The Cube According to Gatherer, Part 30 – Pop Me In the Oven

One! Last! Time! I’m baking a Magic the Gathering cube by hitting up Gatherer, this cube’s baby daddy, and asking for 180 random cards worth of alimony. Meanwhile, I’m the one who’s stuck with raising and educating this dumb cube, designing 180 cards in an attempt to pull together all these disparate themes and keep in check the wildly different power levels. I’m failing, but I’m having as good a time as one can expect to have, writing four books worth of material about a game that no one has played. And like disappointed parents on a park bench watching our child who’s afraid of ladders try and fail to climb the slide from the wrong direction, we can still say “Well, at least he’s having fun.”

Only ten card slots left and the cube is done! I want the colors to be as balanced as reasonably possible, but five of the cards are out of my control. So I may get a little veto crazy here. No guarantees.

Let’s see what spices Gatherer adds to this dish, shall we?

Goblin Warrens. Perfect. There aren’t a lot of goblins in the set, but a few of them, like Dragon Fodder and Hordeling Outburst, already produce multiple tokens. It’s time for those goblin tokens to get sexy and make babies! Though I guess the process of making babies kills the parents? And then we sacrifice the babies to make more babies? I’m starting to understand why this card was never reprinted…

While it may be weird that the Warrens sacrifices two creatures to make three (as opposed to tapping two creatures to make a third, for example) the end result is mostly the same. Hit a minimum threshold of Goblins, then crank them out for three mana apiece. Except this cube includes multiple cards that trigger when a creature is sacrificed, which turns this minor distinction into a huge problem. Goblin Warrens not only sacrifices four creatures a turn for , but it replaces the creatures it sacrifices. Just look at what that does for Krenko’s Brigands…

If I didn’t know better, I’d assume I not only designed Krenko’s Brigands to combo specifically with Goblin Warrens, but that I was far too generous when I did it. But the sacrifice trigger deck doesn’t top off at a simple combo between two cards. Every enabler triggers simultaneously. Including this one:

With these three cards in play, you get something akin to an unlimited supply of flashing Mogg Fanatics (Technically the ability can’t target creatures. But why would you bother when you can chump all day and deal so much pain to the head?) I’ve been careful to limit how frequently a player can sacrifice their creatures so players would need to sweat to make those triggers shine. The Warrens makes a mockery out of my labor.

Goblin Warrens requires no further help to come in like a wrecking ball, try so hard at love, and break the walls of this cube. But it only has eight other goblin cards to work with. And only three of those cards create multiple goblin tokens. The Warrens deck will be out of control when the combo pieces come together, but there needs to be enough goblins for the archetype to be reasonable. I need to design more goblins. And if that goblin doesn’t help break the Warrens, that’s a bonus.

Oh, and I still need to finish the hybrid off-color activation cycle. All these factors combined lead me to to make this:

I’ll be the first person to point out that this card isn’t doing anything particularly new or exciting. But it’s hefting a lot of value for this cube. Torchbearer solidifies the goblin theme, adding another piece that works well with the pre-existing Goblin Warchief and Krenko, Mob Boss. It also provides a couple of Goblin tokens to jump start the Warrens, but has nothing to do with triggering sacrifices. If you want to combine the Warren deck with a sacrifice trigger deck, you need to spread out your picks.

To make matters more challenging, red/white hybrid is the worst possible combination for the sacrifice deck. Red/green is the heart of the sacrifice mechanic, but there are reasonable sacrifice outlets in both blue and black. The Torchbearer, however, would prefer you didn’t sacrifice your creatures at all, instead encouraging you to thrust your goblin pawns into a crushing assault.

Two down, eight to go. What’s next, Gatherer?

Ah, sorry. Nothing against Lull, but we really need a white, blue, or black card, or maybe an artifact. Let’s try again.

Pharika’s Libation provides bonus black enchantment removal in a set with an aura sub-theme? Zero complaints. Though, I guess the aura theme could use one more card to help tie it together. Nothing wrong with the number of auras in the set. But we could use another ‘aura lord’.

Glamour Devourers is like a picky Nantuko Husk that eats both the aura and the creature its enchanted on for double the bonus. Except, there are a number of auras in this cube that still do stuff when the enchanted creature is gone. For starters, three creatures feature bestow, like Spirespine. And there’s a number of ways to pull auras back from the grave. These Devourers might get lucky and really stretch out their meals.

We’re looking good. What’s next Gatherer?

Oop, gotta pass on Ashen Ghoul. Technically, the Glamour Devourers were one card too many in black. But I still needed to round out that off-color cycle. It’s a decent enough zombie, and I could use more zombies. But Black is pretty much done.

Sweet Isochron Scepter not on a stick! I had no idea Elite Arcanist even existed. When I first read the card, I presumed it must be one of the splashy new rares from M21. But this Cancel slinging lad has been in decks since M14? That’s wild. You don’t even need to load him with a blue spell. Load him up with an Advent of the Wurm, drop a 5/5 wurm token every turn, and save your Cancel to protect the Arcanist.

I’m sorry… you were probably already aware of this card that spawns a hundreds combos since 2013, but I just got the memo. In the cube, the Arcanist has 46 available options to choose from. I think I can officially not worry about the Arcanist’s options.

I do need to finish of that off-color hybrid cycle, however, so let’s focus on that.

It’s strange the places you see when you take the back roads between two obscure destinations. In this case, I’m driving my design car out of the aura plains, through the wilderness, to the ‘oops, no creatures’ resort. And if you remember from last week, that deck doesn’t even work with token generators, since we’re trying to work around Tainted Aether, which makes a mockery of Dragon Fodder. But enchantments that turn into creatures slip right past the Aether’s defenses.

And while one half of this card is built to play around the Aether, the other half skirts around Devout Harpist and the equally upsetting Aura Shards in the cube. This is one of the stranger ‘aura-matters’ cubes I’ve seen, where most auras have built in a defense to minimize the impact of repeatable enchantment destruction.

“But John-Michael,” you say, “When you activate Persevering Shell’s second ability, it’s vulnerable to both enchantment removal as well as creature removal, just like any normal Aura. Any number of options kill the aura as soon as you pay its expensive second ability.”

I’ve got two responses to that. First, I know it’s been a long pandemic, but you need to stop talking to your computer. That habit will only make things more challenging when we can invite people back inside our homes to watch sports and yell at the television.

And second, when Persevering Shell is an aura, you can still pay and turn it into a 2/2 flying Spirit. When you do that, it loses enchant creature and unattaches from any doomed host creature it’s attached to. That’s why the first ability makes the Shell lose all abilities, in fact, so it can lose enchant creature. [There’s an aside to this: the Shell can’t activate its second ability if the first ability is activated. It may seem unintuitive, but I think it’s reasonable that the Shell can protect itself if it’s an aura by turning into a creature, but can’t protect itself if it’s a creature because it can’t turn into an aura. Being able to bounce back and forth would only increase the costs on this card into the ‘usually too expensive to play’ zone anyways.]

I don’t like burying the ability to save the aura inside an ability that players will digest a different way before they read the whole card. But I doubt putting the first ability second would make it any easier to pick up on this subtle interplay. Like Frodo in a carriage wondering aloud why his uncle is acting so weird while traveling with the resident pipe-smoking fireworks expert, sometimes you need to smile at a card and say “All right then, keep your secrets.”

Great. Done with the off-color hybrid cycle. Now I won’t be waylayed when designing around these last two cards. What’s next Gatherer?

Ooh… Shivan Dragon sure makes for an interesting throwback in a cube. But… hmm… the set doesn’t need a red card right now so much as it needs a green or a blue card. Which… oh, right. I already turned down a green card in this article. I guess I should pull it forward.

Lull is yet another choice card for Elite Arcanist, by the way. And once again, you don’t need access to green mana to play Lull in that deck. Cycle Lull if you don’t have your Arcanist, or exile Lull to Arcanist if you do, and remove the combat step every turn. Brutal.

Oh geez. I only get to design two more cards, and Lull pointed me in zero directions. Well, I need at least one blue card to balance things out. And looking at all the blue instants and sorceries in the cube, I see that I don’t have a mid-cost hard counter. It isn’t an exciting choice, but I guess I should do for Cancel what I did for Unsummon.

Well, it gets the job done. Only two slots left. One for Gatherer, and one for me. And since things are closer to balanced now, I guess it’s only fair to let Gatherer have its dragon.

This leaves me with an odd problem. There’s only one card left to design, but I need three cards: a white card, a blue card, and a green card. And I can’t make the last card a w/u/g multicolor card, because multicolored is (in theory) balanced.

I’m tempted to put the Seaside Citadel back in that I yanked from the cube because Gatherer sent me no other dual/tri lands. But that does the opposite of what we need. It ensures both one less spell in these colors, and one more land to cast them with.

Maybe I can design a w/u/g card, but one that works best in mono-colored decks?

This was a trick to figure out. I burned through a lot of alternatives, but so many of them didn’t do what was needed, or were too clunky/obvious in their intent.

Temporal Steed hits that nice sweet spot. Its abilities only mechanically make sense in white, blue, or green. It’s a stretch for white to have access to flash, or for green to tap permanents, but the fact that the Steed is an artifact helps smooth over these color pie bends. Arguments could be made as to why black or red could have access to one of these abilities, but access to both abilities feels wrong, even for an artifact.

Further, the two abilities together heavily encourages monocolor. Sure, if you’re playing white/green, it might be nice to have the flexibility to decide which of your two colors has flash. But for creatures of the other color to come into play tapped? It almost doesn’t seem worth the trade. If a deck is 75% green and 25% white, then it’s clearly worth it… but the Steed is practically a green spell at that rate.

Also, keep in mind that your opponent leaches off of the flash ability if they stumble into the right color. Less likely if you were scooping all the cards in color for your mono-color deck, but more likely if your draft pool was split. Modern design frowns down upon making cards that might secretly help our opponent. Temporal Steed is far from a perfect solution. But this is an imperfect cube.

Three hundred and sixty cards, and the cube is complete! Complete, but not finished. I still have a round of simple edits to make. Then playtesting which… probably won’t happen for a while. We’re in isolation at Casa Gariepy throughout the pandemic, so it will take time before the playtest reports roll in.

But after I make the quick and dirty edits, I’ll post the cube soon after. If you’d like to pop on and see what this cube is like in all its untested gory glory, then hang tight for a couple weeks. The pdf is on its way. In the meantime, here’s a link to the According to Gatherer archives, in case you missed a log. See you soon!