Eh, I don't think this is clearly better or worse than Man-o'-War. I'll probably stick with the original just because the chance to bounce your own stuff is the kind of sweet play I want to see in cube.
This looks like a low- to mid-tier red card to me. The floor is close to a 2/1 haste, with the potential upside of nugging a planeswalker for 2. There was a time when the 2-drop slot for red was weak, but that slot has got some love from WotC in the past few years. I think there's a bunch of red 2/x creatures with upside that aren't slam dunks, but get better or worse depending on the rest of cube. Stuff like Torch Fiend, Mogg War Marshal, or Abbot of Keral Keep. This guy fits in that tier.
I'd really like to play Horde of Notions. I had a budget EDH deck made up of mostly Lorwyn/Shards standard and it was pretty fun. I don't keep up with standard these days, but would be cool to have a brawl deck just to try the format.
I played Modern in the beginning of the format, but haven't played since before Kaladesh.
Cards you already own
I have all fetchlands and shocks, and many staples. Notable missing ones are Tarmogoyf, Karn Liberated, Fatal Push, and anything released in or after Shadows Over Innistrad.
Colors you like to play
Don't really care. Typically have played blue.
Style you like to play (control, combo, aggro, midrange, tempo, ramp, rogue)
I played Twin for the longest and Jeskai control when Twin got banned. Open to new stuff. I've been thinking about Storm because I'd like a deck I could practice by myself. I have also considered playing a wacky Battle of Wits deck with all the modern cards I own. Ideally I'd like something that is fun to play, has some interesting choices, and is good vs. the local meta.
Level you want to play at, or aim to build up to (causal, fmn, ptq)
Probably only ever playing in FNM, maybe a PTQ.
Store Meta
UR Twinless Twin (Kiki combo), Storm, Burn, big mana (Tron, Scapeshift), some CoCo.
Looking for a deck with an even to positive match-up with Burn, Tron, Scapeshift, and Storm.
Lands matter isn't a major archetype in my cube, but a lot of cards in the deck are better with running an extra set of fetchlands. So many constructed all-stars in Modern and Legacy capitalize on fetches, be it sending a land to the 'yard for Deathrite Shaman or just filling it up for delve. Fetches are the only doubles I run, and another set of fetches helped cards like Titania and KotR be up to the level I wanted them to be. Gameplay is more important than the singleton restriction to me. Totally respect others' decision to keep it pure singleton though!
I experimented with a heavy lands-matter archetype with Fastbond, Exploration, Future Sight, Horn of Greed, and a couple other cards I'm forgetting. It never really came together though, and so I decided to cut the cards for other things.
Seems pretty good to me. Being able to sweep the board on t3 can help control decks get to the late game where they can take over.
However, I think there are enough wrath effects for me at 450 (Damnation, Deluge, Languish) that I don't think I want this. People with larger cubes might be able to find room for this though.
Love that it plays well with the increasing number of green's look-at-the-top cards. The scry helps get free lands with Oracle of Mul Daya and the Oracle helps know when to fire the 0 ability.
One card I cut from my unpowered cube that other people run is Treachery. In addition to using the broken untap lands mechanic, it also helps control decks crush midrange decks with an easy 2-for-1.
Ya, but that decision isn't based solely off of cube size. Like I said, there are a myriad of factors that go into determining what that saturation needs to look like for each individual playgroup. So the skeleton won't apply evenly to all groups that use that cube size.
Won't we eventually get to a point where we don't want more 1-drops for aggro, or 2-drops in a particular color? I have to think this decision is partly based on how frequently those cards would appear in the draft. White in particular has a wealth of 2-power 1-drops. I don't run all of them, most people don't either. I basically just go on feel and seeing what people draft, and have found 10 aggro 1-drops feels good. That's at 450, and just based on percentages that would mean 7-8 for a 360 cube. You guys don't think that's a helpful guideline, "If you want to support aggro in a color, have about 8 1-drops for a 360 card cube"?
In the past, there's been some discussion over creating a "cube skeleton" (discussions: here, here, and here). These discussion never really went anywhere. First, because there just weren't enough options for some spots in the cube, and so a skeleton wasn't that useful; you just played what you could. Second, because cube cards are often difficult to classify in a simple way (e.g., by mana cost) because they fulfill a variety of functions.
Now, 6-7 years laters, many of the holes we saw in our cubes back then have been filled. So I thought it might be productive to return to the conversation of what the structure of a cube, at least how we do it here at MTGS, might look like. To focus things a bit more, I'd really like to know how many cards at each mana cost do you think would be necessary to support aggro at 360. Let's keep it color neutral for now. In other words, in an ideal world, how many 1-drops are in the cube, 2-drops, etc. Split by creatures and spells if that's important to you.
Seems interesting. The first card from C16 that made me perk up. I don't have a ton of high cmc multicolor cards, but even just the ramp is nice. I'm a fan of mana sources that do stuff, though this is more of a creature first.
The combination of lack of evasion, restriction to artifacts only, and mediocre stats cement this guy as a pass. Maybe he has some applications in powered cube with Lotus, but in unpowered, he's pretty weak. In addition, the other UB options are not only better in the abstract, but often better in the decks this card would be good in. Shadowmage Infiltrator, with evasion and not requiring artifacts is more flexible, and Tezzeret AoB is a bigger boost to an artifacts deck.
Also, I dislike having the partner text on the card. I dislike this trend, with "can be your commander" or "meld" to have rules text that is irrelevant outside of a narrow context. Some people cube with the same people over and over, and so managing complexity is less of an issue. I tend to cube with a wider number of people, with varying experiences with Magic, and meaningless rules text like this can slow down the drafts. This is fairly innocuous, more confusing than "can be your commander," but less confusing than meld, but it still bugs me.
Cards you already own
I have all fetchlands and shocks, and many staples. Notable missing ones are Tarmogoyf, Karn Liberated, Fatal Push, and anything released in or after Shadows Over Innistrad.
Colors you like to play
Don't really care. Typically have played blue.
Style you like to play (control, combo, aggro, midrange, tempo, ramp, rogue)
I played Twin for the longest and Jeskai control when Twin got banned. Open to new stuff. I've been thinking about Storm because I'd like a deck I could practice by myself. I have also considered playing a wacky Battle of Wits deck with all the modern cards I own. Ideally I'd like something that is fun to play, has some interesting choices, and is good vs. the local meta.
Level you want to play at, or aim to build up to (causal, fmn, ptq)
Probably only ever playing in FNM, maybe a PTQ.
Store Meta
UR Twinless Twin (Kiki combo), Storm, Burn, big mana (Tron, Scapeshift), some CoCo.
Looking for a deck with an even to positive match-up with Burn, Tron, Scapeshift, and Storm.
I experimented with a heavy lands-matter archetype with Fastbond, Exploration, Future Sight, Horn of Greed, and a couple other cards I'm forgetting. It never really came together though, and so I decided to cut the cards for other things.
However, I think there are enough wrath effects for me at 450 (Damnation, Deluge, Languish) that I don't think I want this. People with larger cubes might be able to find room for this though.
Love that it plays well with the increasing number of green's look-at-the-top cards. The scry helps get free lands with Oracle of Mul Daya and the Oracle helps know when to fire the 0 ability.
What do you think some of the factors are?
Now, 6-7 years laters, many of the holes we saw in our cubes back then have been filled. So I thought it might be productive to return to the conversation of what the structure of a cube, at least how we do it here at MTGS, might look like. To focus things a bit more, I'd really like to know how many cards at each mana cost do you think would be necessary to support aggro at 360. Let's keep it color neutral for now. In other words, in an ideal world, how many 1-drops are in the cube, 2-drops, etc. Split by creatures and spells if that's important to you.
Also, I dislike having the partner text on the card. I dislike this trend, with "can be your commander" or "meld" to have rules text that is irrelevant outside of a narrow context. Some people cube with the same people over and over, and so managing complexity is less of an issue. I tend to cube with a wider number of people, with varying experiences with Magic, and meaningless rules text like this can slow down the drafts. This is fairly innocuous, more confusing than "can be your commander," but less confusing than meld, but it still bugs me.
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