I've been following
Usman's Cube writings for about 15 years and he's always been one of my favorite voices on the format, but I got the deepest pit in my stomach reading his latest article -- which was overall great and I broadly found myself nodding along with it, can't wait for him to share the post-playtest version in a week or so.
The issue was during the discussion of
Earthbender Ascension. I had been surprised by how high it was on his list: 9th on his preliminary top 10, and one of only three top 10 cards I hadn't already slotted into my list. It was the only one of his top 10 cards that was basically off my radar. Anyways, he said this:
This plays like a
Sutina that can’t block when it’s first cast - a respectable cube card on its own - but it trades the land-bounce ability for a built-in
Retreat to Kazandu that can also grant trample, which is great when your large landfall threats get chump-blocked. Because the effect is split between the animated land and the enchantment, you don’t lose everything if the 2/2 dies to a
Shock: the land still animates and you can continue building toward
Retreat to Kazandu.
I love
Sutina, Speaker of the Tajuru. I think it's pretty underrated in the Cube community, like so many other J25 cards that got overlooked due to the timing, the deluge of spoilers all at once, and the exclusively anime-styled art. I finally traded out
my beautiful Portal Wood Elves for the card that had been in my list since the neat play patterns Sutina offers. She has fairly simple text, but whether it's as simple as getting an extra landfall trigger and +1/+1 counter for your
Bristly Bill, Spine Sower or you're throwing Sutina into a sure death to pick up your
Boseiju, Who Endures to get rid of an otherwise-unbeatable artifact, there's a lot to do with her.
But
she's only in ~900 Cubes on Cube Cobra, and most of them seem to be rarity-restricted.
Earthbender Ascension, I imagine, will be in many more than that, and that's for the reasons Usman says: it's even more flexible. It's better at distributing +1/+1 counters (albeit not as quickly) and it's significantly more resilient. Earthbending is very cool, and the more cards with it, the better it likely will be and the more your drafters will lean into actually trying them out.
Here's where I got a little sick to my stomach: I was reviewing all the earthbending cards in my testing and maybe lists, and thought, yeah, definitely should get
Ba Sing Se in there, and maybe I can just play
Toph, Greatest Earthbender over
Toph, Hardheaded Teacher even though I'm absolutely loath to add a card without reminder text, particularly on such a multi-faceted mechanic. I was excited about potentially slotting in some more cards that I had kept in the maybe board like:
(
Earthshape in particular has the same problem as Toph and would already be in my Cube if not for its lack of reminder text)
But then I realized something else: I've been really struggling to sort my Selesnya section this year.
Aerith, Last Ancient has surprised me as useful with the amount of life gain I've got running around, but it still reads like a commander card and is a clear step down in overall power from my other 4-drops in both green and white.
Danitha, New Benalia's Light is really cool, but I don't think she's quite supported enough. I'm the only one of my players who's probably going to ever cast
Knight of the Reliquary.
Trostani, Three Whispers has been excellent for its goal of exciting our newer/more casual players and making it easier for them to win, but they're fundamentally uninteresting. The fact that
Kellan, Daring Traveler is one of the WG cards I'm
most satisfied with probably surprises me just as much as it does you.
And then I remembered something:
Damn, that card is really good with earthbending. What a perfect one-card build-around that inspires a deck that wouldn't necessarily exist ortherwise. This is the kind of card I love to have in my gold slots!
And thus I was filled with dread. Somehow this feels worse than
Spider-UK being in my Cube, and I think that's because 1) it's full art only right now and 2) it reminds me...we're getting a whole set of Marvel superheroes in the near future. Just when I'm feeling OK in the moment about UB, too.
