Edit:
I missread a card and so reviewed it wrong here, for the review on the card doing what the texts says go here :-
http://mtgcube.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/goblin-rabblemaster.html
Spectra Ward - C cube
Dull and way overcost for normal use however might be good in some capacity at some point with all the aura themed juice on the go at present.
Paragon of the Gathering Mists - C cube
This has been out on the spoiler for a very long time but I feel I may have overlooked this one of the Paragon cycle. For the other colours they seem a bit over cost for just a 2/2 body however with all blue guys being so flimsy and flying being so handy this could see play in some blue weenie decks. I doubt it is worth it but blue global pump cards are rarer and more interesting than the others.
Feast of the Fallen - C cube
This smacks of being way too fiddly to set up consistently as well as being dependant on you having enough guys out each trigger to make that exciting. Potentially very powerful, particularly in a deck with ways to abuse +1/+1 counters but not close to the consistency of power required for main cube use.
Xathrid Slyblade - B cube
Another card I have probably overlooked, not stunningly exciting but hard to deal with, great to equip and potentially very irksome to go near in combat should you lack the removal to deal with him. I lose more games to Geist of Saint Traft because of the hexproof than because of the 4/4 angel so perhaps there is a role for this little Grey Ogre.
Altac Bloodseeker - A/B cube
If this were to go in the cube it would have to take the place of something like a Stormblood Berserker or Lightning Mauler as they are all a bit samey in terms of where you play them while also not having that broad a range of places you can play them. All of these cards are brutal in the right situation however underwhelm a bit too often. For the Bloodseeker to be brutal you want to make it on the same turn you kill one of their dorks, you also want to be able to threaten removal in combat making blocking very hard which could be harder than it seems as often the best play would be just to kill their guy and then attack. If they don't have many dorks this will suck massively, if they do and you have good removal then it should be a kicking.
Hammerhand - C cube
This card does a lot for the mana and given that it is a single mana this card should wind up getting play somewhere. It is very niche but in cube as well as things like modern this will just perform a very specific role better than any other card at some point.
Back to Nature - B cube
Although a reprint I need to remind myself to get one of these. A bit of a hoser but very cheap and powerful and with Theros block out it has way more targets across the meta making it that bit more viable as a main deck card (still not viable I should point out, but getting there).
Invasive Species - C cube
I can't think of a deck that wants to be bouncing its own things enough to run Trained Armadon but it is the sort of useful thing I will likely want if I don't get me one of these. Obviously a bit poo but will have some strength as a support card in the right deck.
Profane Momento - C cube
Low impact and situational, would need good mass removal or milling effects and a strong urge to gain life before this was close to playable but as a one mana artifact that can scale well with synergy it would be negligent to entirely overlook it.
Edit: cards 215-223
Act on Impulse - C cube
Act on Impulse is a kind of red Three Wishes. In blue Three Wishes did not get it done as you can fairly comparably just draw actual cards. In red this is not possible and so there are some situations I might want to run this pseudo-card draw effect. Some cards exists than can give you sufficient information about the top of your deck that this could be good such as Scroll Rack however there probably are not enough of those you would want in a deck that could make this playable unless the deck also highly suited it. By suiting it I mean being able to reliably play three random cards from your deck at the times you would want to play this. Red deck wins can have an average mana cost below one if it likes however you still need to be at turn five to play this, lay and land and cast two one drops from it. As such this will never be well suited to red deck wins style decks. A big fat midrange style deck also can't really dream of playing this and consistently using two of the cards, let alone all three. As such the only places I can see this being of much use are artifact ramp red decks and storm decks without blue. Ultimately resulting in a nice card that won't see much cube play.
Kurkesh, Onakke Ancient - C cube
A bit costly and "made safe" for combo use which is the only place this card really could get a shot in. Just for having lots of raw synergy with stuff to be playable a lot more cards like Jitte and Cursed Scroll need to be printed. Quite cube but unlikely to ever see play.
The Chain Veil - C cube
Clearly the most over priced pile of turds but I cannot pass up on unique effects so this will have itself a slot. This should never see play and if it does there is no chance it will be good. Hopefully we will see more of this kind of effect that tinkers with the functionality of planeswalkers.
Hornet's Nest - C cube
Very elegant design but sadly a little pricey and small to make waves in cube. This is fairly good all round at holding back attackers but has its flaws such as doing nothing to an exclusively airborne assault. If you can get damage on this yourself, be it one per turn or just a total massive chunk then it increases in value but still probably not to a cube worthy level. It sadly offers too little reliably and leaves too much control with your opponent.
Scuttling Doom Engine - B cube
Another far cry from the Wurmcoil benchmark however this does have some of its own special utility. Unblockable by weenies is like a super lame trample but is still likely more use than reach, vigilance or deathtouch. Being a 6/6 for 6 colourless and an artifact makes it quite playable in its own right, not good, but not a dead card like your Hornet's Nest can wind up being. The reason you play this card is because you have some kind of engine focused around Recurring Nightmare, Birthing Pod or Goblin Welder that will allow you easily to cheaply bring this guy into play and just as easily sac him off for a six damage hit and likely some other bonus damage. Six damage will kill off most planeswalkers or it will be a fairly significant blow to the face and will represent a threat with no need of attacks. It might well be that scary Sundering Titan card you can't afford to remove as it will wreak you so you are forced into having some awkward game plan involving surviving the fatty for a long period of time and winning around it. Utility filler threat is another potential role I can see this in, not unlike the Genesis Hydra but for the other main kind of ramp deck.
Ensoul Artifact - C cube
The C cube seems harsh for this little card which simply does too much for very little to not end up seeing play in a variety of formats. I can't exactly see where you might want this in the cube at present hence the low position but I am sure its uses will soon come to light and be fairly diverse and effective. This on a Darksteel Citadel seems like a very awkward threat to have to deal with. The only other thing much like this that has seen play is the ability on Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas which had strong synergies with infect but was a little all over the place to find play in any other decks. Perhaps with the added redundancy with both at your disposal some build around options exist.
Edit: cards 207-214
Necromancer's Stockpile - B cube
Compulsion meets Survival of the Fittest with a smattering of Zombie Infestation about it. I like this card a lot but it is clearly way too narrow for main cube consideration. Black has very little in the way of card quality and even less still that you can get going with fairly early in the game which makes the Stockpile stand out. In addition to this it is a discard outlet for dorks which has several applications in black. Sadly it is all a bit too slow and low powered unless you are mainly discarding zombies, and if you are mainly discarding zombies you are likely an agro deck and probably shouldn't be running this. That said, turning all your guys into 2 mana 2/2's that draw you a card seems pretty decent. This will also work well with the vast number of return creature from graveyard to hand effects in black that are usually so uninspiring. I heartily want this to be good and will build many decks based somewhat around this card but ultimately I think we have a B cube card at best here.
Boonweaver Giant - C cube
I am not sure how this compares to Soverigns of Lost Alara for a way to abuse Eldrazi Conscription and as it neither are viable for running in a main cube for being too narrow it doesn't really matter. Should you want to play some sort of fun aura combo deck then you will play both, at all other times you will play neither. Cube is about different and extreme which this provides in abundance, sadly at seven mana this does rather lack power which is the other thing the cube is all about.
Aether Whirlwind - B cube
Part of me sees this as the blue Terminus, another part of me sees this as some sort of Time Ebb dribble. Five mana is not a cheap way to deal with dorks, especially just Azorius Chraming them, but it is very cheap for a one sided instant speed Wrath. For the decks where you most want to be Wrathing I think this is usually better than a Wrath. Something like White Weenie or RG beats where most of the dorks turn sideways each turn the Whirlwind will be about as good as it gets. It will leave your dorks intact and on the board, it will clear away all their attackers regardless of hexproof, indestructible or the various persist, undying, regenerate type effects, it will generate powerful card advantage and a huge tempo swing. It also really slows up and hurts man lands. Normally I am greatly averse to giving my opponent choices however on this occasion I am not so bothered by it. The objective of this card is to halt any tempo, clear the board of threats and generate card advantage, all of which it does regardless of whether they put their dorks top or bottom. Certainly it means they will likely redraw and cast the most obnoxious threat the next turn and perhaps do so again the turn after meaning you still have to ultimately either race or deal with these returning threats. For the decks like RG agro and white weenie I think that dealing with these slow returning threats will be no trouble and the Whirlwind will provide enough tempo and card advantage to be in a great position to win the game. The problem with the Whirlwind is how useless it is when you are playing a matchup where Wrath of God is not so important. Something like a mid-range rock deck which has loads of walls, mana creatures, value cards like Eternal Witness and just the occasional real threat like a Thrugtusk. In this kind of situation you are usually going to hit very few creatures that the Rock player will either not care about at all or that are able to generate more value by being replayed. A lot of the time you will miss half their board as they are not attacking with them. Against a control deck you will only ever go one for one with the card too making it the nut low Repulse. While blue has very little creature removal and even less in the way of mass removal I don't think this card will be overly sought after as blue is so very used to taking on red, white or black to support it in this role. This does make pure mono blue control decks much more viable but there is not much call for such an archetype and so there should not be that much call for this card. Nicely designed and very interesting but I think a little too niche.
Sliver Hive Lord - C cube
Kind of fine as the various Sliver Lords go but likely now over the limit on the number of RGWBU cards you can play in a deck. Not a card you would ever want outside of a slivers tribal deck although it is a bit of a mini Progenitus!
Generator Servant - A cube
Tinder Wall has returned to us in a non-gold form with a useful body and a potential haste perk. Any mana ramp card is interesting and this one seems to tick most of the boxes. It is cheap to play in the first place, it ramps for quite a decent chunk and it is not a dead card assuming you don't want the ramp. On the down side a 2/1 for 2 is about as low powered as you can get in the cube before you become exclusively about the effect. Also the mana ramp is a one off that costs you card advantage and so unlike a mana elf you have to really do something worthwhile with the bonus mana to justify the card cost. Turn four Inferno Titan is the first thing to spring to mind regarding getting sufficient value from the ramp. The haste alone would be nearly enough to justify the loss of the card in the case of Titan but it is an extreme example. Most of the other good red cards to ramp into have anti synergy instead such as Thundermaw or Seige-Gang Commander. I can see this getting more play in RX decks than mono red as red has less exciting targets on the whole to ramp out with haste. I see this getting played somewhat in the role of a Lotus Cobra or an Orcish Lumberjack. Powerful, fun and explosive but a little bit of a coinflip card in terms of how reliably good it will be for you.
Garruk, Apex Predator - A cube
This is an incredibly hard planeswalker to judge mostly becuase of his cost. Obviously his effects are very rounded and very powerful, in this regard he is not unlike Nicol Bolas or Karn Liberated. Both tend to win games unless immediately dealt with but they are also hard to get into play. Karn is widely played as he is so easy to throw into a any old deck with a bit of ramp but Bolas is very rarely played because he is in non rampy colours and has such an intense and diverse colour requirement. Apex Predator is nestled somewhere between Karn and Bolas in his attributes that should determine his playability. Seven is a world less than eight mana but still a much more significant jump over six than any other mana jump prior to then. Typically the BG decks do not bother with curves that high, preferring to peak at five, occasionally six in the Pod/Recurring Nightmare or controlly versions. I am not sure how a BG deck aiming to get to seven mana looks as I have not had much experience with them in cube. It could be heavily ramp focused and look much like the mono green or Gr ramp decks or it could look more like mono black control and be better at slowing the game down. The problem I see with this is that the main disruption you have at your disposal in BG is discard effects and these scale poorly as the game goes on. The longer you try and make the game to facilitate your high curve high power cards the less effective your control cards become. The cube is slowing down over time with far more emphasis being placed on the power of cards rather than their cost or synergy meaning the meta in cube is as good as it has ever been for such a card to shine.
Looking just at Garruk's new abilities rather than how he will fit into archetypes or the meta game and he is incredibly convenient. Two plus loyalty abilities and four total between them all covering a lot of ground in terms of what you want most in games of magic. Making 3/3 death touchers for +1 is never dead and gives you good protection and board presence even if it feels like you could get much the same deal on a planeswalker for two less mana and one less colour! Killing another planeswalker for +1 is huge, you will likely only every get to use it once per time you make Garruk but that is certainly not the only time it will affect the game. Very few other walkers can come down and snipe off a planeswalker and so once Garruk is down your opponent basically cannot make their own until Garruk is dead, a not so easy task when he is throwing out 3/3 deathtouchers and growing from a healthy 5 starting loyalty each time and periodically eating their best monster. His loyalty is enough that you can likely make him unprotected and take down an obnoxious planeswalker and then still survive the swing back so that he can start to churn out beasts. Essentially I am saying he looks like he is versatile and strong enough to recover very dire situations where few other cards would help you survive and no other cards do so while also offering you a potential threat to end the game with after. The killing of a dork and gaining life seems a little expensive in comaprison to the others however it is well designed as the most common time you will be using this is when you are very near death and likely would be attacked to the face the following turn instead of in the Garruk. By gaining a load of life and taking out their best threat you can stabilize where other walkers would do too little to help. In all Garruk has a complete set of abilities than ensure you can do what you need to recover and take control of the vast majority of game states. His ultimate is fairly dull but should get the job done when you need it too and is a good giggle in multiplayer (not that you would catch me playing multi-player magic but there are some masochists out there...). For the most part I think people will have conceded well before you go ultimate with this Garruk. While I think he is good enough for the cube I doubt it will be a commonly played card at all with the two colours and seven mana thing going on.
Devouring Light – A/B
cube
While this is a reprint
from Ravnica I had pretty much forgotten about the existence of the
card. Back then spot removal was not such a big thing in the cube,
nor was the capacity to exile so valuable against such a wide array
of threats. Fast forward to now and an instant speed exile spell that
is never more than three to cast and can cost zero at the very least
raises an eyebrow. After Path and Plow white has real issues with its
removal, either is is situational like Last Breath and Reprisal or it
is sorcery speed and vulnerable in the case of Journey to Nowhere and
pals. There is also a swath of removal which, like Devouring Light,
falls into the region of only targetting attackers or blockers.
Usually this means it is too unreliable and also inappropriate for
agro decks to play. With the cost reduction aspect working best with
the more agro decks and the exile sweetener I feel I am going to have
to give this a belated chance in the cube. There are just too many
Bloodghasts, Strangleroot Giests, Voices of Resurgence, Vengevines
and ways to get non recursive monsters out of the graveyard for Path
and Plow to cope with!
Heliods Pilgrim – C
cube
A cross between a
Trinket Mage and a Stoneforge Mystic but an offspring that gets
mostly the bad genes. A three mana 1/2 does so little to the state of
the board it needs to be doing something else broken or highly
important to the deck. While you do get some card advantage it is
neither good cards (3 mana 1/2s...) nor that great value. As it seems
you cannot get bestow creatures the Pilgrim is looking like it will
only see a tiny bit of play, typically in exotic decks.
Dauntless River
Marshall – C cube
A nice little card that
is cost efficient for the stats and has powerful ability as the game
goes longer. Sadly this dork is only suited to one deck type and is
therefore far too narrow for main cube consideration.
Avacyn, Guardian Angel
– C cube
Certainly no Baneslayer
but also no Serra Angel either. I peg this Angel at a just below
Archangel of Thune level but similar sorts of card. Both fairly
generic mid range all rounders that offer some good value and utility
but that both are a little fluffy should you want to maximise all of
their abilities. The body on this is good but a touch vulnerable with
only 4 toughness. Flying and vigilance make this a decent threat that
also controls the board fairly well. Being able to protect your other
guys from damage for 1W is a help but more often than not Avacyn will
be the thing they are going to be trying to take down and so will not
feature. Mother of Runes is leagues better as a card to be protecting
your other dorks with. The protecting players aspect just seems far
too expensive to be useful very often, certainly there are some decks
that simply can't beat you should you get to seven mana with this in
play but they are few and far between. If I were playing this card it
would mostly be for the body and as such I find five mana a bit too
steep for something with just 4 toughness.
Ajani Steadfast - A/B
cube
I am glad to finally
see a way to increase the loyalty on planeswalkers other than
proliferate and Doubling Season which are a bit too niche to be much
of a thing. Although not niche, it is also not a very powerful way to
gain loyalty and will be far less of a feature of this Ajani than
just pumping up your dorks in a variety of brutal ways. I am overall
not a huge fan of this planeswalker, he is much like the various
other pure white Ajani's in that he really needs you to have dorks in
play to be doing anything for you. Steadfast is probably the best all
round planeswalker of Goldmane and Caller of the Pride. He is easy to
play, has more loyalty (assuming you do something relevant with
Goldmane!), works well with having many dorks in play or just one, is
able to assist in his own protection while gaining value (due to the
vigilance given by the +1) and is overall slightly more powerful in
what it does that the other two. Certainly it is not quite as good as
Goldmane at powering up an army of tokens while still protecting
himself but then Goldmane is very disjointed in design and hard to
get much utility from with the lifegain being pretty much a do
nothing, like the other Ajani's when you have no dorks in play!
Steadfast has a fairly lame ultimate but it could be useful now and
again and the other two abilities should end games themselves
assuming you are able to make dorks. Mostly I have just compared
Ajani to his other pure white versions and while Steadfast seems
better, neither of the others have held onto an A cube slot
consistently and Steadfast is not all that much better so will likely
be having to work hard to stay in the big league.
Hushwing Gryff – A/B
cube
Much like the Aven
Mindsencor in both body and disruptive effect. It does negate your
effects too however white has surprisingly few of those so it is not
a big deal to build around should you want this in your arsenal.
Mindsensor has fewer things that it disrupts however when it does do
something brutal like counterspelling the early use of a sacland then
it is often game over. The cube is chock full of good enter the
battlefield effect creatures and almost every deck uses them so even
though it is less powerful than the Aven I think it more cube viable.
The body is not very powerful at all but flying is enough to make it
worth it. Flash also means that you can ensure you get some value
from it by countering the significant part of some card like Eternal
Witness, Shreikmaw, Thragtusk, Snapcaster etc etc. It is a bit costly
and cute for a dedicated agro deck, it is a bit small and weak for a
sturdy midrange deck and so I can see it mainly getting play in a
cute GW hatebears or UW agro disruption deck like Mindsensor does.
There is some potential for control decks to run it a bit like how
they sometimes run Vendilion Clique. Flying flash monsters are a
great help in taking out planeswalkers, a thing UW control decks
struggle with, and with some added value on them as well they are
viable all round solutions.
Return to the Ranks –
C cube
Rather situational,
clumsy and niche to be a cube mainstay but a very interesting little
card that can provide some redundancy for Immortal Servitude or
Revileark in some way. I think it is broadly speaking a lot better
than the Servitude, it is cheaper and less restrictive.
Soul of Theros – no
slot
Not the worst Soul and
not the best. The cost of the ability as well as the unexciting
vigilance it has lead me to think this will never see cube play.
Spirit Bonds –
tentative A cube slot
My friend likened this
to Bitterblossom and I find myself agreeing with that more and more.
Spirit Bond has far more requirements from your deck design than
Bitterblossom due to needing creatures to trigger it. With this
inconsistency and the mana cost to trigger it the advantage it offers
is slower than Bitterblossom, a card not renown for speed itself...
That said the Spirit Bonds has no clock that it places on you and
will just generate you a healthy advantage as long as the game
carries on. The sac a spirit to gain indestructible till end of turn
ability is also far from irrelevant is it gives you some great
protection against removal. Board sweepers are a real killer for
white weenie decks and being able to save a few of your best guys
will win a lot of games. This card has what it takes to see enough
play to deserve a top flight cube slot. It is a little narrow, I
can't see many places it would crop up outside of white weenie but as
white weenie makes up a significant portion of what you can viably do
with white in the cube it is OK to be a little narrow.
Warden of the Beyond –
no slot
Terrible if not getting
the bonus, too unreliably at having the bonus and not exactly jaw
droppingly worth having when it is having the bonus. Moving on.
Coral Barrier – C
cube
I want this to be good,
I love it but I think it just doesn't offer enough to merit playing
the card. This may look like a lot of stats for a blue card but
compared to something like a Blade Splicer it is found more than
wanting. A mono blue opposition deck is where I see this being most
viable but probably still not quite there.
Chief Engineer – C
cube
An interesting card
that could easily feature in a combo deck of some description or just
be good rampy filler in a fairly wide array of blue artifact decks
packing some creatures. Between this, Grand Architect, Etherium
Sculptor and Vedalken Engineer blue has some very powerful artifact
based ramp and good redundancy in it as well. Few of those, including
the Chief Engineer, are all round powerful and good enough to be a
cube mainstay. Despite it being a narrow card it is very much one to
keep an eye on. In modern I can fully see convoke being more
prevelent in robots than affinity is! Turn one, Memnite, Ornithoptor,
Darksteel Citadel, Mox Opal into chief Engineer into tapping all
three to drop out a Master of Etherium then mise tapping him to drop
a Signal Pest seems good.
Illusory Angel – C
cube (still)
Another one of those
Commander set cards finding a printing in a base set. Too niche for a
mainstay cube slot but a very powerful all round pile of value in a
well tailored agro blue deck. The reason this is niche is not because
the support cards are not there or are not good enough because they
are with Gitaxian Probe, Aether Vial and Chrome Mox all springing to
mind. What Illusory Angel lacks is other good cards that want the
same kinds of prerequisite so you can double up on your synergies.
Jace, the Living
Guildpact – no slot
This Jace I shall hence
for be referring to as Jace, the Underachiever. Frankly this is just
awful, I would rather have Liliana of the Dark Realms or Tibalt in my
deck. At least they do things in some reasonable proportion to their
cost. For +1 we get to scry for about one and a half, fine but this
is something I can get free on a dual land these days and it doesn't
give me any tempo advantage, protection, board presence or card
advantage. For a joke cost of -3 I can Disperse, not even Boomerang,
ruddy Disperse.... So, this protects Jace a little bit, one time.
Odds on the second time you use it you are killing Jace to do so.
Best case scenario is that you use the bounce to return a costly
planeswalker to hand that had greater loyalty than it began with. The
thing is, the worst thing they can then do is just remake their
walker and start to do actual stuff with it compared to you with your
walker doing basically nothing. This Jace has a good ultimate but it
is slow to get there and nets you little advantage prior to that.
This Jace also has decent starting loyalty but that is just utterly
negated by the fact that for its cost and their respective effects
the +1 should be a +2 and the -3 should be a -2. The worst Jace
printed by quite some distance.
Edit: It has been put to me that I am being overly harsh on this Jace, while all of the above is true if you ignore the existence of the other Jace's this is not unplayably bad. Sure you are always going to want another Jace but this one's manipulation does scale very well with a lot of blue cards, the bounce is a good utility out and the ultimate is still game winningly powerful. There are places where this is a fine inclusion, all be it with better alternatives, if that were a criteria by which cards qualified for the cube there would be very few cards indeed. I still don't plan on getting one but I would be less incredulous if others were to have this in their cubes.
Military Intelligence –
C cube
Another card fairly
well summed up by my mate - “feels like if you are attacking with
two guys your winning anyway”. This does not account for the fact
this card allows for chump attacking where you just throw guys away
to trigger a card draw. Cheap and powerful but unreliable and narrow
would be my synopsis of the card. Basically my mate is right, you
cannot really afford to play optimistic fluff like this in cube these
days. I suspect it will get some play just because we all love to
draw cards, both white weenie with tokens and black with recursive
dorks should be able to design a deck that can trigger this reliably
enough to make it good. The problem with forcing the design of your
deck such that you can draw more cards is that you lose so much
potential power per card overall that you don't compensate for it
enough with the extra cards you draw. Sure, you draw three extra
cards than you would have with a bog standard most powerful card in
slot deck buy turn five but that doesn't help you beat the incoming
Inferno Titan when they are all Raise the Alarm and Bloodghast...
Quickling - A cube
While this is not
really a two drop it is still a very interesting card. Kor Skyfisher
has been a powerful white weenie trickster for many years now in a
fairly similar sort of capacity as this dork. Mostly it is a cheap
evasive threat that can afford you added value if combined with comes
into play triggers. Skyfisher is a little fatter and has a broader
range of things to bounce making him fairly abusive with things like
Moxen and handy to turn on Land Tax however it is sorcery speed
making it very hard to use as protection or as a combat trick. The
flash on Quickling will make it a very annoying card and far more
played than Skyfisher as a result. Snapcaster Mage and Spellstutter
Sprite spring to mind when looking at the Quickling, it is a faerie
as well! Not having to return a blue creature will also make this
powerful in a fairly wide range of deck types with all colours having
strong enter the battlefield effect creatures. While this is far from
what you would call overly powerful it is the kind of card that with
good play and good deck design you will be able to get a vast amount
of mileage.
Void Snare – C cube
Very cheap and to the
point but a bit sorcery speed for my liking. Obviously it couldn't
hit lands at one mana but increasingly more that is a thing I look
for in bounce spells for the cube.
Chasm Skulker – B
cube but potential to be a sleeper
Potentially very
powerful however I am wary of the cards vulnerability as well as a
strong desire to be paired with cards like Brainstorm so as to easily
and quickly grow it. There are a lot of cheap ways to power this up
as well as some more serious ways to turn it into a giant such as
Time Spiral. Really though, you want this in a sort of creature based
tempo deck where it is a growing threat that has a bit of built if
Sprouting Thrynax. Oddly Wake Thrasher is the card I find most
comparable to this in cube and the Skulker has that well beat.
Thrasher only sees play in Merfolk tribal decks and not even all of
those so it remains to be seen if the Skulker can cut it in the A
cube. The existence of Opposition certainly gives strength to its
chances.
Master of Predicaments
– no slot
Nice design on the card
but Air Elemental has to do a lot more than this to be cube worthy.
Soul of Ravnica – C
cube (if it is lucky)
Flying is a whole lot
more exciting than vigilance, first strike, deathtouch or reach. It
is a good chunk better than trample as well making it a long way to
playable before we get to the abilities unlike the other Souls. Sadly
the abilities on this Soul leave a lot to be desired. Seven mana for
starters is a gross amount of mana to pay, you will almost never be
able to do that without having to wait a turn after playing it making
Consecrated Sphinx greatly superior as a threat that nets you cards
as well. Needing to have a selection of coloured permanents in play
as well means you will likely average less than two cards at the
times you could activate it unless you have grossly warped your deck
to include lots of enduring coloured permanents. An overcost,
underpowered situational ability, even if it is a card drawing one
does not come close to cutting it. All we are really left with is the
fact that you can play this from the graveyard, a thing that the
might Consecrated Sphinx cannot do! So lets just compare that
potential to Deep Analysis and then we can move on...
Endless Obedience – C
cube
I think this is just
that tiny bit too much mana to be cube viable. Not many decks both
want to reanimate things and have lots of dorks in play leading up to
that which are the only decks that would ever want this over the
various 3 mana or less reanimate cards. Interesting for sure, perhaps
good in some way with Bridge from Below and Dread Return but far too
narrow for a cube slot.
Indulgent Tormentor –
no slot
There are no ways in
which this is better than Bloodgift Demon. Giving control of parts of
your card to your opponent is very bad.
Necromancer's Assistant
– C cube
Not a powerful card at
all but sometimes you are building a heaving synergy deck and this is
the exact piece of filler you need.
Ulcerate – B cube
I am really struggling
with the evaluation of this card which is odd for one so cheap. 3
life is a massive amount to have to pay for a card, especially when
so frequently in black life is a resource you want to spend on lots
of things. In the kind of roles you would want to play this card for
there is little better in the cube. This kills most creatures in the
cube and more importantly it kills almost every single one of the
cheaper creatures which is the main reason you would be playing it.
Certainly direct damage has more utility than -X/-X effects as it
goes to the dome at hits planeswalkers however pound for pound
Ulcerate is much more effective than Lightning Bolt at killing
creatures. It gets around indestructible, regenerate and can combine
with combat damage to kill off bigger creatures without going two for
one. All this said and done I think I would suck it up and play
Disfigure or Tragic Slip to avoid the severe life cost or I would run
Contagion or Sickening Shoal and pay cards rather than life so that I
could better spend that life later on recouperating the cards.
Cruel Sadist – no
slot
Nice design and a
versatile little one drop that is just a tiny bit too expensive and
slow to be cube worthy.
In Garruk's Wake – no
slot
Nine mana! Ouch.. No
exile, no instant speed, able to regenerate. Even with Nykthos, Lake
of the Dead and whatever ramp you want to throw at it really this is
far too expensive for what it does, and more to the point, doesn't
do. You want Wraths over four mana to be doing something more than
killing all creatures, something a bit different that helps to get
around the robust cube threats survivability. Sure, this hits walkers
and it doesn't touch your guys but then Bonfire does all that without
being prohibitively cost to do anything for the first 8 or so turns.
I would play Decree of Pain in preference to this, at least you can
cycle it off...
Ob Nixilis, Unshackled
– no slot
A very odd card indeed.
Some sort of Sengir Vampire meets Aven Mindcensor. With no way to
flash it into play easily it might just as well say opponents can't
search libraries as the penalty is pretty much death. Having
disruption effects like that on a six drop is poor, you want them on
two drops so that they can effect the game from as soon as possible.
Once you take all that out of the equation you have a really awful
Vulturous Zombie, a 4/4 flying trample for six, even with a minor
growth ability, is so far from the cube bar that I shouldn't really
have wasted the time reviewing it.
Soul of Innistrad –
no slot
For my money, the worst
of the Soul series. Where I come from a 6/6 deathtouch for six isn't
good until it dumps out a couplet of zombies whenever it does
anything. Returning dorks from graveyard to hand has never been much
to get excited about it magic, you need to get dorks in the bin
somehow to get back and then you need to recast them again. All of
this means you are being incredibly slow and have probably already
lost to someone who is not investing six mana in little more than a
Craw Wurm and then five mana to affect the board in no way.
Waste Not – A cube
One of the most
interesting cards of M15 thus far. Waste Not is cheap and powerful
yet it is unpredictable in what form of power it will offer you and
it requires a lot of building around to get it working at all. Free
zombies and cards are never bad but free mana needs to be spent and
this means having things to spend it on, sounds simple but black is a
clunky colour that often doesn't have much it wants to play at any
given time. I think ensuring you don't let the mana side of the card
go unused will be almost as significant in your deck design as the
inclusion and selection of discard spells used to trigger it in the
first place. We are real men and so we play mana burn which will
further increase the importance of getting that mana spent. Lands are
clearly going to be the most commonly discarded cards and so mana
will be your most frequent bonus. Effects that allow you to make
people discard at instant speed will be sought after to pair with
Waste Not. Once you get someone's hand empty very few decks get into
a position where you can hit them with sorcery speed discard again
and thus render your Waste Not useless for the rest of the game. I
think Waste Not is probably powerful enough that you can run it in
decks not built directly around it and that are surprisingly light on
discard effects. There are a lot of uses, synergies and applications
for a card like this, many of which will not be obvious at first.
Burning Anger – C
cube
A combo potential card
like Splinter Twin, only worse. Only likely to see play in standard
and only should a good creature to pair with it show up.
Goblin Rabblemaster –
C cube
Too slow and clunky
with not enough immediate value or impact to be good enough. In a
goblin tribal deck where having haste, +1/+1 for him and his tokens,
one off his cost, a wider range of uses for tokens to sacrifice and
suddenly he is looking a lot more playable. Even so, there are a lot
of good goblins and the three slot is one of the most contested. I
certainly wont be rushing out to get one of these for the one time it
will get played.
Inferno Fist – C cube
Not a great card, low
power, a bit situational and vulnerable etc. However, herioc and
enchantress decks are a thing and this is fairly good as a filler
aura goes. It is cheap and kind of doubles up as a Seal of Fire which
is a thing lacking in enchantment themed decks. I am sure I will
build some exotic decks out of mostly C cube cards with a wack
enchantment theme where this will be a consideration. I doubt such
decks will be a mainstay in the cube for a long while yet but it is
always fun to do something very different for which this could help.
Aggressive Mining – A
cube
This is the other big
card of interest in the set along with Waste Not and I think this is
the better of the two as it affords you more control. Any card that
costs four mana and means you can be operating with six more cards on
your following turn need to be seriously looked at. Necropotence was
a complete game changer in Magic and there are many comparisons
between that and this. While they cannot be played in the same way
due to the nature of their various costs and restrictions they do
line up fairly well on analysis. Both cost a mid range mana curve
amount, both allow you to trade a resource for cards at a powerful
rate and both impose restrictions on what you get to do in a turn.
Even if this is only half the card Necropotence is/was it will still
have some impact on most formats. Being only a single red to play
greatly increases the scope of this card, most likely with green for
its ability to get lands into play. This is not a luxury afforded by
Necropotence, a card who would love to be able to easily find homes
in green and white decks that are flush with life gain. The
difficulty is in knowing quite what new decks can be built around
this card and which old ones can adapt to take advantage of it. I
suspect any deck with Wolf Run and Primeval Titan would be happy to
throw this in. I also think a very cheap red burn deck would happily
pack this to give it some late game legs. Wheel of Fortune gave too
much to your opponent to be frequently played in such a role but this
gets the job done a lot better. I am sure we will all bork ourselves
and lose to getting locked out of land but then I have done this
countless times with Necropotence and that doesn't make it bad (it
might make me bad however...). I wonder if Magmaw and/or Crack the
Earth will get a bit of play just as ways to get out of the land
lock.
Goblin Kaboomist – C
cube
A fun little card that
is fiddly, slow and not actually all that powerful. I like it mostly
as a way to get artifacts into play just to power up other things
rather than to use as land mines. Food for a ravager or Goblin
Welder, contributing to affinity and metalcraft etc. There are few
decks that could make good use of Kaboomist and I doubt he would make
the final cut in many of those which is a bit of a shame.
Soul of Shandalar – A
cube
For my money, the best
of the Soul cycle. A 6/6 first striker for six is not that exciting,
or wouldn't be if it wasn't for the cube meta in which almost no
other creatures survive or even trade with in combat. All the best
threats and big dorks seem to be 6/6s themselves and so Soul of
Shandalar is a fairly tedious dork in combat. He is still vastly
worse than Inferno Titan due to its greater mana cost to take full
advantage of as well as for providing less immediate impact on the
game. If you do get to untap with Soul then it will be similarly
brutal to what Inferno Titan does to a game, assuming you still have
at least five mana available. The reason I like Soul so much is not
how it compares to Inferno Titan as a six drop but how it compares to
Firebolt as a card I want in my graveyard. Sure, Soul has no one mana
cast option with which to get it into the graveyard in the first
place so cannot be directly compared to Firebolt as a card. Most
colours, including red, are flush with ways to get cards from various
places into the graveyard and so I am not too concerned with the task
of getting it there. Once Soul is in the bin you have an
uncounterable, perma-landfalled, non creature dependant, instant
Searing Blaze on offer for the same cost as the flashback on
Firebolt. Bargain. It is quite an odd pairing of effects and unlike a
lot of cards with split functionality or roles it is fairly dead
weight in the early part of the game except that you feel like you
have gotten bonus value if you somehow wind up with it in the bin. I
can see this working in a lot of different decks fairly well, the
test will be whether it is ever preferable to Inferno Titan and if so
how much supporting synergy you need to make that the case. If it is
the case of just having the odd thing like a Survival of the Fittest
and a Faithless Looting in your deck make Soul the better card then
it should be an cube mainstay, if you need to be going near all out
with some sort of Forbidden Squee style deck to make it good enough
then it will be too narrow for the cube.
Stoke the Flames – A
cube
Interesting like
Endless Obedience is however more acceptable in base cost as well as
more all round in purpose. As soon as this costs two mana it is very
powerful indeed. At three it is fine and even at full whack it is
still doing something you need even if the cost isn't great. Not many
viable burn spells deal four damage and so it is a really annoying
toughness for red to deal with as it so often 2 for 1s you. Flame
Javelin and Char were never exciting options, they were clumsy and
very poor damage per mana. Stoke the Flames has none of their mana or
life style drawbacks and is vastly more flexible in terms of when and
how it is played. Oddly the card I liken it to most is Fireblast.
Sure, it is not as consistently able to be played for free but then
the standard cost is significantly more affordable while the
reduction cost is substantially less detrimental to your board state
and other resources. I can see loads of plays where you dump out a
hand full of guys, end of turn or while blocking you convoke out the
Stoke and then alpha strike for the rest the following turn. Stoke
scales well with vigilance dorks and token generators. I doubt
control will often play it as they lack the guys to optemize its use
however I think both midrange and red deck wins will play it a
surprising amount. Mid range just because you get a lot more burn for
your card than with most other spells and in red deck wins because
you will often enough have the dorks about to make it cost two or
less in a way that costs you no damage output loss. I am keen to
wrong foot someone by tapping out to make a Siege-Gang Commander onto
an empty board then fire off a Stoke the Flames from nowhere to ruin
their plans. I think this is the sort of card that is very easy to
overlook and underrate but I think it will be one of the most played
cube cards from this set. It has all the most important attributes in
a burn spell, it is instant and it hits creatures and players. It
then has the two perks of being a whopping 4 damage per card out
pacing the likes of the mighty Lightning Bolt combined with the
potential cost reduction all the way to zero. Yummy.
Hornet Queen – C cube
I have had one of these
flitting in and out of my cube since it was first printed but on
balance I would say it has deservedly spent a lot more time out than
in. If you want tokens then Avenger of Zendikar is your man, if you
want to deal with fliers then Cloudthresher and Chancellor of the
Tangle are the dorks for you. Hornet Queen is a nice all round
powerful card that is just never best in slot.
Phytotitan – no slot
I am not a fan, six
mana dorks without trample or some kind of evasions are deeply
unreliable as threats. This is slow to recur, easy to kill and offers
no particularly exciting synergies. Cube removal is set to be able to
deal with awkward things and with all the bounce, graveyard removal,
exile and returning to library the Phytotitan is not half as durable
or difficult to race as you would like a card of this cost to be.
Reclaimation Sage – A
cube
This is clearly the
card that will see most cube play from M15. Not the most exciting or
even the most powerful, this little elf just does exactly what you
want it to. Back in the day (when I had power in my cube) Viridian
Shaman and Uktabi Orangutan were complete staples. Almost every deck
had multiple good targets for them and they let decks like RG agro
and the Rock be competitive with stupidity like Tinker and Mana
Vault. Creatures have gotten better and so you cannot now afford to
run Grey Ogres when there are not targets which is more often the
case now without Sol Rings and Moxen all over the place. Acidic Slime
and Wickerbough Elder have taken over in that role in green both for
having wider ranges of targets and for being more useful bodies.
Although the weakest body of the lot the Reclaimation Sage is not
relevantly weaker than Viridian Shaman and can generate a lot more
tempo than you can with Slime or Elder. Being able to take out a
Jitte or Sword before they get a swing in is obviously great however
the value you get by spending turn three rather than turn five
dealing with a problem rather than furthering your own game is often
overlooked. The opportunity cost of not making the Thragtusk (or
other cube five drop) on turn five because you had to make the Acidic
Slime is going to be greater than the opportunity cost of making
Reclaimation Sage over some other three drop. With Theros littering
the cube with all sorts of enchantments it is becoming the case again
that the vast majority of decks have Disenchant/Naturalize targets,
many of which are irksome creatures. I actually think this card will
see more play than Eternal Witness despite being a bit less powerful.
Decks with only 40 cards yet that are of the power level and
diversity of the cube need certain tools and have to dedicate slots
to these tools or they will be cold to a variety of different cards
or archetypes. Reclaimation Sage kind of allows you to jam a tool
into your deck without it costing a complete slot. The Sage is still
a dork and satisfies all those kinds of quota, it is a threat and it
is something you can curve with and so although it might be a little
lower power than another three drop that does all of those things it
is also a naturalize as well. By being able to compress and condense
your deck so that your cards overlap on the various roles you need
from your tools then you have a lot more space left in your deck to
ram full of power. I suspect every mid range upwards green deck will
run the Sage if it can, any deck with creature engine cards as well
such as Birthing Pod or Recurring Nightmare will also have the Sage
very high on the team sheet. It is single green, it kills things, it
is an elf, it is fit for the Skullclamp, there is just nothing not to
love about this little fella.
Genesis Hydra – A
cube (but not a secure or solid slot)
The merging of Green
Sun's Zenith and some basic X casting cost hydra of old I cannot be
bothered to look up just to reference... I don't love this card but I
suspect it is actually fairly good. I don't love it because it is
just a bad dork bolted onto a very unpredictable effect. Without
spending a lot of mana or having some knowledge of what is on the top
of your deck you are risking winding up with the worlds worst 2/2 or
3/3. Should you have a Sylvan Library or some such down then it might
be OK to make it as a 1/1 just to get that mana elf into play or
something but for the most part this card should cost at least six
mana and could still be wiffing for you until about 8 mana spent
where your odds are pretty low at not getting value. As such I think
the X is misleading and really you have a card that is really quite
awful till about seven mana. Primordial Hydra can be made at a wide
range of X costs to good effect and is solid as a result. You can
build your deck so that a Green Sun's Zenith will be useful the whole
way along the curve. All that is why I don't like the card, why I
suspect it will be good is that green ramp decks lack card quality
and card advantage and are prone to over manaing. Genesis Hydra
scales very well with your mana production, sure, it is only a card
you want to play from seven mana up but you can often get to fifteen
mana no problems at which point your Primeval Titan is looking awful
while your Hydra is looking really spicy. When you do just make it
for seven it is at least getting you something else of value. It
greatly increases your chances of getting the card you really want or
need as well. Often you simply need to find your Karn to deal with
something or just can only win by finding that Craterhoof Behemoth.
The green ramp decks need to play a certain mass of top end to merit
ramping there however a lot of the top end cards are just sort of
good fat you don't really need, like I say, it is usually a case of
find Karn or find Craterhoof. Along comes Genesis Hydra and promises
not only to fill the role of being a top end threat but also that it
can greatly increase your odds on having what you really wanted.
Sure, you have to pay nine and ten respectively to find those cards
however I have found myself with the mana and not the right cards
more often than I find myself without the mana in green ramp decks.
Like I was saying with Reclamation Sage being able to condense and
compress the deck I think you can do a similar sort of thing with
Hydra therefore making it playable.
Nissa, Worldwaker – A
cube
A very awkward
planeswalker yet also a rather powerful one. To be able to attack
with a 4/4 trampler on the turn you make her she effectively costs
six as unlike Koth, she does not do you the kindness of untapping the
land. This would probably make her bad if not for the fact that she
has a second plus one ability that can free up a whole bunch of mana.
Between the two plus abilties you can probably find one to work well
for your situation, when you have other stuff to do you can make
Nissa, untap lands, grow her loyalty and carry on with your doing of
things. When you don't have stuff to do you are probably past the
five mana stage or have already got the Nissa in play and so can
start to beat down with 4/4 tramplers. Even with two plus loyalty
abilities the ultimate is a fair way off with four activations and no
loyalty loss needed to get to sufficient loyalty to use it. It is
powerful and both poses a serious threat likely to end the game the
following turn while also greatly increasing the draw quality you get
for the rest of the game should they survive the land onslaught. It
is not as robust as some of the emblem ultimates but is none the less
fairly decent. I doubt it will be used much as the combination of +1
effects should get it done before, or she will die before then most
of the time. The ultimate also gets worse as time goes on in the cube
and requires you to have a decent chunk of basics in the deck, the
latter is also the case to make use of the untap 4 lands ability
which overall makes Nissa rather niche, I suspect only to feature in
mono green decks with the likes of Dungrove Elder and Rofellos.
Another thing in Nissa's favour is she effectively has two different
ways to protect herself, both of which increase her loyalty. Unlike
Koth the land you animate does not revert and so while this does have
some awkward issues regarding the lands getting killed or just
spending time attacking and not allowing you to cast things it also
has some serious upsides. Firstly, you don't have to attack and 4/4
blockers are pretty decent and secondly, should you attack the damage
will increase rather fast should you continue to animate lands each
turn. Assuming you start animating and attacking from the turn you
make her, in the turn after your next, again assuming no blocks or
removal happened you have gone in for 24 damage total, 40 the
following!. It is hard to say which is better out of five mana Garruk
and this Nissa without having played it. Garruk is triple green
making him almost as exclusive to mostly green decks as Nissa. They
both make reasonably fat dorks and grow, they both have a fairly
overkill fatty ultimate that should see little use and they both have
a middle ability that offers you a pile of resources. Pound for pound
I think Nissa is slightly stronger than Garruk but also more awkward
than Garruk to a greater degree than it is more powerful. Having to
force your mana base in a certain direction to accommodate a few
cards is painful, also Garruk offers card draw rather than a mana
boost and green has plenty of mana boost yet little good card draw.
Overall I think the best thing in favour of Nissa getting lots of
play is that there are no other good Nissa planeswalkers yet there
are plenty of good Garruks to chose from meaning your second and
third planeswalkers are that much more likely to be Nissa than the
increasingly awkward alternative Garruks.
Life's Legacy –
Starting life in the A cube, likely winding up in the B cube
Big potential for cheap
card draw in green. Lots of cards have this kind of effect such as
Momentous Fall and Greater Good but they cost a lot and are rather
unwieldy as a result. Greater Good has seen a decent chunk of cube
play as you can build engines around it but it is too niche to be
much use in more normal decks. This cheap little card can cycle away
something like an Eternal Witness much like Lat-Nam's Legacy works in
blue. It can desperation dig by tossing a 1/1 mana elf or it can
fully be an extreme Ancestral Recall should you have the luxury of
something like a Thragtusk to throw under the bus. It is a touch
risky as the sacrifice is part of the cost and the spell is sorcery
so against countermagic it might be too much of a liability. The fact
that you can use it on weak utility creatures to reasonable effect
and thus not really losing anything by losing the body will help when
faced with counterspells. With green having such little choice of
card draw and this being so direct, convenient and cheap I am sure
this will be ridiculous in a selection of situations and matchups. It
does savagely suffer from the win more or do nothing dicotomy where
by in lots of situations you won't have anything to sac and in lots
of other you could just attack with the guy you are sacing and win
that way instead. I am certainly keen to play with this and have lots
of fun drawing piles of cards on the cheap but if it will be
consistent enough or desirable in enough archetypes to be main cube
worthy remains to be seen.
Soul of Zendikar – no
slot
While Soul of Shandalar
has the being a lot better than Firebolt going for it this very much
does not have the being better than Call of the Herd. As a dork,
Rampaging Baloths are going to be a more fruitful investment. As a
thing to have in the bin, aside from Call of the Herd, there are
plenty of creatures I would still rather have than this. No trample
is a real killer for this Soul and so I think we can fairly well
write this fatty off.
Sunblade Elf – B cube
Likely the best of this
cycle and while powerful enough for the cube I think it is a bit too
narrow. Wild Nacatl is a lot better than this, and Loam Lion is
close, much better in the early game when you want the card and much
worse in the late game. I think this card will fall into exactly the
same category as Flinthoof Boar, a card I always cull from the cube
when drafting as only one archetype wants it at all yet always
returns to the cube as soon as that archetype is constructed. This
will certainly see play, it will be a strong one drop and it will
scale into the late game better than most but it is not a card than
any archetype will miss much and as said, not a card with many
suitable homes.
Yisan the Wandere Bard
– no slot
Cool card, Elvish Piper
meets Aether Vial, however all rather slow and costly for cube play.
Sliver Hive – C cube
I guess viable in a non
slivers deck but certainly not the best utility land I can think
of... Should you have a slivers theme in your cube this is a must, an
utterly insanely good tribal land. Without slivers this is not a
thing you need.
Obelisk of Urd – C
cube
Much as I am a big fan
of this card I think that Hall of Triumph is just all round more
useful and reliable. Six is an awful lot to pay for a card that has
no impact on its own, especially in a tribal deck. If you cannot
conveniently convoke this out it will be pretty awful and odds on you
will have a turn of do nothings in order to get it out. The bonus is
huge but I think mostly unnecessary, tribal decks should have
sufficient inbuilt synergy within their guys to not need this kind of
thing.
Perilous Vault – A
cube (just)
The new Oblvion Stone,
it costs one more to kill things and doesn't give you the option to
save some of your own stuff however it exiles rather than destroys.
Normally a mana more to do much the same thing would rule something
out however on this case the detonate ability on both costs five so
unless we are at stupid mana then the speed at which you can use
either is very much the same. Neither are quick cards and in many
ways are slower than Nevinyyral's Disk simply for total mana
expenditure required. When you have mega mana in super late game or
because you are a ramp deck then the Disk becomes much weaker as you
can't use it right away. The difference in cost between Vault and
Stone at this stage of the game is more negligible than in the early
game. When, for normal use the speed of all three cards is much the
same then the focus should be more on the benefits of exile compared
with those of saving your own stuff. Generally speaking I think the
exile wins out, it is more in line with the intended purpose of the
card and it is more direct. Increasingly in cube you need to exile
threats to properly deal with them. Oblivion Stone is not a high
powered cube card but it earns its keep, much more so in draft than
the more constructed formats. Overall I think they are much of a
muchness and it rather depends on the fine details of your deck and
your opponent's as to which is the superior of the two. The cube
certainly doesn't have space for both and so I am going to run with
the fresh new card for a while and see how we get on.
Soul of New Phyrexia –
C cube
Probably the second
best soul but really nowhere close to what a Wurmcoil offers. A 6/6
trample artifact for 6 is fine but not good. A five mana way to
protect things while in play or in the bin as a one off will win the
late game but won't be doing much before then. Unlike Boros/Golgari
charms which can utterly wreak someone planning on using mass removal
or even just spot removal and combat, the Soul ability is not only
250% of the cost but is also fully visible to your opponent so
assuming they are not asleep or terrible they are not going to just
walk into a losing play. A playable card with some late game utility
but greatly underwhelming compared to other 6 mana threats or ways to
protect your stuff.
So, the M15 top ten
list looks something like this in my mind at present. Garruk the only late entry and he is far from a lock in to the main cube at present.
Reclamation Sage
Aggressive Mining
Waste Not
Stoke the Flames
Nissa, Worldwaker
Soul of Shandalar
- Garruk, Apex Predator
Quickling
- Genesis Hydra
Ajani Steadfast
