MTG Salvation

How do you guys feel about Vesuva in Cube?

It seems like an interesting way to double-up on powerful utility lands, or to help the mana fixing of multi-colored decks. Plus it's a very unique effect.

Thoughts?

It's very linear and I don't like it much at all, if it didn't ETB tapped I'd run it in a heartbeat, then its WCS becomes another basic land. But as is it's a little inconsistent for me.

My group loves making wacky 3&4 color decks and we don't run signets so most of this time this is an evolving wilds that can fetch up a dual land too.

I cut this long ago, haven't looked back. It's okay card but even Reflecting Pool isn't a high pick, and this card usually serves as a worse Reflecting Pool except in small circumstances. It comes into play tapped, but you usually want to wait until you have a good land to copy so many times it becomes awkward because turn 2 Vesuva or turn 3 Vesuva isn't something I want to be doing.

I hope someday we get a clone for lands someday (and enchantments too!)

I ran Vesuva in my cube when it was slower and had all 10 Ravnica Bouncelands in it (with which Vesuva works quite well) and it still wasn't that good.

I play with this in EDH and Tiny Leaders a fair bit, but haven't even considered it for my cube. How often are you going to manage to draft this and one or some sweet lands to copy? Then how often will you main deck it? Then how often will it actually play out where you get to double Maze if Ith, or win off of a single turn of double Gaea's Cradle? Seems to me that the BCS will be so rare as to be not worth it in all but the largest of cubes.

I don't know, this card seems pretty bad.

I played it in my modern cube back when that thing was around, and it was generally just a bad Reflecting Pool that came into play tapped outside of the corner cases where you were copying some kind of good utility land that wasn't mana intensive (which is pretty rare).

Quote from Griseldaddy »

I believe Vesuva can copy any land in play, yours or your opponent, will try and see how it goes, maybe is not good enough. Also not sure what you mean with "Seems to me that the BCS will be so rare as to be not worth it in all but the largest of cubes." The smaller the better right? So you find better targets to copy? This concept that some of the members of this forum have is very difficult for me to understand sometimes. Anyway, thak you for you reply!

Greetings!

You are exactly right in terms of the density of the best lands to copy, but I meant that I felt the card was low enough in power level that it only warranted a slot in very large cubes. I agree the concept can be counter intuitive and that sometimes it is misapplied or not applied at all when it should be. Basically I'm saying I'd rather the ABU duals, the man lands, several rainbow lands, Mishras Factory, etc.. all before I would spend a cube slot on Vesuva. There should always be room for cards you and your playgroup love however, and even if your cube is 360 or less, if you really like the idea of using your opponents lands against them, double Stip Mining or whatever, then you should find room to test the card out.

There may also be a lot more targets for it in a bigger cube. A lot of the fringe utility lands are good to copy, but don't see play in small cubes. So while there's a density of good targets, I don't know if there are enough total targets by percentage in smaller cubes. Larger cubes may actually have more utility lands worth copying.

It's also a bummer that a lot of the lands I might actually want to build a deck around by copying them (Tolarian Academy, Cradle, Tabernacle, Haven, etc) are Legendary, and this land comes into play tapped. And other lands that would seem great for copying like (Dust Bowl, Creeping Tar Pit and Celestial Colonnade) have such high activation costs that cloning them is fruitless. And your Strip Mines are likely already gone by the mid game if you don't draw both lands together... Vesuva is a great card for EDH where you will always have a deep suite of good utility targets that don't fall to any of those downsides, but the cube just doesn't give you the same flexibility.

Yea, I think the variance is too much for Vesuva. Most of the time you're just gonna copy your own lands, and that's if you're increasing the mileage by picking a utility land (prior) per se.

We got Mana Confluence last year. There is still a chance we will randomly get a good one.