The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 17 – Back In Business!

 

Sorry about the long delay between log 16 and log 17 everybody, but someone needed to playtest the cards they designed.  I’m not going to say who it is.  I’m just going to turn to them and wink.  Oh, and now I sprained my neck trying to wink at myself.  Good job, me.  Ow!

A quick explanation for the new and/or clueless.  I’m building a cube with Gatherer.  One half of the cards are determined by hitting the ‘random card’ button at said website.  I, myself, am designing the other half of the cards so that the first half make sense.  It’s like making a meal our of the random dented cans and half-stale food on the discounted shelf at your grocery store.  It may not be the best meal you ever eat, but that pinto bean birthday cake sure is memorable.

In my last log, we completed the first half—all 180 of them. This cube is shaping up!  All we need now is a mix of interesting filler of medium power level to smooth out the gaps.  So let’s clean the cobwebs off the old website!  Hitting the random button we get…

 

 

…

You must be kidding.

Sword of Fire and Ice is one of the most powerful pieces of equipment in the game.  If I was to make a personal list, Umezawa’s Jitte and Skullclamp would be locked in a death grip for top spot, while this Sword and Batterskull duked it out over third.  Sword of Fire and Ice is a super-powered combo piece.  It combos with ‘creatures’ and yields ‘game wins’.

I’ve been designing cards around Gatherer’s random selections for a while now, so the occasional meteoric impact on the cube doesn’t shake me.  My problem with ‘best sword’ is that it’s a no-think auto-draft.  Every color and archetype can use it.  You’re a heck of a maverick if the Sword of Fire and Ice isn’t your first pick (a maverick for game losses, that is.)  Making choices in a draft is fun.  Always picking the same cards is not fun.

My gut reaction was to close Google Chrome, walk away, and pretend this never happened.  It’s not the first time I had that resonse. When I don’t like what fate gives me, my mind plays tricks.  “You were goofing around.  You only pressed the button to see what would happen.  But you never planned to add the card to the cube, right?  This pick isn’t official.  Hit the button again, or go do something else.”

The tricky problem with these mind games is they’re sometimes right.  Sometimes, when bored, I might wander my way to Gatherer, hit the button, and see what happens.  I’m not planning on adding any cards.  If I was forced to buy something every time I browsed the Internet, I’d own a lot of apartment units by now…

When you click the ‘random card’ button enough times, it can be difficult on reflection to discern whether or not you were serious at any particular time.  That’s why I created a Magic Mantra.  It locks me in.  Now, before pressing the button, I say to myself out loud “Abracadabra!”  That way I know I’m serious. I’m performing an action which can’t be mistaken for a whim.  A Rubicon-shaped die is cast.

I didn’t say my mantra for Fire and Ice.  And when I realized I didn’t, I argued with myself over whethr the card should be stricken for the sake of consistency.  But it’s been two months since I added any new cards.  I forgot I was doing the mantra.  And I know better.  I pushed the button because I was ready to move forward.  I need to respect that, or the entire set would lack integrity.

At least the response was fast.

 

 

In previous entries, when an overpowered card appeared, I’d grumble, think about designing an answer card, then decide against it.  “What are the chances the answer will appear next to the problem?” I griped.  So my alternative tactic was to ignore the card.  Try not to design anything that made the card better.  The best response, I thought, was to instead strengthen the other cards in the set.

I was wrong.  One of my friends saw through this in the first playtest.  If there will be a wide variance of power level in this cube (a fact I could not avoid) then there should also be a large selection of great removal spells.  That way the overpowered cards can be kept in check, and the underpowered cards can still shine.

My friend is right.  I don’t think the removal needs to be spectacular.  But there needs to be a lot more than what’s in the cube right now.  My original mistake was that I couldn’t imagine one removal spell negating the damage an overpowered card brought to the cube.  But if I designed a removal spell for every above average card in the pool, there would be enough answers to problems when they appeared.

I’m trying to design new cards, but I’m also trying to design simple cards.  The cube already features the Replicate mechanic.  But Shattering Spree already exists, so I reached for Smash instead.  It’s not as efficient as Shattering Spree, but few spells are.  Maybe the Replicate cost on Wreck the Halls is too much.  I’m not sure.  But Red isn’t supposed to be a card drawing color, so paying a lot to squeeze a few extra cards keeps us closer to its color philosophies.

Okay.  Next card.

 

 

Oh neat!  Our rules state that whenever a basic land is randomly chosen that the next card is color-shifted to that color.  Who knows what bizarre oddity may spring forth?  Let’s see what kooky color pie bend we get today!

 

 

Oh.  Well, that is stunningly mundane.  I’m fine with putting Glory Seeker in the set.  But this is like winning an office lottery, only to discover exactly one other person paid into the lottery, so you made five bucks.

But this isn’t so bad.  We need more vanilla creatures.  Up until now, the cube features zero.  And we can even tie this into Spirit tribal, since the only white bear in the game is Ursine Fylgja which so happens to be a Spirit.

 

 

Like I said, this cube is too rich and could use the vanilla icing.  So I’m following vanilla with vanilla.  Looking at the file, I decided Black was rife for something simple.  So I looked through all the black vanilla creatures in the game, found a unique power and toughness to casting cost combination, and used that.

 

 

For those who are wondering, there’s a cute trick to finding only vanilla creatures in Gatherer.  It looks like this:

 

 

Gatherer searches for word parts instead of whole words.  So if you search for ‘morph’ you’ll also pick up all creatures with ‘megamorph’.  This vowel-less search also picks up tokens, but it’s easy to ignore them.  If you wanted to instead look at creatures with flying, but which are otherwise vanilla, replace ‘not i’ with ‘and yi’.

If you did do a search like this, you might notice something interesting.  There’s a large swath of unexplored multi-colored vanilla space.  In Black, for example, there’s five color Fusion Elemental, the cheaty-mcgee five color Transguild Courier, and one odd hybrid standout in Golgari Longlegs.  Outside of that, there are three multi-colored vanillas that hail way back from Legends.  And even those cards come with Legendary rules baggage, so one could argue they aren’t true vanilla.  Weird.  I wonder if multicolor vanilla is constantly cut for space, or if Wizards collectively forgets this rich vein to tap year after year.

Hitting the random button!

 

 

Huh.  Well that is sufficiently random.  This works with some of the aura theme, but not all.  That’s fine considering this is a bonus aura atop the pile.

Genju of the Cedars is tricky to get rid of.  It isn’t so tricky that I feel I must print enchantment removal to stop it.  I’m printing the enchantment removal anyway.  Like I said before, the set needs more removal than what’s already here.  There’s a decent chance I would have designed this upcoming card no matter what Gatherer presented me.

 

 

I played around for a while with different replicate costs and bonus abilities.  But in the end, I thought it best to mirror Wreck the Halls.  Sometimes being clever doesn’t make the set better.

Moving on.  Hey, Gatherer, whatchu got for me?

 

 

Huh.  Myr Moonvessel is an interesting combo piece.  But otherwise, it’s a 1/1 for with a weak death trigger which usually happens in combat.  Not so fun fact:  All mana drains at the end of combat.

I’ve seen worse creatures, though.  Aven Envoy, for example.  I’m still locked in a futile fight to make that stupid bird relevant in this cube.

It’s likely that Moonvessel will hover around pick fifteen for most players.  But if it was going to end up in a cube, at least it walked into one with a sacrifice theme.  The theme in set is Red/Green, but I think we can make an exception and design an artifact which gives the Moonvessel a touch more relevancy.

 

 

I know it’s weird.  Blade of Burden doesn’t do anything to the first creature it equips.  I toyed with a version that gave a bonus keyword, and a version that started the party with a charge counter already on it.  But the cleaner version reads better.  I also tried a version of the equipment that grants +2/+2, or +4/+4 if you sacrificed a creature when it entered the battlefield.  On/Off.  But that version doesn’t interact well with spells that duplicate counters, and that’s another theme in the cube, so I tossed that one too.

So this card will only be drafted for decks which plan to burn through their creatures.  Not every card needs to be useful in every deck anyway.

New card!

 

 

It always feels odd when the random card aligns with multiple themes previously established.  In this case, Reinforced Bulwark is both a creature with a tap activation (which works with Twiddle.dec) as well as supplying another wall for Tunnel to destroy.  Speaking of Tunnel, back when it first appeared in Log 14, I said I needed to increase the number of Walls in set to make it relevant.  And if I’m increasing the number of walls, I should slip in a minor ‘walls matter’ theme.  I guess it’s time to make a Wall Lord.

 

 

Let’s keep moving.  Would the next random card please step forward?

 

 

Oh good.  In playtesting the cube, Tom also lamented the inability to put together a blue/black creature rush strategy.  Personally, I think there should be aggressive strategies and defensive strategies in every color combination, so I’m happy to see a cheap beater that can protect future plays.

I also want aggressive blue creatures because it fits an odd theme Blue has in this cube: declaring moral victory by fielding exactly one creature more than its opponents.  Unfortunately, that theme isn’t easy to recognize even when players are looking at the cards in theme.  “Blue likes to field more creatures than the opponent, but it doesn’t want to overdo it because it’s not a creature color.  It just wants to prove it could have more creatures if it wanted to as a means of showing off, then quickly loses interest when its goal is achieved” is not an easy mechanic to cipher.  Cards like Unified Will only scrapes the surface of the story.  Cards I already designed like Lunar Meddling…

 

…tell a story about how Blue wants more creatures, and wants to get rid of excessive creatures.  But Lunar Meddling also tells a story about how you can wipe your team to tap your opponent down, which muddles the message.

I need more cards that show Blue’s transition more directly.  Hopefully, more cards like this will help…

 

 

To that end, let’s look at another card I previously designed, Lethomancer…

 

 

The idea here was that Lethemancer liked it when you had more creatures than your opponent, and rewarded you by giving you the option to return excess creatures to your hand.  But what players mostly saw was a creature that gave you a bonus for having more creatures, and an awkward escape clause when you did not.

Let’s get rid of the clunky self-cycle clause, and double down on the Delusionist’s wording.  Maybe players won’t get what I’m going for, but at least they’ll recognize there’s a theme going on.

 

 

Alright!  Twelve cards down, 168 cards left to go.  But we previously binned 180 cards.  Mixing it into the second half of the cube is only a matter of time.

Feel free to move on to part 18 here.  Or perhaps you’d like to check out what you missed in the According to Gatherer article series?

 

~

Oh.  Um.  Are you still here?  Well that’s awkward.  I got a number of changes I made to cards I designed in the Cube after playtesting, and I feel I need to list them somewhere for the sake of posterity.  So I’m dumping them here.  There’s no jokes or fun anecdotes from this point forward though, so if you want to peace out… well, I’d suggest it.  Either way, see you in log 18!

Lunar Meddling and Hall of Mirrors: Changed from “…as long as you control less creatures than target player, create a 0/1 blue Illusion creature token.” to “…an equal amount or less creatures…”

Bedizen Vanities:  Increased cost by .  Now creates two copies instead of just one.

Pull of the Weave: Removed the part that changes the creature to a green druid.  It just added more words.

Vermin Garrison:  The insect hives were too good.  Well… not really.  They were just clearly superior to Blue’s creature token generation, and I feel that should be the focus.  changed “Target creature gets +1/+1” to “Target Insect” which was my intent to begin with.  Changed “: Create an Insect” to “When enters the battlefield, create two insects.”  Which makes this ‘creature’ a 3.5/3.5 for .  Below average, but suddenly much better when other insects are out an about.

Hiveheart:  Pulled “Insects you control can’t be blocked, unless the defending player controls a flying creature.” This wasn’t a power level thing.  There were just too many abilities on that one card.  The card seemed plenty good enough without the bonus ability anyway.

Cultivator Nursery: Increased the activation to create an insect from to .  Still seems pretty good.

Violent Transformation: Changed “Enchant creature” by adding “you control” on the end.  Never intended this to be a two-for-one by enchanting the opponent’s creature.

Ghost of the Unknown Commander:  Removed mana in the activation cost, and sent the creatures to your hand instead of the battlefield.  That means I don’t need “only activate on your turn” so that got pulled too.

Charnel Jaunt: Player went to play this as an instant, then found they couldn’t.  The high cost makes this feel like an instant, so I’m making it an instant.

Battle Alacrity: Removed ‘combat only’ and attacking creature requirement.  But upping the cost to make room for all the one-cost red cards in the set, I accidentally made a unique and simple Magic card that hasn’t seen print.  change ‘cast’ to ‘play’.  Changed instant to sorcery so as not to have to increase the cost by .

That Which Does Not Kill: Reduce by .

Essence of Air: Card makes flying creatures.  Artwork looks like art can fly.  Hence, I added flying.  changed power and toughness from 3/3 to 1/5 so the creature didn’t kill opponents before its ability turned on.