I recommend playing it with haste creatures. Probably has no place whatsoever in cube. Renowned Weaponsmith is pretty saucy though, two mana is a lot, even if you can spend it only on artifacts.
Also, Vendilion Clique is still a very good card and incidental faerie support for the Sprite. Not that I have much of a clue about Modern, but I wouldn't play Spellstutter without the 3/1.
Titanic Cloudskate seems rather straightforward? I had no problem filling my Simic section with impactful existing cards either. Is the Cloudskate filling a specific hole in your cube?
That's actually not half-bad. I mean, it's super fragile and dies to any chump block, but it can dish out an absurd amount of damage for its casting cost.
I know! I run two Bonesplitters, a Madcap Skills, and several other power-enhancers, and still he disappoints. I couldn't figure out why, so I just had to assume he wasn't as good at the table as he looked on paper.
I was thinking the same thing! There's also sacrifice effects like Goblin Bombardment. Activate, sacrifice, the ability on the stack will try to do as much as possible. Bonus points if you have a sacrifice outlet and a mimic vat of course ;)
Man, the reverse would have been golden (heh heh) in my multicolor cube. Oddly enough I don't want my drafters to feel punished for playing more than one color... (in other words, why is this appearing in a multicolor block?)
Yeah, I went through that phase. Then I started playing the cube with the Pox package, and nobody was ever picking Pox itself, though Smokestack and Braids were well-loved. So, I went and did the only sensible thing, remove Pox.
Oh, you want to run a mono-blue aggro decks. Yeah, that's not going to happen soon is it? :)
I combine Raptor and the excellent 3+ cc drops with the aggro drops of another color if I want to draft a "blue" aggro deck. Blue-based tempo decks are pretty good, despite the lack of aggressive blue...
Cloudfin Raptor is the real deal though, I cut Delver of Secrets completely and now play two Raptors in my cube.
I do wonder what your definition of "cheap good creature" is though if you lament the fact that blue never gets good cheap creatures. Snapcaster Mage and Vendilion Clique are pretty...
I solved my problem by going the other way around with my cube guilds. Now I don't have to play Boros and I can play Gruul instead. I like Xenagos a lot more than Ajani Vengeant :D
Funny that you mention those cards. I love Smokestack (and Braids) to death. It's not that I don't like resource denial strategies, but, like CML put it, that Ajani can worsen both color screw and mana screw.