I wish the mountain in the basic cycle was more evocative of the show. Mt. Bikini Bottom looks like it debuted in Season 7 and aired in 2011. Considering every other moment captured in the Secret Lair is from the pre-movie run (generally considered the golden age of the Sponge), this is an (extremely small) disappointment. I'll be picking up a set of the basics for my Cube's land box and an extra mountain for my mountain binder as is tradition.
I think my playgroup would be 70/30 split on "upgrading"
Counterspell to the meme version. Following MaRo's advice, I should do it anyways, because it's better to give people experiences with the highest resonance than provide a great experience in aggregate, even if it upsets some players. But also, I do think the negative on this is bigger than most things -- I can't see any of my friends "quitting Cube" for the inclusion, but it may make them a lot less likely to be jazzed about it! I guess I'll ask them what they think, but it doesn't do anything for me personally.
Fun fact: I made a SpongeBob TCG when I was in middle school using
Pokémon Project Studio! Maybe I'll post it here at some point, I recently found the cards and they're pretty funny when I compare them to this.
--
On another note, I was watching
LSV's first draft of his Retro Cube the other day, which is meant to evoke the era of Cube in the mid-2010s, with cards generally only coming from pre-Amonkhet but with a modern design sensibility. While it's funny for me to consider this a "retro" cube, it certainly is in Magic terms, with hardly a card under 10 years of age. My own Cube looked reasonably similar to
this a decade ago!
It did make me nostalgic on its face, but it also brought up three big takeaways for me:
1. It was much more skill-testing
Looking through LSV's decklist, it's not a "gigabrain" deck or anything, but it's something that would be hard for anyone beyond a Limited grinder to concept. The gameplay is also much more compelling than modern Vintage 8-mans, with a lot more focus on midrange and incremental value.
Honestly, this is not necessarily a good thing! Most of my playgroup is reasonably casual, and I remember how easy it was for the lower half of my playgroup to make it through Cube night without a single win under their belt during this time. If I'm trying to maximize for fun, having Cube be the most competitive format around isn't ideal, and the occasional card like Sheoldred act like mythics in retail draft that give a fighting chance to players across skill levels.
2. The lack of haymakers was refreshing
This may sound contrary to my previous point, but it's not: the most popular bombs in Cube these days are not 5-mana, they're
Gut, True Soul Zealot or
Ajani, Nacatl Pariah that are engines and payoffs all in one. It was lovely to watch some Cube where every card had to pull its weight, but rarely did more than one thing for the larger strategy.
I've talked about this elsewhere on these forums, but I recently took my first step in de-powering my Cube, and am looking for a big shift in cutting off a bit of the top end -- the very kinds of cards I just referenced. Inti is one of my favorite cards in terms of play-pattern from recent years, but I also do acknowledge it's a single card that's very capable of taking over a game...for just two mana. It very much feels like the whole "I play
Fable of the Mirror-Breaker to support discard and artifacts-matter" meme from that one Cube "bracket" system I very much resemble.
I want Cube to be a place where my playgroup can play with some of the most powerful cards from Magic's history, where they can make sweet decks and play with the best of the best, but the best of the best in the last few years have been
so much so that they're seriously invalidating the 30 years of
Magic before them. Like Andy said on Paper Radio,
Psychic Frog is essentially fair but super powerful, but can the same be said about
Broadside Bombardiers or
Ocelot Pride?
Immediately after watching the draft, I went back to my Cube and looked at what it would mean to get rid of my most egregious haymakers. Just removing ~20 cards from my 720 list would be enough. "Much to think about,"
as a wise poet once said.
3. I feel validated
One thing I
do really like about modern cards is: Commander-specific cards.
One thing I really missed watching LSV's Cube was all of the cards designed with Commander in mind. From
Toxic Deluge to
Occult Epiphany, Commander-made cards align more with the design principles I have for my Cube than a retail Magic expansion. That may seem weird, considering I am a big fan of retail limited and want as much of that
feeling in Cube as possible, but when
Jace, the Mind Sculptor is the same "rarity" as every other card in your list, the juiced cards that make their way into precons are, in the same vein as Modern Horizons sets, the best way to enable new archetypes and strategies for many Cubes.
I think Cube is a better format with hyper-specific synergies available to include as archetypes. I like being able to get powerful individual cards doing things that are weird or beg to be built around in a bigger way. I think
Staff of the Storyteller and
Astrid Peth are excellent tools that would be impossibly hard to justify in a mainline expansion and that
Death-Greeter's Champion would ruin too any retail limited experience.
It's not my first or second priority, but I still want Cube to be a collection of the best and most famous cards from the game's history, and now, that means Commander, too. There are plenty of ways the sensibilities of that multiplayer experience are at odds with what I'm going for with Cube, but there's more overlap than folks give credit for. Also, most of my players (and most Magic players in general) are Commander players first and foremost, and catering Cube to those sensibilities is not just reasonable, but thoughtful.
Thanks LSV for making me think all these things, I guess?