Halting Order (reworking)
Power 9
Design 3
Much as I really like this tweak to Remand I rather misunderstood the core premise for time based interaction. Lowest cost is always paramount and so while this is technically a 3 mana Remand, it is practically a half price Remand as you can get that card at your leisure while interacting powerfully as and when you need it. This needs to go back to the drawing board, likely to have some kind of stipulation placed on it. Things that spring to mind are making it target cards cheaper than 3 or 4 mana only, or perhaps giving away a treasure. I might experiment with turning the clue into something else that means this is card disadvantage such as scry 2, or just nothing at all. In principle I still like the card but it has a way to go before it is acceptable and good. Remand was already a bit good so the side grade was never a safe path to tread!
Hamhatter Efreet (retuning)
Power 9
Design 4
Another wild overshoot that I have nerfed and nerfted. Turns out the haste is just the ticket on this card keeping it super relevant. I think 3/1 is probably the correct size for this naughty Efreet. This confluence of generic haste dork and cheap basic land cycling really shines a light on quite how good these two effects are
Hammer of the Gods (retuning)
Power 3
Design 5
This reuse of the Amonket gods "Last" cycle mechanic worked out really well. Of those I made this was the least exciting and least powerful for a number of reasons. First and foremost burn spells are two a penny and are mostly about balance and quantity. There are not many that stand out as that much more or less fun than others. Secondly, the way burn plays out is so direct that this drawback isn't leading to quite as many interesting choices. The go to face mode of burn is almost always indifferent to the lands untapping. That means it is only interesting when used as removal. It is fine on turn one, great on the last turn and increasingly dodgy towards the middle of the game. This power scaling curve not only makes this a very polar card but also one with a very low average power level. Probably this just wants to do 4 damage and should lose the cycling to add in some tension and make it all a bit cleaner. Hone in on this being a bit of a Fireblast of a card. One of my all time favourites.
Hammer of the Navarone (retuning)
Power 7
Design 4
For some reason Hammer of Boggarden has always held an alluring spell over me. It was the limited card to open in Mirage block. I loved the art, the flavour, the inevitability and directness. Recover is interesting in that you cannot have too much control over it and it allows for some counterplay, all while letting me recreate my nostalgia burn. The right cost on this is probably somewhere between 3 and 4 to recover. The usual fix for this is slapping a phyrexian mana into the mix. Here that is likely not super relevant and probably not as clean as just adding a ping of self harm to the main effect. It is a very fine line, too good and the card gets universal play and too bad and it sees none. For a recursive spell that is like walking a tightrope in multiple dimensions at once. I wouldn't be at all surprised if I ultimately failed to find a sweet spot that I was happy with for this one. No great loss either, Volcanic Hammer is not a thrilling magic card. I would like to try and have more instant speed burn as it has much more game to it. That puts this right at the back of the que for a tuning session.
Hardened General (reworking)
Power 8.5
Design 2
Convoluted and wildly overpowered. I had a notion of what I wanted from this that I chased too hard and didn't let go of, resulting in a card that was way off. I got lost in the process with it going through loads of iterations confusing the final picture. Not only does this fail to be the card I had in mind, it fails at being itself too.
Hardhome
Power 8
Design 6
Harrowing (cut)
Power 3
Design 4
Much as I think this is quite a cute card it is a long way from getting it done. This kills little and rarely gets a 2 for 1. Which begs the question, why not just play a better removal spell that does kill things or can get two for ones. This has some cute synergy with prowess but it is in the wrong colours. It has some with proliferate, but there isn't much of that. All in all it just isn't enough and if I want to keep this in the cube I am going to need to find a way to bolt it onto something a whole lot more overall playable.
Harvest (cut)
Power 6
Design 3
My attempt at a white feeling card quality spell. While pretty powerful filler it is just that. Control decks were interested but few others were. It costs tempo, it costs your deck some total power. Really however this just got utterly outclassed by the land cycling cards which took all the deck slots this and cards like it might have had. Really this is just a tool to draw out a game, and I have too much of that going on. Also, I could have done a lot better in art regarding flavour, the wild flower harvest doesn't sound like a thing...
Hasran Charm (cut)
Power 3
Design 5
As with basically all the Charm style cards I made this got cut. Too aimless. Too fair. Same sort of story. I am happy with the feel and spread of them but they are a long way off being something you want to put in your deck. In a world with lower power or fewer playables these carsd would go down well, in a cube type setting struggle to get a look in.
Healing
Power 4
Design 5
My attempt at fixing Healing Salve, or indeed Harms Way. The first is just woefully powerless while the latter is all a bit situational and polar. This card is fine, just rather dull. It is never dead as you can just cycle it and gain some life, but sometimes it saves a dork in combat and offers a big tempo swing. The issue, as ever is simply that the card itself is low power with a conditional ceiling and so people play meatier threats instead.
Heart of Temptation
Power 6
Design 6
Certainly one of the better of the cycle being relatively hard to remove even when there isn't the devotion. Also quite the board presence when it does stick with the lifelink giving great racing and stabilizing power. A little on the dull side and a little too white in feel. I think I should probably flip this into a 5/4 or something to make it seem more black. This card does do what you want from it most of the time but it is just so hard to get excited by it and that is the biggest failing here. Big flashy cards should excite and tempt, not just perform their role in a satisfactory way... A big fail on the name as a result, tempt is not what this does.
Heat Tracers (reworking)
Power 9
Design 3
Far too good given the ease of drawing cards and getting lands. The simple fix was to stop this hitting players at which point it becomes entirely fair. This is low tempo removal that rarely gets you value. It is a bit of a value converter in that you can turn land value into damage but at a rate that excites no one. The power is more like 7 once it no longer acts as a win condition.
Heathland
Power 8
Design 7
Hellhounds
Power 7
Design 4
I am majoring in dull threats. This is just a beater. Quite a meaty on theme one at that. This gets a reasonable amount of play but I think that speaks more to a deficit in my cube than it does about this card. Red does dragons and they mostly come in from five mana making this sort of card a rarity at four.
Hellsteed
Power 7
Design 5
The facts that this and Heart of Temptation both ended up with the same mana value, statline, and keyword is a design fail in and of itself. This also should be more power and less toughness to feel more black although it should perhaps just have a different combat keyword all together. This is a fine card that does a fine job. You play it to bolster a list. It adds top end, which most decks are looking for, without too much cost to your low end. In general I liked this cycle of cards and while this is decent, I think it has a good amount of room to improve. Both design wise but also in imagination, the overlap between the devotion demigods and the single mana colour cyclers is huge. All five drops with black, blue, and green all having the same keyword...
Hemimorphite Powerstone
Power 8
Desigm 6
Herald (retuning)
Power 8
Design 5
I like the tension in the two mechanics here but overall this card is just waay too powerful. It hits hard as a one drop by itself early, curves really nicely, and threatens to hit like an absolute train in the late game. The fix is a 0/2 or a 1/1 body. The former makes it more of a mid to late game card with the latter just makes it more polar. Obviously I dislike the sound of polar so am leaning the other way.
Herded Wumpus (reworking)
Got real lost in the sauce with this one and forgot what it was about. One of those where I had an idea for what I wanted and never quite managed to get the right design and spent so long tinkering that I lost sight of the more important basic things. This is not the version we are playing in the cube, nor is the one below it. Just various ambiguous iterations along the way. As you can see, both these cards are quite different in what they are trying to do despite looking similar on the surface. I am leaning towards a card more like the second of these but who knows where we will end up, or even if we will end up with anything viable at all.
Heroic Confluence (cut)
Power 5
Design 4
Nothing wrong with this one but it is surprisingly bad. It is poor card draw and life gain isn't something you often want making this mostly just a Hordling Outburst. In the right colours and versatile but low on power. The sort of thing a cheap modal card should be. Despite lots of choice this still fails pretty hard to be interesting. It also does a really good job of looking white in terms of flavour. A sad correlation. Ultimately the combination of not seeing much play and not being that interesting have ended up costing this one its slot.
Hexfire
Power 8
Design 7
This was top down design entirely as I liked the picture. I saw the picture, it made me think of the name, and from there I filled in the blanks. It is one of those luck out good cards that was popular and played pretty well. A lot of damage spread as you chose. Spread over targets and/or turns giving this some real flex. A reasonable threat in that it can push through pretty good damage, but an even better stabilizing tool. Not to mention impressive scaling. This certainly sits at the top end of the power threshold, but it is accidentally the kind of fun top end card I otherwise suck at designing and so I am reluctant to do much with this.
Hexmage (retuning)
Power 7.5
Design 5
This is too playable and needs to cost 2BB to keep reasonable. The other solution is reducing the power level. The flexibility of this ensures it is almost always a value and tempo swing, even if relatively minor on one of those fronts. While not exactly oppressive it does see universal play and I want other cards to get more of a chance to see action.
Hidden Dragon
Power 6
Design 6
Top down design to fit the name and surprisingly popular despite being so plain. This offers a good amount of threat without the usual risk of such a slow vanilla four drop dork. Despite the scary looking ward 3 this card has not over performed at all nor been that unpleasant of a play experience for opponents. In many ways it is nice to be able to play with cards so simple. It is like playing Alpha!
High Captain of the Inquisition
Power 7
Design 6
I don't really like the design on this as it feels off somehow but I do like how it plays. I don't like the stat line, it is too tough for a generic human. It is also not all that well suited to the more creature focused aggro decks you want this kind of card in. A 3/2 would be lower power but more suitably aggressive and more in line with the expectations of humanity in the realm of magic! I might go to a 2/2 and give ward 1 or first strike however I need to be careful, both of those abilities want to be used sparingly. The reason I have given it a relatively high design rating despite not being fully happy with the card is that it is playing well. It is seeing a healthy amount of play and performing nicely, not too strong, not too weak. As such it has not been earmarked for a retune, I am only going to do that if I have a good idea. The old, if it ain't broke don't fix heuristic.
High Hillary
Power 7
Design 8
Really really happy with this cycle of mana doublers. They are something I always want to play with and build around. They offer a huge amount of power but do none of the work for you. You need to work hard to milk these. You have a lot of fun when they stick but it isn't always a death sentence for the opponent. You need to have the things to do with them. Yes, these are big targets for removal spells and that can set you back if you rush into things however the mana doubling does mean you can negate a lot of the potential tempo risks if you can deploy them a bit later with some mana up. This essentially only costs 2 if you have a pair of islands untapped and can do a four mana thing off the back of it. Obviously a single island can represent some serious protection and disruption with double mana which is why this has the least impressive body of the cycle. A 1/3 might even be more reasonable here. As yet this has performed second worst of the cycle only beating out white. This is probably for the best, blue isn't a colour we really want having all the mana! Equally it is likely that this is underperforming because mono blue struggles in cubes rather than this card being weak.
Highveld
Power 8
Design 7
Hill Giant (banned)
Power 9
Design 1
Exactly the sort of card you just don't want. The floor of this is effectively Hill Giant while the ceiling is winning the game. It isn't fun or skilful when this wins. Land disruption should never be put on cheap things, proactive things, or value things. Simply put, it should never really be playable, let alone good. I played this once and instantly cut it, I think it was my first cut and I have entirely zero plan to try and fix this. There just isn't any point, it won't improve the game and I won't find the sweet spot for balance as there isn't one.
Historian
Power 6
Design 6
Arguably the weakest of the cycle of two drop graveyard hosers. This is a limp body that doesn't achieve much in combat. The yard disruption is nice of course but the perks it returns are super slow and pretty hard to trigger. The percentage of cards in the bin that are artifacts and enchantments is low, the percentage of those that are problematic when in the bin is even lower. You often end up putting in a bit of extra work supporting this guy so that you can be assured of a couple of clues via your own bin. I would like to slap something extra on this but I am not sure what exactly, the combat stuff feels a bit of a flavour fail. Perhaps the activation wants to be colourless, perhaps I could get away with making this a 1/2 for W? Presently this isn't an issue so I've no burning urge to change but one day in my strive for perfection we can turn our gaze to this little dude. He is a third print run card making him that much less tested. Results to tweaks are better if there is more testing on those cards before said tweak. Shocking I know!
Hoarding Wurm
Power 5
Design 6
I like this, I think it is quite cute. A bit of value, a bit of threat, and a decent range on how you want to use it. Initially this was smaller and drew cards and it was a bit good. Then the format got a bit power crept and this rebalanced version is seeming a bit too fair and now the original version might be better suited. This area of high mana value threats in the cube is the one that has felt the most change in performance hence finding some unusual outcomes in testing and tuning of specific cards.
Holy Command (cut)
Power 5
Design 5
I thought this would perform better than it has. This is never bad, it is technically always a two for one although 1/1 tokens and clues are very much on the low end of power for what we might call a "one". Turns out this is less exciting than Ambitious Farmhand as you cannot flicker it for value. The problem with Holy Command is that it is never really good either. The best it gets is killing an enchantment and that is the rarest mode. It is also pretty bad compared to other cards at dealing with enchantments. So much as I am happy with this one it is not something I think does much to improve the format. It is the kind of filler card I am thinning from the cube to make room for more exciting and impactful cards. Before making the homemade cube I was under the impression I loved modal cards. In reality I hated inconsistency and thus in other cubes modal cards did the thing I wanted and I was keen. In a consistent format I do not need the assist from ambiguous underpowered modal cards anywhere near as much and would just rather play the right balance of things that do their thing well.
Homecoming
Power 6
Design 5
As printed this is pretty poor however it is now X or less which is rather more viable. This is very playable thanks to the cycling and a very blue take on mass removal. It doesn't kill anything and needs quite a lot of mana sunk into it to reliably clear the board. It leans pretty hard on being instant to perform. Control decks sometimes play this to give a bit of flexibility in their ways to control the board. If you just play Wraths things like vehicles and manlands can cause issues. Mostly I play this in mono blue decks so that there is some hope you can sneak tempo wins or recover when you fall behind. Mostly these decks are bad and so this doesn't look great however those decks wouldn't even be viable without the kind of support cards like this offer.
Homelands Trumpet
Power 7
Design 7
Originally cost at four this was winding up in a lot of places and being generically vey good. At five it still gets a good amount of play and does good work. Due to the convoke the cost of going up a mana is less than usual, further to that, this card is one you want to play in a list with lots of dorks and so the odds on you having them to convoke are higher. There are a number of cards you can simply play this on the back of for free. The old five mana, make five guys into free Glorious Anthem is quite nice. This is just a nice enabler that promotes aggro and does so for all the colours.
Honey Bear (retuning)
Power 8
Design 7
Big fan of this one but it is a little good. It loses all the flavour wins if I try and balance it more properly. It just has to be a 2/2 for two. Really I should remove the EtB option and have it just as an attack trigger. That puts this where it needs to be. Otherwise really flavourful and fun little card. A good way to be mana efficient and lots of options and synergy without anything complicated going on.
Honey Trap
Power 7
Design 7
Not the most innovative of cards being a bit of a mash up of black flashback legends and a fairly standard modern day Edict effect. Although not exactly novel it does a lot of good work. Flashback is a lovely thing to have in general, feels good to mill, discard, use in general etc. It being this low cost on an Edict also makes a lot of progress towards fixing the issues with Edicts as removal. As does the non-token clause. In many ways this is a really really improved Barter in Blood! What I like most about this card is that it is a bit interesting but it takes the job of typically boring card.
Horn of Anger (reworking)
Power 4
Design 4
Where this falls down is lack of evasion. Who cares if you are one or two stats bigger than your average dragon of the same cost? If you aint connecting with face that power means a lot less. The devotion is hard to achieve in red and the card already has haste which does a reasonable amount of the work you want protective effects for. This is too costly for aggressive decks and too one dimensional for the slower decks. I get the impression this cycle is going to wind up with about two remaining cards once all is said and done, with this not being one of them. If I want this to work out it needs to be a four mana 5/4 or there abouts. It will end up looking like a rather vanilla Hazoret but at least it is then in teh realms of playable.
Hot Rocks
Power 7
Design 8
A cute little card that reminds me of Harnessed Lightning. While you cannot increase the output of this it does still convert any excess damage into value. Direct face damage here rather than energy but that is probably preferable. To me this is a properly balanced Searing Blaze being neither hard to include and wildly polar. There is something slightly off with this and I think it is that the trample isn't first on the card rather than it being an instant with trample!
Huhu, Titan of the Storm (cut)
Power 9
Design 4
This predates Phlage and likely wouldn't have come to pass if I had seen quite how potent Phlage was first! I had to cut this as it was just so far above the curve compared to the rest of the stuff. It also didn't teach me much. I simply copied an existing thing and so learned nothing. Yes, these Titans are interesting and powerful and work well in cubes. Are they something I feel the need to play and see more of? No. There are cards I tried to emulate because they are important. This was more of a tribute and intended to fill out the ranks and should never have come into being in the first place.
Humming Symbiote
Power 7
Design 8
Wirewood Symbiote plus Quirion Ranger loosely trying to disguise itself as a harmless bird. This is a dangerous card and not something you could print at all comfortably in the real magic metagames. Because the inspirations for this are such synergy cards I had to go really hard on making this generic. It is still only something you can play with synergy but that is relatively easy to do with good EtB effects all over the shop on both dorks and lands, as well as plenty of dorks you want to untap, and even some lands and fortifications that are especially spicy to untap. This is a card I really enjoy playing with and building around. It was borne out of me thinking about my favourite types of card and trying to bring that to this cube. On this occasion it worked out well!
Hunger
Power 7
Design 7
This is a top down design card but ported over from the art set. Initially it was Goya's Saturn devouring his son. Kroxa also had an influence on this and was pretty much the art I wanted. Kroxa is a bit too prominent in magic so I was happy to use this old ratty incarnation that all bar the commander folk are going to be somewhat oblivious of. I ported this across as I felt it was going to perform significantly differently in different metas and wanted to test that but mostly it is because it was a unique, interesting and elegantly designed top end card, of which I managed pitifully few. Black is fairly well supported with top end so this dude gets a little less time getting play. As such I don't fully know how good this is yet. It is certainly a little polar in that when you have a significant board and you deploy it the game is pretty much over. In a close game however this does rather less. I think perhaps the Control Magic effect should be sorcery speed only as the card is quite complex already in terms of rules interactions.
Hunter Class
Power 6
Design 6
As a card I am very fond of this but it is a little aimless and a little over bearing. I like my cards to be cleaner and less word soup. Much as I feel as if this is a good green card and a good representation of a hunter I am unsure if this improves the format. The first mode is a little bit of a do nothing, not that far off a cycle for the most part. The second mode is super conditional and can do almost nothing for your mana or lock someone out of the game. That is a bit of dodgy design. The level three is also just a way to sneak in some situational green effects, it isn't really adding to the card as a whole.
Huntsman (retuning)
Power 4
Design 4
Trying to hit two birds with one stone here offering green some removal and energy extra support. Absolutely feel like this could be a 2/1 and still be below par. In energy lists it is fine but unexciting and in green decks it is still dodgy removal a lot of the time with a "free" 1/1 not exactly tipping the scales much. The art is lifted from that wanna be green Grave Titan which just offended me on principle. He was such a long way from a 6/6 dork and looks absolutely in place as a 1/1, or indeed a 2/1. I didn't feel like I was upcycling that artwork or giving it a second lease of life, I just felt like I was doing it the proper service of being used as intended.
Hungering Corpse (cut)
Power 3
Design 3
Similar situation to the above card. It is removal? Is it a cheap dork? Yes. Yes to both but also not very good ones. It is either a very underpowered and over priced Smother or a Grizly Bear. Not good cards, certainly not cube level cards. Much as I could boost this a bit I have little interest in doing so as the card isn't very exciting, it doesn't play especially well.
Huorn
Power 7
Design 7
Somewhere between Oracle of Mul Daya and Ramunap Excavator lies this Courser of Kruphix style of card. This sort of card is now emblematic of green but I fear I missed the cleanest baseline version of this card which is a shame. It is probably just this without the exert, and perhaps reach to make up for it, but I am fine with the power level of this as it is and have no desire to weaken the card. Possibly I should have just made two cards around this theme rather than trying to reflect all these sort of past cube staples in one. Regardless of the design mistakes this card is played a lot, plays well, and feels very green.
Hydro Confluence (cut)
Power 8.5
Design 3
A little too universally playable in addition to being no fun to run into. This is just a tedious card to face regardless of what you are playing. Normally this is counter a spell and get a couple of scry. Sometimes it is Fog an attack, others it is tap down blockers for an alpha strike. It is a more efficient and reliable counter than Condescend with substantially more modality. Equally, it matches Mana Leak for countering power while piling on the added value and utility. Turns out that outclassing two decent counterspells is not the place you want to end up. This needs to be UU at the very least but this makes it somewhat unnatractive to include in the cube. I would much rather just have a 1U card in its place. I would be OK with it if the card were a fun and rewarding card but it isn't and so it is cut. Making it three mana kills it and so I feel as if I have come to a design dead end.
