Solid Gold Dancers – The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 26

This may sound strange to anyone born after 1985, but there was once a TV show on CBS that spent a full forty-four minutes, once a week, on interpretive jazz dance routines set to the latest pop hits.  And it was so popular, it lasted eight seasons.  Even the existence of real music videos in the form of MTV couldn’t slow it down.  It only made it stronger.

That show was called Solid Gold.  And when bands played on Solid Gold, nobody cared.  Who wants to watch checked-out stoners sway with instruments to their pre-recorded songs when you could watch the Solid Gold Dancers gyrate on a stage of gilded cylindrical columns? 

And were they talented?  No really, someone tell me if they were talented or not.  They usually stuck to basic forms, glissades, and arabesques, with the occasional impressive, yet out of rhythm, quadruple spin. But each dancer needed to learn four to five dances per week. And this was all tied to a fickle top ten countdown, which I’m guessing meant they sometimes rushed routines for songs that shot up the chart, and ditched routines for songs they never danced again.

I guess it would be easier if I showed you what I was talking about.  Ladies and gentlemen!  The Solid Gold Dancers!

Admittedly, they get better.  Here’s a full episode from October 22nd, 1983 if you care enough to watch it.  By that point they were making full-on music videos with Lionel Richie in a pastel wonderland.  Just… you know.  Be prepared for Air Supply and afros.  I’d warn that 1983 wasn’t on the good side of the 80s.  But let’s not kid ourselves.  The height of 80s culture was the television commercial.  I’m starting to think the good side of the 80s started in 2011.

I’m talking about Solid Gold because that’s today’s designs.  Red, slacker that it is, is trailing in cube card quantity.  But with only 59 cards left, I need to solve the multi-color problem first. Assessing the fine weight of gold requires a precision scale.

And yes, I’m aware the scale will topple with an unlucky press of the Gatherer button, scattering my work.  The chances of getting one multi-color out of thirty random Magic cards is pretty good.  Oh, that’s right.  I still need to explain the premise for those late to the party.  Cue the 80s sit-com intro music.

♫ Hi!  I’m making a Magic Drafting Cube! But instead of selecting cards, I foolishly gave the wacky ‘random card’ button on Gatherer control of half the picks.  The other half the picks are designed by me, Zach Killscreen, in an attempt to stuff two suitcases worth of Magical dirty laundry into a small travel valise.  This is The Cube, According to Gatherer! ♫

Okay, kill the intro music and get back to work.  The following is a list of color combinations currently in the cube, not counting the completed cycles.  Who needs unnecessary complication?  I mean, unless you’re a Batman villain or a Time Lord.  Those jerks are paid commission per complication.

The bonus gold cards in the cube currently include…

What a headache those last two make  Without them, I could design four two color cards and call it a day.  With them… if I counted the colors independently with hybrid counting as half a color…

• White 4    
• Blue 1.5     
• Black 5       
• Red 4.5      
• Green 2 

This infers I could design three cards, a card, and head off to the arcade for a few rounds of pinball before going home.  That’s balanced, right?  Nope.  The colors would be balanced, but Blue/Green players would be at a distinct advantage.

I guess the best thing to do is go full ham into the weirdness and discover odd casting costs to fill gaps in a way that doesn’t recommend one combination over another.  Though a single spell doesn’t hurt.  Hey Gatherer!  What you got for me?

 

 

Geesh.  Gatherer sure likes big monsters.  At least Luminate Primordial is fair-ish one-on-one.  Still, I think it qualifies for our rule that ‘for every bomb question, we need a bomb answer.’  The cube could use more counterspells, and we could use a Blue/Green card.  Bippity boppity boo.

 

Something simple to start us off with.  I thought about making this card more elaborate.  At one point it cost , countered a spell unless your opponent paid , and put X lands from your hand on the battlefield.  But it’s silly to make an elaborate version when the simplest version is yet to be done.

Sometimes I’m staggered by all the simple ideas Wizards has yet to do.  In this case, it makes sense.  Traditional color pie theory states that hard counters require in the mana cost (a hard counter being a spell or ability that counters a spell. Full stop.  As opposed to a soft counter that maybe counters a spell, like Mana Leak, or counters a subset of cards, like Negate.)  The point was to not allow other colors easy access into the counterspell suite.  If you want universal countering power, you must devote yourself to Blue.

But in Gatecrash, Wizards printed Psychic Strike.  According to Rosewater, Lauer floated the principle that a mulitcolor hard counter could forgo as long as it “would still have two colored mana so it wouldn’t be easy to splash outside of a dedicated blue-black deck.”  Rosewater called it an experiment.  And the experiment seemed fine?  Maybe it didn’t?  I don’t remember anybody complaining about the Summer of Psychic Strike, despite the prevalence of Snapcaster Mage decks.  But besides the throw away card Fall of the Gavel (which technically came out the set before, but it seems there was no pressure on Rosewater to explain why Fall of the Gavel was breaking the color pie on account that the card sucked.)  Wizards wouldn’t print another hard two-color, no-double-blue counter until Ionize.  And then none so far after that.  [Insert shrug emoji.]

So maybe this is okay.  Or maybe it isn’t. Honestly, I think the reason we haven’t seen hard counters like this is because it isn’t necessary.  There’s plenty of design space for two-color hard counters inside blue, there’s only been two dedicated multicolor blocks in the past seven years, and there’s an even greater design space for soft counters in general.  Meanwhile, there’s only been five printed Blue/Green counterspells.  They got a lot of combinations left to print.  Give them time and they’ll Make Room.

Alright Gatherer.  Give me another one!

 

 

Mayor of Avabruck.  Well I can’t say I’m happy to see a transform card hit the deck this late in the game.  But another human tribal card is a welcome sight.  So I’m going to count this as a positive addition.  A positive addition that might require telling players new to the cube that there’s a transform card in the cube ahead of time, and exactly what it does, just in case it ends up in their draft pack and they don’t want to signal that they drafted it.  :p

But at least the Mayor doesn’t require help from me to make sense in the cube.  I’m prioritizing a different problem: there still isn’t enough mass card drawing in the cube for Plagiarize to make sense.  Might as well make another plagiarize trap.  Sounds Blue.  I need Black to make an appearance if I’m going to mix things up, but since Black is the most common on gold right now, I’m hitching it to hybrid half-points.  And white needs two cards… or maybe two hybrid and a full?

 

 

Imma word it up on ya: odd multi-color costs be buggin.  I know it don’t seem that way when looking at the finished product.  Mind Geld belongs in this color combination (okay, it’s not perfect. This card incentives killing small creatures.  That’s more black than white.  But it doesn’t explicitly tell you that you must cast the spell that way, so…)  But it was tough enough figuring out I could get “Exile target creature. Draw two cards.” out of this combination.  Simple in hindsight. But so isn’t the fact that the division symbol (÷) represents a fraction with an unknown quantity above and below it.  That’s also what the percentage sign (%) represents.  Epimetheus is a cruel god.

I didn’t want to stop at “Exile creature, draw two.”  I can’t go about thumb tacking two mechanics to each color combo corkboard, then waste the rest of my day on Facebook. I don’t work in middle management.

Thankfully, I had a Breakthrough breakthrough.  I suppose this could’ve drawn cards equal to the creature’s power… but that would be remarkably close to Twisted Justice, neh?  Better to aim for the little bosses.

Here we go Gatherer, here we go! 👏 👏

 

 

Gatherer lobs me a softball with Trusted Pegasus.  Instead of aiming for the bleachers, though, I’m knocking it to the ground to ensure my other cards run home. This time we’re hybridizing White and Red and pairing with Green.

 

This was a headscratcher.  There aren’t too many things Red and White do equally well that Green cannot.  To be sure, there are creature keywords that work in this space.  I took advantage of first strike.  But sticking to just keywords would be unrewarding.  So I stretched for “, Sacrifice another creature: Target tapped creature deals 2 damage to itself.”

Is that a ability?  I originally wrote two paragraphs here, defending my choice.  Then I discovered Nahiri, Storm of Stone and subsequently deleted both paragraphs.  I thought I found a clever new niche, but it turns out I was being trendy.  Ah well.  It’s a good hybrid ability.  I’m glad Wizards got there before me.  The only change I made was that the Naga forces the creature to damage itself.  Not for flavor reasons, mind you, but because sacrificing creatures activates the Naga’s instant kill mode.  This card isn’t baking a flavorful strawberry rhubarb color pie so much as sustaining itself on a practical pork pie mechanic.

The Naga only has first strike when attacking because deathtouch and first strike are brutal on the block.  It’s still great on the attack, but at least the game is moving forward.  Combining first strike and deathtouch is a big no-no for many designers.  It’s one of those combinations that radically increases the casting cost of cards in a way that’s invisible (see also the surprising savage combination that is deathtouch and trample.) The resulting monstrosity feels overcosted (see also Pestilent Kathari) so some designers (myself included) have a knee-jerk reaction to never pair the abilities.  If I’m to fold and let it happen, a three color half-hybrid with very strict color pie requirements seems like a reasonable banner to wave.

What flag are you waving Gatherer?

 

Gatherer waves a Roc Egg.  I must admit, Gatherer is being very polite while I work out the cube kinks.   Did you know that there are six creatures with the Egg type in Magic? That’s counting Unglued’s Chicken Egg, which seems inoffensive enough.  Plenty enough Eggs to cook up a tribal deck, featuring Reality Scramble, Scrambleverse, and Saltblast to taste.

Since Gatherer is passing, I’m filling another hole.  We still need half a black card. And there’s nothing Black/Green in the pool.  But we also need whole Green spells.  What can we do with ?

 

I figure the trick to making a card is to focus on a mechanic that looks Black on first pass, but could be done in mono-Green.  Here we have a kinda-sorta permanent Yawgmoth’s Will (but only for other permanents.)  I’m over-cautious here.  Even with a casting cost of eight, this card could be used as part of a grinding combo that wins games through attrition.  So if anything leaves the battlefield for any reason, it’s gone.  You can still see everything twice.  That’s powerful enough, even with the catch.

What else ya got, Gatherer!

Muck Rats.  Merfolk of the Pearl Trident was the only card I vetoed for being a little girly man.  Like Merfolk, I’d find ways of making Muck Rats relevant if there was enough card slots left to design.   Maybe in some far future date, I’ll make another Gatherer cube, Muck Rats will appear as card numero uno, and the entire cube will be civilization versus the rats.  For now, I muck.  Though I can’t help fear the gods of luck won’t look kindly on me…

 

 

Oof, Great Defender.  I suppose it could be worse.  Great Defender may look terrible next to… let’s say Iron Will. But it’s still a combat trick.  And it still counters a Shock.  But I’d only run it if all the other cards in my pool were Muck Rats.

What’s more, Great Defender is a flavor abomination.  This is a white card that protects creatures.  So why am I looking at a a hairy merfolk launching a ranged attack under the sea?  This is supposed to be an instant, but the name ‘Great Defender’ and the focus of the artwork screams “Creature!”  Maybe there’s a story to this card, and the setting in the artwork will help establish..  Nope.  The background features a little seaweed and a distant hammerhead shark.  Or maybe this guy shoots miniature hammerhead sharks from his eyes?  I don’t know.  Either way, the setting doesn’t explain to me why anyone would think throwing a javelin underwater would do anything but result in a javelin hovering in the water a foot in front of you.  Maybe he’s lifting his javelin away from a handsy crab below the frame.  Maybe.  Because there’s no flavor text, despite all the space the Legends team had to work with, underneath a mechanic that’s tied to a creature’s converted mana cost for no apparent reason.

You know what?  I’m in charge here.  Let’s give this card some flavor text.

 

 

I can honestly say I didn’t make the card any worse.

Okay, let’s see what I can do with …

 

 

I find it interesting how, once you figure out the hook to the color combination, they build themselves.  With Eternity Unwound, I originally aimed for a three cost spell that provided fast mana if you controlled four or more creatures.  Green isn’t big on fast mana.  But it would be odd to say that green isn’t allowed to turn all its creatures into Birds of Paradise for a turn.  So far, so good.

Then I worked on a Blue ability players might want access to while producing all this extra mana.  They would probably want time.  That’s when the casting cost shot out of fast mana range.  That’s okay.  You can get the bonus mana during your bonus turn.  Since your opponent doesn’t get a turn in between, it’s like getting fast mana in the future, which is now.

If I could put time in a bottle, Gatherer, I’d waste it all with you.  What would you give me?

 

 

Skyrider Trainee? Ick, ick, ick, ick, ick.  For a hot minute, I almost vetoed this card for being too depressing.  But as dispiriting as it is to require an overcosted Hill Giant to be enchanted before it becomes a real Nimbus of the Isles, I couldn’t ignore how it’s tied to the dedicated aura theme, and how we’re doing that in this cube as well.

Doesn’t mean I got to like it, though.  The cube is bound to go through changes after the first few playtests.  Which means I’ll return to Gatherer later to replace cards I cut.  Skyrider Trainee may not be holding ticket number one at the meat counter, but it’s waiting its turn, staring through the pickle jar.

I need an Izzet spell.  But like the Golgari spell, I need Blue more than Red.  What can we do with ?

 

 

Like with Winter Harvest, we’re looking for an effect that looks Red, and Red’s help seems reasonable, but could comfortably be mono-Blue.  Fickle Echo is an instant speed Heat Shimmer, without haste.  In a great number of games, this card will be used to block an opponent’s creature.  Red likes the effect, but frowns at control.

I did make a quick check to see if this was already printed.  There’s a number of cards in the mindspace, but most of them copy your own creature.  Cackling Counterpart is the one most players think of, I suppose.  I get it.  Wizards would prefer to reward players for playing good creatures, not ruin them for that choice.  Occasional exceptions are welcome, I’m sure.

One last card, and we win a golden cube.  Because Gatherer wouldn’t dare give me another gold card after this point.  Right Gatherer?  Right?!

 

 

Oh, okay.  I guess the cube now includes a copy of the eternally strange Spellweaver Volute in it.  I always was confounded by the art on this card.  I’m not sure if anyone gave Bud Cook any instruction on what he should draw.  This is remarkably similar to what happens when design presumes development will kill their card, so the art direction reads “Just tell Bud Cook to paint a spell.  Any spell!  I don’t know!  Why are you writing all this… oh forget it.  Put a hawk’s face on it for all I care!  No one’s going to see the card anyways!” 

So a couple things.  It’s nice I get to play with an aura that’s not an aura for the aura theme.  This may be the only aura that bounce spells can’t crush.  Neat.

I also like that this card establishes an entire archetype by its lonesome.  Draft it early, and you could have one mean deck on your hands.

But that depends on the instants and sorceries in the cube.  Right now, there are 39 instants, and 34 sorceries.  Compared to 147 creatures; that’s a limited field of options.  And some of those instants don’t make sense at sorcery speed, when this spell goes off.   This article includes three instants that be like that. To everyone’s great embarrassment, Great Defender was elected most likely of the three to be enchanted.

We have one last multicolored card combination.  By designing a card, each color will be set to six points in the cube.  So I need to design a half-hybrid instant with value at sorcery speed.  Easy peasy.

 

 

Normally I wouldn’t use such silly art, but the tiger in the top right corner was giving me the thumbs up, and I couldn’t tell him no.

Green can draw cards when the draw is attached to creatures.  Blue doesn’t need a reason, it’s just happy to be at a card drawing party.  Is the Verduran Enchantress ability still Green?  Maybe not.  But I’m arguing White can cover here, since White occasionally draws cards when you play into its other themes (see also: Mentor of the Meek and Sram, Senior Edificer.)

I needed White to care about all these cards you were drawing.  Can’t tie life gain to cards in hand, since Green can do that.  Green can also create token creatures.  Except it can’t make token flying creatures… which Blue can do.  I could go on, but let’s not.  The point is that White can scavenge for enchantments and play them for free and I don’t care if Green and/or Blue is able to do those things too, shut up, shut up.

There’s one last thing I need do before we wrap, and that’s to create a token creature.  I was a good boy today and didn’t create a single new token.  But Gatherer just had to toss a Roc Egg in the mix.  Ah well.  Have a bird.

…featuring art by Genzoman.  And since it’s clear that I need more tokens than this series has logs, here’s a bonus Ogre. 

That’s 14 more cards down, leaving but 45.  When the next log is available, Check out log number 27 here.  Or feel free to check out the According to Gatherer archives.  JM out!