With the title I do not refer to the basic land type of Island but the poem by John Donne. What I mean by this reference is that no card can be judged in isolation. There is no absolute measure of a card's power level. A card's power is determined by the context the card exists in, the other cards around it. A card can be a bomb in one deck or format while being unplayable in others. Changing from one deck or format to another is quite sudden and can have these more marked effects. Time however will also change things within a format. Often slowly too as cards are released, banned, or rotate out of formats and people adjust to those changes in a back and forth way. One of my favourite things to observe in cube is old cards that are slowly growing in power under the radar as the environment around them becomes a more suitable home for them. Cards obviously go in both directions, with the general tend being towards that of less relative power but more potential or absolute power. This relative decrease is due to power creep and just more stuff to compete against. Without that increase in power over time the trend would be in the other direction as more cards would allow more favourable interactions and thus more options and more power overall.
Cube is one of the slowest and most glacial of movers when it comes to the individual power level of cards. Mostly this is down to so few new cards entering the format compared to others. It does also have the quirk of being a relatively small selection of cards from all of the cards. This gives it a kind of extra layer of insulation. It is not just a case of legal cards and decks as is the case in standard or modern etc. It is a case of all the cards, those that are chosen for the cube, and then the decks that can be built out of those that are chosen to be the cube in that case. Cards need to be allowed from the greater pool of all the cards into the smaller pool of the cube itself in order for them to affect the others while in games and decks. With change in the power level of cube cards being slow it can be easy to overlook it. Convenient to remember how powerful something is rather than test again and re-evaluate. This can often mean we do not revisit cards that have been cut for one reason or another. It can mean not considering older cards. It can even lead to cube stagnation and evolutionary dead ends of a sort.
To keep a cube fresh I find it important to do little overhauls (if such a thing is not an oxymoron) as well as ongoing upkeep. The ongoing stuff is simply adding new stuff as it is released and I acquire it, and of course cutting cards. I tend to add in bulk and then cut gradually and continually but this is a logistical convenience rather than optimized for play and testing. An overhaul on the other hand tends to be much more of a restructuring, usually cutting a bit and then adding a bunch more than I should back in its place! These tend to be little synergy pods of cards that go together. Perhaps I decide I am done supporting a sacrifice theme so heavily in the cube and gut all of the support cards and those that obviously don't stand up on their own. I then use this space to add in another group of cards that work well together, perhaps so self mill support and payoff. This changing of the guard lets you see what works and what doesn't, it gives you a better idea of which types of cards work better and which of the more payoff style cards are actually worthy of the support.
It is also very important to strip back the support for synergies you have in the cube every now and again to make sure you are not just artificially inflating the power level so to speak. Those all important "natural disasters" have to happen so as to test an archetype. If certain cards cannot exist without others they are likely too parasitic and narrow for the cube but if you get stuck in your ways you can fail to stress test either things in isolation. It can all get a bit self fulfilling too, you think something is good so you support it and so it becomes good and so you support it more and bam, your cube gets locked into certain immutable strategies.
A little example of this I am testing out at the moment is a very small changeling package. I think just three additions with the aim of supporting a couple of new cards that are particularly impressive when assisted by certain dork types. Otharri, Sun's Glory and Slimefoot and Squee are those cards. Both of those also then work really well with looting and self mill effects. As such I will pair these changeling support cards with a smattering of red looting effects. All very minor but interesting (to me at least!) and revealing. It is also the best way to give unlikely cards a useful home. I love to play the unplayable, the awkward, the unknown, and the quirky. I love it so much when I find a way to do so that is good and justifiable. Cute little support packages and the areas in which a couple overlap are the best places to search for those especially eclectic cards.
Basically I love support cards. Low powered low cost role fillers that scale well with other cards. Satyr Wayfinder, Mental Note, and Stitcher's Supplier are great examples. Of support cards for any graveyard matters synergies. Wayfinder and Mental Note however stand up all by themselves, they are useful cards for other synergies and may just be something you play in their own right. Supplier not so much. Without payoff the card is unplayable and as such the bar for justification on it as a cube inclusion is that much higher. It is absolutely the sort of thing you need to starve your cards of every now and again to see if they work without it. Judging how much to strip back is tricky, you can't take everything as it will ruin a whole pile of things and stop it working all together. You just want to skim off the top, all the parasitic stuff and perhaps a little more, and see how that pans out.
One of my favourite slow rises to prominence was Urza's Bauble. Long before Mishra got his Baubles printed in Cold Snap Urza had his out in the cold Ice Age of '95. Urza's Buable is a little weaker in that you cannot sneak a scry effect out of it with a shuffle effect but that is a super minor part of what the card(s) are about. In cube both of the brothers Baubles are comparable in power and role, they are fairly interchangeable, and critically for this story, both started getting used at around the same time in my cube. Urza's just happens to be a decade older and thus a more impressive sleeper. I feel like these cards should have started to see play around 2015 however it isn't really until 2018 that I really start to get on board with the Baubles. I suspect had they been first printed at some point between those two times I would have immediately put them in cube but the fact that they were already out there took me seeing them used in modern with other cards that are good in cube. Baubles have probably always been good enough for cube simply by virtue of not costing you that much to thin and improve your deck. The ever increasing number of strong synergies they have however has taken them from mere deck filler to actively potent support cards. We have morbid, prowess, delve, escape, delirium just to dip out toe in the waters. We have cards like Lurrus, Urza;s Saga, Urza himself, Ledger Shredder, and many many more individual cards that also pair up well. The lesson here is not just that some cards are sleepers, but also to keep an eye out on other formats, other cubes, any other source of inspiration, as places to give you hints as to where you might find a sleeper or a new synergy package direction. Even if you don't discover anything better or new you will have still learned, still benefitted from the variety of experience. Fluid changing dynamic cubes are healthy, rigid ones run some risks! This is not to say all should always be chopping and changing, it really should be a thing you scale with use. If you only play your cube a handful of times a year then it isn't going to matter how much tuning you do while if you are playing it weekly it will become a dull tool far quicker if left unmaintained.
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