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Fucking hell, Wizards, stop inventing new mechanics that offer modal costs! I just finished making a new 2-3-7 cube. Look at our two heroes walking war-crimes! I feel like Urza is the stronger of the two (permanent ramp, looting instead of rummaging)... but I feel like Mishra is the cooler...

I dunno if that's supposed to be a compliment or not. :p As for the "short deadline to deal 20"... I forgot to mention that my particular 15-card environment started everyone with 10 life. And that the "grindy" decks were packing stuff like Serene Remembrance.

I mean, you're also making the assumption that I have a group of people who would be drafting this cube on the regular. Which is flattering, don't get me wrong, but the reality is that this would be a design exercise that would probably get drafted once or twice as a novelty. As for the...

"Regular" cube? I don't actually have any.

Eh, the fact that the format is going to be utterly degenerate is part of the fun. I'm also unlikely to run Life from the Loam (maybe if there was a version that didn't have Dredge?) If I'm going to include ways to loop lands, it'll be something like Turntimber Sower or the like.

I think Keyword Trading Post is a perfect example of why that style of wording doesn't work for Magic. If that were a Hearthstone card, you could hover over the card and a nice pop-up would show up that would explain exactly what each of those words mean. For Magic... well, you're shit out of...

"Oh, yes, while this card says Kiki-Jiki on it, it's actually a Mountain."

How much would your calculus change if most of the "engine pieces" for the cube lived in the graveyard (e.g. Pyretic Ritual instead of mana rocks)? Would you still think Grip was the most palatable? (Thinking through which cards work well with retrace is legitimately giving me a bit of a...

I... completely forgot that my brain off-gassed the Aura idea. I think the idea was that I'd essentially be running creature auras instead of creatures, and seeing what happens. Looking at it again... I'm not sure it'd actually be all that interesting? The problem is that vanilla token + Aura...

Restore --- Actually, here's a question - assuming a cube where all instants and sorceries have retrace, which of these cards is most interesting? Invasive Surgery Grip of Amnesia Laquatus' Disdain

Retrace is also nice with Apprentice... but I felt like I had to highlight how nice it feels to turbo-charge Explore. Like, it makes it very likely that your Growth Spiral is effectively a two-mana Eureka Moment. And I love that.

Yeah, I think I'd be perfectly happy with a 5/6 flyer for {1}{U}{U} that I milled over or looted away at some point earlier in the game. It's in a similar boat to Roar of the Wurm for me — casting the "front half" is kinda meh (you're not casting it on T3 unless you've put effort into stocking...

What's even the point of Jumpstart 2, then? Don't tell me we lost sweet themed basics just so that we could get random anime-style reprints. Because that would be very sad.

My problem with Cleansing Beam is that more recent "Pyroclasm, but it doesn't hit your stuff if you build around it" designs have all cost {2}{R}, and they're still pretty meh. For 5 mana, I'd want it to deal at least 3 damage to each target.

She's a solid design, yeah - a weird little combo of Akroan Crusader and Signal Pest.

My only issue with Rally of the Righteous is that it's a gold card that asks me to either run a bunch of gold creatures or splash for it if I want to maximize its effectiveness. Granted, I've never drafted OG Ravnica, so I might be misassessing it.

Yeah, if the Radiance cards cost one less, a lot of them would go from being utter trash to being mediocre. Like, I'd play Incite Hysteria if it cost {1}{R}. Maybe. If I didn't have anything better for that slot.

What do you mean it's high variance? You just need a little bit of this, and it's perfectly reliable! Painter's Servant ... In all seriousness, Radiance is one of those mechanics that sucks because of the double-whammy of being wildly dependent on how good your format is at color fixing and...

I have been awake for... 39 hours at this point? I'm not sure how the hell that happened, but I'm going to off-jet a cube thought (because it makes me less sad than thinking about the slow, inexhorable death of people's love of Magic). Ajani's Chosen cube, where Auras take the place of...