Too slow imo in a slot that’s too stacked.
It’s only application is aggressive and recursive durability is not the axis you want to attack on with a heavy red deck.
no interest
What's the axis on which you'd want to attack on with red aggro?
With the caveat that I haven't been able to cube for a long time outside of MTGO cubes... My constant experience with "standard" powered cubes has been that red aggro is just worse than white aggro. White has all the best toys: removal that can hit anything, one-drops that help blank removal and blockers, Wrath-proof two-drops, Bolt-proof three-drops and several flavors of 4-drops that give you longevity (PWs) or end the game if you're even just a tiny bit ahead on board ('Geddons).
Red aggro feels one-note, much more likely to fold to a Wrath, has little options in terms of grinding back from bad board positions. I'm drawn to the idea of red threats that keep coming back. Is my impression of red completely off, and/or have new cards like Laelia changed things?
Was really hoping red would be the best in the cycle as it always gets the *****tiest free spell in the cycle. Unfortunately this isn’t that, but who knows maybe it’s better than it looks.
I'll just throw this out here and see what others think:
I think this is actually the best card in the pitch evoke cycle.
My reasoning is as follows: as people smarter than me have pointed out, the pitch evoke cycle cards differ from cards like Force of Will in that FoW is either card disadvantage (two cards to get rid of one spell) or card neutral (1-for-1), whereas the pitch evoke cards have a CDA mode (two cards for a spell) AND a CA mode (creature + spell). Even the CDA mode comes with the added bonus of binning a creature, which can be useful for some but not all deck types.
BUT, unless I'm missing something, Fury is the only card in this cycle that has a situational CA mode within the pitch mode, in that you can sometimes destroy three blockers or two tokens and a PW. Thus, "best card", in terms of CA - all the other pitch elementals are good, but their pitch modes are CDA. And no, I don't think the high CMC for the creature mode matters enough to make it worse than any of the others, it either helps close out a game by pitching or come back from an unwinnable situation which is likely to happen if the game goes long anyway. What am I missing?
(All that said, even if I think this a slam-dunk, I was a bit disappointed in that I don't think this card necessarily helps what I think is one of the bigger issues with red in cube, that being red aggro being overshadowed by white aggro and struggling to hold the title of Fun Police. YMMV, but I feel like white aggro has been the best aggro deck for a while given how it can attack from different angles, but this is with the caveat that I haven't been able to play cubes other than the MTGO iterations for a while now.)
As an aside, I think this might be the best mono-red card in the cube.
I was thinking that as well in an unpowered context. Red sometimes seems like close to the best colour in aggro-supporting unpowered and depending on the way aggro is supported in other colours, red might just be the most capable in closing out a game (contrast to the recent MTGO Vintage Cube iterations where white was, at least in my estimation, the obvious best aggro colour and mono-white aggro was the best archetype or close to it in the Christmas cube iteration). Lutri might end up being too much.
Fair - I was thinking of it as an 8-card hand with an okay cube creature as the eighth card, but the fact that it can't be discarded is a good point. I am crazy enough to test this in unpowered, and potentially crazy enough to start going powered because this is such a fun & dumb design that I'd prefer to have a cube that can play such cards
(Seriously, I absolutely love the fact that they decided to try something like this with the wording so that it works in draft and sealed and I assume constructed, unlike the draft-matters-cards from the Conspiracy sets. It's a really ambitious design.)
I'd like to hear more on the reasoning here - assume I have a "high-octane" unpowered cube - competitive but without P8 (Timetwister is fine), Library of Alexandria, Sol Ring or Mana Crypt. What does Lutri, quite concretely, do that gives the drafter that picks the card such an edge?
While we're on the subject of these Secret Lair versions of cube cards, what are thoughts on the rest? I was a little worried I'd be tempted to buy myself a 200 dollar Christmas gift and get the whole bundle, but now that I've seen them all, I'm only interested in the Bitterblossom set for cube.
This is probably just me, but I would run the pixel art Serum Visions over any other version. That said, even if you don't want that kind of clearly non-MTG artwork in your cube, I think any of the other Secret Lair versions of Serum Visions are pretty good to run over any existing option if you run the card at all (though of course there is always the argument for that more organic-feeling original art and frame).
I'm also running the SL Bloodghast because I'm a sucker for having a variety of art styles, plus I love the idea of having a black card illustrated by someone who's worked for Iron Maiden (The LftL is pretty cool too)
Is there any way ATM to view your cube the way it was when it was 450 or 540? I'm thinking of including green aggro in unpowered 540 and just wanted to have a reference for numbers and what I can afford to include in terms of space.
I think this kind of tax is, in the end, too weak. Thalia can prevent them from getting their PW down on a crucial turn, but once the PW is down, adding a tax of one mana to an already free spell seems anemic. I could imagine a scenario where they need to activate JTMS to dig for a fifth land to cast a spell that turns the board to their favor, but not really much else?
I agree that it's a bit of a build around.. more so, that you can't just shove this into a mono green deck with 16 lands and have it be playable. It's ceiling is way way higher than it's average case performance, and it should miss a decent % of main decks or be a weak playable.
It's ceiling is in a deck with strip mine , crucible effects , oracle of mul daya and/or courser of kruphix.
Once you go off with some of those shenanigans, you'll see why this card is much better than the lantern.
Upside is a very important thing to consider when evaluating a card imo.
My guess is it's a clear miss at 360, worth a test in the 450-540 range, and a slam at 540+.
I wrote that message a bit late so I realize now that I wasn't very clear about this, but yes, I absolutely agree this card has a much higher ceiling than Chromatic Lantern and this matters. I was just surprised to see people point to the Chromatic Lantern effect as a significant point in favor of this card AND claiming that this is more resistant to removal against aggressive decks than Lantern, since I don't think the latter is really the case, and the former in and of itself seems a bit weak to me.
I checked your cube while I was writing this and saw that you're running double Fastbond, and this makes sense to me in terms of making land shenanigans work: the deck needs consistent ways of getting extra land drops early, so I would probably add Fastbond and/or Exploration before I added Dryad of Ilysian Grove. Even then, I think the deck might be more in need of more cheap ways of playing lands from the GY, cheap ways of getting lands into the GY with some sort of benefit, or cheap was of benefiting even more from your lands going into the GY rather than more cards that give you double land drops without actually helping you get those lands into your hand/GY. We're not going to get functional reprints of Strip Mine or the like, so I think the deck needs a more playable Seismic Assault or Titania rather than an Exploration on a stick... but I might be mistaken.
At what size do you people see playing this? I'm in the skeptical camp here (unpowered, if that matters). I'd like to support the lands.dec more but I'm just not seeing this.
Chromatic Lantern pretty much does everything this card already wants to do.
Hard disagree. Chromatic lantern doesnt shut down aggression on turn 3, and there is significantly more artifact removal vs enchantment removal in most aggressive decks.
Secondly, chromatic lantern doesnt let you go off with crucible of worlds.
I cut Chromatic Lantern mostly because of arguments made on these forums: perfect fixing on one card isn't that good if that card can be removed easily, so it's kind of a redundant effect, and at 3 mana a ramp card should do more. I see a lot of the same issues here. When it comes to this vs. an aggro deck, sure, there is often more artifact than enchantment removal, but there is also a lot of creature removal. This survives most red removal, but not much else.
I agree it's probably better than the Swordtooth because it at least does something on an empty board. But it also dies to a Disenchant. I like the fact that it fixes mana while giving you extra land drops, as the lands matter decks can get a bit color intensive. Still, it would seem like it needs a lot of buildaround :/
I think this looks sweet. Good with Narset/Leovold interactions, good top-end for spells matters decks, powerful with Fastbond and sweet with Psychatog.
Does the Narset/Leovold deck actually have enough support, or are the cards just good enough on their own? Narset seems pretty mediocre to me, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned this: Talismans are better than Signets in land destruction strategies, especially in unpowered cubes. In powered it probably doesn't make as much of a difference as you have the Moxen, Sol Ring and Mana Crypt to pick for Wildfire or similar archetypes, but in unpowered, a bunch of signets without a land equals no mana. Also, very marginal, but Tezzeret the Seeker works better with Talismans as well, if you want to support the artifact deck. I've been running the full Signet cycle since it just felt more appropriate especially as I drafted with new people, but I'll probably make the swap to Talismans now. If the life loss turns out to be too cumbersome, I can always swap back.
^ Even though I don't play powered, I'd say the cards that make broken powered decks even more broken are exactly the kinds of cards I'd like to add if I ran power. It's the narrowness and wasting a cube slot for a potential second Time Walk that just might not materialize during the draft, rather than the once-in-a-blue-moon deck with three virtual copies of Time Walk via this and Mystical Tutor, that is the issue.
I'm a bit lukewarm on this and don't think it's necessarily an obvious slam-dunk. I don't see this competing with white 3s but white 4s - the fact that I could technically cast this on turn 3 with no white open does not matter that much because there's really no reason. It also goes only into a very heavy white deck, and white has no shortage of crazy midrange beaters with less demands for colored mana. I love the design and this type of card in general, but the way they costed the abilities hurts it. I wish they'd given it a blink instead of a bounce ability, but that would probably have been game-breaking in limited and too close to Aetherling.
Then again, it does win the game very quickly on its own, a bit like Geist of St Traft. It's a "kill me now or suffer" kinda card like Mirror Entity or Eldrazi Displacer, but I'm not sure if it can create as much value. I'll probably test it.
I don't love the cards, but they're solid and effective, so they're in. If I had one instant-speed Incendiary Flow (to give me a "strictly better" Incinerate/Spear variant) and maybe one more utility burn spell along the lines of Abrade, that might spell the end for the Incinerate clones for me.
This. Some other potential scenarios I can come up with:
* Power creep on creatures getting to the point that a certain threshold of aggro creatures simply can't be killed with three direct damage
* More ridiculous cheap divisible burn cards like Arc Trail getting printed
* Cheap red temporary card advantage spells getting better
What's the axis on which you'd want to attack on with red aggro?
With the caveat that I haven't been able to cube for a long time outside of MTGO cubes... My constant experience with "standard" powered cubes has been that red aggro is just worse than white aggro. White has all the best toys: removal that can hit anything, one-drops that help blank removal and blockers, Wrath-proof two-drops, Bolt-proof three-drops and several flavors of 4-drops that give you longevity (PWs) or end the game if you're even just a tiny bit ahead on board ('Geddons).
Red aggro feels one-note, much more likely to fold to a Wrath, has little options in terms of grinding back from bad board positions. I'm drawn to the idea of red threats that keep coming back. Is my impression of red completely off, and/or have new cards like Laelia changed things?
I'll just throw this out here and see what others think:
I think this is actually the best card in the pitch evoke cycle.
My reasoning is as follows: as people smarter than me have pointed out, the pitch evoke cycle cards differ from cards like Force of Will in that FoW is either card disadvantage (two cards to get rid of one spell) or card neutral (1-for-1), whereas the pitch evoke cards have a CDA mode (two cards for a spell) AND a CA mode (creature + spell). Even the CDA mode comes with the added bonus of binning a creature, which can be useful for some but not all deck types.
BUT, unless I'm missing something, Fury is the only card in this cycle that has a situational CA mode within the pitch mode, in that you can sometimes destroy three blockers or two tokens and a PW. Thus, "best card", in terms of CA - all the other pitch elementals are good, but their pitch modes are CDA. And no, I don't think the high CMC for the creature mode matters enough to make it worse than any of the others, it either helps close out a game by pitching or come back from an unwinnable situation which is likely to happen if the game goes long anyway. What am I missing?
(All that said, even if I think this a slam-dunk, I was a bit disappointed in that I don't think this card necessarily helps what I think is one of the bigger issues with red in cube, that being red aggro being overshadowed by white aggro and struggling to hold the title of Fun Police. YMMV, but I feel like white aggro has been the best aggro deck for a while given how it can attack from different angles, but this is with the caveat that I haven't been able to play cubes other than the MTGO iterations for a while now.)
I was thinking that as well in an unpowered context. Red sometimes seems like close to the best colour in aggro-supporting unpowered and depending on the way aggro is supported in other colours, red might just be the most capable in closing out a game (contrast to the recent MTGO Vintage Cube iterations where white was, at least in my estimation, the obvious best aggro colour and mono-white aggro was the best archetype or close to it in the Christmas cube iteration). Lutri might end up being too much.
(Seriously, I absolutely love the fact that they decided to try something like this with the wording so that it works in draft and sealed and I assume constructed, unlike the draft-matters-cards from the Conspiracy sets. It's a really ambitious design.)
This is probably just me, but I would run the pixel art Serum Visions over any other version. That said, even if you don't want that kind of clearly non-MTG artwork in your cube, I think any of the other Secret Lair versions of Serum Visions are pretty good to run over any existing option if you run the card at all (though of course there is always the argument for that more organic-feeling original art and frame).
I'm also running the SL Bloodghast because I'm a sucker for having a variety of art styles, plus I love the idea of having a black card illustrated by someone who's worked for Iron Maiden
I wrote that message a bit late so I realize now that I wasn't very clear about this, but yes, I absolutely agree this card has a much higher ceiling than Chromatic Lantern and this matters. I was just surprised to see people point to the Chromatic Lantern effect as a significant point in favor of this card AND claiming that this is more resistant to removal against aggressive decks than Lantern, since I don't think the latter is really the case, and the former in and of itself seems a bit weak to me.
I checked your cube while I was writing this and saw that you're running double Fastbond, and this makes sense to me in terms of making land shenanigans work: the deck needs consistent ways of getting extra land drops early, so I would probably add Fastbond and/or Exploration before I added Dryad of Ilysian Grove. Even then, I think the deck might be more in need of more cheap ways of playing lands from the GY, cheap ways of getting lands into the GY with some sort of benefit, or cheap was of benefiting even more from your lands going into the GY rather than more cards that give you double land drops without actually helping you get those lands into your hand/GY. We're not going to get functional reprints of Strip Mine or the like, so I think the deck needs a more playable Seismic Assault or Titania rather than an Exploration on a stick... but I might be mistaken.
I cut Chromatic Lantern mostly because of arguments made on these forums: perfect fixing on one card isn't that good if that card can be removed easily, so it's kind of a redundant effect, and at 3 mana a ramp card should do more. I see a lot of the same issues here. When it comes to this vs. an aggro deck, sure, there is often more artifact than enchantment removal, but there is also a lot of creature removal. This survives most red removal, but not much else.
I agree it's probably better than the Swordtooth because it at least does something on an empty board. But it also dies to a Disenchant. I like the fact that it fixes mana while giving you extra land drops, as the lands matter decks can get a bit color intensive. Still, it would seem like it needs a lot of buildaround :/
Does the Narset/Leovold deck actually have enough support, or are the cards just good enough on their own? Narset seems pretty mediocre to me, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Then again, it does win the game very quickly on its own, a bit like Geist of St Traft. It's a "kill me now or suffer" kinda card like Mirror Entity or Eldrazi Displacer, but I'm not sure if it can create as much value. I'll probably test it.
This. Some other potential scenarios I can come up with:
* Power creep on creatures getting to the point that a certain threshold of aggro creatures simply can't be killed with three direct damage
* More ridiculous cheap divisible burn cards like Arc Trail getting printed
* Cheap red temporary card advantage spells getting better