggest upside. It's also one of the reasons I'm putting Ral in the gold section, as opposed to proper. Being able to cast both sides of Fire // Ice makes a massive difference in overall card quality. The fact that has easiest access to instants and sorceries, and the only mechanical synergy for casting them, makes Ral pretty easy to categorize. Even though Ral enters play with extra loyalty depending on what you cast before he transformed, I think it's pretty unlikely that he'll ever have more than 4 loyalty to start with. That would require you to cast 3(!) instants or sorceries on your own turn, lose 2 coin flips and then win the third. Thankfully, having 3-4 loyalty allows you to immediately use his -2 ability and survive, which is the acceptable floor.

If Ral, Monsoon Mage doesn't work out, it will be because a combination of small frustrations add up to a card that either can't provide consistent value and/or is frustrating to play with. I'm honestly on the fence at the moment about how he will play, but I like the design enough to give it a trial run. Basically, I had a card I wanted to cut, and Ral is serving as an adequate space filler until he proves his keep.

Out

Saheeli, Sublime Artificer consistently struggles from mismanaged expectations stemming from both the wording of her -2 loyalty ability and her perceived reliance on artifacts. I've had numerous players provide feedback that they lacked enough artifacts in their deck to allow her -2 ability to function as intended. This is despite the static ability creating artifact tokens whenever you cast a noncreature spell. I've explained that she functions more as a spells matter payoff as opposed to an artifacts matter payoff, but this point of contention repeatedly comes up.

The second issue, and the one that's more concerning to me in particular, is that she can only copy an artifact or creature that you control, and only until the end of turn. spells matters decks frequently play fewer creatures than most other decks in the cube so that they can make more room for interaction and card draw as a way to reliably trigger some of their archetypal payoffs. This often leaves them without ways to maximize Saheeli's -2 ability, as making a copy of Mercurial Spelldancer is really underwhelming as a one time effect. Frequently, what will happen is an opponent has a creature that her controller wants to make a copy of, and they are disappointed when they realize that they cannot do that. This happens most often in controlling versions of , which will often have one or two excellent targets for the ability and very few other intriguing candidates.

While Saheeli, Sublime Artificer is able to provide consistent value in spite of these idiosyncrasies, it's not what players imagine or remember from their experience of playing with her. If she was a creature that was able to provide some value independent of these factors, I'd be more forgiving. It's just more difficult to justify it with a planeswalker, which are both inherently complex and restricted in number.

Didn't Make the Cut

I absolutely love the design of Invert Polarity, but the combination of having a prohibitive mana cost and being unable to guarantee an upside commensurate with that cost makes it difficult to justify for cube. I don't think it's a bad card though, even if the forced randomness will frustrate some percentage of players. Unlike some coin flip effects, you're at least guaranteed to find a permanent solution for whatever spell your opponent is trying to cast. I'd much rather cast Aethersnatch than Cancel, particularly at the same mana cost, but at least the downside of losing the flip isn't catastrophic. It's just not something I want occupying one of my limited gold slots.

Orzhov

Sorin of House Markov is an excellent fit in decks of any variety because of its ability to pressure an opponent's life total while protecting your own. The combination of lifelink and extort allows you to not only offset some of 's cards that use your life total as a resource, but it makes it rather easy to transform him. Whether you are extorting two spells and attacking, or combining it with Blood Artist effects, gaining 3 life in a single turn will happen eventually, even if he spends his first couple of turns on curve blocking for you.

Once transformed, Sorin provides an excellent suite of abilities that will have unique play patterns depending on the game state. The turn you transform him you are guaranteed to be able to use his -1 ability to deal at least 3 damage to something, and you can use a combination of extort and Food tokens to set up future activations. Making multiple Food may not impact the board, but it allows you to reach his ultimate two turns after he transforms, while setting up a massive -1 activation the turn after that. It's fortunate, therefore, that the ultimate provides an effect that is worth players taking into consideration when they sequence his abilities.

Sorin of House Markov needs to be considered a gold card because of how demanding extort is on your mana base. I've tried to make it work in and decks in the past, and it's never gone well. Being able to put a lifelink counter on the creature you Mind Control is a significant upside if it survives to combat, but the decision is ultimately driven by the presence of extort. I also like how it supports bleeding aristocrat decks without simply acting as yet another Blood Artist variant. Accomplishing a similar goal in a unique and exciting way is a mark of a desired cube card, particularly in the gold section.

Out

The importance of Blood Artist variants in grindy aristocrats decks cannot be understated if the archetype is to be properly supported. This demands a certain amount of redundancy, especially in a cube as large as mine. Cruel Celebrant was more of a necessary evil than something I felt good about utilizing one of my limited gold slots on. Fortunately, there has been an increase in the number of mono variants within the last year which frees up some space for more adventurous inclusions in gold. Sorin of House Markov grinds out a game in a different fashion, allowing for more novel play patterns in the same archetype.

Didn't Make the Cut

On my initial read of Abstruse Appropriation, I missed the colorless mana clause and thought you could just recast whatever permanent was exiled using any mana. Needless to say, I'm much more interested in that version of the card because it's an exciting, Fractured Identity-esque upside that would make me want to put a removal spell in my gold section. As it is, I just don't have any colorless mana enablers in my cube, and players are largely going to be at the mercy of whatever colors they happen to be playing. In that respect, it's obviously not a good fit. What a heartbreaker.

Selesnya

Didn't Make the Cut

Kudo, King Among Bears is a deceptively powerful creature with incredibly complex and annoying play patterns, as anyone who has played with Godhead of Awe can attest to. The key to playing with Kudo is finding a way to ensure that your 2/2 creatures are better, or more numerous, than your opponent's 2/2 creatures. This can be done by leveraging anthem effects and equipment, having creatures with relevant abilities (which are not affected), or by playing as many token generators as possible. Since Kudo overrides the power and toughness of every creature, it actually enhances anything smaller than a 2/2, something that cards like Lingering Souls and Deranged Hermit take full advantage of. This can be very powerful in the right deck, but it requires careful planning to maximize both before and during a game.

The main problem with cards like Kudo is that they put a lot of equity in your opponent not having removal for your 2/2 in the middle of combat. This was always a problem with Godhead of Awe, and it was immensely frustrating to play with because of it. By far the most common takeaway that players had was that they felt stupid for having put it in their deck whenever they got blown out by a removal spell. Basically any game instantly becomes a board stall if neither player has a way to break parity, and the complexity associated with layers simply is not worth the hassle of a rules explanation. Kudo, King Among Bears is unquestionably powerful, but it's also a miserable card to play with and against, and it makes any format worse simply by being present.

Simic

I think a lot of people are going to see Nadu, Winged Wisdom and automatically rule him out as a power outlier because of his performance in constructed. And yes, he was ludicrously unbalanced in constructed when you play him with Shuko and Outrider en-Kor, which can target your creatures multiple times per turn without paying any mana. These interactions simply do not exist at anywhere near the same rate in cube. Yes, you can still combine him with Bristly Bill, Spine Sower, Ranger Class, Lonis, Genetics Expert, and Ornery Tumblewagg, to name a few cards, but you aren't combo killing players. You aren't triggering its ability twice a turn, every single turn, every single game. Without multiple copies of these cards in your deck, Nadu is free to serve as an above rate creature that provides a very powerful effect if you are able to take advantage of it.

While I largely construct my decks as more of a ramp archetype, I do want there to be multiple varieties of ways to build the color pair. Nadu leans more into the proactive elements of that normally feel a bit out of place in the traditional deck. I've been really happy with color combinations like , , and that provide different flavors of deck, and this is me trying to broaden the appeal of in general. I'm also extremely partial to the Coiling Oracle effect, so I'm excited to get it back into the cube one way or another.

Out

The Goose Mother, outstanding name and flavor aside, is essentially Hydroid Krasis number 2. Now that I've established as a functional ramp deck, I no longer feel the need to double down on such a similar design. It's a bit of a shame though, since Goose was definitely more proactive and generally playable before you established your mana. Creating and sacrificing Food was just a really slow and tedious way to generate card advantage. If I had another way to leverage Food tokens alongside The Goose Mother, I'd be much more interested in it, but they're largely relegated to being sacrificed for life gain if the Goose is dealt with. I'd be open to another similar design if it had a more palatable way to accrue an advantage, but the flavor of the Goose was honestly doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Land

Didn't Make the Cut

I've been very happy with my decision not to include any lands that overtly support three color mana bases in my cube, so there wasn't really any consideration put into including the landscape cycle. The only reason I'm referencing them at all is to highlight a triumph of their design: having the actual mana symbols of the lands they can tutor for being visible on the card.

One of my main points of contention with lands that fetch for more than two colors of mana is how poorly they communicate which lands they can tutor for. Obscura Storefront and Maestros Theater are impossible to differentiate without carefully reading the text of each card. The same goes for Bant Panorama and Jund Panorama. Even if you are familiar with the thematic names for the color pairs, it's very easy to misread or misremember the colors you can tutor for, resulting in very frustrating moments of realization. Regardless of how often players actually cycle a landscape, simply being able to reference the mana symbols as needed makes them much easier to play with. This is the rare example where increased complexity actually simplified another aspect of the card.

Horizon lands have performed extremely well in my cube due to their ability to provide either mana fixing or card advantage depending on the game state. Paying 1 life to tap them for mana has felt like an appropriate cost, as the life loss does matter against proactive decks. That said, the fact that these lands actually fix your mana is critical to them being acceptable cards to put in your deck.

Horizon of Progress cannot do that, as it instead acts as a Reflecting Pool; a card that I cut years ago because it was frustrating to play with and consistently underperformed. The advantage of being able to potentially trade it in for a card doesn't make me want to play a bad Reflecting Pool. The additional upside of being able to cheat lands into play for four mana is so irrelevant that I think the card would actually be better if it wasn't on the card at all. At least then it would be less complex.

Phasing is an ability so confusing that I basically never want to include a card with it in my cube unless there is a very good reason to do so. I certainly don't want to play a card whose main upside is tied directly to being able to phase a creature out of play, as there are a multitude of ways for players to interact with opposing creatures regardless of the color combination. If Talon Gates of Madara was able to blink a creature instead of phasing it out, it would be a much more interesting and intriguing card, as it would introduce a risk/reward dynamic while providing novel lines of play. As it is, I'm certainly not interested in a Painted Bluffs with complexity baggage.

Lazotep Quarry's direct reference to the Desert subtype pretty much excludes it from cube consideration immediately. I'm not playing any Deserts at all, and I'm not interested in the additive distraction even if it's able to sacrifice itself to its own ability. The upside of reanimating a creature if you pay its mana value plus is interesting on a land, but it's not mana efficient enough for me to be excited about, especially when you have to sacrifice a land in order to do so. It's already a risky proposition during the developing turns when the eternalized creature would be most relevant, as a removal spell puts you pretty far behind.

The real draw should be its ability to fix your mana as a free sacrifice outlet, but it's largely only going to produce usable mana if you're able to cast an instant. Players are not going to use removal spells during your main phase when you have this in play, which removes much of the interplay that Warren Soultrader enjoys. Lazotep Quarry provides a lot of interesting lines of play, particularly on a land, but it's not a card that I feel players would draft highly, particularly when it doesn't reliably produce colored mana.

Conclusion

Modern Horizons sets are always a bear to talk about due to their incredibly high level of complexity and sheer number of interesting and powerful cards. These are also some of the most difficult cards to assess because they often show the intersection of mechanics that are never in the same limited format as each other outside of cube. In that respect, these are also some of the most important cards to analyze because they provide important lessons about how complexity can be managed while blending mechanics and strategies together in your own environment. I've loved working through this five(!) part series discussing both the mechanics of Modern Horizons 3 and its associated changelog, but I'm ready to move on to something new.

The next set to discuss may be Bloomburrow, but I'm going to take one more detour before I inspect that plane of adorable animals. Next up is a short article on Darwin Draft, a novel format that represents the main way that my playgroup interact with my cube. I'll highlight how to actually do a Darwin Draft, and I'll discuss the impact that shifting away from traditional draft has, and will, have on the design philosophy of The Awesome Cube. Until next time, may all your packs contain a card for your cube.