I just wanna give a shoutout to a mechanic we all love and heap some praise on it: Ward fucking rocks
And not just because it's not hexproof, though it does deserve praise for that as well (
not that they've stopped with that bullshit)
I was watching Jeff Hoogland's spoiler review of the Alchemy cards and his breakdown of
Rimewall Protector stuck something in my head I've been turning over since.
Rimewall Protector is a 3 mana creature with ward 1, so if you consider the average removal spell (we're talking standard/historic here) is 2 mana, it trades even on mana while providing a good body and some hard to evaluate level of ETB value.
The four toughness might be notable but given standard's current big players (
Esika's Chariot,
Goldspan Dragon,
Adeline, Resplendent Cathar, and
Old-Growth Troll) make 3 damage removal spell less valuable than 4 point removal, both of which are options so that point is a bit moot. However something like this could come into play in your cube:
If there's two things I love it's:
-Volt Charge and no other proliferate effect
-
Karnstructs in any form
Bronze Guardian, a card I'm increasingly convinced only I love the more I hear about it, has a toughness that DOES matter. Now it's a 5 mana card, so your opponent needs to kill it with a 3 mana removal spell for it to be trading neutrally on mana. This can happen, there's plenty of playable 3 mana removal spells, and maybe your cube is all about
murder, but what I like is mine isn't; it's
doom blades as far as the eye can see, and this card still works.
As above, if we assume removal spells to be 2mv
in general you'd be trading down on mana, but the five toughness means you're likely to need two red removal spells unless somehow you're playing the
wendy's twitter cube.
The double strike also means that trading a small creature and a single burn spell to try and dodge paying for ward twice is a harder piece of the puzzle as well, as your creature might just get struck out.
You
can try and shrink it down over the course of a few turns by pointing removal spells at other artifacts, but it gives them ward 2 as well so this plan is still awkward, but (in classic ward fashion) still doable.
Iymrith, Desert Doom has the lovely "Ward - Huge While Untapped (TM)" which does lean a bit harder into the "aren't you glad this isn't hexproof" angle but I still love letting people choose their shields down moments.
Ward - Pay N Life feels more like a consequence than something that shapes your play patterns, but I think that's more because it changes how your opponent plays around it in a more fluid way. Afterall, people have more life to play with than mana on a given turn for the most part, but you only get so much. This might just be a visibility problem, where it feels "free" the turn your creature dies but actually benefits you when they're on the
squeeze five turns down the line cursing putting
infernal grasp in their deck
As well there is the absolutely brilliant "Ward - Discard a card" which as I understand it we all think is excellent but personally I haven't actually seen a card with that text I want to run.
Also I love this mechanic because I get to do shit like this and bring
Lightning Greaves back to my cube without tilting out:
Boros aggro won the finals against orzhov aggro, both decks playing 15 lands and ending the curve on three drops. Wild. Have I pushed aggro too hard? 
