I had some space left on the print run after doing the Art Set and wanted to put it to good use. I had 92 card slots to play with and so took some completed new designs I was most excited to use first. That took 77 of the slots. The remaining 15 I gave to the most pressing of reprints on cards needing a rebalance.
Despite this 3rd print run being small it is very pointed. The Homemade Cube started out life with multiple goals and aims in mind but over time I have focused those aims. I am now just trying to make the most fun format, and with that single goal in mind I know more what I need to do to achieve that. I previously made a lot of functional magic cards that led to a somewhat slow and dry format. Now we are trying to spice it up!
I had a few "issues" I wanted solving and a few experiments I wanted to try. I wanted more colourless removal, I wanted more non-green means of mana ramping, and I wanted more tools to interact with the graveyard. It is fairly obvious which cards are aimed at these tasks! I wanted to push my aristocrats archetype harder and so gave them a very rounded helping of quite pushed support.
In the guise of bolstering archetypes I provided some touching up on the support for energy and graveyard matters stuff. Lastly I wanted to provide some better threats at pressuring control decks as I felt they were getting a little strong. These control pressurizers are the most diverse group of cards with artifacts, awkward vehicles, manlands, cheap dorks etc.
After these direct solution cards it was all about fun and experimenting. A lot of the fun cards were reworkings of some of mine and my playgroups favourite cards. Be that an updating for power level reasons or just some kind of reworking to make is suitably different from its inspiration card. These are pretty obvious and not at all trying to hide their inspiration.
The experimental stuff is mostly with free spells, I expect to cut most of these for being oppressive but one has to dip a toe into these waters to be able to understand them. That is the whole point of experimenting! I dabbled in some card quality that is of equal power level across the colours. There is also a cycle of cards aimed at bringing down the power level of tokens by having protection from them. These were pushed to ensure they saw play so that in turn I could see how the protection panned out. If it is good and plays well these cards will likely be reigned in a little so as to stop them just getting played everywhere!
The final 15 cards on this spoiler list are some reworked reprints. I have nearly 200 of these sat in a folder, mostly with minor typos or visual errors. Plenty also of cards needing a tweak up or down in power level. Generally these are fairly low priority as I have over 1000 cards to chose from and only want a cube just over half that size! Most of these are tweaks that are making little to no difference, and in the rare case the card in question is rendered unplayable it usually matters not. There is not too much pressing me to make a slightly buffed version of a card that isn't exciting, necessary, or untested!
Here is the list of new additions;
Homemade Cube Third Expansion
I have played with the new cards a few times now and they are mostly as I expected. The free blue counterspell, even as a lowly Force Spike seems like no fun at all, and soon for the chopping block. The others are feeling a lot more reasonable. The cards I expected to seem pushed have been good but at least not yet broken. The biggest misses so far have been a couple of the reworked big blue dorks, which on many accounts seem just as problematic, if not more so in some cases than before! All in all the format is a lot healthier, the gaps are suitably plugged, there is more spice and excitement and the games are speeding up. There is still work to do on that front I think but a lot is my own fault for being a total sucker for a really grindy deck. If I keep building them that way of course my games are going to be long....
