MTG Salvation

I was actually looking into adding Opt recently, and this looks way better. Nice!

Blue is tough to crack into, but this is a great card. Not sure if its much better than Serum Visions though.

This card is quite good. My favorite cantrip outside of the Mount Rushmore of cantrips. This is the best of the tier-2 effects, as good as (or better than) Opt and Sleight of Hand, and leagues better than Serum Visions (or any of the other cantrips that aren't front-loaded card selection and immediate draw). I'll likely be finding room for this, especially since I've been wanting to expand my card-selection cantrip suite as it is.

Certainly a staple if you like the cantrip sauce

Another great card ... no idea who to cut.

Looking over our list, the cards we play that care about putting stuff in the yard instead of your deck are the reanimator spells, tasigur, the golden fang, wrenn and six, firebolt, lingering souls, Faithless Looting, search for azcanta, Narfi, Betrayer King, Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger, Uro, titan of nature's wrath, bloodghast, Scrapheap Scrounger, Jace, vryn's prodigy, Sun Titan, Scavenging Ooze, Tarmogoyf, grim lavamancer, and deathrite shaman. Although we aren't even close to playing Opt, it's still a good and playable card and this might have enough cool synergies to put it over the top into testable territory. Not sure yet, but cool card regardless. Getting an Opt that has a 1/8 or 1/10 chance of milling a fattie and drawing a card (entomb-esque) or an Opt that sometimes helps fuel extra delve and escape and generates additional card advantage or stats at EOT seems super intriguing. Opt is a solid floor, so definitely keeping this card on my radar. Card is gonna tear up modern tho lol

This is exactly what we’ve needed for our 720. I’ve felt like we’re one decent blue cantrip short of the right density for a while.

Better than Opt, but I still prefer Sleight of Hand and Serum Visions over this and Opt. It doesn't make it for me at 360, but I like 1 mana cantrips and would probably include this and Opt if I increased my cube size to 450.

I'm actually not running brainstorm right now because of the relative lack of shuffle effects in cube (and I don't love cards that really want fetchlands to be good), so I like the cards that can get cards off the top of the library. Is it crazy to think that this might be better than brainstorm in cube?

And I think instant speed pushes it past serum visions and slight of hand - you still get to see 2 cards if your top card is meh, and you can leave countermagic up on turn 2 and still cast this.

Edit, not to mention the small (but real) upside of being able to put cards in the yard for flashback, snappy, reanimator, etc.

The idea of playing this over brainstorm does indeed seem crazy to me unless you're intentionally cutting back on power. I've never thought of shuffle utility as being a particularly important part of brainstorm.

Brainstorm is busted. I think the idea of it being reliant on fetches is way overblown. The card just got banned in Historic for warping that format and being too good ...and that format doesn't even have fetches. It has a tremendous impact on the composition of your hand for a single mana, it can hide critical cards from disruption, and it smooths out your sequence of operations better than just about anything else out there. The tremendous synergy it has with shuffle effects is simply a nice added bonus.

Yeah, I'm definitely lower on brainstorm than most lol. I guess it was crazy.

Fwiw, the narrative of brainstorm requiring shuffle effects to be playable in cube was partially because of popular streamers like LSV valuing it low in early iterations of the vintage cube. I watched many of his streams on channel fireball and he cut it from his deck citing this as a reason. He thinks preordain is a stronger cube card @ 540, and I'm not sure he's wrong.

In my opinion, in a deck with zero delve, zero combo elements, zero power and zero fetchlands, brainstorm is a mediocre card.
However, that kind of deck is the exception, not the rule. It doesn't take many of the factors above I mentioned for it's power to change starkly.

It was "too good" for historic, but there were some strong interactions with it that would make it better than most cube decks. 4x fabled passage, 1 mana cantrip triggering arc light pheonixes, putting velomachus on top of the library, hiding your hand from thoughtseize/duress, setting up good expressive iterations...

Card is still great though and can't imagine a format it would be worse than consider, even if I could imagine some decks

On top of that, we have cards like Dark Confidant, Bolas's Citadel, Courser of Kruphix, Terminus that interact with the top deck of the deck favorably.

But also, we don't need fetch lands to shuffle away dead draws - we could always use discard outlets to draw 3 to find the best options to discard and use scry effects to push dead cards to the bottom.