L. Niven, Elven Author (original - cut)
Power 5
Design 3
This was an odd one in that some parts were a great success while other areas missed. As such it got one of the more significant reworks. Really this was doing too much. It also wasn't something you wanted a companion to be doing. Companions want to be value or reach. Either they top you up when you run out of gas or they cap off your game with a winning threat. This dude did neither really. He was a really cute support card that provided some value and ramp if played early, but as a companion, he never came early. Essentially this is only good when in the maindeck, and that is bad design. Also just too narrow for the power. A fine card in one place and unplayable everywhere else is not the design you want for cube.
L. Niven, Elven Author (new)
Power 7
Design 7
New Niven kept some of the structure of the original but became an artifact card rather than an enchantment one, and hopped into a colour pairing more appropriate for such things. Izzet is a colour pair that has slightly more synergies associated with it than others and I am very pleased to have represented both artifact matters and prowess in this card. Of the various companions this one certainly seems to be the one that is most often found maindeck. Prowess decks will just run it because they will not have the option to companion it, and will be more about making tokens. Artifact decks will companion it as it is free to do so and they will be more interested in the late game ability to tap their artifacts for gas.
Lady of Vesuva (cut)
Power 8
Design 3
This is dangerous in addition to just being generically over powered. I am not quite sure what I was on here nor why I made this. It severs no real purpose, is clearly pretty punchy, and also pretty aimless. It is one of those ones where I am not sure the intended result for this and so I cannot tune accordingly. I think I just liked turning classic art into sagas and got carried away... Generally this card was fine. It typically cost no cards, offered a bit of selection and mill support, and netted the odd bit of mana in a slow and reasonable way. Every now and again it netter a lot of mana immediately then went to town with egregious use of over powered spells!
Land Grab
Power 7
Design 9
One of my very favourite cards. This is a Prismatic Vista in disguise. Not so good for landfall but better for prowess. It is super pretty. Super balanced, and offers my favourite of things; consistency. This is how one makes free spells without having them be dangerous.
Land Storm
Power 6
Design 8
This was just me getting cute with Lay of the Land effects. While this might have some impressive scaling the high green intensity in the replicate cost rather detracts from that. The value you get from this is generally very very slow to manifest and it is really hard to usefully squeeze this out in a game. This might be the flashiest of the many Lay of the Land alike cards I printed but it is also one of the least useful and playable making it the most sensible choice to trim. A shame as I love the look and feel of this one.
Lava Pits
Power 8
Design 6
Lava Song (cut)
Power 6
Design 3
Cute card but a little too convenient on the one hand, while being too narrow on the other. This is not a thing for cube. Nor really magic in general what with it breaking a somewhat fundamental aspect of the game. At least this doesn't cost a single mana like the green ones making it an almost reasonable card.
Leaky Mildred (cut)
Power 5
Design 5
Stitcher's Supplier is an outstanding support card for the right archetypes but it is a little bit too good without any real comparable redundancy. It is also painfully narrow. If you don't want self mill it is a waste of space making it a real nightmare for cube curators to work with. This card is an effort to soften the polarity of Supplier. Sadly I failed. This is still only playable if you want mill, and then when you do, it isn't as good at it. It can be cute in a sac deck for the double death triggers but mostly it is just too low power to be worth. Cute design but not overly useful as yet. If I do a better job of supporting a self mill aggro list it might regain a spot as is. Otherwise some kind of looter card is going to be a better fit.
Leitbur Zealot (banned)
Power 7.5
Design 2
A mess of a card, too pushed, and made with bad mechanics. It is just polar when facing a planeswalker and bland otherwise. This is not the way to bring balance to a setting with slightly oppressive walkers. Shame I got this so wrong as the art is delightful.
Lepper Gimp
Power 8
Design 5
I was surprised that I failed to make a viable aristocrats sac style archetype in the format so decided just to really push a couple of enablers to see how that looked, fully with the intent to learn and then pull it back in a bit. This is one such card, a Zulaport Cutthroat with a bonus dork bolted on. Certainly the dork is a liability by itself but that never happens and so this is just a very good card. It is either an extra thing to sac, or at least a chump. I am OK with this card if it is needed but I have no real love of just having a really pushed card as a solution to a problem. Sadly I can't think of any good clean ways to nerf this without making it pretty awkward or just bad.
Lewi Blue Eyes (reworking)
Power 8
Design 5
I have no real love of this card despite it turning out alright. It is a little polar in much the same way any Oblivion Ring card can be. A planeswalker is so much more inherently vulnerable that you are pretty risk averse with this card and the use of the -3. It is mostly when you have no alternative or when you are securing a win. The rest of the time this is just a threatening dork factory. When not Banishing Lighting Lewi is pretty hard to kill, gaining loyalty and churning out 2/2s and sat behind an army of untapped dorks. He doesn't win very fast, if it all in that mode, but he surely gums up the game. Not unless you have something else like an Anthem. Turns out that even in my fairly slow format things than churn out small vanilla tokens do not perform all that well, they just wind up being fairly inconsequential. Lewi is certainly very powerful but a lot of that is down to the imbalance biasing planeswalkers. Lewi will sit very neatly should I solve that. Another card that is the victim of hitting well on feeling very white but then trips itself up by being a pretty boring card. I am not sure the passive giving of vigilance is a good addition here. I didn't bother much in the way of ultimates for planeswalkers as they are so seldom used but this would be a great candidate for one in place of the vigilance. I should probably re-work this easthetically. The art is old and thus the res is real grainy. The card doesn't feel very white either and the art was mainly chosen as a poor taste joke on the real Lewi! In practice this wants to be some captain hero Ajani or Gideon style character to feel appropriately white.
Leyline Atoll (cut)
Power 2
Design 3
Cute but ultimately a fail. This is narrow and low power. For a card like this to be worth having in a cube it needs to be both impactful in the power it brings to bear, and desirable, in so much as players actively seeking to put it in their decks enough. This falls flat on both accounts. Not looking to fix this either. To be worth the slot I would have to power it beyond a point I am happy doing. I like this kind of card for constructed and for flavour but for limited it is parasitic.
Library
Power 7
Design 9
Absolutely one of the fortification triumphs. This is somewhat where you arrive if you draw a line between Library of Alexandria and Jayemdae Tome and stop at a healthy power level. This is pretty much pure card draw at pure tempo cost. There is some synergy with making artifact tokens and using them for things but mostly you just want to draw cards. This is cheap enough for most decks to be happy playing, but costly enough that it is used surprisingly little. What I like is the chaotic cost to card return rate on this card. First card back costs five with subsequent ones costing three a pop, assuming you are going at a one per turn max rate. Find yourself with a pile of lands you can step up the rate of cards per turn to more than one if you pay four a go. This is all fairly pricy sounding, the massive saving grace of this card being the impressive degree to which you can chop up the costs. You never have to pay a chunk bigger than two. A lot of the activation costs can be paid at instant speed, and three of the first five you have to pay cost a single mana each. This is a very tidy little mana sink, and works well with powerstone tokens. Everyone loves drawing cards and this is just one of the cleanest ongoing options out there.
Life Drain
Power 7
Design 5
A bit of a cop out. Drain Life is a little ugly in presentation but spot on in terms of representing the colour. I took that cheeky opportunity to improve on matters and have basically the same card ported over, rather like I did with Fireball. Another way to look at what we did was "de-gold" Death Grasp so as to make it more playable. The slow nature of my cube has meant this is pretty decent. Versatile, threatening, and providing fuel for the various black life cost payments.
Lifeforce Menhir (retuning)
Power 8
Design 6
A third print run card and so relatively under tested so far but I have a strong suspicion it is going to be broken and need an extra mana slapping on the cost. Basically just Overgrowth in fortification form. While technically the same cost the ability to break it down into two neat portions just lets you have this up and running way too fast. On turn three with just this and three basics you can have five mana. That is too much. I do rather like the design on these mirroring the auras of the same sorts of effects endemic to green. I should probably try one that fixes in some way too. It is rather more open design space than dorks!
Lifeforge Mystic (cut)
Power 4
Design 4
There is a lot of open design space in tutors at the cube power level. Tutors cannot be as broad in scope or cheap as this in real magic. In my smaller pool it is probably OK for constructed but at some point wouldn't be if I kept making cards. What really makes cards like this fine is playing limited. Tutors are about the most tempo negative thing in the game and this one lives upto that. You might as well invest less and get card draw effects. Shockingly this above rate tutor isn't good enough in my below rate cube. This Recruiters meet Fierce Empath all rolled into on neat package just doesn't do a job needing done. This was the case pretty much across the board, I made a lot of above rate tutor cards and they tended to see little play and underperform when they did show up.
Lifetap Thrull
Power 8
Design 7
A subtle but delightful way to incentivize something are cheap card draw spells. Of all the cards that temp people towards black this rates pretty high. People just love to draw cards! The power is pretty impressive here but it comes with costs across the board. Costs people are used to and will to pay but seemingly sufficient costs to have kept this card well within the fair range. What I like about this is that it seems like a reasonable magic card, it is simple, it is on brand, and most importantly of all, it is fun to play with. It is Night's Whisper that you get to cast more often thanks to Raise Dead effects, not to mention things other colours do like flickering.
Light of the Trees (banned)
Power 7
Design 1
Oops. This might be the worst of the catch up cards as it is such a different curve profile in each mode and thus really hard to build smoothly with. It was at least either fine or very good so the average performance was pretty high. That all being said, it is random and frustrating and no one needs that from their rampant growth.
Lightning
Power 8
Design 3
Open design space that I shamelessly took. Turns out I didn't need it either, plenty of more interesting ways to make Bolt and removing instant really hampers the interaction one can get out of the card. This is just dull function filler, all be it high powered.
Lightning Hammer
Power 7
Design 7
This however does the job far better than the vanilla Chain Lightning. We lowered the power but greatly up the interest and fun factor to offset that. This is a pretty simple scale up of the classic Firebolt using Chainer's Edict costing as a guide. This card plays well, remains simple and easy to parse, while also bulking out the necessary ranks of certain card types. This is what you want a good chunk of your cards to be like in a format, and what makes cubes a little less accessible to the newer magic player.
Lightning's Balls
Power 7
Design 8
The For Mirrodin! treatment given to a classic and old favourite of mine. The name and picture here are somewhat on the nose pointers to that tribute but I couldn't think of a better way to represent this card. All told this is quite interesting and somewhat unique. It provides a decent amount of reach to aggressive decks, a bit like the Skullclamp of ending games rather than drawing cards. There are issues with it however. First you cannot effectively use it more than once a turn nor can you use it with your one toughness dorks. The most problematic aspect however is the weakness it has to certain defensive measures, mostly first strike but not limited to. When you can't profitably attack with this it is dead weight and no one likes a dead card. On the upside, it gets in one attack by itself before you need to feed it dorks. This is one of those random cards that just worked out well. I have played with the equip cost at both 3 and 4 and it turns out it doesn't really matter all that much, they are not core elements that determine how the card works. Certainly 3 is better and you could set it to just price out the aggro decks at like 6 or something but I have found that you tend to have the mana to equip and swing when it is time to do so. That first swing plus the threat of more eventually is what makes this good.
Lillie Pond
Lion's Eye Elf (cut)
Power 6
Design 6
I was really pleased with this conceptually but it plays pretty badly. It is like the Arbor Elf of mana dorks in this format. Occasionally it outperforms the Llanowar Elf benchmark, with Arbor it is fixing with multi type lands and extra ramp with things that empower forests. With Lion's Eye Elf it is turning colourless into coloured, most notably with Powerstones. Lion's Eye Elf has more problems than Arbor Elf though. Firstly, she is awful at casting non-green cards, especially early on. Her second problem is having to bunch up mana. This is less of a problem than the first because green is pretty sorcery speed and can generally use all three mana at once. I have absolutely wanted to play cards at different times and not been able to because of the way this offers mana to you but mostly that drawback is obscured by the first! There is also the glaring issue that this is clearly an elf with a load of tigers.... If I rename the card it loses the call back. Equally, tinkering with the mana returns likely does too. So, I just remade a slightly less problematic version that adds GG for 1 and tapping and gave it a new name and art to take this cards place. It is what this should have been from the get go and I just got carried away with references. It isn't even that this is a shocking card, it is just a bit annoying and it pointed to a clearly better design for much the same sort of thing.
Living Nightmare (retuning)
Power 4
Design 6
Oddly I have given this a relatively high design rating because this is underperforming. Mass removal that leaves behind threats is scary. Generally it is either unplayable or broken. There is just a very thing line at that crossover point. This seems to sit on the healthy side of that line and I am still a little surprised by that. Certainly this is expensive as mass removal goes, and leaves behind a relatively small body. Perhaps it could afford to be a 1/1 or 2/2 at base? It compares relatively poorly to Jet Dragon needing an extra black mana pip and being less efficient both on the size of teh -X/-X and on the stats, while also having flying. The latter of which is particularly relevant as it makes the body much more likely to do stuff. It is a threat rather than just some stats. I had presumed the controlability of the value of X in this would make it appeal to the midrange player a lot more. I could up the threat of the card further by chucking on menace or something. Keywords certainly seem the best way to go to bring this in line. While it is certainly a somewhat lower powered card it is getting play and doing work, on the low end of things as you might expect, but still sufficiently to keep a spot. I could buff it a bit but it is absolutely the kind of card to not go overboard with, perhaps I am better leaving it underpowered than I am bringing closer to the middle. Could equally make it more black and lower the cost while adding in life payments and going in a Toxic Deluge on legs kind of direction. I don't like it when I have cards that feel like they should offer something unique sit in each others design space. This and Jet Dragon have too much overlap for my liking.
Llanowar Warrior
Power 6
Design 7
Somehow this dull card is a real winner. It just all lines up. Guay is one of my favourite magic artists and she has been harvested hard on the elf side of things. I had this art pulled out and no card for it so I went top down and this is what we came up with. It is very simply a Steward of Valeron with the white gone. No extra power at all, just extra playability. What makes this card such a winner is the pressure it applies on multiple fronts. You have an attacker and a mana dork. Yes, it is a bit underrate on both, and I normally would be tossing out the mantra, just play a card that does the thing you want well not a low power mashup of both. The thing is that this is both, not either as many mashups are. It just gets you off to a nice start. Spend loads of mana, apply some pressure, get really ahead in the tempo game, don't get too caught off by a planeswalker. I thought this could would be a filler card at best, I didn't even conceive it could be a good card both in design and play!
Lock Box
Power 7
Design 9
A big Portable Hole. Really pleased with myself on this one. Ward is a good ability in the right place. White Oblivion Ring removal effects are interesting and flavourful but have some annoying risks that make them a little polar for the best of gameplay. This merging of these things gives us this Smother Oblivion Ring card. I like the flavour, the power, the playability, the potential synergies. I just like this card. It is a rare example of a removal spell that is powerful enough to be widely playable, while not just being a dull cheapest possible "do the thing" card.
Locked in the Tower
Power 8
Design 6
Here is another attempt I had at reducing the risk found in Oblivion Ring style cards. This specific fix is the Fiend Hunter! The idea here being you still get a 2/2 body and an Oblivion Ring on their dork, but you don't get blown out by creature removal and have to be a complete weasel in combat with your dork for fear of its demise. This has proved a little strong but I am not sure how to fix. A 2W cost that just makes a 1/1 Soldier token might be the way to go. It would increase playability while also taking some of the sting out of the card. It might however just be too much of a nerf and result in people finding other removal cards to play.
Lone Wolf
Power 8
Design 4
I was really struggling to pad out the ranks with vanilla dorks. I just wanted some guys you could cast and attack with that kind of set the tone for stats curves. A kind of Grisly Bear, Hill Giant, Craw Wurm progression but of appropriate power level. To make these at all interesting and viable for cube play was one of the more challenging design briefs I gave myself! This was a little over cooked, but only just. This card did a lot, from surprise blocking, to early pressure, to empowering other attacks. It is a lot of card for two mana. This is mostly OK as it dies to basically everything and will often do so in a way that is a net of cards, mana, or both for the opponent. This card just begs to give a two for one away or conceded some tempo. Certainly that was the outcome far more often than this ambushing some attacker and killing it with first strike damage. The main criticism I have of this card is that it is still relatively dull. Yes, you can still make Grisly Bear stats viable, takes some key words to do so. I like the look an apparent simplicity of this card but can mostly take or leave the play pattern. It is a little hard to find decks I want to play a card like this in and so it feels as if the cube slot is going to be better used on a more interesting and more played card.
Looter's Satchel (retuning)
Power 8
Design 7
A little too all round good. This is played most of the time it is an option to and it does decent work. I think I'll pop the equip cost upto 3 and call it a day. The other fix would be to remove the power buff but then it is less like the Merfolk Looter it is calling back to. This fires on all cylinders. It gives board presence, card selection, an array of permanents, a mana sink. This just has something useful to do at all stages of the game. None of it is crazy but all of it combined adds up impressively. I found I rarely left this out of decks and that is the point at which you have to consider the nerf.
Lord of Doom
Power 8
Design 6
Bloodgift Demon given a modernizing to make it a cube card. One extra toughness for neatness and the draw trigger moved to the EoT so as to increase the odds on you at least getting one card back. While the least powerful of the cycle this is still a house of a card. Played least, not for lack of power but a relative wealth of top end in black, in addition to plenty of card draw all over the place. This is one of those classic "needs to go" cards. Once in play you do not have too long to get it out of play or win despite it. It is not going to take too long to over power you with ongoing card advantage or smackdowns for five in the air each turn.
Lord of the Dance
Power 7
Design 5
This is what constitutes a blue finisher. With enough time this will dominate any game. Mostly this gets killed and we move on with things in a typically fairly even trade. The rush with which it is killed ensures you dodge most of the risky sorts of removal that will two for one you or gain a massive tempo swing should you be fool enough to flop out a four drop that doesn't do anything else right away. Much as it is a bit messy and somewhat of a flavour fail, the use of phyrexian mana within activation costs has been a massive win mechanically. It has a habit of levelling and speeding things up. If I am wildly ahead I can just make a lot more dudes quickly and close out the game. Rather than being a win more mechanic, it is a rounding it off mechanic. Like putting people out of their misery. Mostly this card is a mana sink in threat form which is what you want broadly speaking, which is why this can get away with being relatively low power. It plays fine, I have no special love for the card but it fills a role and does so without much in the way of problems.
Lord of the Dead (cut)
Power 5
Design 5
I like tribal cards but they are not really viable in cube settings. I tried to make this broad, I tried to make it reasonably strong, but to no avail. This just wasn't something the people wanted. I quite like the general design of this one but can't argue with results. If a card this reasonable and broad isn't getting there I think the message is fairly clearly to not bang the tribal drum for limited settings unless you go all in. No dipping a toe in that synergy.
Lorien Elf
Power 8
Design 5
This is a card where I fell for flavour. This art fitted perfectly but it clearly didn't have the 0 power I had prescribed the card. As such I made this a 1/1 and in turn it is played every single time it can be in green white decks. It is just too good in all regards. It pays for the card immediately. It pays back the mana in two turns while ramping you, and it is boots on the ground. Because it is a support card it is hard for it to be broken but it does smack of lazy design. This is effectively too good and as such takes away some degree of choice. A few cards like this are ok to have in a format but they have to be really worthy cards for such a sacrifice and this is not that. We need exotic and fun, not convenient and bargainous. Being gold saves it from being immediately culled but I will ultimately look to replace this with a more interesting option.
Lost Ninja (sidelined)
Power 5
Design 7
Felt like I needed a Ninja in the set and this was my attempt at that. It feels really close to correct but just off somewhere somehow. The principle was that you could use this to recur EtB effects with other dorks if you go them through, or indeed, effectively reuse the evasion of another dork to allow this to loot. I like that this card is low impact but really hard to kill. It is subtly really tricksy due to the way ninjutsu works. This guy can pop in a few times in one combat! This is a very me card but it is rather masterbatory. It is a big tempo cost which blue finds hard to front and it fits in an archetype that has never really flourished in any cube! I could probably push this quite a bit and still have it not do all of that much. I like it but don't know what to do with it or for it. Mostly just leave it out until it seems like the meta might have a place for it. The problem with that being there are a fair few tempo blue cards in that camp and with too many sat out at once you are going to struggle finding a critical mass that does allow for the meta to support any of them!
Lost Vale
Lothlorien
Power 5
Design 7
This is very easy to get to a 2/4 where it is fine. Get it to 3/5 and it is looking pretty good. It is a little tamer in that the threat it of it is lower prior to using it. You actually have to invest a little in this before it is too much of a pressure on planeswalkers. It is also notably the case that you use manlands more after wraths and such like where training is harder to trigger. These lands have all underperformed although this is one of the better of the cycle. There doesn't seem too much room to buff this. More toughness seems intense. More abilities is messy. This leaves a 2/3 starting statline which is fine but makes the training a lot less relevant and meaningful. I might need to go to 2/3, or make more manlands! There is a reasonable argument for just having a mono cycle of lands rather than gold ones if I am going to be locking the coloured mana behand an exert wall. That pretty much makes these colourless lands.
Lowveld
Power 4
Design 1
Loxodon Becalmer (banned)
Power 9
Design 2
Oops. This isn't a fun. This dude hoses way too much. It pretty much felt like a Time Walk. It comes down and fully stabilizes all by itself for very little mana. Cards and effects like this are not fun in general and in trying to get this kind of thing out of the way by rolling them all into one card we obviously made it worse. Unsurprisingly the card has too much punch and was one of the earliest cuts. It was clearly oppressive and clearly a horrendous design that didn't merit any attempts to fix. The only way one could represent some of the less pleasant white prison effects in good cube card design would be to slap them on to real top end threats costing at least five mana.
Loyal Protector (cut)
Power 7
Design 3
Something about this felt too much, too complicated, and just off. It doesn't feel like a real card. It isn't a one mana common of an effect. While this was a long long way from broken I didn't much like the play pattern either. It would kindof seize up a game. It was just a complicated card to be considering from the get go every time you did anything. It was one of the better one drop dorks for power but there are a near endless supply of things in line to replace it. Probably the cleanest fix to this is adding a W to the cost, and perhaps just making it a key word such as indestructible.
Lynx (cut)
Power 4
Design 4
The art was too good and I got suckered into making this card. It is cute. I quite like the arsebreathing, a kind of scaling regenerate effect. It is doubly scaling in that you have to pay to save you guy based on how much smack they took, but then that cost is relative to the relevance of the dork in question. Here, you are saving a puny one drop 2/1 and so it is a pretty expensive means of protection. It isn't super cat flavour either. The problems here are two fold. Firstly, as hinted at. This just isn't a very exciting card. The power is low and while it does have some options, they are also dull and low powered. Critically however, green does not have an aggro weenie archetype where it wants generic gribblies.
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