Hey, it's been another year of looking at cards instead of staring into an abyss! Time flies! I keep on not dying, the sun keeps on rising. (Again.)

Here are some final changes to the cube for 2024 and some words about the year and my feelings towards this cube and Magic and so on.

The end of 2024 sees the end of the final big butt three-drops. I drafted a very fun Raffine, Scheming Seer deck in a roto draft of the cube in 2022 and there was one time that Raffine was equipped with Batterskull which was extremely funny and cool but, on whole, the card has just rode sideboards. Glarb is Glarb and Glarb was funny to say and see and Glarb but a valiant player tried to draft a Glarb deck and it did not go hot and also Glarb is just Glarb. The card is a whole bunch of stuff and I don't know if we really need all those bells and whistles and Glarb on top of four toughness for three across three colors. Glarb.

Phyrexian Revoker comes out again as is its fate and I look forward to finding a way to add it back in just to take it out. Anointed Peacekeeper has some of my least favorite art in the cube and always makes me think, "damn, I wish I had drafted Elite Spellbinder instead".

In their place I am bringing back three cards and trying Supreme Verdict for the first time. When I took out Batterskull I wrote that "Batterskull does not fit comfortably in this cube. It is antithetical to the type of Magic I like beyond the sheer joy I find in Stoneforge Mystic tutoring for Batterskull. That is so cool. Stoneforge Mystic is capable of doing so many other cool things whereas Batterskull is basically a very annoying roadblock that slowly batters at your skull." That was six months ago. In the time sense, I think my thinking has gotten simpler. Do I really know what type of Magic I enjoy? Tutoring for Batterskull brings me joy. Getting sweaty palms facing down Batterskull brings me joy--and stress. The risk/reward of picking Batterskull in the draft and wondering if you'll see Stoneforge Mystic. I love the card and if I can't play the cards I love in this cube what am I really doing?

Flickerwisp originally got cut because it is a good generic card and Voice of Resurgence got cut to make room for Knight of the Reliquary. Now I have space for those cards again. Neat.

Supreme Verdict is... I dunno, I want to try out another wrath and maybe angle towards a control deck that folks draft every now and then.

I do not know what this counts or truly reflects but, if one were to go through all the change blogs I wrote this year and tallied up the card changes it comes out to 152 changes. Now, some of those changes were me doing essentially nothing--adding Insist, Overmaster, and Savage Summoning and then taking them back out for the same cards they originally replaced before any drafts--and a good chunk of them were some of the same cards cycling in and out of the cube (e.g. Twinshot Sniper); but, still, that seems like a lot? Or is it? I am not sure. It's an interesting little number to fixate on and what is cube if not fixating on a bunch of numbers and endowing them with varying degrees of importance.

I think I am at a point where I like being fiddly and not precious with cards in this cube; more "classics" and cards with some "personal" importance/affinity than hot new things and making changes whenever I feel like it as opposed to when a new product appears. At the same time, it would be good just to sit with stuff for a while. This will likely be pretty possible in 2025 given that the announced sets/"products" look icky to me.

Oh! This seems kind of relevant or worth noting: with these final changes, and despite those 152 changes over the course of the year, I seem to be running only 22 cards printed in 2024. Of those, 10 are the surveil lands--never coming out of the cube; no notes; great cards--so I don't know how much those count for. Is that something? I mean, the cube made it a whole year without any supplemental products so I skipped over MH3 but also nothing there really inspired much temptation or interest. Weird year for Magic? Weird year for my personal interests? Weird year in general but maybe that's every year?

There were other things that I believe I wanted to touch on in this blog when I first opened this tab about two weeks ago but in the ensuing time I drafted an old border desert cube I am working on and now my mind is full of sand--in a good way.

Okay, that's all. The odds of a follow-up correction blog seem low.