The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 29 – Penultimafest

Welcome to the second to last design pass in the Cube According to Gatherer! For those tuning in while the end looms nigh, we’re building half a Magic: the Gathering cube by hitting the random button on Gatherer 180 times, then designing 180 cards to fill in gaps, solidify themes, and occasionally transform stinkers like Aven Envoy into three star cards. Like Adam Sandler’s acting career, these cards will never be great, but given the right environment they can be shockingly competent.

This is as good a time as any to talk about what happens after the cube is finished. Because the next log is bound to feature a sparkler laden, birch beer drunk, partied out John-Michael, dopily looking down the lens of the camera like a goldurned fool. This cube, which was originally meant to be a cute personal project before I made the cursed realization that it could be article fodder, took me four years to complete. If a baby was born when I started in 2016, it could help me playtest the cube when I finish. Maybe not critical play analysis, but if they can sleeve and randomize cards, I can put them to work.

Looking through this list, though, it’s clear that even when I’m done, I won’t be done. The cube is wildly unbalanced. Casting costs, despite my attempts to skew down, continue to trend upwards. Some of the problem is because the random button in Gatherer is as likely to hit a rare as a common, and rares were never intended to be drafted with the same frequency as commons.

But also, too many of these cards look like what happens when a college cafeteria hosts a ‘stuff your own burrito night’. Too many ingredients shoved into unyielding, burst tortillas. Niche designs are piled in with clever trappings, and twists of flavor. For each design doodad I add, the card’s value increases. And value increases casting cost.

So when I’m done creating cards, the first pass will be to cut costs where I can. Then I play a fundamentally unbalanced cube. Keep in mind this cube includes monsters like Hythonia the Cruel standing shoulder to shoulder with Minotaur Abomination. Some cards are, without question, better than other cards. That doesn’t mean we can’t make an interesting, and theoretically fair draft environment. But it ain’t gonna be no pretty draft environment.

Usually, ‘development’ would put their scissors to the file and make cuts before playtesting begins, so as to not waste everyone’s time. But this cube is so violently unbalanced that (outside of some minor alterations) changing the cards ahead of time would be the real time waster. Furthermore, the worst offenders are the reprints foisted on me by Gatherer, which I can’t edit. It doesn’t make sense to smooth over the imperfections in my patio bench when the patio itself is teeming in splinters while bent nails zigzag out of every joint. My first goal is to seek clever ways to work around the most problematic cards, while tossing tatami mats over warped knots in the wood so nobody twists an ankle.

That said, I can point to the card most eligible to be cut and replaced, and it will probably happen in the next log. I failed you, Seaside Citadel. Way back in the early logs, I presumed Gatherer would set me up with more nonbasic lands. To prevent myself from designing too many cycles in response to one card, I planned to wait until the rest of the nonbasics dropped, then fill together a cycle of nonbasic lands out of what was left out. But the dual/tri lands never arrived. Instead, I was presented with color-netural Terramorphic Expanse, Mirrorpool, and Island of Wak-Wak. I did design Spectral Borealis at one point…

…but this land isn’t useful in most decks. It’s intended for decks that could use a bonus creature to sacrifice, or a cute combat trick with all the cards that untap permanents kicking around. And if you’re playing either of those decks, you don’t need a single blue card in your deck for the Borealis to be useful. For color balancing reasons, I consider this card to be one-half of an Island, and one-half of a colorless spell.

So, 338 cards. Ignoring the 72 colorless and gold cards, means each color requires 57.6 monocolor cards per color. Any future colorless or gold cards will eat into that number.

Currently I’m at 55 white and green cards. So if I see a white or green card today, I’m vetoing it, no questions asked. There are 53 blue and red cards, so if they appear, I accept them. But it’s Black, with only 50 cards, that needs the most help. My short term goal in this log is to only design black cards. Let’s see how I follow through.

Gatherer! Show me what’s behind door number one!

Nice card, but auto-vetoed. Door number two!

I’m not keen on color hosers, but Searing Rays doesn’t care what color you play, as long as you play a lot of it. I can dig it. It won’t appear in every game, but a mild encouragement to avoid bleeding one color dry of every playable creature is reasonable.

Seeing I’m dedicated to designing black cards, one possible response is to create a black card that makes other cards black, in the vein of Darkest Hour. But no other cards in the cube take advantage of color. I’m not designing a card so it can work with exactly one other card in the cube.

As I alluded to in an earlier log, there used to be a design philosophy in early magic that Black encouraged players to play more black. All the colors dabbled in this practice, of course. The color pie was undercooked in 1993. But in the Pocket Player’s Guide, Garfield wrote he liked the idea of Black’s corrupting nature tempting players with minor rewards for adding just one more Swamp to their deck. Church leaders in the 90s cited Magic’s artwork of cult sacrifices, demons, and spooky skeletons as images that drove youth souls to the Adversary. But if they understood the mechanics of the game, maybe they would sermonize over Drain Life and Nightmare as the cards that sent our children down the harrowed path of torment.

Way back in log four, I designed a card that played with the flip side of this narrative: that Black also encourages opponents to splash occasional Swamps, leading them down a dark path too (as seen on cards like Lim-Dûl’s Hex and Thrull Wizard.) Maybe we can play in that space some more. The more Swamps floating through your opponent’s library, the better they can mitigate this fell wolf.

Fallen Alpha is easy to splash. But it’s marginally better for every Swamp in your deck. And while your opponents can defend against its ability by sinking mana in their pool turn after turn, there will always be a metagame pull to put an extra Swamp in one’s deck, if only to stave off an occasional disgraced wolf for one more turn. Which will either make you more diverse, protecting you against Searing Rays, or closer to monoblack, making you vulnerable to Searing Rays.

Let’s see what Gatherer chose for its next card.

Oh my. Soul Collector is spicy. I would feel bad, considering this is the only morph creature in the cube. After its first reveal, your opponent will always know what the face down creature is. Not that it matters much. Even without morph, the Collector is well above the average power level for this cube.

If Soul Collector wasn’t so efficient, I’d probably design something similar to Power of Fire to go with it. (Honestly? Soul Collector isn’t restricted to combat damage? And creatures don’t revert to their owner when she leaves the battlefield? The creatures in Magic get better year after year, but the mistress of chains hits that gym every day and stays in shape.) What I’m trying to say is that Soul Collector doesn’t need our help. If anything, we should keep an eye out for ways to make the card less relevant.

During the very brief playtest at the halfway mark of this cube’s design, I realized that every time a bomb was added, I needed to supply an answer. Otherwise, ‘best creatures’ tended to win games unopposed. Looks like I need an answer in black.

Kill a big creature with a small creature, or gain a pile of life when a big creature connects (hopefully hitting a ‘when you gain 3 life or more’ trigger), or force an opponent’s creature to kill itself. And yes, the choice to not use lifelink was intentional. If you’re paying six mana to venomize your opponent’s dragon’s fangs, then force it devour itself, you should gain the life, not your opponent.

I don’t have much more to say about this. Except there are some words you shouldn’t search for in Deviant Art, and ‘overindulge’ is one of them. I’m not trying to kink shame anybody. You do you. But I’m always surprised at how I’m always surprised by the sheer volume of artists on DeviantArt with the sort of swelling obesity fetishes that would make R. Crumb blush.

I need a mental recharge. Send me something easy on the eyes, Gatherer.

Close enough.

Hm. Guiltfeeder. Not only is it a black card, but something to feed off of the casual mill in blue/black. But is this a bomb? It feels like a bomb. Should this warrant a follow up removal card?

Maybe? It’s not as clear cut as Soul Collector, but if your opponent is past the seven card graveyard threshold, Guiltfeeder is game over in three swings. But instead of another kill spell, I feel like making an efficient bounce spell, because the two bounce spells currently in the cube are a three cost card, and the clunky Vedalken Dismisser. This next card isn’t a perfect answer, but Guiltfeeder isn’t a perfect bomb.

Originally, I named this card “Time Out” because it felt like a player was ejected from the game, and both teams are going into a huddle. But you work with the artwork you can find, and I didn’t find any high fantasy art with adventurers huddling on the battlefield while an orc encampment does the same.

Instead, I found some classic art by Paul Lehr, and rebranded the flavor to focus more on surveiling and less on returning. As an Unsummon variant, sometimes Gather Thoughts is more destructive than helpful. But with cards like Guiltfeeder kicking around, every chance you can encourage your opponent to pitch a card or two stacks up.

While I was at it, I returned to the cube with my red pen to change all the cards with scry to surveil. But I guess there was only one other card with scry. Maybe I should make a few more before I’m out of time?

Hit me again Gatherer!

Tainted Aether is a difficult read. What deck wants to play this card? I guess the kind of deck that wants to hose creature token and/or Overrun strategies, plays creatures with small bodies and solid enter the battlefield abilities, pairs those expendable bodies with titanic one-creature-armies, and packs incidental creature destruction to take out the occasional fatty that the Aether will never hit. Fair enough.

If you build around Tainted Aether, you can minimize the damage to your creature base. But, as Ewumi reminds us…

The chances of that happening in this cube is low. In theory, you could cobble a deck together using noncreature permanents that turn into creatuers like Genju of the Cedars, Shapeshifter’s Marrow, Blessed Gardens, and Eutierra, gain control of the opponents’ creatures with Custody Battle or One of Us, then enchant those creatures with bestow enchantments like Spirespine or Lone Moose.

Huh. Maybe you could do it. Obviously, those cards would need a lot of support from the rest of the noncreature spells in your deck. But it’s not impossible.

Well, let’s add another noncreature to the pile. One black enchantment with surveil, please. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of cards in black that trigger ‘gain 3 or more life’. I suppose there’s a point where the mechanic stops being a ‘green/white mechanic with occasional black support’ and instead becomes the wedge mechanic it’s meant to be.

Now our two surveil cards are a little less alone. Let’s move on. Who’s zooming who, Gatherer?

Huh. Duergar Cave-Guard. In theory, this doesn’t unbalance our multicolor cards, since it plays fine in a red deck. In practice, however, it’s too clunky to see play in any two color deck, except for red-white.

I could correct for this. It wouldn’t be hard to make a cycle of creatures that include a hybrid Holy Armor/Rootwalla/Frostburn Weird etc., etc., ability. But I’m running low on slots. There are only six more cards to design. And I need to make sure the base colors are balanced.

Oh, and this cycle exists:

Which covers much of the same ground. It even moves around the color wheel in the same direction.

But I’m giving this a try anyways. I don’t need to limit myself to only Firebreathing variants. Maybe I’ll need to double back in the end and scrap these cards. But it won’t kill me to make three or four new cards after this cycle potentially flops. Since blue is currently behind one card, I guess we make the blue card first.

Originally I planned to return to a mechanic that may not be fully fleshed out, and make another creature that put 0/1 Illusion creature tokens on the battlefield. But the four permanents that already do that is enough. If there’s a problem with the ‘Blue wants exactly one more creature than you’ mechanic, I don’t think adding more illusion generators will solve it.

So I removed that central ability in what already proved to be a busy card, and ended up with this utility creature. There’s minor stuff in the set built around tapping and untapping. Red still loves those sacrifice triggers. And Soul Trafficker will appreciate all the illusion and goblin tokens in blue and red.

One last card for the day, Gatherer. Everything is coming together. It’s time to throw a curveball at me.

Huh. Hikari, Twilight Guardian. You’d think I’d be happy to see a tribal spirit creature. But this card really wants spirits and arcane spells that move at instant speed. While there’s a few cards like this in the set, they aren’t in the sort of numbers Hikari wants to see. Hikari also works well with mass removal, but outside of a lone Hythonia the Cruel, that isn’t happening either.

I’d prefer not to veto two cards in this article, but there aren’t enough card slots left to make sense out of the Twilight Guardian. And I don’t want players puzzling over a 4/4 flyer whose best trick is to miss combat for a turn in order to remove an aura from itself.

The funny thing is that even though I declared war on white cards at the top of this article, I’m not vetoing this card because it’s white. By the time I got to the article’s end, the colors are all balanced, with black up one card. I guess I technically didn’t need to veto that Trusted Pegasus after all.

Wait a second. Maybe we don’t need to veto two cards in this article.

Trusted Pegasus was very polite to wait its turn in line. I need to design another hybrid/not hybrid creature. And since I’m avoiding white and black right now, I guess it’s time to make the green one.

Taking inspiration from the couple of bestow cards already in the set and Elephant Guide, I made a sort of Elephant Guide Elephant Guide. Once again, the bestow cost looks ridiculously expensive. Which I’m guessing means it’s balanced? Bestow costs are impossible to judge without testing.

All right! Twelve more cards down. Only ten more cards to go! I’ll see you fine people at the finish line. In the meantime, perhaps you’d like to take a trip through the According to Gatherer archives to see how we got here?