On one hand, I adore all of the old frame reprints we're getting here, as well as the classic-framed basic lands -- for the first time in well over a decade! There's over a dozen cards I'm going to be able to happily swap into my cube for
MA: Maximum Aesthetic.
On the other hand, this is a pretty unfortunate set of cards to get the treatment. While brown-bordered artifacts are something that the Magic community has come to an agreement on as the strictly superior version (to the extent that the MtG community has ever come to any sort of agreement, at least), the gold cards and
particularly the colored artifacts are genuinely misleading without the revised frames we've been using for 18 of the 30 years of Magic's development.
Nothing in the frame indicates their artifact-ness. Even the above
Faithless Looting has a (wholly unnecessary but rad) graveyard symbol to indicate its value sitting in the graveyard. On
Angel of the Ruins, the blown-out white-on-white text makes the type line practically unreadable at a glance, and the fact that this giant angel is weak to
Naturalize is easy to get lost on a complicated board state. I will be avoiding these, and most of the gold cards getting a reprint here.
I'll happily make an exception for Expressive Iteration since the art obtusely conveys that it's an Izzet card at a glance and I just think it looks nice ok??
The worst offender of this misleading use of the classic frame can be found in the form of a reprint here:
Inclusion of this card in a playgroup with anything short of GP grinders (or whatever they're called these days) is nothing short of gross negligence as a Cube Curator.
But overall, very very happy to have these. Some great new designs too! Certainly making some considerations here myself:
Thopter Shop is probably too slow for my environment at present, but I love the way it draws people into recursive/staxy artifact decks. It's a great sign-post that really didn't need the "once each turn" emergency break for my cube, but this
is a Commander product after all.
Glint Raker is similarly underpowered in my cube, but I find it hard to hate a
Thieving Magpie with upside in the artifact deck, and I so dearly love to fill my graveyard. Don't imagine I can justify such a slow and durdly 4-drop that relies on artifact synergy, but it's hard to argue it's sweet design.
Sanwell, Avenger Ace is the most likely of the three here to crack my list. I currently am just shy of the artifact creature density to really get this going, but it's something I continually come back to as an increasingly-realistic dream. A 3/1 for 2 with solid potential for repeated card advantage is something I've got to pay attention to, even if it means I may have to add in the ugly Star Fox gag card to get there.
There's another card or two I'm going to take a look at but I've hit the maximum for file uploads for a single post, so I'll hope someone else brings them up rather than double-posting (read: procrastinating) any more.
