That's the worst idea. Intentionally making other colors worse is the opposite of what you should do. Just make black better.
There is a ceiling with how good you can make black with the cards Wizards has printed. Cube design should not be about simply including the most powerful cards in each color but about creating a fun and balanced environment.
In my cube however, Black also has not been so much worse than the other colors that I have to weaken them to balance things. However, I have shied away from a lot of cards that are especially good against black because black does not need any hating (Soltari Monk etc.). Even Mirran Crusader is under review, but I like that card a lot so it stays for now.
On the topic of Toxic Deluge: An extremely strong card, but I also think a lot of people underestimate the life cost. Black already has a lot of life payment cards, and each one gets worse for every other life taxing card in your deck unless you have the lifegain to back it up.
Wow, this card is insane. I'm seriously considering not adding it to the cube because it is so busted and the epitome of uninteractive. It really is good against just about every deck and in every deck that can spare the UU mana cost.
So if Timetwister is only powerful when played with the rest of the P9, can we safely say in the context of cube it isn't really a "powered" card - so an unpowered cube could play it?
I'm also hugely disappointed with these lands. They're fine, but they feel like they'll be replacing placeholder lands with different placeholder lands. Instead, I was hoping for a cycle that would really be worth running.
They really can't do that with the ravnica duals currently in standard while accomplishing their goal of making mana fixing harder than it has been in Innistrad/Ravnica standard.
I'm going to replace my remaining bouncelands with these. I love that they help reduce manaflooding or manascrew and they're also much more intuitive for lesser experienced players. No longer having to check whether an opponent's land produces two mana is also a reduction in unnessecary complexity that I'm very happy to make in my draft environment.
Green Direct damage? That seems incredibly fake. On second thought, it does come from a creature and is fairly slow, but... doesn't feel right and doesn't feel like something Mark Rosewater would want in his set.
There is a ceiling with how good you can make black with the cards Wizards has printed. Cube design should not be about simply including the most powerful cards in each color but about creating a fun and balanced environment.
In my cube however, Black also has not been so much worse than the other colors that I have to weaken them to balance things. However, I have shied away from a lot of cards that are especially good against black because black does not need any hating (Soltari Monk etc.). Even Mirran Crusader is under review, but I like that card a lot so it stays for now.
On the topic of Toxic Deluge: An extremely strong card, but I also think a lot of people underestimate the life cost. Black already has a lot of life payment cards, and each one gets worse for every other life taxing card in your deck unless you have the lifegain to back it up.
The heroic ability is little more than flavor text, however.
Yes, we can.
Yep, that threw me off as well.
They really can't do that with the ravnica duals currently in standard while accomplishing their goal of making mana fixing harder than it has been in Innistrad/Ravnica standard.