The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 22 – Doing Things the Hard Way

There’s a game by the name of VVVVVV.  If you haven’t played it by now, you should.  You can find it here.  Go ahead.  I can wait.

 

 

The graphics aren’t much.  The plot is bare bones, too.  You’re on an oddly box-y spaceship whose warp drive wibble wobbled you into the middle of an asteroid.  You should fix that.

Despite the lackluster veneer, what makes VVVVVV stand out is its gameplay.  It’s a standard platformer.  Except instead of jumping, players reverse gravity.  The player’s avatar bounces about the stage, performing strange trick shots with its own body.  It’s a quick enough game.  I logged 6 hours, with only one trinket left to go.  And close to three of those hours were spent Doing Things the Hard Way.

Doing Things the Hard Way is this super crazy unnecessary challenge that I somehow made a beeline for within the first ten minutes of playing this open world game.  There’s a shiny trinket.  That’s the goal.  It sits to the right of you.  But you can’t reach it because a stupid little box prevents your forward motion.

 

 

To get it, you need to reverse gravity and go up.

 

 

and up…

 

Well, a little further up than this.  And banking around a tight corner while we’re at it.  Until we get to…

 

 

Are you serious?  Well, after about fifty or so respawns you eventually get to…

 

 

A surprisingly challenging straight corridor, since you need to slam on the brakes after the last few zags or careen into one of the two walls.

 

 

Wait, this keeps going?

 

 

wat

 

 

All the way to the top where we reverse directions.  That bar up there was a platform that melted when V touched it.  No time to rest; only enough time to run across the bar while reversing the gravity.

 

 

And…

 

 

…back…

 

…down…

 

 

…we…

 

 

…go.

 

 

With this stupid wide open room being the most frustrating.  At this point you’re coming in hot, with an itchy cursor finger and the knowledge that if you’re too far left, you missed your mark and need to do it again.  I slammed into the right wall at least ten times before getting a run where I dropped down on the trinket.

After hundreds of attempts, my reward was a stupid trinket and a pithy congratulations message.  I played around a little more, shut off the game, then came back the next day only to find out I did not save properly.  So I went back and did it all again.

Why?  The hours of failure were exhausting.  Certainly, that feeling of exultation when one completes an absurd and unfair challenge is great.  But does it last hours?  The payoff cannot possibly be worth the pain!

Yet there’s no way I wouldn’t do it.  I knew about Doing Things the Hard Way before picking up VVVVVV.  I knew it needed to be conquered.  Because (in my mind) if I wasn’t going to do things the hard way, then I might as well not bother doing it at all.

Which brings us to today’s selection of cards.  Hi, I’m John-Michael and I’m constructing a very strange Magic Cube.  I go to Gatherer, hit the random button, and toss whatever Gatherer gives me onto the pile.  Then I design a custom Magic card to complement the random card, reinforce the themes of the cube, and try to make sense out of the senseless.

It is a totally unnecessary endeavor.  I could instead copy someone else’s list, buy the cards, and call it a day.  Or I could go through my own collection for choice material, toss it in a box, and slowly shape that box over time with shiny new toys.  But instead, I drop the cube into fifth gear, jam a piece of wood onto the accelerator, crawl on top of the hood, and spit methanol into the air intake hood scoop.  I like to build decks and design the hard way.  Because if I didn’t, then I might as well not do it at all.  And if you’ve been reading this article series for this long, I presume you do too.  Or you like to see a guy spread eagle on his face a lot.  I do that as well.

You wouldn’t be able to tell that by the milk toast cards Gatherer is serving up this week, though.  Way to point out how I’m overselling it, G.

 

 

Our first random card for this log is Vastwood Gorger.  It isn’t exciting, but it gets work done. So far, whenever Gatherer sent me a vanilla creature, I designed another one so it wouldn’t feel lonely.  A lot of people mock vanillas.  The vanillas of Magic can use our emotional support.

The only color left in the cube without a vanilla creature is Red.  And while there are a number of red spells that cost one or two mana, there aren’t a sufficient number of red creatures that cost one or two.  I’m unsure one can make an appropriate one-cost red vanilla creature.  Mons’s Goblin Raiders was a joke, even for Alpha.  Maybe Wizards will make a 2/1 vanilla for some day.  But that Holy Grail is yet to be realized.  And 1/2 for  feels… wrong.  It’s both weak, and an odd fit for Red’s aggressive nature.  0/4 isn’t weak (I got a lot of value out of Kraken Hatchling in the past.)  But it’s even more defensive.

I thought about upping the stats and making this a Wall with defender.  We need more walls, and traditional Red used to feature a lot of defensive walls to link up with our out-of-pie flavor.  But defender isn’t the purest of vanilla.  I’d do it if there was a pure red vanilla in the cube already.  But there isn’t, so no go defendo.

With two-cost there are more options.  The cube could give greater rewards to a commitment to mono-red, so I settled on .  Now that Wizards is printing red common 2/2 creatures for without a drawback (five total printings, and counting), I figured this was fine:

 

 

I tend to take some inspiration from the random submissions from Gatherer.  In this case, it’s the flavor text.  Two creatures, with two similar detached lab reports.  Blue is supposed to be the color of nurture, but it looks like Ilsor’s prejudice against the barbarians of Pardia is costing him a lot of wasted time in the laboratory.

♫Abra-abra-kadabra.  I want a random card from Gatherer♫:

 

 

Oh.  Wind-Scarred Crag.  What do I do with you?

The problem: Stone Quarry was added to the cube in log four.  Which prompted me to add the other four enemy lands from the cycle (with different names and art based on Settlers of Cataan regions, for funsies.)  This isn’t a duplicate of Stone Quarry.  It’s strictly better.

Somebody once asked me what I would do if Gatherer gave me the same card twice.  I answered “Oh, I suppose I’ll put the same card in the cube twice.  It’s unlikely to happen.  But even if it does, the cube is a large enough card pool.  Two of the same card would only solidify a theme.”

That sounds reasonable enough.  But it doesn’t work for every card.  Two Giant Octopuses is fine, if not funny.  Stone Quarry, plus the rest of its four card cycle, and Wind-Scarred Crag by its lonesome is grating.  And we’d be using a lot of slots here to reinforce enemy colors with a cycle and a cycle of strictly better lands.

Funny thing.  This exact thing already happened.  Gatherer gave me Seaside Citadel all the way back in log seven…

 

 

I didn’t know what to do then.  So I balked.  I added the card to the file, designed a green/white/blue creature the cube needed anyway, and hoped Gatherer would somehow solve its own problem down the line.  That answer never came.  Or if you like, the answer was a big old slap in the face with Wind-Scarred Crag.  Now with 256 cards out of 360 locked in, the situation is even more precarious.

So what do I do?  I’m continuing to ignore the problem.  It’s unlikely to solve itself by this point, so I’m kicking the can down the road to future John-Michael.  It’s that schlep’s problem now.

In the meantime, I’m solving a problem that doesn’t need solving.  It bugs me that a cycle of enemy life-gain lands might end up in a set where “gain 3 or more life” is a trigger.  That’s five lands that trigger nothing.  So I designed a land to help smooth my wrinkled aesthetics.  And because I’m surprised this card doesn’t exist yet.

 

 

Nothing crazy here.  Sheltered Oasis is to life gain what Zhalfirin Void is to scry.  Also, compare to Kabira Crossroads.

Okay Gatherer!  Hit me with another!

 

 

Feral Shadow.  Huh.  It’s weak, but Kelinore Bat/Gloomhunter could still see print.  Anything for evasion sometimes.  And the fact that it’s a Spirit in a cube with a Spirit tribal theme makes…

 

 

 

Hold up.  It’s not a Spirit.  It’s a Nightstalker.  Meshuggeneh.

Feral Shadow hails from a time when tribal was treated as delicate seasoning and Wizards passed out creature types like candy.  Did we design a generic green creature?  Any artwork will do.  What’s kicking around?  This picture of a cat that explodes in brambles, will that do?  Or maybe the cat is being eaten by a bramble monster (Mark Rosewater still doesn’t know which it is.)  Whatever.  What is this thing?  I’m calling it ‘Brushwagg’.  What’s it’s creature type?  I don’t know.  It’s a Brushwagg.  Just make it a Brushwagg.

 

Feral Shadow was (thematically) intended to be sacrificed in combination with Breathstealer and Urborg Panther to summon Spirit of the Night.  So to tie the theme together, all three were given joint custody of ‘Nightstalker’: A creature type with fuzzy flavor that didn’t see print past 1998 (Though, Portal: Second Age sure made a run for it.)  During the grand creature type update, Spirit of the Night errata-ed into a ‘Demon Spirit’.  Urborg Panther became a ‘Nightstalker Cat’.  But Breathstealer didn’t become a ‘Nightstalker Shade’, and Feral Shadow didn’t become a ‘Nightstalker Spirit’.  I can’t do anything about the Breathstealer, but I performed de facto cosmetic errata on another card in this cube.  Why stop now?

 

 

Now that Feral Shadow is a tribal creature with only keywords, I might as well make another one to match. So far, the cube features this Spirit with flying, a Human with Masquerade, and a Zombie with Menace, First Strike, and Lifelink (he has a busy social calendar.)  But the cube also includes a Wall tribal theme, and no 2-cost artifact creatures.  So I made this:

 

 

Should I have made this hallway a 1/4?  Wall of Mist leans toward ‘no’.  I don’t mind power creeping, but doing it to a creature available in all five colors is probably a step too far. I can always boost this creature later if it players keep cutting it (or if control needs a shot in the arm.)  That said, I vividly remember the frustration of marching my Dreamscape Artist into an Ashcoat Bear back in Timespiral block draft, so I know the card has its uses.

I wanted to find artwork of a living portcullis falling from an open sky, and smashing into the ground.  But you work with the artwork you can find, not the artwork you can imagine.  The flavor text is based on one of my favorite tricks when designing traps in Dungeons and Dragons.  Never jump over an obvious pit trap in a corridor.  Unless you want to find the not so obvious pit trap in as fast a manner as possible.

Gatherer! Gimme a beat!

 

 

Rootwater Hunter.  That’s interesting.  Blue doesn’t do this anymore.  Heck, common doesn’t do this anymore.  But Gatherer breaks the color pie whenever it wants.  Thems the rules.

The more I think about it, the happier I am Gatherer gave me a Tim.  There’s a number of ‘untap target creature’ cards floating around the set—mostly in blue.  But Blue being Blue, most of the creatures which tap to activate focus on utility, incrementally improving your resources.  See also: Sindbad.  They don’t impact the board.  Rootwater Merfolk, however, comes from an age when Blue slapped small creatures around, and a few big creatures, given enough Twiddles.  I try to stick to modern design parameters, so I would never let myself design a card like this.  But who am I to complain if Gatherer does the dirty work for me?

Though, now that I think of it, the cube does include utility creatures that impact the board.  That is, if you count creating 0/1 Illusion creature tokens as ‘impactful’.

 

 

The other three cards I designed which summon Illusions use them to Twiddle, Rescue or Millstone.  The Mythxonerator uses Illusions to punch (with extra punching for every time you untap Mythxonerator.)

It occurs to me that this might be fighting against the ‘proving your superiority by having more creatures’ theme I fostered in Blue.  The other cards can take advantage of a deck full of creatures.  It just means that their second abilities are easier to ‘turn on’.  But turning on the Mythxonerator with no Illusions on the battlefield is a meaningless endeavor.  Instead, you might prefer no other creature on the battlefield so you can make as large a contingent of flying illusions as possible.  I don’t know.  But I like the card, so I’m willing to accept the potential departure from archetype.

You know what day it is Gatherer?  It’s Thursday.  That’s right.  It’s business time.

 

 

Mind Ravel.  Look, I think it’s weird that we need to wait a turn to draw that card.  You probably think it’s weird too.  There’s no reason this couldn’t be Unhinge.  But we take what Gatherer gives us.  And no, I will not be tempted into making a Hellbent card just because a single slow-trip popped up in the last third of the cube.

 

 

I did like the idea of finding a new cantrip, though.  My notes say we need a simple bounce spell, so that’s what I worked on first. But I couldn’t come up with anything that was simple, cheap-ish, a cantrip, and somehow belonged in the cube.  So I looked back through my notes, and noticed that while the cube included a lot of cards that put counters on things, I mostly neglected this theme.  I need more cards that take advantage of those counters.

On a side note, I don’t think I’m the only one who’s neglecting this particular design space.  There are only three instants/sorceries I can think of that move counters:  Bioshift, Fate Transfer, and Dismantle.  A few permanents are in this space too.  And there are more cards that add or remove counters.  I’m not saying this stuff isn’t out there.  Just that it’s a surprisingly small number considering how many cards use counters.  Even sets not known for its counter theme can stockpile a surprising number of cards with counters.  (Dominaria, for example, includes 33.)

Once upon a time, every standalone set included some Sleight of Mind variant.  Wizards stopped making those when hosing entire decks via a single color word stopped being en vogue.  It’s a shame that gap wasn’t filled in with Sleight o’ Counters.  Ah well.

Gimme one card, gimme one card Gatherer!

Krosan Tusker is great.  No complaints here.  I’m already monkeying with cycling, so the Tusker fits right in.  Oh, and hey!  New reminder text tells players to search before they draw.  Good call Wizards!

I guess that means I make another card with cycling, eh?  Looking at my notes, it seems I still need a red combat trick.  I guess the combat trick doesn’t need to be tied to an Instant…

 

I always find it odd when I stumble upon obvious design that Wizards hasn’t gotten around to yet.  As of 2019, there aren’t any cards with “When you cycle [cardname], or when it enters the battlefield”.  I’m sure Wizards thought about doing this at some point, considering there is a cycle of cards from Alara Reborn that trigger when you cycle, or when they leave the battlefield.  I suppose that even though cycling doesn’t come up all that often, there’s only so many tricks one can riff off the mechanic before it becomes another ability entirely.  Might as well hold a few tricks in reserve.

 

And finally we add one more token creature to the cube.  I admit it.  I don’t get worked up over 1/1 Goblins.  This may be the most generic token in the history of Magic.  Big props to John Silva’s artwork though, and his excellent worm’s-eye perspective which gives this petite foe a deadly air.  Silva is so in tune with Magic: the Gathering’s style guide that I went to Gatherer and searched for his name just to make certain I wasn’t overlooking something.

264 cards down.  Only 86 cards left to go.  Head to log number 23 here.  Or perhaps you’d prefer to check out the According to Gatherer Archives?