General Archetypes you'd never play

[Onderzeeboot]

I highly recommend installing Shandalar (1997) and having a go
The final boss has ~500hp by my recollection, and you've got access to not exactly the best creatures.
One of the ways to beat him is by looping timetwisters while swords to plowshares'ing his threats

I once won with a Mind Bomb + Ancestral Recall + Hypnotic Specter deck :')

 

[TrainmasterGT]

TLDR: Viewing these one archetype cards as something a cube should support with many cards makes them parasitic.

But that's the specific implementation of these cards I have a problem with, and the reason why I don't support archetypes where playing one of these cards is the entire goal. There are plenty of situations where you can make one of these cards part of a more coherent whole instead 0f having the deck revolve around resolving one of them and hoping you can win from the aftermath. As we saw with Onder's Wildfire as a part of R/G midrange example, some of these cards can work well as support pieces for other decks.

But that's not normally how they get used.

Most of the time when people throw Wildfire or Upheaval in their lists, it's not as a small piece of a well-planned synergy archetype. Instead, many designers opt to use them in conjunction with mana acceleration for "lol I just blew up the world" moments. That's really not great design and it leads to a lot of un-fun game states for everyone involved.

You can definitely do something weird with these cards as a part of a broader archetype and make something fun, but that's not the issue. I'm specifically talking about archetypes where the entire deck is designed around "I'm going to play Opposition and hope it lets me win." The former can be cool, the latter is trite and simply poor design in most cases.