Mono Blue Tempo

 

I love mono blue tempo however it has never been a great cube archetype. While it does pray on combo decks and the clunkier of opponents, it also tends to roll over dead against most aggressive decks with their actual proper creatures. Overall the deck has historically had a below average win percentage, lower still in an unpowered cube. I still love to play it because it is super option rich and you always feel like you really earned it when you win. You get a lot of game out of the deck, win or lose. Typically you will improve the build a lot with the addition of a second colour for a bit of actual removal, some juicy gold and powerful cards, and some half reasonable dorks! While usually better you do need the fixing, blue is colour intensive at the best of times and tempo decks tend to roll over dead if they have mana issues. So, if the mana doesn't support it you can raw dog your tempo and run it mono. I also just love the purity and challenge of a mono blue iteration. 

Back at the dawn of cube the mono blue tempo list was a kind of skies deck that had a pitiful couple of threats and would try and get you with cheap and free counters. Over time the routes to winning as a blue tempo mage have evolved. These days the most success I have had is with a "instants and sorceries in the graveyard" strategy. It isn't purely self mill nor is it prowess. It is a mix of the two strategies where you cast a lot of cantrips, loot a bunch more away, mill some, and then cast very large and very cheap dorks. While somewhat of a glass cannon archetype, it is about as consistent a deck as you can get. There is a lot of redundancy in the parts for one. A bunch of generic counter magic and a nice pile of cheap cantrips all look much the same. Then you get to look at most of your deck with a variety of looting, scry, and draw. Just so long as you get enough of the appropriate threats you should be able to cobble together the rest and be good to go. Below is the most recent list I cobbled together from a sealed pool.

25 Spells

Delver of Secrets 

Mental Note

Brainstorm

Gitaxian Probe

Consider

Preordain

Sleight of Hand

Unable to Scream

Spell Pierce

Silent Hallcreeper

Chart a Course

Memory Lapse

Suspicious Stowaway

Dress Down

Jace, Reawakened

Falliji Archeologist

Floodpits Drowner

Brazen Borrower

Repulse

Cryptic Coat

Time Warp

Sublime Epiphany

Tolarian Terror

Sailor's Bane

Murktide Regent

15 Islands

While you will play most of the cheap cantrip cards that come your way there is a surprising preference for instant speed stuff. Even if your turn is just a Consider, being able to leave up that mana in their turn will get you a lot of free tempo. You are blue, you are known to be a tempo deck with cheap disruption. People hate running into things like Force Spike, Mana Leak and that sort of thing. You will tend to find leaving up mana worthwhile and thus the various non-disruptive elements of your deck; the card quality and the threats, do better for you if they have flash. I'll take and Opt over a Ponder in this list every day. Malcom is my favourite looter thanks to that flash etc.

This list was a long way from perfect but it had the core bits in place without missing anything. I had a nice spread of answers, both to stuff in play and to stuff on the stack. Not the best of the options but the appropriate areas all covered. I also had pretty premium support tools ensuring I would get off the ground in most games. Lastly I had sufficient depth of threat payoff. It can get a bit scary if you are thin in this department and want to loot threats away early, mill a couple too many, or just eat a lot of removal. So while the deck isn't perfect there are not many clear cuts, just upgrades. Jace, Reawakened is very much a clear cut, not just from the deck but also from the cube. This was me testing the card and it is insufficient. Certainly quite cute and fun when it works but mostly I'll take any two mana looter in preference here, perhaps even OG Merfolk Looter... The other cut is the Cryptic Coat. There are builds of this where you might want such a card. It is evasive and persistent which are good attributes for a threat. However it is also mana intensive and offers no real synergy in this build. Show me a Proft's Eidetic Memory and I start to get more into this kind of card.  If you want access to delirium or artifact synergies for some reason then this is certainly a pretty playable one. I could even see running Enduring Curiosity or Grazliaxx, Illithid Scholar in some settings where I have enough smaller evasive dorks, all be it more fun than good! That direction is more towards the old school skies route of having cheap low quality evasive stuff that you can empower to do some real work.

Time to take a look at the archetype in general and the sorts of cards you want to be packing, and in what sort of ratios. Due to how the cards key off each other in this archetype there are far fewer general rules to follow and lots of little tweaks and interactions to pay attention to in this archetype. I group the cards in to four main camps; threats, support, disruption, and filler. The filler is a bit different to usual. What I would normally consider filler is the actual support side of the deck you need for it to function. Padding might be a better term for it just to differentiate. Regardless, all shall be more clear when we look at the cards in each group.

Threats

Threats come in three main camps, cheap, mid, and payoff. Cheap are one or two mana to deploy, and can be deployed on the first or second turn consistently, even if they are not immediately very threatening. The good ones of these are great and I would play all that I can get my hands on but they are pretty limited in number. The mid stuff is typically 3 or 4 mana to deploy and is usually packing some extra utility to work with. There is lots of choice and power here but it is important to be sparing and play relatively few in this group, ideally those with flash or alternative utility beyond being just a threat. Lastly the payoff stuff that looks like your top end can be cheap as chips to deploy but they need to be setup by filling up the bin.

Generally speaking these threats are in two caps, utility dorks with some evasion, and very over statted beaters (evasion here is still great if it can be found). You want some of both, probably about 50/50 although I tend to end up with slightly more utility stuff because there is a bit more of a bottleneck on the good blue beaters. You also obviously want a spread of the cheap, mid and payoff cards for curving reasons. you also need to consider the means in which your cards consume the payoff. You cannot play too many delve cards. Two or three at most, to include the Oculus. You certainly don't want to waste precious delve spots on cards like Treasure Cruise. You want to convert that resource into game ending power not value. 

Delver of Secrets

Pteramander

Ledger Shredder

Silent Hallcreeper

Astrologian's Planisphere

Wan Shi Tong, Librarian

Malcom, Alluring Scoundrel

Suspicious Stowaway

(I guess manlands go here)

True-Name Nemesis

Cryptic Coat

Kiora, the Rising Tide

Brazen Borrower

Vendillion Clique

Kitesail Larcenist

Whirler Rogue

Quantum Riddler

Abhorrent Oculus

Ethereal Forager

Eddymurk Crab

Tolarian Terror

Sailor's Bane

Murktide Regent

Support

This is the simplest category as it is basically any instant or sorcery that cheaply and easily gets itself and/or more things into the bin. Some come with card quality, some with a bit of utility. Play a lot of these cards, a good third of your nonland cards want to be in this group. I also toss the looters that dont have evasion into this group.

Thoughtscour

Mental Note

Consider

Gitaxian Probe

Brainstorm

Opt

Peek

Careful Study

Preordain

Sleight of Hand

Serum Visions

Censor

Lorien Revealed

Chart a Course

Jace, Vryn's Prodigy

Kitsa, Otterball Elite

Fallaji Archeologist

Picklock Prankster (Free the Fea)

Occult Epiphany

Disruption

Disruption comes in a couple of guises. Mostly in blue we have bounce things and counter things. We do also now have a couple of "make things useless" effects which round out the colour fairly well and leave it able to deal with most kinds of threat it will face, at least in a round about way. This was always a critical weakness of blue as a card like Grim Lavamancer would be too cheap to counter and bounce profitably while it would just wreck you while sat in play. Much as I don't love putting things in my deck that are not instants and sorceries there are some threats that bounce isn't an answer to. Having a smattering of these transform and turn off types of cards can go a long old way. It has made the deck a whole lot more robust to the likes of Blood Artist. While none of these cards are great cards they do a lot of great work in giving blue access to such an important tool. I am pretty happy with a couple of these cards in any of my lists.

Unable to Scream

Dress Down

Fresh Start

Floodpits Drowner

Kitesail Larcenist

Then there is of course the bounce. Nice versatile high tempo trickery. Play a bit but not too much. Play a range too, there is convenient bounce, cheap bounce, and big bounce. The more you spread your bounce types around the more you can usefully fit in. There are a few big name bounce cards I would typically avoid. Things like Venser are just a bit clunky and slow. You have no real use for a 2/2 dork with no evasion and so the extra cost is just a burden. Equally, Cyclonic Rift is merely fine. You can play it and sometimes you will even get to overload mana and win with it. The thing is it is mostly too slow or low value against your weaker matchups and really strong against your good ones. Overkill in the wrong place.  There are some other pretty big spells on this bounce list and I stand by them. I am happy running two such things in my lists. Being able to do some large scale trickery can be really swingy. These cards can both help you get back into a game or actually close one out. They give you the control your big vanilla threats fail to so that you can manoeuvre into a win.

Into the Floodmaw

(or indeed Aether Spellbomb, Silent Departure, or really any one mana Unsummon effect)

Brazen Borrower

Sink into Stupor

Repulse

Cryptic Command

Mystic Confluence

Sublime Epiphany

Counter magic comes in the free, the cheap, and the meaty varieties. The meaty stuff  that can counter is stuff I would play is mostly already to be found on the bounce list. I actually try and play low countermagic counts in this kind of deck. You never want to get stranded with too much of it in hand. You are also playing some fat top end that is dead weight until you fill up the bin. As such you cannot afford to have much else dead weight in hand. This makes the counters that are other things a lot more viable includes. The modal stuff, the cycling and MDFC things, all very welcome places to slap a bit of stack disruption! Also part of the reason that those big modal counter/bounce effects are so welcome here. When it comes to the more pure "this is a counterspell and that is all this does" cards, I want two or three at most, and ideally ones on the cheaper side of things. In cube, blue is also pretty spoiled for good counters so these are not the most important pickups. 

The Cheap

Force Spike 

Spell Pierce

Stern Scolding

Remand

Mana Leak

Memory Lapse

Counterspell

Arcane Denial

Jwari Disruption

The Free

Daze

Flare of Denial  

Force of Negation (and Will...)

Subtlety

The Meaty

Archmages Charm

Cryptic Command

Mystic Confluence

Sublime Epiphany

Filler

Lastly we have the filler. Some of these cards are more dork based cantrips. They typically give a bit of board presence at low cost such that you dont get over run by weenie decks. They are pretty free inclusions and can help a curve very nicely. They don't really empower your synergies but they are low cost inclusions that help buffer the deck nicely in most situations. They can get in a bit of chip damage, fuel a Flare of Denial, sacrifice themselves to win a race, just nice utility. There are also a couple of cantrip cards that can do nothing and can win the game. These are your win more cards and while you rarely want to be playing many of these sorts of thing, this deck can both afford to and quite wants to. Equipment and vehicles exist in this realm too. You do not have quite the depth of dorks to reliably power such things and so they are best kept to a minimum. The recursion tools, Snappy, Tamiyo, Forager, and JVP love having access to a Time Walk. Really the card should sit in the same camp as the meaty bounce/counter effects but they are very much disruptive while a Time Walk isn't. Recursion effects in general are good in a deck with a lot of cheap targets and a lot of self mill! They are good card quality and give a lot of legs. They are just not great tempo so do need to not be overdone. The filler group is the one group you can afford to have nothing from. It is useful for tuning, tweaking, and patching over holes in your list. It can offer some nice utility but you really need to have a reason to play cards from this category. I think I would probably toss all equipment, vehicles, and planeswalkers into this group of cards as well.

Snapcaster Mage

Stormchaser's Talent

Spyglass Siren

Watcher for Tomorrow

Hard Evidence

Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student

Time Warp

Proft's Eidetic Memory

There are not that many cards not already in my cube that I would want to add. This is just one of those decks that loves good generic blue cards and can consequently play a whole heap of premium cards and have them be appropriate. Tossing in lower powered or real narrow cards isn't going to do much to help this deck and it is going to do plenty to worsen the cube overall. Really this deck is now only in the market for power upgrades on the kinds of thing it already has good access too. A couple more fat dorks with cost reduction effects in line would be nice. Tolarian Terror is a pretty bad card all told, just a necessary evil for a singleton synergy deck in a limited format! Temporal Trespass and Wash Out are the only things I might like to try in this although pretty sure threats is where I want any delve going!

You might note a lack of planeswalkers in the list too. You can play a few. Original Jace is one of the best because of the bounce. Walkers are just real risky in this kind of deck. They don't do enough when you are behind and when you are ahead you should really try and turn that into a win rather than establishing a walker. So there you have it, all the good cube cards for a great fun old school archetype that is having a nice surge in potency.

Rakdos Discard

I have been trying to get a discard themed deck working in the cube for as long as I can remember. Madness has always been under supported, both in terms of cards that use the mechanic, and in cube playable ways you can discard those cards. Even in constructed settings the madness decks I built for cube would fail due to low card quality, insufficient interaction, and being quite easy to pick apart themselves. We have had a dash more of the madness cards and a pile more that supports them in recent years, much like everything else! Not to mention generic good graveyard cards and mechanics. There presently isn't even that much in the way of cards in the cube for a discard deck that shouldn't be.  Regardless, I finally got a sealed pool with a sufficient seeming mass of cards to build a discard based deck and it did not disappoint. So much so that I feel I may legitimately be able to bring back some of the narrower cards to further support the archetype. We might have finally hit that critical mass turning point where I am no longer trying to push or force and archtype and instead move to just naturally supporting it.

My list was about two thirds discard synergy stuff and about a third generic good stuff. I would say I managed to get most of the key low cost cards in my pool resulting in it feeling like it was all much more synergic than it was. There are at least enough discard themed cards in the cube that I could run to make it a fully themed deck in the unlikely event that I got everything in a sealed or draft setting. I also splashed white rather ruining the aesthetic of a nice pure example list. My lands were a bit too good not to include teh white, it felt free and I had a couple of very powerful well suited things to bring in. My ideal list however would be straight Rakdos. Below is what I played, everything marked with an * is something I would cut from the "Platonic" or example version of this archetype, be it for being off colour or just not discard themed.  

24 Spells

Marauding Mako

Asmoranaculdicarcaisdar

Stalactite Stalker

Deathrite Shaman

Dragon's Rage Channeler

Nethergoyf 

Faithless Looting

Currency Converter

Underworld Cookbook

Skullclamp*

Flametongue Yearling*

Scrapwork Mutt

Invasion of Tarkir*

Inti, Seneschal of the Sun  

Phlage*

Lingering Souls*

Bastion of Remembrance*

Tersa, Lightshatter

Fable of the Mirrorbreaker

Liliana of the Veil

Broadside Bombardiers*

Sheoldred*

Lethal Scheme  

Rankle, Prankster

16 Lands

Ash Barrens

Marsh Flats

Godless Shrine

Plateau

Elegant Parlour 

Sacred Foundry

Badlands

Blood Crypt

5 Swamp

3 Mountain

You may note that the cards with an * are often role fillers. A lot of them are removal as that is where there is the most deficiency in synergy and support discard tools. I have tried somewhat to supplement the deck with a range of different types as there are delirium components. Mako is a premium one drop that does exactly what you are looking to do and is provided some lower power redundancy from Stalker. Then we have the generically good DRC, DRS, and Nethergoyf who all tie in to the game plan delightfully well with top end power right where you need it on the curve. Asmo and the Cookbook are the cards that perhaps do not deserve a cube slot and are my present  nod to trying to force this archetype. Cookbook has actually done some good work by itself but this is the first time Asmo has performed in cube, even if she has been played once or twice beforehand. These one drops are broadly the most important cards to have a good mass off and what this list did so well. All the missing things where thankfully not from this group and why the deck was so potent.

The best one drop by far however is the Currency Converter. This really makes the whole deck tick along. It turns all your discards into extra value while offering utility at the same time. You can even just use it as a looter itself if you get really stuck for things to do! It really feels like a one mana artifact you can tap to make a Treasure or a 2/2 token each turn in this deck. Perhaps not quite the consistency and burst of a Sol Ring but certainly outclassing it in overall power and utility. The next best card in the list, in no small part thanks to how well it pairs with the Converter is Ash Barrens. It is a cheap, instant speed, card neutral, discard trigger. It is also fixing obviously. Further to that it is a land that discards to get a land which allows for mana production with DRS and Treasure production with converter. It lets you have and play lands comfortably while stocking the discards with lands at the same time. Certainly a higher ceiling than a sac land in the deck, presumably better overall as well. I didn't have any of the LotR land cycling dorks which are also pretty cute if being a little way off as potent as Ash Barrens. You are rarely casting teh top end so it is mostly just an EtB tapped land with a discard trigger and a bit of yard fuel, mostly useful for collecting evidence. This deck is all about tempo and EtB tapped lands are a big cost, I would try and keep them to a minimum. The real trick with this deck is not to get too carried away with big powerful top end stuff and rely on the fact that your early stuff is able to carry pretty hard compared to normal. I was pretty happy with my curve. You get a bit more flexibility than most archetypes as you will have a bunch of looting and discard to toss away unwanted stuff but that doesn't give you licence to be sloppy in deck design.

The deck works much like the various high tempo decks that use synergies or the graveyard to get a little extra out of their cards. Most of the cards are decent in their own right while also supporting each other in both power and utility. You get lots of options while packing a pretty good punch. It doesn't lean so hard on the synergy like old Madness decks that it can be shut down with a little disruption. Even though the curve is low I prefer a slightly higher land count as discarding lands is something you actively want to be able to do early on and flooding out late is a little less likely. Another quirk of the deck is that you get to really vary how much you want out of a card. Sometimes you simply want to toss something in the bin to get some counters on some dorks, perhaps turn on delirium or threshold etc. Other times you hold the card to cast it. You can afford to toss away top end because your one drops can become game ending threats. You can afford to have cards in your hand just being a +1/+1 counter worth of value as you have novel ways to obtain extra value. On the flip side of all this, the deck does not mulligan well. You really want those cards ust as bits of cardboard. Another reason to play a bit land heavier and ensure you have a strong mana base.

Below is the list of cube cards you will often find in most cubes that I would consider good synergy options for this archetype. The kinds of cards I would like to replace the * cards with so as to move towards a purer synergy build. Each with their own pros, cons, and specific synergies that they perform best with. 

Bomat Courier

Lava Dart / Firebolt

Voldaren Epicure

Bloodtithe Harvester  

Ivora, Insatiable Heir

Fear of Missing Out

Collective Brutality

Phyrexian Dragon Engine

Seasoned Pyromancer

Detective's Phoenix

Smuggler's Copter

Bitter Triumph

Bone Shards

Troll of Kazadum

Oliphant

Vengevine 

Bloodghast

Unearth

Reanimate

Urza's Saga (probably, if you got Converter in your pool!)

And here is a list of cards which are not commonly found in cubes that are especially good in this kind of deck that I will now be considering for a trail (re)run in cube. Of which I am only really expecting the first three to have any real hope. The others are really too narrow and look like they are not going to offset that with payoff. The first three are convenient and/or powerful enough that they can make a meaningful impact to the archetype and perhaps see some play outside of it too. 

Hobgoblin, Mantled Marauder

Blazing Rootwalla (and I guess Basking...)

Burning Inquiry 

Goblin Lore 

Hollow One

Ovalchase Daredevil

Squee, Goblin Nabob

Fiery Temper

Street Wraith

Flameblade Adept

Finally, here is my realistic idea of roughly what I'll be aiming at for this archetype within my cube when drafting it next;

Marauding Mako

Asmoranaculdicarcaisdar

Stalactite Stalker  

Deathrite Shaman

Dragon's Rage Channeler

Nethergoyf

Faithless Looting

Currency Converter

Underworld Cookbook

Bone Shards

Unearth

Scrapwork Mutt

Inti, Seneschal of the Sun

Bitter Triumph

Bloodtithe Harvester  

Ivora, Insatiable Heir

Fear of Missing Out

Smuggler's Copter

Tersa, Lightshatter

Fable of the Mirrorbreaker

Liliana of the Veil

Detective Phoenix

Lethal Scheme

Rankle, Prankster  

16 Lands

Ash Barrens

The Figure of Destiny Enigma

 

Cube is a relatively static format compared to most. The tinkerings of their curators doing far more to change the meta than the release of new cards ever does. The one thing that does change with some consistency are the creatures of choice. We get a new staple spell now and again but mostly once a spell is in the cube it stays in the cube. Creatures on the other hand arrive, stick around for a bit, and then get power crept out. They have a limit lifespan and a shockingly short one on average. Obviously this is more down to the curator and how keen they are but I am pretty sure that the average time a new creature added to the cube from the last ten years lasts about six months for somewhat active curators. The only creatures that have ever retained an ongoing space since arriving are utility creatures. The green mana dorks, Mother of Runes, Grim Lavamancer, that sort of thing. That sort of thing and Figure of Destiny apparently... Cube and power creep are most brutal upon the beaters of the game. But somehow the little kithkin is unscathed. He is to cube what Giant Spider is to sealed deck limited!

Figure of Destiny is a threat, a beater, and nothing more. No value offered beyond combat. It is now an incredibly old card, ancient and alone as far as such pure beaters go. The only cards that come close to it in terms of age and role are Siege Gang Commander, Flickerwisp, and Bloodbraid Elf, most of which only really feature in cubes for nostalgia these days, and all of which are absolutely more in the utility/value camp than pure beater. 

Not only has Figure of Destiny outlasted all other threats in cube it has done so without ever really being that overbearing or top tier. It has played alongside Savannah Lions and Mogg Fanatics all the way to Ocelot Pride and Ragavan, all the while never feeling too out of place. The card has always just been a solid role filler. By far and away the three most commonly played aggressive colours played in cube are mono red, mono white, and Boros, for which Figure is a perfect one drop and mana sink. Indeed, just having the card greatly increases the consistency of your Boros beatdown deck. Being able to use any colour of mana to develop your board lets you play the spells in your hand you want without being mana inefficient. Having it effectively turns one of your lands into a dual land when you are Boros. Being a reasonable mana sink is a nice perk for consistency too whatever colour you are.

Being able to level the card at instant speed makes it a very safe way to invest mana allowing you to dodge the worst tempo swinging of answers. It is pseudo flash on all bar the first and safest mana and it is also options. All be it just how and when to use it but it is still far more option rich than almost every other pure beater threat card going. You can go all in on a Figure, you can be safe, or fast and lose, mana efficient, card efficient, or max damage! The card is never the best on any one axis but it performs so consistently on so many while remaining direct. It can afford to perform worse than you average red or white one drop beater and still retain a place by being playable in so many more places than most cards. All places that want what it has to offer.

Cute new things keep popping up and working with Figure. Need a white card that is a red permanent to buff your MHIII Ajani? Need a way to sink that Firebending mana? Slow and steady really does win the race here. It is comical to me that time has shown the best beater in magic to be a one mana 1/1, a two mana 2/2, a five mana 4/4 or an 11 mana 6/6 flyer....  This should really drive home the notion that consistency really is king when it comes to magic. It is like the exact opposite of Ragavan. The legendary monkey has a ceiling so far above Figure it is comical, orders of magnitude better, but it is an infrequent ceiling. Critically, almost every other situation you could find yourself in the Figure is outperforming Ragavan, all be it, usually not by all that much. It is hard to say Ragavan is a weaker card, it clearly isn't. Neither is it weaker on average but Figure still puts in more work. Figure will show up in more places and contribute more. You can output more with a lower average simply by being there more of the time and that is how Figure gets it done. Strength without power.   

An Ode to Mishra's Factory

 

Mishra's Factory is pretty iconic. It was the first card to do what it does and remains remarkably reasonable at doing it. A kind of benchmark for what a manland or creature land can or should be. What is most remarkable to me is quite how viable this card has remained over the years. This is especially the case given that creatures are the main focus of power creep over the years. A Grisly Bear might have not been laughable in the nineties but in more recent times such things don't hold much water. How is the simple notion of being able to hide as a land able to transform a 2/2 vanilla dork into a relevant asset? And perhaps more vexingly, how has this first iteration manage to keep up with newer cards that hide better dorks or offer better lands?

The strength of the land one can animate is well appreciated. Land is pretty hard to interact with affording you a safe place to keep a threat. Having a mana sink on a land is a great pairing of early and late complimentary utility pairings. It is a very low cost inclusion to a deck letting you cram in extra value to you deck. 

Aggro decks of old couldn't pass up on those resilient extra threats and the control decks couldn't pass up on the free value on mana sources. Magic in the early years was rife with the Factory. Then after 5th Edition I think it was they stopped printing it for a while and we got a smattering of other animatable lands to play with from the Treetop Village cycle to Blinkmoth Nexus to Mutavault and eventually the duals in the first Zendikar, upon finishing and adding to that style of cycle we are now beyond spoiled for choice on lands that can attack. All of these historic cards were good and all got play, and all of the newer ones would have if they came before the glut, however none have properly unseated Mishra's Factory. Throughout that period the Factory has mostly been in the cube and been getting enough play and activations to be a worthwhile inclusion.  

A couple of factors are I think at play helping the Factory to compete in a world of ever increasing creature power and utility land variety. The introduction of planeswalkers helped to increase the relevance of anything you could do to boost an attack with on an immediate basis. Simply having a land sat in play you can animate greatly changes an opponents ability to deploy a planeswalker. This applies to all manlands as well as creatures with haste and things like vehicles. What specifically about Factory lets it still compete in this wide field? Simply put, it is the cheapest on offer. On all fronts. All colours can play it. It is a single mana to animate and there is no tempo cost to deploying the Factory, it comes in untapped. Assuming you can stomach the colourless mana it has no other real cost. 

You then only have to pay an effective two (colourless) mana to get in two extra power of attack at any future attack. Not only is that one of the cheapest you can get an attack in with a land but it is also still one of the most efficient damage output per mana invested. The strength of the land that attacks is being able to attack when needed and do so efficiently and Factory is still absolutely one of the best in the business for that. It isn't so much about sustained threat, it is about being able to have that extra couple of point of damage or have that extra body to go wide with on that key turn. No utility land is efficient when activated over and over again, it is about being able to do so when it matters and Factory is just a card that is there for you more than most. Sure, Mutavault has those same key traits and is a very comparable card but artifact synergy in cube has been vastly more relevant in cube than tribal synergy. We haven't even touched on the 3rd ability that Mishra's Factory has. It is the least relevant of the three but it is still a good one, and enough to carry it about Mutavault by itself, even in singleton. Factory can pump itself to block as a 3/3 when not summoning sick, or it can use a cheeky untap effect to attack harder or be a surprise combat trick. It can even pump Mutavault if it really wants to rub it in!

Over the years I have done a lot of cube style constructed events too, usually epic rotisserie affairs allowing any cards to be picked. Suffice it to say I have played a lot of 40 card singleton affinity decks. Yes, the flying on Inkmoth and Blinkmoth Nexus make them the best utility lands in the deck. But no, that doesn't take away too much from the fact that Factory is still a really top rate card in that archetype. Able to turn on and power things up without attacking, able to hold modular counters like a legend, or just be another piece of sacrificial fodder. Hard to go wrong with Factory in affinity. Not many other cards have played alongside Cranial Plating and Arcbound Ravager on the one hand and Counterspell and Wrath of God on the other!

Few cards have such a historied resume, let alone such a broad, diverse, and active one. Yes, in the early years you could make a case that the card was over powered. But then, lots of cards were. And you could equally make the case that creatures were underpowered in 1994 and the power level pegging of Factory was pretty on point for a mover averaged notion of power level across magic. Indeed that is how I view things and in that light you find one of the very best designed cards of all time. A card that is playable in multiple different archetypes and formats over multiple decades is already an impressive feat. Doing all that without ever really being that oppressive or broken elevates you to a pretty special tier of card. As far as design accolades can get, I think few can be more deserving than Factory. It is very likely up there in the leader boards of cards I have won or effectively won games because of as well, not because of power but because of that seemingly omnipresent quality it has, just there to tip the scales in your favour.

HMC 4th Printrun Reviews Part V

 

Hopefully this at least works outside of UK, no clue what this looks like now as Imgur has ceased operations in the UK. 

Stone Wall

Design 4

Balance 6?

These minor fortifications that give a land a new tap ability are kindof like utility lands, and as such you somewhat need them to go get a land, or at least do something comparable on EtB to be worth playing them. Sadly even with finding you a Mountain, and thus costing very little in real terms, this still doesn't lure people in to playing it. I do wonder if there is an element of this being sufficiently different as far as conventional magic cards go that is stopping people from playing it? Unfamiliarity being a barrier to entry rather than power or suitability. Perhaps it is more that red is not overly looking to play Maze of Ith style effects. This is a control card but a marginal one. It costs valuable deck space and so you want it to be more significant than it is. I like the flavour of the card but don't love the nature of it as a red card. Nor how fiddly it is for a low key common. I will continue to give this a chance as it seems a lot better than the attention it is getting would suggest but I don't think I can offer much in the way of suggested changes to the card when it seems so on point and I have so little testing information to go on. Realistically the best this is ever going to be is as a way to develop a board at low all round cost, and not doing the thing it looks like it is supposed to do. Devotion and affinity decks both are rewarded for casting this and they never have to mess about with fortifying!

Stromkirk Scavengers

Design 6

Balance 7

Graveyard disruption is one of those things you need for a healthy format but that you cannot afford to pick and play in its own right - often like Disenchant effects in a cube. Designing these tools becomes tricky as you need to have a card that is effectively playable without the disruption aspect, but not that much more improved when it is useful. The Scavenging Ooze model worked very nicely. It is a dork so it is always doing something and it is always interactable. The yard disruption costs mana and thus cannot just be used with impunity. The exile ability also provides perks beyond the yard exile meaning you will sometimes want to fuel it yourself. The exile is sometimes a cost you are paying like escape for the effect, and sometimes you are using it for the disruption to the opponent. This formula is one I have used multiple times across all the colours so as to ensure there is a healthy amount of graveyard interaction. This little dude is pretty low key but it ties in to Blood synergies giving it a pretty wide range of potential uses. This guy rocks up plenty and does OK work. A lot of this is simply thanks to being cheap and useful. I wouldn't call this a good card or an elegant card or a beautiful card. I consider it more of a necessity. It does its job well and earns its place but it is the total opposite of a main character or leading role card.

Supply Lines

Design 2

Balance 5

Much as I have long since learned that cards like his are dodgy design I do still indulge myself now and again. This is a shocker in multiple ways. Firstly the excessive use of the word "or" is enough to turn the stomach and land this a low low design rating. Secondly it is just spewing out far too many different tokens and messing up the board no end. Everything about this card screams clutter. It was a top down design trying to do rebellious seeming things that were not creatures. I do rather like the flavour here. It is also the kind of card I like playing with, hence the indulgence. I figured rebels was at least a safer place for a card like this as its fate is more tied to theirs. I am sure I could tidy this up but I'll have to play with it a bit more to understand which aspects are the desirable bit. It is such a mess of a card because I was trying to design a card that was good with Rebels without being unplayable outside of that one archetype. This is about as far down the priority list as is possible to go but if I manage to fix the rest of the rebels somehow I may well get to some more self indulgence with a rework of this.

Svyelun's Saga

Design 7

Balance 5

My green riff on Urza's Saga proved sufficiently successful that I have been slowly expanding the cycle. This is the blue offering and it has mostly performed admirably. The only significant failure with this card is not actually having a blue mana symbol on it anywhere resulting in what really should be a colourless land. I have remedied with by changing the bounce cost to 1U since this printing and it suitably sorts the issue. While not overpowered the card is certainly on the strong side so a little nerf is no problem. The power of this card, while very high is all safely locked away behind 'if' clauses. Do you have good mana sinks for Powerstones? Do they have relevant things to bounce? Do you have targets in the bin to flashback? You need a healthy amount of yes for this card to be playable but you don't need all yes by any means. It is also noteworthy that it is rare that you can usefully target countermagic with this and so your blue targets tend to be value ones rather than disruptive. When you can usefully fire all three modes on the saga is where the card starts hitting the too good mark! This form of card design - saga land, is a real win as it applies a new kind of tension we don't get in other types of cards. The limited lifespan of a saga land leads to crippling yourself should you use it to early even if the low mana costs are tempting. That beign said, in the heavy artifact deck this thing acts a bit like a Mishra's Workshop as it can dump out three powerstone tokens.  In that situation is a very strong turn one play, something the other saga lands thankfully cannot be. The power level of this saga is both able to be higher than I would like, as well as more fluctuating in performance than I would like, but the card is sufficiently fun and enticing that it gets away with these minor grievances and feels like a big win.

Swineherd

Design 8

Balance 6

This just made itself as soon as I stumbled upon the art. This is perfect filler. This is what Portal cards should look like! This is on point for power and for flavour and has real good clean design ensuring minimal mental loading. It is everything going for it bar one critical ingredient - excitement. This isn't fun at all. This is just a boring filler dork. It isn't even really fun if you scale it somehow. This is a mono red Watchwolf level of stats that has double scaling with Glorious Anthems, Blood Artists and all that jazz. It also works nicely with flicker effects. There is a lot of potential to do stuff here but none of it gets the juices flowing. I'll happily use this to even up the ratios in cube curating or deck design but I'll just as readily cut it for anything with the promise of doing something threatening to be interesting. 

Sword of Change

Design 7

Balance 3

This is one of the more interesting Rebel cards I made - not to mention one of the few that doesn't recruit... This was pretty busted with other rebels but rather more interesting and reasonable by itself. There was a bit of an Esika's Chariot vibe to the card. You can really go quite all in with it which is interesting. On its own it is a four mana 4/4 with some residuals. Not overly impressive. If you want to start throwing your lands away however you can generate a 2/2 and a +1/+1 to the equipped dork for every turn plus two lands you use. As such, if you make this on turn four with four lands, immediately toss two in your turn and then do so again in their turn with the last of your land you will start your next turn with a 6/6 and a pair of 2/2s all ready to attack. Ten power over three bodies for a mere four mana feels like it is probably a bit much even if it does cost you all your land. It is very all in but it isn't too easy to stop. I think that makes the card dodgy even if it doesn't stop it being interesting. I've not put too much time into solving this card as I don't entirely know where I want it to end up and thus how best to balance. It could be a stand alone card with nothing to do with rebels or it could be predominatly a tribal synergy tool. Interesting but incomplete. 

Take Note

Design 8

Balance 8

A card quality tool aimed at supporting prowess decks. In general, the cleaner the support card the more welcome it is. This is a long way from the most powerful of the support cards I have made but it is super easy to appreciate what this does and so it has been getting plenty of play. It is really versatile and allows you to setup big storm, prowess, or card draw trigger turns. None of those things are that heavily supported in my cube in a way as to make this kind of payoff anywhere near as exciting as this card would be in the real powered cube. Doesn't seem like that matters too much given the play it is getting.

Telim Tor, Rebel One

Design 1

Balance 1

Just in case the rebels were not good enough to beat you first time round they get to have another go at doing so thanks to this dude. I wanted more big top end payoff dudes and already had a lord. This was something different and so I did it. Turns out it is pretty egregious. Both parts as it happens. The haste is somewhat of a colourpie fail too. This will get some kind of full rework before he is allowed out to play again. And he won't be getting that until the rest of the rebels get fixed.

The Dowager Sengir

Design 4

Balance 4

Here we have a bit of a leftovers card. I had a few ideas I wanted to explore that I didn't manage to fit elsewhere in designs so I just made this card and stuck them on. That is why it is a lifegain card and a blood card and a vampire tribal card.... There are a lot of potential synergies on the go here but nothing at all just by itself. For a legend this feels like it should do a bit more, the floor is just a bit too do nothing.

The Frog King

Design 6

Balance 4

This was an attempt to make an interesting +1/+1 counter card that could do some really cool things with proliferate and other synergies. A bit like the Dowager just reviewed, this needs to be a bit more by itself. Perhaps just like a 3/3 reach might be enough, it is just all a bit limp if you haven't got the appropriate other stuff going on. I will likely revisit this both with a bit of mild buffing but also as and when I manage to design a more critical mass of support and payoff for this. It is inline with the kinds of synergy that are lots of fun it just lacks the external support and the raw power itself. 

The Spaniel King

Design 6

Balance 3

Another one of many cards which I somewhat broke by allowing unconditional use. Things without a tap, a mana, a number of uses, or a timing of use restriction all get dangerous real fast. They get dangerous on a power level but also on a logistical one. They provide so many extra options that the game gets hard and slow and draining. Errors creep in to peoples play. Obviously this card is problematic because always all goats. It was like that Elk problem back in Eldraine. You attack, suddenly goats blocking. You pass the turn, suddenly an army of goats there to enjoy Overrunning your face. You can fix this card by slapping on a G to use the ability, making it once a turn, making it only sorcery speed. You could completely ruin the card by making it a tap ability instead if you wanted to! Conceptually I like this, it is food and graveyard synergy overlap and has the kind of scaling I like. On turn three this is very Grey Ogre. Late game and this is rather more card. I think this will sit very nicely for both balance and design once I have settled on the best fix for the forage ability. 

Thraben Conscripts

Design 3

Balance 5

The next four cards are a little package I made in an attempt to give white more fun things to do. Pretty sad that this is as fun as I could manage for white. Pretty desperate that this counts as more fun than what is already in place... The idea was a kind of human soldier tribal synergy support package. This is a low key Savannah Lion that gets the ball rolling. It ensures you have follow up of some sort if you want. Consistency but ultimately just a narrower and wordier iteration for the 2/1 white dorks with scry or cycling that already exist in the meta. This wound up just being a dull card that is narrow and on the low end of power with too many words.

Thraben Leuitenant 

Design 4

Balance 5

A bear that dies into a bit of value that is similar looking. Potent but pretty boring. Human is sufficiently common that you can play this anywhere pretty safely. Indeed, it is probably better in the more control shells where you will have less targets. They will tend to be more specifically useful and knowing what you are more likely to hit helps with planning. While the card is OK it failed the design brief fairly impressively! Both being better outside of the cycle and the intended archetype, all while not managing to avoid being dull, or even being all that well balanced....

Thraben Captain

Design 3

Balance 6

Yet more dull filler. This is a two for one but it is such low steaks value that it might as well not be. A 3/2 is not making the difference in most games, it is barely going to be relevant in most games... For a three mana card there needs to be more threat. Either ongoing potential for value or a more relevant beater of a body. Double white in the cost makes this narrow as well. That is the first thing I would change here, reducing the colour intensity. Filler wants to be broadly applicable. Given that this somewhat failed on all fronts I doubt I'll be rushing to apply any fixes here. 

Thraben General

Design 2

Balance 3

And the big Thraben series payoff? This idiot... I thought this was a cute lord but no, absolute shocker of an effect. If you have this active and they can't disrupt then it is such a massive pile of extra stats that you just win. That happens too often to be healthy but not enough for this card to be good on average. Not helped by being a 2/3 for 4 when not active which is well below an acceptable floor. What is even worse is that there is still lower you can go with this big turd. You naturally want to get stuck in when you have a big old board advantage. The thing is, it is very easy to turn this off mid combat with almost any instant removal spell. Turns out that results in a pretty blowout combat. This card has a range where it is a total blowout for each player at the extreme ends making it about as polar as possible. Bad pump effect, bad creature, bad card.

Tome Owl

Design 8

Balance 6

This is one of my preferred prowess adjacent dorks. I love the various self balancing feedback situations as well as the way it scales. It just feels very blue while also being a fairly viable cheap beater. At worst this is hitting for 1 in the air or chump blocking. Toss in some cycling or some card quality effects and this will start to slap a bit harder a bit more consistently. The odd big draw spell lets you do a sizeable hit as well, balanced by the fact that you are not adding further tempo or immediate pressure to the game when you use these kinds of effect. Do blue stuff and make this guy good. Support this guy with dorks and other attacking less blue stuff and suddenly this hits a lot softer and fairer. While both scale very differently this feels like a balanced Delver of Secrets and hits with a comparable punch, just in a much more controlled and reasonable way. As far as flavour and balance go I should probably have this be just a power buff and not both ends. The potential to turn Ancestral Recall effects into Giant Growth combat tricks can be a bit blowout. You will be forced into trying to block this eventually and that can be dangerous. That will sometimes let card advantage turn into tempo as well.

Trade Caravan

Design 6

Balance 6

Top down design akin to the blue Merchant Ship I also made in this set. I like these in both concept and flavour but find them to be quite unlike actual magic cards. There is something just a bit off feeling about them. Perhaps they are the wrong pacing for magic which feels more like a dual than a long term thing. This is more the pace of (Sid Meier's) Civilization! Perhaps it is the stretching of what the colour pie allows for that is what is off with these? Perhaps it is just that they are different cards and thus finding out how and where to use them optimally takes significantly longer. Perhaps it is just that this is a low impact card that, while balanced, can offer more to the opponent than you and as such is a high risk card with more unknowns than one is comfortable with. Both this and the blue one got play. This is probably the better of the two as white can put small bodies to more aggressive use and has more capacity than most archetypes to expend resources. This just works with what you want to be doing, and with itself. Even so, I think this is one to retire. Interesting but not for now.

Traumatized Summoner

Design 6

Balance 6

Bit of a wierd one here. Blue is not at all a colour I would associate with this sort of token generation but somehow, likely thanks to Simic, this one feels reasonable. It also took some fiddling around with so as to get it working how I wanted. Turns out evolve on a token producing dork can go infinite real easily. I could probably remove the on death trigger and neaten the card up but I wanted to make it playable. I feared blue wouldn't have enough dorks or enough dork based strategies to fuel this sufficiently without a bit of insurance. So far all has seemed well with this one. It plays fine. It isn't that quick or threatening in what it does but it does do it quite well. My main concern is that this isn't a card with a great play pattern if used defensively. This can pretty much make you a chump blocker for every dork you make and just clog up the board safely and cheaply. If that becomes an issue I'll look to make the token dorks unable to block. Presently it is just winding up in the more proactive blue decks, and in those it is quite a cute alternate Young Pyromancer. It is to Young Pyromancer what Cloudfin Raptor is to Delver of Secrets, or even Dragon's Rage Channeler and that is a nice place to be I would say.

Vengeful Summoner

Design 7

Balance 6

Inspired by Vengevine and the return trigger it has. This card is hard to fuel and even harder to abuse. If you are playing two dorks in a turn then recurring a dork with yet lower mana value then there is a good chance you are getting something small, even late game. The only real way to game the system here is with cost reduction dudes. There are a couple of these but it is all sufficiently rare that is just makes this a bit fun and spicy. It is a lot worse than Vengevine both in that you have to cast this to get any value from the trigger, you can't just toss it in the bin. And secondly, because it is a Grey Ogre at base and offers pitiful tempo. Even the ward doesn't do too much to offset the risks of playing a Grey Ogre. With this all in mind I need to be playing a creature heavy deck with some graveyard support, and perhaps some sac synergies, before I am too interested in this. I could probably afford to buff this a little. It doesn't need it but it is fun and it would help it to be less narrow.

Vodalian Soldier

Design 5

Balance 6

Fine but a bit safe for the kind of card it is. Probably this needs to come in tapped or be a 1/1 or something. There is just too much free tempo to be had here for a blue card. This is great offensively and defensively and thus winds up getting pretty universal play. It is really is just the kind of card that elongates games. Consistency like this is what I desperately want more of in real magic and so I overdid it for the homemade cube to the point of having the reverse problem. Games that go on too long and are just full of minor incremental edges like those Vodalian Soldier offer are hard on the brain and not what you want too many of. 

Voldaren Vampire

Design 6

Balance 8

Boring but fine. Acceptable stats with pretty broad utility thanks to the flying. Blood is looting as a floor making this card a great support tool in and out of Blood decks. This is a pretty perfect level for a low end common support card. It is clean, easy to parse, and yet offers a reasonable amount of card and game. In the real world this is a bit good for a black common and would likely need to pay a cost to gain flying or be unable to block or something. Power level wasn't a significant factor in my selection of card rarity. Neither did I put too much effort into getting it right! I have noticed it being more off in the later printruns. What I really like about this kind of cheap card is that it will tend to gain ongoing value if left in play but will tend to put you behind if answered quickly. It is very easy to answer but then it is also still cheap enough to not be too big of a risk. A gamble within ones means but that has significant potential payout.

Wake Celebrant

Design 5

Balance 5

Speaking of Blood payoff cards... This one is one of my larger concerns. It has real "Carrion Feeder but blocks" vibes. This sits around getting value or becoming a threat or a bit of both as required. It works well in a variety of places, really only needing creatures to be supported. It does however excel when you pair it up with other blood cards or sacrifice strategies. Being able to grow this in size at any speed and without any cost beyond the blood is possibly a problem here. I think I need to add a cost to it or make it sorcery. It might be acceptable if this was a 3 or 4 mana card (with a bit more starting stats) but as a two drop this is doing a bit too much. Always active effects like this end up taxing rather more mental resources than is ideal for a cheap support card. Regardless, it has yet to be a problem despite plenty of play so perhaps I am worried about nothing. 

Yawgmoth's Saga

Design 9

Balance 8

This style of land saga is great and so I am exploring them. They entice and intrigue and they don't even need to be that powerful to do so, as demonstrated by this little card. This does a fairly disparate array of black things but without any real cohesion in the effects. If we were describing this card like a wine connoisseur then it would be the body of Phyrexian Tower come Lake of the Dead with notes of Edict and Entomb. I love the tension land sagas offer between getting them out early to get the goods quickly and staving off deploying them so as not to hamper your mana development too severely. This one is especially uncomfortable as the first phase requires you to further sacrifice development to put to use. You can wind up a lot of lands down through using this! I have often enough just skipped using the first phase. It is rare to find all aspects of the card to be highly useful in any given build, let alone any given situation. Luckily the card is versatile enough and sufficiently potent that it gets play in spite of this. Much as this is an unexpected design triumph it is one I can only attribute to luck. I ignorantly threw some appropriate looking effects on a land saga in an attempt to be flavourful and playable and the result is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Zoological Expedition 

Design 4

Balance 3

The setup for this is not at all difficult but it is enough to keep this from being exploited. You will get mana advantage out of using this but not so much nor so quickly that is overly impacts the game. You may well be choosing to pay more to use this so as to retain things in the yard for later escape costs. Where this card falls down is that it plucks a powerful card out of your deck. When you are as in need of support as this card you might as well just play another threat in its place. The total amount of threat you can cram into a 40 card cube deck is important, more so in the homemade cube than other cubes. This might be a great tutor for a combo deck one day but it is no general use card in the meta I have created.