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WOTZ is still treating cube as a casual format and appears to be completely oblivious how misguided their design philosophies are.

Excerpt from this channel fireball article: I think my original cube environment was just really poor for necropotence. A {B}{B}{B} enchantment that didn't immediately affect the board was basically uncastable, and it didn't really have a home. That was so long ago that I don't want to seem...

I gave the drafter a whirl a little while back, to try to force the spells matter archetype, and it came out pretty reasonably, I think. It’s always hard to tell how a deck will do in a vacuum, but this seemed ok, if a little greedy on my part. The battle screech is a bit ambitious. As long as...

I'm actually kind of excited now about the shards. Jeskai is a blue, red, white shard with a spells matter mechanic: I am sure to (finally) get some awesome white build arounds for that theme. Prowess itself seems nuts considering how often it triggers; it has the potential to be a fixed...

This is starting to look like it could be a great tempo oriented draft environment. Mechanically, delve, outlast, prowess, ferocious, morph, and raid all encourage committing resources to the board, and provide a means to connect the early game with the mid or late game, much like flashback and...

So, all of this talk got me interested in Clique's actual design, and I found this article, which was fascinating. Relevant parts extracted and quoted below:

I think the mana requirement makes it pretty bad even in power max lists. It always wheeled over here.

Yeah, the whole problem is that "best" is very subjective in both what it constitutes and how you apply whatever criteria you use to the card. Flavor and the color pie, to me, is less important than the card actually being good. For example, while clique is less elegant than other cards in...

I like this. To answer your questions. I don't think it’s necessary to break singleton, but sometimes its desirable to do so when you are trying to encourage certain interactions and have an extremely limited pool of cards capable of supporting those interactions. Some of the more interesting...

I think they just used cognates that would vaguely invoke a connection with the historical Mongol's world. Abzan=Azerbaijan Temur=Temujin Khan Sultai=sultan Takir=Tartar Mardu=Mongol. I suspect the naming process didn't take very long :rolleyes:

If I was going with favorite card it would be delver. I went with clique because everyone enjoys playing it. It has all of the "gotcha" appeal of the ninjitsu cards, but is actually good. It has tons of decision point intersections, but the card never feels intimidating to play, grows with...

Wake thrasher looks like the perfect example of an inclusive aggro card. It is of course in blue.

I can see bolt, but given the reasoning above: Lightning bolt VS. Giant Growth Is bolt really a better design than giant growth?

Geist is just so much raw power that it sucks people into that deck, which i'm fine with. I know its a controversal card to run. Lyev skyknight looks great. A little weak maybe for a direct delver shell, but I could see it as part of a nasty W/U humans deck, that sometimes shows up in a...

I would run riptide sea witch in a heartbeat. Amazing synergy with certain cards over here.

Flashback extracts a heavy tempo cost in exchange for card advantage. BV helps ease that tempo cost, and provides a good long term value plan for when the deck switches to a more controlling game plan. In addition, when you aren’t running powered point removal, the burn off of BV becomes a...

So, i'm very happy with my U/R delver decks, which have a lot of incentive cards, and can basically shift between being an aggro, control, or burn deck to close out games. I want to buff a bit my U/W delver decks. For the U/R decks, these are the core cards. delver of secrets delver of...

I don't get the negativity either. Its three color fixing and acceleration that can be slotted into any deck due to the colorless morph cost. The fact that it has a useful 2cc ability is also great, because it helps avoid the morph problem of having a format oversaturated by 3cc plays. I really...

I think FOF, gifts, and cabal therapy are all great examples of some of the best skill testing cards ever made, but I think they natively operate at too high of a level to be best design ever. Vend. clique and eternal witness are powerful intuitive designs that grow with the player (and to a...

The best part about mishra's factory was running mana through it to avoid mana burn :) Onderzeeboot, i'm surprised you didn't suggest BOP originally. Everything you mentioned about elves applies to it, but I think BOP has better flavor, is a better representation of green's color pie, has...