Card/Deck Low Power Card Spotlight

[Seeker]

There's also new Rosheen!


Feels unlikely you'd get to the necessary density for her in a cube, let alone in a draft that doesn't contain the full cube, but maybe not impossible. What makes her not work for me is the "spend this mana only on costs that contain X" bit. Just let us have fun, wotc!

 

[ravnic]

I don't think I want to go that deep. Original Rosheen will be my only enabler for now. She is a flexible hybrid and, as you convinced me, probably worth it with very few X costs in the deck.

I'm already running 10 cards with X costs right now without even trying, and I will add one in three different colors with my winter update. I'll see if this is enough for Rosheen making a main deck every now and then

 

[henkdetenk]

How many cards with X costs would you want in your deck before you include her? Talking about a power level where you wouldn't want to put a four mana 4/4 in your deck but you're also not ashamed to cast one, since stats are relatively old school in the environment.

I'd play it as a 4/4 for 4, if I had room for it, the hybrid mana helps a lot. To make it worthwhile for the ability, though, I'd want at least 1 splashy X spell finisher in my deck. 2, preferably.

 

[ravnic]

Would that card be fine a lower powered list? It would seem pretty sick if you could hit strong three drops all the time like Flickerwisp or such, but it probably doesn't always work out like that. How does it compare, for example, to Call of the Herd?

 

[Humpty_Dumpty]

It's a fairly strong card, but will only be as strong as the permanents you are returning with it. I think it is fun and rewards creative deck building.

 

[MilesOfficial]

It scales well with the power level of your Cube, I think there are few environments in which it's overly strong or too weak.

 

[gaytransmulldrifter]

I think you mostly just want to think of the card in terms of card economy. In a slow enough environment where you expect the flashback to get paid more often than not, the card is essentially a very slow 8 mana 3-for-1. So you gotta decide if that's what you want players to be able to do or not. I think it is a very fun card to play with though, at least for the person casting it

 

[Humpty_Dumpty]

... a very slow 8 mana 3-for-1...

This is true but bear in mind that you can get up to 9 mana worth of permanents onto the battlefield.

 

[Brad]

This is true but bear in mind that you can get up to 9 mana worth of permanents onto the battlefield.

In ravnic's cube, that could be up to 6 power!!!
(It scales to your environment and almost anyone can safely run it.)

 

[gaytransmulldrifter]

Fwiw since nobody answered I would say on average it is probably stronger than Call of the Herd, but doesn't fill the same role.

Call of the Herd is like the ultimate midrange curve filler thing since it's always a 3 -> 4 if you need it to be, and it has the extra flexibility of being a meh 7 drop in the late game.

I think it's pretty rare that you're playing Sevinne's on curve if you're doing fair stuff with it. It's a bit more of a late-game turn-the-game-around card than a keep pace card.

I imagine your average three drop is quite a bit better than a vanilla 3/3, and Sevinne's has way way more late game value, but Call of the Herd has the early game consistency going for it. Sevinne's is still better but in your cube probably not insanely crazy better. Call of the Herd is pretty good!

 

[ravnic]

I just played some jumpstart games on arena and I got to play these two in the same turn:



I had six Saprolings and a random 3/2 on board. I drew eight cards and attacked for 51 trample damage. It was glorious.

Now I am sitting here wondering how much effort it would take to support Zada in my cube. Not a full blown heroic deck but a fun buildaround that can change how your prowess aggro deck or token deck plays.

Well, I barely run any spells that pop off with Zada. At 500 I have:

Raze the Effigy
Niveous Wisp
Shelter
Harm's Way
Supernatural Stamina
Snakeform

How much do you need?

 

[MilesOfficial]

How much do you need?

If you don't have 5 in your deck, it's probably not enough, right? That means you'd draw ~2 of them per game on average, and if you don't get two of them, it won't feel like you're getting enough for your hill giant...and even then, that's really the absolute minimum needed to justify it, even at your power level.

So to make sure the Zada drafter reasonably has a chance to get a minimum of 5 targetable cards, you'd want 20+ of the effect in a 500 if you draft regularly with 8 people, in which case there'd be an average of 72% of your cards in the draft pool, or 14 cards. If you have 6 drafters, it'd be ~11 cards, so you'd need to get half of the Zada-able cards in the entire draft pool to feel good about it. That doesn't seem impossible, since I imagine tricks will go later than average in the CCC, but there's no scenario here where the Zada drafter isn't sweating a little.

Yeah. I'm going to say 20 Zada-capable spells is your number.

The upside? Rosnakht, Heir of Rohgahh becomes much more reasonable.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Adventures are the way to increase pump spell density without sacrificing threat density!

 

[MilesOfficial]

Speaking of which, definitely consider Intrepid Trufflesnout, a delightful card that I've tried out a few times in my on-deck binder and, worst case, has a perpetual home in my on-deck binder. I love the little Boar.



I'm a big fan of the random adventure cards we've been getting in Commander sets as well. Brightcap Badger was a bright spot in the Bloomburrow spoiler season, and Karvanista, Loyal Lupari would already be in my Cube if it didn't remind me of an awful season of Who every time it were cast. Unfortunately, neither of these would work terribly well with your Zada plans (unlike the pig), but I want to mention them any time I can all the same.

 

[Nanonox]

I've been having fun with my lower powered cube and a sick glue card that I've discovered is



At first blush, it's a +1/+1 counter enabler and payoff, but it does so much more!

- As advertised, being an artifact itself opens up the door for some Modular cards to drop their counters on it



And being able to sacrifice artifacts (then proliferate!) means it can really mess up combat math with aforementioned Modular cards.

- Sacrificing artifacts opens the door to a lot of synergy. You can build entire engines around it



- Charge counters might seem random, but check out these crazy ramp options



And you have other ramp options too which work with Proliferate



- There are many more types of counters that benefit from being proliferated



Highly recommend to anyone doing artifact and counter shenanigans! What are your favorite counters to proliferate?

 

[vennythekid]

I am absolutely stealing this idea, fantastic write-up!

 

[Ecophagy]

There's a lot of overlap with the article about Green Artifacts as well

 

[ravnic]

This guy seems pretty good and both, the ninjutsu deck and black in general need a little push. But I wonder: how often is this even put into play via ninjutsu? Also, how good is it actually?

 

[Humpty_Dumpty]

This guy seems pretty good and both, the ninjutsu deck and black in general need a little push. But I wonder: how often is this even put into play via ninjutsu? Also, how good is it actually?

I ran this card for a while in my cube, using ninjitsu as part of a blink archetype across Esper colours.

Although the saboteur effect is powerful (unrestricted choice as well as permanent exile of the card) and you can reset the counter by blinking it, the card always felt a little clunky and over costed. It felt like a ninjitsu cost of would have been more appropriate, though possibly that would have been too good.

 

[ravnic]

ran this card for a while in my cube, using ninjitsu as part of a blink archetype across Esper colours.

How often would you say it was hardcast vs. ninjutsu'd?

 

[Humpty_Dumpty]

Probably more ninjitsu, but it wasn't played ver much before getting cut. casting cost and ninjitsu cost, similar to Ninja of the Deep Hours, would have made it an all-star.

 

[Nanonox]

Iterating on a Penny Pincher classic

Wanted to share my experimentations with the Penny Pincher classic that is the bounce theme with some updates from 2024. This is coming from a mid-low power cube environment where synergy is supposed to shine.

The archetype is mostly White and/or Blue based and is fun to design and draft around. Contrary to Blink, the need to use mana to get value from whatever permanent you are bouncing makes this less snowballing and more fair. Under pressure, you will have to choose between setting up your engine or your board.

Bounce



These four cards form the core engine in White. They are cheap, mostly evasive and open-ended. There are some other options, but these have been testing the best



There are a ton of ways to bounce permanents in Blue, I chose these to showcase a variety of ways you can go about doing so (and they happen to be my favorites).



This artifact is a single card engine for the archetype, it's just a shame that artifacts are off limits.

Another way to return to hand is with the fun Ninjutsu mechanic



While only working with creatures, there are still plenty of targets to gain value. This lets black get in on the action a little bit making the theme more broad.

Payoffs

There are a few explicit payoffs for returning cards to hand and these two make for great payoffs in the archetype.



Bonus points if you are on Bouncelands, Penny Pincher style.

There are permanents that are fantastic to bounce, I'll try and showcase a few of them



Resetting a Saga after a chapter or two can be worth a lot. Could be nice to explore removing counters from permanents too.



ETB permanents are the most obvious way to get ahead after bouncing them. Like mentioned, having to cast them again makes this strategy a big tempo loss that you have to be aware of.



Getting double value from your adventure feels so good. You also have the option of casting the creature side first absent other plays and still get the adventure down the road.



Double dipping on Hideaway is a fun little interaction (once again, Bouncelands!).

Branching off

This is where things get interesting and you are rewarded for choosing open-ended variants of the bounce effects.



Bouncing to hand means you get a new cast trigger for your various payoffs.



Speaking of casting, it is now a lot easier to double spell and get triggers from your cards. The new Tarkir set will make this even more appealing.



The other side of returning to hand is that you trigger leave the battlefield cards.



Other than trigger landfall more reliably, the bounce effects can allow you to hit land drops instead of missing them, effectively reducing their casting cost or use the land to discard for value or Retrace.

Probably missed some stuff, but if you are in the mid or lower end of the power level spectrum, I highly recommend at least considering this for your cube!

 

[LadyMapi]

Might see play in Standard

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Bounce

These four cards form the core engine in White. They are cheap, mostly evasive and open-ended. There are some other options, but these have been testing the best

Usman and I talked about this briefly in our Aetherdrift Cube Review Cube Engineers Episode. This core of cards may be good enough for high-powered environments! I definitely think you could do something cool with it here, especially in conjunction with some classic Blink enablers and payoffs in U/W.

Any reason to play Emancipation Angel and Blade-Blizzard Kitsune is a good reason in my book!

 

[Nanonox]

Usman and I talked about this briefly in our Aetherdrift Cube Review Cube Engineers Episode.

Cool, I’ll check it out, thanks!