The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 28 – ♫Dinosaucers!♫

Or, How I Went to Design Cards for a Cube, But Instead Made a Deep Dive Into a Radical Dinosaur Cartoon from the 80s.

Welcome back to the Cube According to Gatherer! In each of these logs, I start by asking Gatherer to add a random card to my 360 card cube. Then, because the choice in a vacuum makes no sense, I design an answer card and add that to the cube because I seem to be of the questionable opinion that my choices are better than the forces of sheer randomness.

Rinse and repeat about six times per twenty-seven logs, and I find that we’re sitting on a pile of 327 cards. Only thirty-three cards left to go? Soon I’ll ride this lumbering brontosaurus of a project out of the valley, across the foothills, up along the nearby cliffs, and crashing over the edge. But the tail over teakettle will be glorious. Let’s ask Gatherer for this week’s first card, shall we?

Oh, cool! Metamorphosis boosts itty bitty bodies into big badda booms, bish bash bosh (I swear the previous sentence was in English.) For example, if I sacrifice Ondu Giant, Metamorphosis would add five mana to my pool (four for the Giant, and one to replace the cost of the Metamorphosis.) Presuming I started the turn with five land and tapped one for mighty morphing, I can now slap a nine drop. And seeing the cube includes a fine selection of thirteen creatures that cost seven or more (plus an additional Pouncing Wurm) I’d say Metamorphosis has potential.

As a bonus, Metamorphosis fits our red-green theme of ‘creatures who relish sacrifice’. I suppose it only makes sense to design another.

Every time I step away from this series and return, I’m revisited by the ghosts of this cube’s needs like a greedy banker on Christmas Eve. The set needs more small creatures. It needs more Spirits (My first instinct for the artwork was to fetch a Dryad. But isn’t dryad just another name for ‘tree spirit’?) Kami of Softwood’s Succor protects all nonland permanents, but my aim fosters another need: the cube needs cards that help protect the aura theme.

But one of the most pressing needs for the set is more cheap outlets for sacrificing creatures. I designed a number of creatures with a high cost to sacrifice for a weak ability, and a strong ability that triggers when something is sacrificed. The trick was that you could either pay the high sacrifice cost, or use another card to ‘cheat’ the trigger.

Cute. But playtesting taught me those cards are frustrating problems when solutions aren’t plentiful. It’s not a big deal if a player drafts a solution and never sees the problem it was fixing. Presuming, of course, the solutions stand on their own. Many of them, like Kami of Softwood’s Succor, don’t make it evident there’s a problem to fix in the first place. But cards like Wall of Thorns come with obvious hurdles that players intuit the set’s design will counterbalance. Many players draft problem cards presuming the solution is inevitable if they’re patient. When those players don’t see a solution, though, it can feel like betrayal. In other words, I need more solutions than problems.

Enough pontification. Send me another card, Gatherer!

Thanks, but no thanks, Otepec Huntmaster. You know, if this card popped up in the first twenty logs, this cube would have more dinosaurs than a bottle of Flintstone’s vitamins.

But with only forty odd cards left to go, of which I’m only designing half, I can only make Otepec Huntmaster work if I dedicated the rest of my design to reviving season two of Dinosaucers. “It used to be an ordinary Magic cube. Until it met some friends, from out of town. They were called… Dinosaucers. ♫Dinosaucers!♫“

Ma-ti has the power of heart. But I have the power to veto. I’ve been very good about it, too, preferring to work within the limitations Gatherer sets before me. But with only a score of cards left to design, I predict my veto powers are going to come into play quite a few times in the next few logs.

Let’s try again, shall we?

Swaggering Corsair is a welcome addition to the cube, if not a little boring. But boring is fine. The cube already includes too many exciting cards.

This creature is a French Vanilla, if French Vanilla is allowed to expand into simple ability words. Crème brûlée? Tradition states that when the cube gains a French Vanilla, we add a French Vanilla. I suppose we need another Crème brûlée now? Let’s see what I can whip up and blast under a blow torch.

Fateful Hour is a good match for our suicide red/black theme. Granted, it was originally a White, Green, and sometimes Blue mechanic from Avacyn Restored. But I can’t see why it can’t be a Black and Red mechanic instead. In Innistrad, White/Green/Blue were the colors experiencing a fateful hour. But Red and Black are the colors most often to cause a fateful hour. You say En Sabah Nur, I say Darkseid. They’re both chonky gray Apocalypse bois, with minor flavor variations mostly based on the Universes they inhabit.

Show me the secret to the Anti-Life Equation, Gatherer!

Oh cool, it’s Will of the Naga. A number of blue and black spells in the cube mill both yourself and your opponent. It’s nice to see a card slide into the cube and help solve a problem I’ve been ignoring. Thanks Gatherer! You’re an unfeeling emission of the chaos that is this Universe, but my brain gives you a personality anyways.

Now I’m torn. The mill strategy needs more representation. But with so few cards left, I also feel that the number of cards that encourage self-mill isn’t quite there either.

Ill-Boding Relic does a little of both, giving you enough mill to empower your graveyard, while making your opponent second guess every minor spell they cast. As a bonus: colorless mana. I’ve been on a mission to slip more colorless into this cube ever since Mirrorpool was added.

Let’s check the mailbox and see what Gatherer sent.

Penumbra Spider, admittedly, is an odd card to veto. But we established long ago that Red was the anti-flying color in set, as well as the color with reach. That idea still tickles me, and I don’t want to go back on the thought this late in the game. Maybe seven logs ago, but not while we’re wrapping things up.

That said, Green needs a few answers for flying. So whatever I design next, I should do that, and maybe the next design too. But no green reach. I don’t want to go back on something that was established all the way back in log number two.

Oh, huh. I don’t think I ever saw Spirespine before. It’s a good match for the aura-matters theme in the cube, even if its Gatherer score is poor. But I think this is one of those scenarios where the poor score doesn’t reflect on the value of the card. Most players are notoriously bad at judging cards which are valuable in different ways, in different scenarios.

The poster child for this problem in action is Leaden Fists.

The voters on Gatherer put this card down as a 2.88, but in my not so humble opinion it really deserves to be somewhere around a 3.75. The card…

• Can be used to neutralize a creature after it attacked. That alone is worth the price of . Certainly there are more effective ways of dealing with creatures, but not many in Blue. The best common Blue anti-creature auras are worth . This spell costs one more and says you need to get hit first, but the ability to leave your land untapped (in case Cancel, for example, is the more prudent choice this turn) makes up the difference.
• Can be used on your attacking creature as a sort of suicide charge. Your creature will be locked down, but the opponent’s creature will be dead.
• Can deal the final 3 damage to an opponent. Who cares about the drawback if you won the game?
• Is a permanent Giant Growth on any creature that you never planned to tap anyways, like Wall of Air, Omenspeaker, or Segovian Angel.
• Is in the color that untaps. You don’t need to put sub par cards in your deck to untap creatures enchanted with Leaden Fists. But if you’re already thinking about playing with an optimal card that includes untapping, there’s synergy here.

It’s hard for players to wrap their heads around a card that’s sometimes beneficial for you, sometimes detrimental to your opponent, and on rare occasions be a liability (You’re running Pestermite? Gah!) Leaden Fists almost comes with too many options. Tom Lapile called it “the bad kind of puzzler” in two different articles. Which is a shame. I love a good puzzle. But the message Wizards gets back from many players is “what is this box pushing puzzle if i wanted to match-3 i’d be at work right now”

Likewise, I don’t think Spirespine deserves the 2.36 the players gave it. Granted, it’s not a great card. But I can visualize players approaching this card through its most optimal play, and it ain’t great: Enchant my opponent’s creature, then trade with a high power creature of my own, to get a creature that will probably trade with an opponent’s goblin token. ‘Card advantage plus one, but only for poor trades’ isn’t worth five mana. But you could instead drop Spirespine early into an empty board. Or you could enchant your 3/4 trampler and swing for the fences.

I’m not pretending Spirespine is suddenly great, but the combined versatility is nice. It doesn’t make sense to me for it to share a similar score with Street Savvy and Scaled Wurm, two cards I would only ever run as a joke. But again, I never played Spirespine, so I could be wrong.

All this hot mess talk and green anti-flying measures lead me to design this:

Moose Mount…

• Can be a 2/1 drop on round one with trinket text that matters in the rare unlucky case your opponent is packing a Flight variant and is willing to waste it here. (You can make a moose fly, but they have zero aerial coordination.)
• Can be used to stop an opponent’s flying creature, unless that opponent has an even less likely Earthbind variant.
• Can be used as an Unholy Strength for most of Green’s team which pops out a 2/1 creature when the enchanted creature dies.
• Can be used in tandem with other cards that grant flying, like Caller of Gales as a way to stop a non-flying creature in the odd scenario where you can both set it up, and it’s a profitable trick.

That’s a lot of variation for what is technically a beefed up Nyxborn Eidolon. But the eidolon wasn’t spectacular, green creatures are supposed to be beefier, and there’s a subset of cards this doesn’t work well with (I wouldn’t recommend running this in a deck full of Wind Drakes, for example.)

But despite all the options, Moose Mount isn’t the best choice for any one scenario, so I’m guessing it will consistently be undervalued (whatever its true value might be.) Ça va.

Enough imperfect puzzlers. Give me something straightforward Gatherer!

Hey, hey! How’s Goblin Warchief for results! There’s only seven other goblin cards in the cube right now, but unlike dinosaurs, we have a base to work with and can add a few more. So I guess we need a Goblin. Ideally one with a casting cost of five to take advantage of the Warchief’s first ability.

I guess if fateful hour is a thing, I might as well lean into it. Okay, Gatherer. One last card for the night. Let’s make it a good one.

Huh. Thada Adel, Acquisitor. I have no particular love of islandwalk, which might as well read, “Unblockable, but only in 40% of the games you play. Each opponent rolls randomly to determine if they can block this game.” It’s even more egregious when evasion is tied to a swingy mechanic that could cut you out of the best cards in your deck while your opponent gets oodles of unfair card advantage. But I’m sure there are worses cards in this cube. And we already vetoed two cards. I guess we’re stuck together, Thada.

But what does Thada need? Not artifacts. We got enough for Thada’s trigger to succeed against the average deck. And not turning lands into Islands. We’re too far along for me to push that archtype.

I guess Thada needs an answer. Green already has a problem with flyers. What if I did something like this?

Sometimes when you remove a presumed standard, you can end up with some interesting design. Since I don’t want Green to use its usual anti-flying tricks, I’m forced to find other solutions. One way is to not target flyers, but evasion in general. I like where this card ended up since, instead of trying to quantify what an evasion creature is (a dubious endeavor seeing how there are so many ways to evade) I turned my attention to the creature incapable of blocking, for whatever reason.

I’m not sure if this wording is perfect. As it is, I was forced to add ‘Cast this spell only before blockers are declared’ because it could be argued that, if you choose to blast past the declare blockers step, every creature you control can’t block the attacking creature. Likewise, I’m uncertain if a creature can look into the future and determine it won’t be able to block an attacking creature. There’s a few questions, but it passes the common sense test, so I’m letting the flag fly.

Bonus token time! I didn’t add any new tokens this log (though I dodged the bullet with Penumbra Spider. Looking through the file I see that Portal to Wildfire is making elementals that I have yet to make a token for.

Looking good! There’s only twenty-one cards left to add out of our 360 card cube! Soon we’ll be able to play these cards and find out how unbalanced this pile is! You can head to the next log here. Or, perhaps you’d prefer going through the According to Gatherer Archive? Come back for more, dinosaur!