I'm really partial to Aetherling myself, but after playing a blue control deck in a powered cube last weekend and finding that Aetherling was arguably the best card in my deck there, too, I'm wondering if it's a little much. The Meloku suggestions sound great - I'm generally not a fan of unbounded token spam, but in this case, the pack of 1/1 flyers might present a slightly less hopeless situation for the opponent than a literally unkillable, evasive shapeshifter.
Tangentially related to the topic, I actually disagree with the notion that blue control decks should be expected to win primarily with grizzly bears. While that might be how some games of Magic play out, I don't feel that supporting creatureless, draw-go blue control in cube is necessarily the best design. I suspect that the notion of having no win conditions in your blue control decks was borne of a different era of cube design, but even constructed control decks in the last half decade haven't borne much resemblance to the draw-go decks of old, save for one season where Nephalia Drownyard was a legitimate finisher. Expecting your control decks to have complete and utter mastery over the board state, such that any 2/2 flyer can polish off the opponent, can set the bar too high to be realistic, when other blue decks will be competing for and sniping the best counterspells, bounce, draw engines, and other spicy effects. I personally think it's important to give control tools to stop messing around and simply close out the game when it has partial but not overwhelming control of the battlefield, and Aetherling is one of the best tools in its arsenal to do that.
Tangentially related to the topic, I actually disagree with the notion that blue control decks should be expected to win primarily with grizzly bears. While that might be how some games of Magic play out, I don't feel that supporting creatureless, draw-go blue control in cube is necessarily the best design. I suspect that the notion of having no win conditions in your blue control decks was borne of a different era of cube design, but even constructed control decks in the last half decade haven't borne much resemblance to the draw-go decks of old, save for one season where Nephalia Drownyard was a legitimate finisher. Expecting your control decks to have complete and utter mastery over the board state, such that any 2/2 flyer can polish off the opponent, can set the bar too high to be realistic, when other blue decks will be competing for and sniping the best counterspells, bounce, draw engines, and other spicy effects. I personally think it's important to give control tools to stop messing around and simply close out the game when it has partial but not overwhelming control of the battlefield, and Aetherling is one of the best tools in its arsenal to do that.
