Jet Knight (cut)
Power 5
Design 4
Aesthetically very pleasing card and a nice homage to the classic Knight theme. Sadly a card that doesn't play well or excite that much in draft. Low nominal power and relevance curtailed behind a paywall of high black mana intensity. Very few decks want this card. An OK blocker or a hard to block attacker. It isn't enough threat for an aggro deck, especailly as black doesnt' seem to have one, nor it is enough value or tempo for a midrange list. This is filler, perhaps it is devotion support. Regardless, it is not worth a slot.
Jessica, Firemind
Power 7
Design 7
Generally happy with this one. Very red feeling in both play pattern and offered abilities. It is hard to get value with Jess but there is plenty of utility. I really like the include of Threaten. It is a hard effect to include in a cube being rather situational but it sits nicely on a walker in the pseudo ultimate slot. I toyed with -1 on the ping but that was a bit too harsh. It is more the case that walkers in general are a little good in my meta rather than this one being out of line. As such this is likely best left alone while some other cards are designed and tuned such that walkers are more suitably placed overall.
Jet Dragon (retuning)
Power 8
Design 4
Inherently a polar card in that it wipes the board and leaves a big old dragon in play. In control decks this is fine but actually underperforms relative to elsewhere. Control don't need their answers and threats on the same card and in this case it might well limit you. A six mana Wrath with restricted range is not going to be sufficient a lot of the time when compared to an actual Wrath of God. That 5/5 flying body means nothing if you died a a turn ago! Equally, if you are leaning on the body to close out the game it is slow and answerable as far as control threats go. A four turn clock isn't terrible but it isn't impressive either. I have considered an array of tweaks to this to try and make it more suitable but I fear it is a more fundamental design issue with this type of card. Most of the tweaks lower playability on the wrong way, such as making it 3BBB or scaled up to a seven drop. If they are not reducing playability they are reducing elegance. A 4/5 statline does a bit but not relevantly. all the actual issues still remain. The jury is still out on this one. It could ultimately get a bit of a rework, it could just get cut, or it could remain in the cube as it is. Very few cards still sit so openly on their future potentials. Especially none with quite so much testing as this, for this certainly gets play. As you would expect from a limited format, the bell curve of decks is slap on the midrange, and the midrange is where this shines most. It is fine to have a few cards you need to know to play around, but few is the key component there. A card has to be really worth it for that accolade and I am not yet persuaded as to the worth of this dude.
Jizzum Djinn (retuning)
Power 9
Design 6
These are the saclands of the set and really glue everything together. This is one of the best of the land cycling dorks. Big stats with a relevant ability make this consequential late game in flood mode. It is also in black which has a bunch of extra upsides for getting dorks in the bin. Turn one cycle into turn two recur in some way for value is a common and good feeling line. Much as I am happy with the way it plays having an abundance of cheap land cyclers I do want to get the power level of the card side as on point as possible. You can go pretty terrible and still have them see play. Keeping them just above playable isn't the objective with these cards as it is with most others. The ideal I think for these is having them be somewhat close to 50/50 on the play to cycle ratio. That usually means having the card side a lot more potent than you would expect of a real card. Regardless, dropping this from a 5/4 to a 4/3 isn't actually going to move the ratio very much on this card. You will still play it when you don't want a land and have nothing better to do. The ratio it would change more significantly is how often you win when you cast it. There is no real pressure to sort this out, it is not ruining games by being over tuned. Pretty sure the final iteration will cost this and be either a 5/3. a 4/4, or a 4/3.
Jonny Mono
Power 7
Design 8
This card isn't super exciting but it does exactly the design brief and does so in a really clean and balanced way, all while being one of the hardest card types to balance. This dude could even be a 5/5 and remain fair and reasonable. He is just a Jegantha style big dork. Jonny is a payoff for being mono, all be it a small one. His relative high cost makes him little more than some mild late game value in an aggro deck. Control loses a lot more from being mono than it is ever gaining from an over priced vanilla dork. Midrange sits in the sweet spot. Ideally midrange against five colour green, the only archetype where the protection becomes anything other than cute flavour. It is nice that the mono deck gets a potent tool against the gold deck as it is often a dodgy matchup for the mono player. Jonny isn't interesting is his problem. You play him as your companion if you can, otherwise you don't. You are almost never trying to play him. He doesn't change much. What he brings is a nice warm feeling when you get a free card. He is feel good rather than play good. That is no bad thing however. He is simple and not taking up much space or anything.
Jonny, Golden Nugget (retuning)
Power 8?
Design 3
A really dangerous and dodgy walker here. Suffice it to say I got this well wrong the first couple of goes. I wanted a very high cost walker you could instantly use all the loyalty on to counter something, or that left behind a low value walker when you could afford to slip him out. The problem was that having an effective Seal of Counterspell planeswalker was just game winning. Whenever you got it down safely it was as good as winning. You need to have to work upto that counterspell loyalty. I suspect even the iteration shown here is still too powerful. It is one of those dodgy combinations of types and effects that plays poorly in terms of fun and so needs to be balanced on the lower side of the power range. I wouldn't be shocked if this never quite came together. There is a lot of novel stuff trying to happen here so perhaps best to split some of those ideas off. Losing the flash certainly takes an element of the danger away from this and would open up some design space. I really like the few walkers that allow for instant speed play and/or use and that is where the inspiration for this arose. Much as I am on revision three of this now I have as yet still done relatively little testing on this as I have had to cut shraply each time given how egregious it was. I am not in the habit of leaving cards this bad in the format too long else no one is going to want to play it. The homemade cube has to appeal more than my other cubes for it to get play and leaving cards as devoid of fun as this are not how that is done.
Journeying Disciple
Power 7
Design 9
Always loved the Cloudfin Raptor but it was never that well supported in cube. I was trying to make more interesting one drops that potentially did more in a longer game than the generic 2/1 beater with some mild upside. This was my attempt to fix Cloudfin Raptor into a more playable card and I think I managed that very well. This is a scaling one drop that isn't too snowbally or oppressive. There is lots going on too, both with consideration in deck building, and plenty of options in game. It all came together really nicely with this one and it feels like an even bigger win than usual as I get to replace a boring 2/1 aggro dork with it.
Jubilations
Power 8
Design 6
Initially this cost 2W and was underwhelming. At this price it is rather scarier. It probably needs to be that way though as this was very much made with the brief of giving white aggro decks a means to paly well passed their 40 card deck size. This is an inevitability tool and quite the potent one. It is most dangerous in aggressive decks where the counters are at their most scary. Even so, the range of utility this brings makes it perfectly acceptable in basically any deck. I am not entirely sure how fun of a party hosted by a white mage is going to be. I feel like I want my revels red based! Not about to make this gold for flavour though.
Jumpy Goblin
Power 5.5
Design 7
Take Ragavan. Strip away his two best modes and you wind up with a card still very playable. Dash it transpires is quite a good mechanic. This is just a generic 2/1 beater for 1. You can make them all day and they are rarely super interesting. This one does very well on interest to complexity even if nominal interest isn't wild! It is super clean, highly plausible, and spot on for fair. It is even a little bit option dense. You need a critical mass of these one drops to support certain archetypes and you do not need them all to be masterpieces, indeed the odd simpler one can help keep things running smoothly. Cards like this that do the job efficiently are likely pretty optimal. It is hard to get excited by this guy, especially when so eclipsed by naughty thieving monkeys. But, Jumpy fucking Goblin mate. The Ronseal of one drops.
Jungle River
Power 8
Design 7
Jungle Troll
Power 6
Design 6
This was a card made to plug a hole. I simply didn't make enough green three drops first time round, particularly not enough stat focused ones, and I needed some. This is the kind of dull creation I flop out when going full bottom up process in an area that I lack interest and inspiration! It hit all the deign parameters. It feels and plays about right but it is pretty dull. It even tends towards duller games. Toughness heavy statlines favour blocking. Regenerate also stagnates and slows games. Get this guy some juicy equipment and things get pretty wild. As he comes he is just a nice safe way to curve with tempo. Mana dork into Troll is very green feeling. You get to be the big cheese with your big numbers. This is the kind of card that should probably have some complicated exotic card in its place, and perhaps one day it might. In these early stages of development however, these clean and simple cards that do the job at hand are a great help and have done wonders for general accessibility. The thing I most like about this is card feel. This evokes green both mechanically and aesthetically. It feels like a pure old school magic card, like straight out of a Mirage booster! I think that cards like this that are real flavour and aesthetic wins have done wonders for making my homemade cube appealing.
Jungle Valley
Power 8
Design 7
Junior Monk (retuning)
Power 5
Design 6
I worded this poorly and somewhat broke the card as a result. It needs a clause to allow on a single activation else this has more of a Blessing than prowess! Even so, not as broken as you might think with it relatively rarely coming up. Basically, by the time you have mana spare to mess around with giving this prowess it is usually irrelevant on the board or long since left it! The ratio of turns this is in play to the turns it is activated are low. I could happily lower the cost of the activation somehow and have the card remain fair. If done right it could well make the card more interesting as well. A fine generic 2/1 filler card with a dash of scaling but nothing like the power of Swiftspear to actually push an archetype. This would likely be better as a 1/2 if the prowess were sufficiently easy to turn on.
Junk Monkey
Power 6
Design 7
I wanted to make a real disposable dork, one you could afford to be real wasteful with, a red Thraben Inspector ideally. Junk gave that opportunity in a very red way but any sort of 2/1 with a junk was going to be too good. I could have gone with a 1/1 but that felt boring. Instead we have put frenzy to work. This is able to beat up players and planeswalkers but it does a very poor job of trading in combat. As such it is hard to gain or lose value with this dork, but it can take advantage of tempo and apply some more on that front. This card plays almost like it is from another game, but it is interesting and plays well. The worst thing about it is that frenzy is not well known by players and as such the card isn't at all intuitive. A card that I presently deem worth the extra effort in understanding as it adds so much to the format. I love a Thraben Inspector, I even love a Voldaren Epicure, but I also resent the Epicure for not quite being what I want. This is what I want for red, it is my little red Inspector!
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