Acid Rain
Design 5
Balance 6
Eating a bit into my own design space rather here but I do like the Desert Twister card in green that is made viable with cycling. This is the Bramblecrush version of that treatment. The cycling is not quite so convenient nor is the cost reduced, but I did treat the card to some instant speed action! I am a little concerned with this being able to hit lands but it is yet to even hint at being a problem. This is much more an insurance policy, you are generally a little down when you use it but you are glad that you had it. Instant is nice but it is still so expensive that it is pretty hard to find yourself up having used it. Instant speed interaction that is both playable and on colour in green feels like a bit of a miracle and so I will gladly take that even if it is occupying somewhat similar design space, perhaps this is just an area in green where some redundancy is more than welcome! This just seems to improve the format overall in the same kind of way that Cast Out used to in real cube. This is one of those simple clean cards that lets you properly get down to playing some good old Magic! Bramblecrush doesn't become broken with cycling, nor at instant speed, nor apparently even both. I love when you find how to make a card playable without having to fundamentally alter what the card does, I guess that is why I like cycling so much...
Design 6
Balance 6
Ancestral Unity
Design 5
Balance 6
Always nice to be able to give a nod to Ancestral Recall, especially if it is a somewhat reasonable one. While miracle is a fairly poor mechanic, making Rosewaster's Top 10 bad mechanics list I believe, this doesn't mean you can't use it, you just need to do so with a lot more caution. Miracle is a weird one, it rather falls flat on limp cards. Other attempts I had made at balancing the miracle mechanic was simply to make low key cards that didn't break the game when you randomly hit them at the right time. While the cards were indeed safe, they were also boring. Putting big effects on miracles just makes them swingy and random and a bad experience for the opponent but not doing so leaves them lackluster. The "safest" thing you can do in magic that is big and flashy tends to be drawing cards. It isn't tempo, it isn't assured power or victory but none the less it feels great. And here we arrive at this thing. The card is surprisingly fine. It is great when you hit it but no so much of a swing as to be broken or egregious. I don't think this is a great card but it is surprisingly reasonable. I think it is about as good as you are getting while using the miracle mechanic and packs a good balance of polarizing to excitement. Sadly I have quite a lot of reasonable card draw effects I have designed and they are competing for ever more contested space. This is not one of the best and is likely getting edged out sooner rather than later. It is good for a card with miracle but it has to compete with cards that say "draw cards" without having the miracle text weighing them down.
Battle Ram
Design 8
Balance 8
Part of the drive to make white more fun. I had made so many generic 2/1 dorks in white and not only was it a bit dull, it was also something you could easily meta against. Variety is key to any healthy ecosystem. A lot of my white 2/1s did a thing once and then that was that, just a generic small body and no ongoing choices. This card is aimed squarely with some targetted design at alleviating those issues in white. It is super simple yet quite interesting. It has the capacity to scale and be more relevant than many one drops in the late game which is another thing I appreciate in a one drop beater. This is really spot on for where you want a common cheap support card like this to be. It isn't too wordy or complicated but it retains some interest and gameplay.
Black Market
Design 6
Balance 4
Basically just an Underworld Connections made fortification. I have since reworked this to allow you to sac the fortified land and gain 2 life. This was simply, and somewhat surprisingly, underpowered in my format and needed a little buff. This is pretty cute and flavourful but sorely awaits that buff so as to get it some actual play time amongst stiff competition in the heavily saturated world of card draw. The Zuran Orb mode buff is decent but a long way from too much. Having to fortify the land really takes the sting out of it. Your lands essentially become very bad Foods. Not sure why this has been left common, pretty clearly a rare looking card.
Blood Vendor
Design 6
Balance 5
This is very much a Seasoned Pyromancer of a card. It is a bit less tempo and a bit more longevity and utility. Safe consistency in a can. I attempted to make Blood a more relevant token type and made a load of support and payoff cards for it in the 4th and 5th printruns. Unsurprisingly these took mainly vampire forms! This is one of the most generic ones and is presently a little under tuned to have done much of much. I like how it is a fairly reliable source of Blood and discard whatever the situation and I like how the Blood it makes can fuel its own escape. It may well jump from fine filler to very good blood support card as the 5th printrun cards are more thoroughly tested but I think that will speak more to the power of those newer cards than any problems with this.
Bloodthief
Design 4
Balance 3
Conversely this dickhead is way over tuned. Stuff that can just pop back for no mana at instant speed is a right royal pain. These effects generally want to be sorcery speed, or at the very leave ensure that the card is coming in tapped. I think this guy also lost a toughness in the nerf. He was just too robust and fired on too many axis. I like the card conceptually and like the manner in which this is a Blood payoff but the implementation was all off. There is a cool kind of arc where you can either have enough other blood producers at one end, or enough sources of crime at the other end of the spectrum, where the card is playable. That or you cobble together some of both and hope the card is good enough - it did very much seem to be good enough most of the time. That in turn is concerning for a card you can't reasonably call good without support. This is not a standalone good card and thus clearly a problem when it is performing so well in limited.
Brimstone
Design 4
Balance 7
Bargain is a mechanic that came out after I stopped with real magic. I wanted to toy about with it and needed more instant speed cheap burn. This seemed like a good way to do it, and clearly it was because Wizards had done basically the same thing already. This card is fine, it does its job. It is certainly on the powerful side as the sac has utility despite mostly being a cost. Shock is a fine card and Bolt is a great one, an option on either with a bit of potential trickery and spice and we have quite the card. It is however not super original. It is just a burn spell and it is one that many people have essentially played with already. I will likely cut this before it is the worst designed burn spell remaining because it is not something I am at all proud of making. Still, you need a critical mass or clean simple effects in the game and this ticks that box like a dream. Considering how clean this manages to be, it is a whole lot more card than Lighting Bolt. Both more interesting while also more reasonable in power level.
Buzzard
Design 3
Balance 6
This is basically a vehicle but it is in mount form. The reason I have ranked it so low on the design side of things is cohesion. This is a confusing card as it fails to conform with other mounts and how they operate, while also not quite fitting the vehicle mould. This is just not an intuitive card. It isn't exciting or interesting either. Not being able to saddle can often render this a dead card, and when it is working fine it is just a boring efficient evasive beater. I could put effort into fixing it but it doesn't seem like the best investment of time, likely I'll just cull this and move on to greener pastures.
Caerbannog Badger
Design 6
Balance 7
A fusion of Inti and Ledger Shredder - both cards I enjoy playing with. They do a good job of being cheap relevant creatures that offer card quality and continued late game relevance without feeling too oppressive early. The Badger does all those things and manages to do so without being quite so pushed in power, and while being somewhat cleaner. This is simply an example where I have seen something I like in real magic and tried my best to clean it up and distil it. I don't think the Badger is very original but it does play rather nicely thankyou very much. Powerful but in the right kinds of way. The name is a Monty Python reference combined with a personal joke between my wife and I where I made the claim that a badger was likely the most dangerous wild animal in the UK and my wife ruthlessly mocked me ever after....
Citadel of Traitors
Design 5
Balance 7
This is just me experimenting with lands and trying to understand the way in which they scale. This is knowingly pushed and I had no expectation of it being reasonable nor that it would last in the cube. I had just been surprised at how burst mana and double mana sources had performed thus far in my homemade cube meta - and that is a lot less impressively than in basically all other forms of real magic. I presume the reasons being less broken things to do with burst mana and greater risk of exposure for trying to take big swingy turns. So far this land has seems totally fine. It has helped with some turn three 5 drops from a mono red deck but that didn't break the game. Mostly it just feels like a spicy mountain. It is more likely to get cut for not being impactful enough than it is for being too powerful! Despite not making any waves thus far I shall be keeping a watchful eye on this one. It is exactly the sort of dangerous card that is just suddenly oppressive. It is pretty fun to play with, and it feels really naughty when you do, even if it isn't. This does all work in it's favour.
Crowd Source
Design 7
Balance 8
Serum Visions but surveil instead of scry. Not exactly original but super clean and on point. I made too many blue card quality effects and they were generally on the more convoluted side of things. While this is certainly not he most powerful, the self mill aspect gives it a synergy boost others lack, and the cleanliness of the card makes it more approachable and appealing. Much as I have no real pride in this card it will be very hard to cut it as it performs so well. It is that sweet spot where Mental Note and Serum Visions meet. Have two cards for the price of one. Just what a cube curator wants.
Dam
Design 4
Balance 4?
The Mana Battery or storage land have ever been a part of magic. There is nostalgia merely in the concept. Sadly they have not done too much to impact the game beyond some fringe things. I suspect it is one of those things that is fundamentally flawed and is either unplayable or broken without ever passing a sweet spot of good designs. Here was my first attempt at a storage land card. I like the flavour, I do not like the performance. This does nothing to entice people in. When I break it down it looks like it is better than most two mana mana rocks and yet I cannot ever seem to find the place for it. Perhaps it is just too fiddly and that puts people off. We all like our mana sources to be clean and easy. Tap, bam, done. Messing about with counters isn't fun when your bursting to blurt that spell out. I have to call this a design fail but sadly I can't proffer any fixes or solutions.
Dark Halls
Design 3
Balance 2
Turns out manlands are one of the harder things to get right within a format. They do not scale quite as you might expect and subtle changes, even to weighting and not power level, can totally alter the card. I had been struggling to get manlands I was happy with in the meta and had a crack at some meatier ones. I failed pretty hard with my first go. I somewhat knew I would and so only even put out 2/5th of the cycle to test! This is one of those cards from the partial cycle. Simply put this is way too much card at too little cost. This is a huge and resilient threat basically bolted on to a swamp for effectively one mana and no cards. I wanted manlands to offer a good counterplay to planeswalkers more than anything else, but some wrath protection and late game mana sinking is all bonus good stuff. This land moved way beyond those roles and just landed itself squarely in the overpowered threat camp, I have finished the cycle of these now and reworked their activation costs, hopefully bringing them back down to where I want them.
Delirious Girl
Design 6
Balance 4
Although Dragon's Rage Channeler is pretty broken I do enjoy the way it plays. This was a bit of a tribute to the card. In some ways I toned things down but in others I managed to boost it... This obviously has a better floor with the starting 2/1 statline able to beat relevantly regardless of the bin situation. There is also the hellbent mode where this is just drawing you a card on attack. All the things combined result in this being one of the most powerful one drops in the format. It does a lot on a wide range of fronts. Luckily for this card it looks and plays real good and so despite my lowish ratings I cannot see this getting cut.
Doctor Moin
Design 9
Balance 8
There is little more fun and powerful feeling in magic than going off with an Urza or a Tolarian Academy. Neither are very fair magic cards but at least Uzra has a wiff of fair to him thanks to cost and ability to interact with him. This is basically Urza but more so in regards safe design. This is an Urza you can attack with dorks. It is one that comes with a rather smaller dork bolted on and that lacks the built in mana sink card draw tool! This card is great, it is loads of fun without overstepping the mark. It is a card that makes you want to build around it, rewards you with scaling and cool interactions for doing so, and does all this without being too offensive from the other side of the table. This is a product of me asking what the most fun cards and things in real magic are and trying to replicate that in a healthy way. Much as this is firing perfectly in the present meta it is a card with scaling and synergy and thus will rise and fall in power with the tides of the meta. In other words, this is exactly the sort of card that could become unplayable if the support dries up, or a bomb if I print a couple of whoopsie cards. Until then it is going to sit happily as one of my best designs and best additions to the format.
Doom
Design 8
Balance 7
Yet another example of my wanting to explore and understand a new mechanic. Comically this landed pretty well and managed to do so despite a typo resulting in ambiguity over the card. It seems to have both impending 3 and 4 thanks to a reminder text error. What really threw me is that the card played fine at both values. People said it was bad at 4 and yet it got plenty of play. I assumed with it being fine at 4 that running it at 3 would make it oppressive but no, it was still somewhat the same. Much as it was initially hard to believe I think ultimately it just speaks a lot to the mechanic and the progression of games. This is a two toughness dork that is very rarely attacking before turn six and that broadcasts itself a long way in advance. Doom provides every opportunity for counter play and that is ultimately what makes it interesting. Edict needs to be boosted to be playable and this is a bad Edict on the front end. If left unchecked however it slowly turns to a bit of value and then ultimately into a game ending problem. Broadly this one seems to have been a good success but I don't know if that is because it is a good mechanic or just good fortune. I also still don't know when to set the impending counter at! Four is probably sensible but then it is wise to push the more fun and interesting cards. Lots of conflicting things going on here!
Dragon Peaks
Design 3
Balance 1
This is the other mono coloured manland I printed and boy was it a booboo. It is perfect for red in design and then also under cost. Probably at six to activate this would still be a bit problematic in my format. Against a red deck it kindof just feels like a Lava Axe sat there in play. That is the floor as well. It can just kill you pretty much all by itself if you fail to have the appropriate answers. I have attempted to rework this but still fear it is the problem child of the cycle and anticipate more reworks down the line. Activations now require the sacrificing of lands and I am still not convinced it will do enough much like with Fireblast! The mere existence of this card makes it seem like opponents start on 15 life. One does not need lands in play to win the game!
Edvard
Design 7
Balance 8
Another card to be born out of the question "what real cards are fun". This is simply Torbran but toned down and made a little broader in appeal. Toned down in that the damage boost and stats are less. Broadened in that the cost is less red intense and the effect is not limited to red things. All told this is a pretty powerful card but it is doing so in the right kinds of way. It is interactable. It is scalable. And most importantly it is still fun and alluring. I see this and I want to play red. I scan through my ping effects etc. While not the most original card it is clean and very much fulfilling the brief. I also love that ultimately we are looking at a Hill Giant here when there is nothing else going on.
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