With the abundance of EtB creatures these days, I'm actually happy when not every slot is filled with them. Will pass on this, since I also have enough copies of this effect with Eternal Witness, Regrowth and Bala Ged Recovery.
I'm actively maintaining a comprehensive article to help explain to new cube players how some complex vintage level cards work in a cube environment. Vintage Cube Cards Explained
Eternal Witness is still amazing obviously and won't ever cut her, but I've noticed she's dropped a bit in my pick order since my early days of cubing. Likely a function of the format speeding up a bit.
An extra mana is reallly pushing it, even with the eternalize value.
Maybe I'm wrong though *shrug*
Seems to slow for vintage. You may even just end up closing out the game and using your would-be eternalize mana to cast your other cards and win anyways in which case a 4 mana witness isn’t incredible. I love this design a lot and it’s like a four for one but still think it’s maybe too slow.
I’ll bring an alternative opinion - this seems quite good to me. In our group the Pod-style ETB-abusing decks in green have been performing very well, and this is exactly the sort of card you want in those decks. You can usually make plenty of mana from dorks. With the many creature tutors in green there are a lot of decks that really want to see an E Wit for utility, and if you can’t get the E Wit then I’m still happy to see this in theory. I’m coming from the perspective of 720, and I get that this is probably not a card for smaller cubes.
Green 4 drops with good EtB are scarce, and this card seems to be a perfect fit to lists that run Birthing Pod.
I feel compelled to repeat everything I hear
Vintage Cube Cards Explained
Here are some other articles I've written about fine tuning your cube:
1. Minimum Archetype Support
2. Improving Green Archetypes
3. Improving White Archetypes
4. Matchup Analysis
5. Cube Combos (Work in Progress)
Draft my Cube - https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/d8i
An extra mana is reallly pushing it, even with the eternalize value.
Maybe I'm wrong though *shrug*
Last Updated 02/07/24
Streaming Standard/Cube on Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/heisenb3rg96
Strategy Twitter https://www.twitter.com/heisenb3rg