General (DMU & DMC) Dominaria United Testing/Includes Thread

[TrainmasterGT]

Over-valued
Haughty Djinn - I just don't think this has the staying power in blue's always-competitive slice of cube. The extra pip needs to represent significant power, and I don't think it does here, archetype support be damned.

Under-valued
Sheoldred, the Apocalypse - Ditto here, you don't need draw 7s to realize the power represented here. Unreal.

I agree with most of your takes except these two.

Haughty Djinn– If anything, I think this card is being underrated by the community. While I would agree this isn't the most powerful cheap Baneslayer we've seen lately, it is one of only a select few three-mana Blue creatures that can really bring the fight to the opponent.

Blue does not have very many cheap finishers for tempo-oriented decks. Even though URx tempo is a fun and powerful strategy, the playable Blue cards often end up being support for Red prowess dudes. You might get one Murktide Regent as a late-game finisher, but that's about it. Compare this to Constructed where Delver of Secrets is a premier threat that arguably created the contemporary notion of "blue red tempo." In those formats, Blue gets to have both a great early game threat coupled with it's full support package. However, Delver doesn't translate well to most Cubes, so we find ourselves back in the original issue. Haughty Djinn solves this issue by being an early-game scaling threat that also acts as an amazing late-game damage source. It gives tempo decks a nice threat to protect and murder the opponent with. It certainly stands head and shoulder above most other blue threes, which are either painfully small or are highly parasitic to specific archetypes. Really the only blue three-drop tempo creature that seems better than Haughty Djinn right now is Brazen Borrower, and that is mostly because it is a tempo spell stapled to an evasive idiot. It's definitely not played as a finisher.

Hot take: if I were to criticize an overrated blue three from Dominaria United, I would pick the Horizons set uncommon masquerading as a Vintage Cube card. I bet at least a 3rd of the people testing this will cut it in the future.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse– I think this card, by contrast, is being overrated because of it's showing in standard. Mono-Black is the best deck in standard right now, and Shelodred is missed by the majority of highly-played removal spells. Because of this, people almost always see her when she sits on the battlefield for 3+ turns and kills you, but almost never when she just dies within a turn of being played and effectively acts as a fancy paperweight. I think outside of low-removal environments, Shelodred is going to die before her full value is unleashed.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse going to be fine in MTGO knockoffs, but everywhere else she's probably just worse than Siege Rhino. Why mess with perfection?


I think this is a fun concept for a post, so I'm going to do a couple of my own. : )

Over-Valued
Shivan Devastator– I understand why so many people are excited to try this card and want it to be good. Big scalable awesome Timmy dragon? Cool! But I think outside of Cubes designed to accommodate big stuff like this, it's probably going to fall flat. It doesn't scale all that well until we get to the 5+ cost range, at which point the mana investment starts to become a liability. I think some people around here who have designed environments specifically to accommodate stuff like this (Cough * @safra * Cough) will have good luck with it, but I think about 15% of the 20% testing this will probably axe it at some point.

Phoenix Chick- This card is fine but nothing special. It's seemed a little bit clunky to me so far, and it's made me not want to play it anymore. I think many others will eventually feel the same way.

Also, the art is not nearly as good as what I was hoping for when this card was leaked. I'm sad about that.

Cult Conscript– Blaggro seems increasingly weak with time and I would not be surprised if people start cutting it. Black has gotten a ton of pushed midrange, reanimator, and graveyard stuff over the past year, and at this point I think the easiest place to cut from in order to accommodate these cool new cards is slots dedicated to blaggro. Black can still serve as a great secondary color for aggro decks without needing 87 1-drops, anyway.

While I think this card will remain popular in Cubes with Blaggro, I don't think 43% of people will be playing it 2 years from now.

Under-Valued
Archangel of Wrath and Urborg Lhurgoyf– My judgment on these two may be clouded by how cool I think these are, but I think their flexibility and brew-ability make them significantly more appealing than other portions of the community is seeing as of now. I bet one of them could see play if Standard stops being mono-black oriented at some point in the near future.

Nishoba Brawler– I think this card will go up with Leyline Binding. It seems very powerful for Zoo Cubes.

Balmor, Battlemage Captain– This is the single best Prowess signpost we have I feel. Most Cubes with redundancy for Red Burn and Blue Cantrips should consider playing this.

 

[Mown]

the idea that cards can be under-rated or over-rated suggests that cubes are normalized enough that you can make generalized statements about how the majority of the community wants their cubes to function which is probably fairly accurate but I would still like to object to it

 

[landofMordor]

Thanks as always for maintaining these. Would kill to be able to break out cubes tagged with rarity restrictions or that are EDH-focused for the analysis, but I can 1) technically do that myself if I just want to play around in CubeCobra, and 2) I know how much work that would be!

Especially on the heels of the retrospective y'all posted today, I can very much see which cards are going to be over/under-valued, even with just a little bit of play on them.

Over-valued
Evolved Sleeper - Black aggro never seems to have terribly good staying power in the typical cubes on CubeCobra, I don't think this'll be the exception.
Serra Paragon - Just because I adore her doesn't mean she'll stick around for others; white's 4-drops are too competitive, and like you said in your more recent article, this is the kind of card that gets a new shiny version nearly every expansion these days
Haughty Djinn - I just don't think this has the staying power in blue's always-competitive slice of cube. The extra pip needs to represent significant power, and I don't think it does here, archetype support be damned.

Under-valued
Leyline Binding - Again, going back to your thesis from today's article, I think people are strongly influenced by constructed formats in their cube curation. This isn't strictly a bad thing -- part of the fun of Cube is playing with the "best of" from your other Magic experiences -- but I'll be shocked if it's not one of the strongest DMU holdouts in a year's time.
Sheoldred, the Apocalypse - Ditto here, you don't need draw 7s to realize the power represented here. Unreal.
The Raven Man - It's my personal goal and ambition to change the Cube community's perspective on this card. I will make it happen, even if I have to do it alone. Raven Man is sick as hell y'all, and Cube is the perfect format for a novel card like this.

Somehow I missed this excellent reply -- thank you!

I think I agree with you on most of the specific cards you mention, and good luck with Raven Man

I'll also see about filtering the list for multiplayer. It already has rarity filters for the Peasant/Pauper-eligible cards, which should get us partly there. But multiplayer is such a different context that it may be worth zooming in for that -- or maybe next time I'll at least devote a paragraph to multiplayer, specifically.

Hot take: if I were to criticize an overrated blue three from Dominaria United, I would pick the Horizons set uncommon masquerading as a Vintage Cube card. I bet at least a 3rd of the people testing this will cut it in the future.

boom roasted

the idea that cards can be under-rated or over-rated suggests that cubes are normalized enough that you can make generalized statements about how the majority of the community wants their cubes to function which is probably fairly accurate but I would still like to object to it

I think cubes are probably bell curves about some averages, but they've got an enormous variance. Saying "the average cube that responded to the LP set survey is over-valuing Aether Channeler" is like saying "the average Dutch male is taller than the average American" -- it's true factually, but for a randomly sampled individual, the average may not be applicable at all. (I'm American and ~1.8m tall, so I'll be taller than any below-average Dutchman, meaning that the general claim only applies to me half the time for a normally distributed population.)

So, tl;dr -- the general statements may hold true for the averages, but individuals shouldn't take those statements as prescriptive, because the population has such large variance.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Train, my man, why did you have to do it to em?

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Train, my man, why did you have to do it to em?

Because I like dealing 5 damage to a creature without flying for .

 

[Mown]

I think cubes are probably bell curves about some averages, but they've got an enormous variance. Saying "the average cube that responded to the LP set survey is over-valuing Aether Channeler" is like saying "the average Dutch male is taller than the average American" -- it's true factually, but for a randomly sampled individual, the average may not be applicable at all. (I'm American and ~1.8m tall, so I'll be taller than any below-average Dutchman, meaning that the general claim only applies to me half the time for a normally distributed population.)

So, tl;dr -- the general statements may hold true for the averages, but individuals shouldn't take those statements as prescriptive, because the population has such large variance.

Tallness is an objective measurement. When you call a card overrated, you presume to know the criteria by which those people rate cards, which is wholly subjective.

Which, to reiterate, I think is something that can be done with a generally high degree of accuracy, I just don't like that reality because it presupposes a level of rigidness to the way people conceptualize cubes.

 

[Chris Taylor]

To try and stop us from getting TOO deep into the whole "but what IS cube" discussion, I think that even if incorrect, the idea that generally a majority (or even the largest subset) of cube owners agree on how to make "the cube" and do so at least partially motivated by power is a helpful stance to take.

That being said, it's one perspective among many and in no way stops you from doing what you want to be doing.

 

[MilesOfficial]

I agree with most of your takes except these two.

Haughty Djinn– If anything, I think this card is being underrated by the community. While I would agree this isn't the most powerful cheap Baneslayer we've seen lately, it is one of only a select few three-mana Blue creatures that can really bring the fight to the opponent.

Consider me Haughty Djinn-curious. I'll pick up a copy and try him out, thank you for this! I love tempo cards, and you've sold me that this fits the role I had always wished Wake Thrasher would and never could.

[Insert unbelievably hot take about Aether Channeler]

The battlefields of Riptide Lab have trained you well, my friend.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse– I think this card, by contrast, is being overrated because of it's showing in standard.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse going to be fine in MTGO knockoffs, but everywhere else she's probably just worse than Siege Rhino. Why mess with perfection?

It's honestly a small percentage of cubes playing this card, relative to other DMU picks. When it comes to Black's 4-drop suite, Sheoldred has all the same disadvantages as the rest of the grindy midrange options, but also has the advantage of being sweet. People love the Phyrexians, and this is a card that makes many a Magic player well up with a giddy, somewhat evil laugh inside the first time they read it and start dreaming of wheel effects. I don't think it'll make it in the top 5 most-played black 5s any time soon (not that I can tell anymore RIP my favorite CubeCobra feature of sorting by cube count) but I think, in terms of which DMU cards stick around in lists a year from now, even if its standard performance falls off a cliff (which it won't), I'd wager strongly it'll move up the ranks.

I'm not personally compelled to pick it up because it's replacement-level as I mentioned before so maybe I'm being a hypocrite here or whatever but that's ok.

Phoenix Chick- Also, the art is not nearly as good as what I was hoping for when this card was leaked. I'm sad about that.

Right?? It kills me. I feel like red gets the short-end of the stick with sick art on the cards I want to play most. At least the new Squee makes up for it.

Somehow I missed this excellent reply -- thank you!

I think I agree with you on most of the specific cards you mention, and good luck with Raven Man

I'll also see about filtering the list for multiplayer. It already has rarity filters for the Peasant/Pauper-eligible cards, which should get us partly there. But multiplayer is such a different context that it may be worth zooming in for that -- or maybe next time I'll at least devote a paragraph to multiplayer, specifically.

Thank you! I'm interested either way, and will probably be doing some analysis of my own on the Cube Cobra datasets that I may ask to publish with y'all once I move and get settled in my new place / relearn some Python.

I think cubes are probably bell curves about some averages, but they've got an enormous variance. Saying "the average cube that responded to the LP set survey is over-valuing Aether Channeler" is like saying "the average Dutch male is taller than the average American" -- it's true factually, but for a randomly sampled individual, the average may not be applicable at all. (I'm American and ~1.8m tall, so I'll be taller than any below-average Dutchman, meaning that the general claim only applies to me half the time for a normally distributed population.)

So, tl;dr -- the general statements may hold true for the averages, but individuals shouldn't take those statements as prescriptive, because the population has such large variance.

the idea that cards can be under-rated or over-rated suggests that cubes are normalized enough that you can make generalized statements about how the majority of the community wants their cubes to function which is probably fairly accurate but I would still like to object to it

I want to very much appreciate and support Mown's point, while also acknowledging it's worthwhile to explore the data landofMordor style. There are negatives to this -- huge negatives, even. Cube is not a "format" as much as it is a mindset, and Cubes like the MODO lists and wtwlf's "strongest in every slot" serve to narrow the general population's imagination and understanding of what cube is and, even more importantly, what cube "should be". Many things that fundamentalize Cube are practical, like standardized sizes linked to anticipated playgroups, or broad concepts regarding color balancing for the sake of support diverse drafting opportunities. Some I would consider neutral, like adopting banlists from constructed formats. But many heuristics of cube, which translate into what is essentially harmless language like "must-includes" or "obvious upgrades" can often undermine what makes Cube Cube, and these attitudes can be heightened/justified by play rates.

I mean, I say these things, but I'm usually talking about for someone with a similar Cube philosophy to me, which, again, I think a lot of people who say these things are as well, and it's not a problem it just contributes

But in my estimation, these analytics are a net benefit to the ecosystem because it does not meaningfully accelerate that issue while simultaneously providing a wealth of opportunity for discussion and consideration. I absolutely love Lucky Paper content, I adore adored playing with the stats in Cube Cobra for things like "Red 1 MV creatures" to see Play % by size of Cube, and I find the conversations surrounding these kinds of articles to be some of the best I can find outside of the Riptide Lab community.

So yeah, Mown's got it down that it's rough to make generalized statements about "the Cube community" while still very much valuing the process of doing it, and I think we can continue to help change the mindset of the general Magic player that "Cube" doesn't have to mean the specific set of parameters a MODO player may reasonably mistake it for.

 

[alvoi]

Hot take: if I were to criticize an overrated blue three from Dominaria United, I would pick the Horizons set uncommon masquerading as a Vintage Cube card. I bet at least a 3rd of the people testing this will cut it in the future.

Man-o'-War would never let you choose the wrong option

 

[blacksmithy]

folks… Train’s not even saying that Aether Channeler is a bad card, just that it’s closer in power to a strong retail uncommon than to a vintage-cube maindeckable. and he’s absolutely correct.

 

[shamizy]

Sure, but that doesn't mean that it's unworthy for inclusion or overrated. I don't think anyone has been looking at it as some archetype defining card or best in show 3 drop. It's not that. The whole appeal of it is that it's a Charming Prince like glue card to supplement archetypes. Only this one has relevant modes on all 3 either drawing you a card, bouncing any nonland permanent, or creating another blocker. Strong retail uncommons are the glue that make good Limited formats stick.

If you want to build out a cube environment that plays well and is worth revisiting, one that is welcoming to both veterans and newcomers alike, you need to consider and include some number of these kind of cards to make things function.

 

[Nanonox]

Really the only blue three-drop tempo creature that seems better than Haughty Djinn right now is Brazen Borrower, and that is mostly because it is a tempo spell stapled to an evasive idiot. It's definitely not played as a finisher.

What are your thoughts on



In my experience, it hasn't been difficult at all to cast it for the reduced cost, often on turn 3 after a cantrip or burn spell. Even later, it's easy to double spell and hold up interaction. The card selection and prowess are nice bonuses. Then you can have some nut draws where it costs 2 with Manamorphose, Frantic Search and Gitaxian Probe if that is your jam. I also like that it doesn't care about your GY. You could delve away your GY to reduce Treasure Cruise to a single mana and still cast it.

I would rate the Entity above Haughty Djinn myself. It's kind of cheating as it technically costs 5 mana, but my experience has been that it's much cheaper in practice.

Under-Valued
Balmor, Battlemage Captain– This is the single best Prowess signpost we have I feel. Most Cubes with redundancy for Red Burn and Blue Cantrips should consider playing this.

Wholeheartedly agree with you. Balmor's anthem is amazing at turning do nothing cantrips into big damage. It's cheap enough that you just cast it on turn 2 and continue with your game plan while reaping the rewards.

 

[Erik Twice]

Ok, here's what I've seen so far.



First, The Raven Manis perfect. I did not think too much about it at first, but it is pretty much that fabled second copy of Young Pyromancer. It doesn't trigger in the same way, but it is very similar in how they can be used in all sorts of different archetypes. In fact, both discard and spells have a heavy crossover in my cube so it has been a huge winner. It's even a human, a wizard and it has a hate-bearish quality in the right matchups. I'm liking it a lot.



Serra Paragon is the fair Lurrus. It's not as cheap, it has no companion clause and, most importantly, it doesn't slot into every single deck in your cube by virtue of costing hybrid mana. So far I like it and there are very few 4 mana white creatures I actually like.



This is just an improvement over previous cards. It only costs one coloured mana, it has better tribal types and it bounces more than creatures. It does away with the need for other "ETB Draw a card" junk and it creates a token if you somehow need it. There's little reason to run older cards, which were a bit questionable, when this one works better.



Bazaar Trademage dissapointed me. It looked great in paper, but I never seemed to want it. It's very good because its stats are fantastic, but the actual ability wans't coming into play as much as I wanted it to. Haughty Djinn seems to fill a similar role but also has a powerful ability for storm and spells decks. So far I like it more than Trademage, let's see if it works out.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Sure, but that doesn't mean that it's unworthy for inclusion or overrated.

Aether Channeler is a perfectly good card... just not a "second most popular card in the set" good card. I could see 10% or 15% of people responding to the survey playing this card. That's roughly where the other reasonable archetype roleplayers landed. 52% of respondents' testing is a lot, though. That's more people than tested some all-stars like Dragon's Rage Channeler (29%), Woe Strider (40%), and Power Word Kill (48%), and these are only cards where people were generally pretty close in evaluating how the cards actually played in practice.

When a card that's really not that powerful or interesting is getting better numbers than some of the most well-regarded cards in previous sets, calling it overrated is a perfectly fair conclusion. As I said, I think the number of people playing this card is going to drop significantly in the future. I don't even think that's a stretch position, the card is just overhyped.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

What are your thoughts on



In my experience, it hasn't been difficult at all to cast it for the reduced cost, often on turn 3 after a cantrip or burn spell. Even later, it's easy to double spell and hold up interaction. The card selection and prowess are nice bonuses. Then you can have some nut draws where it costs 2 with Manamorphose, Frantic Search and Gitaxian Probe if that is your jam. I also like that it doesn't care about your GY. You could delve away your GY to reduce Treasure Cruise to a single mana and still cast it.

I would rate the Entity above Haughty Djinn myself. It's kind of cheating as it technically costs 5 mana, but my experience has been that it's much cheaper in practice.


Wholeheartedly agree with you. Balmor's anthem is amazing at turning do nothing cantrips into big damage. It's cheap enough that you just cast it on turn 2 and continue with your game plan while reaping the rewards.

I think Stormwing Entity goes into the same deck as Haughty Djinn and a Cube supporting entity should also probably run the Djinn. Entity is a bit more specialized and really wants to be going into specifically the Izzet Blitz style deck so it can consistently be cast for . Meanwhile, Haughty Djinn is still happy when it's being played in reactive strategies which can protect it with counterspells. While it's a little bit less impactful in the early game for the all-out attack Izzet builds, I think it scales well enough over time that it's not noticeably worse than entity outside of nut draws.

Tl;dr Stormwing Entity has more opportunities for explosive starts while Haughty Djinn is more rounded. I like both cards as blue creatures fo Izzet and will play them both.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

Man-o'-War would never let you choose the wrong option

Man-o'-War was a hero, we just couldn't see it.

 

[landofMordor]

I adore adored playing with the stats in Cube Cobra

 

[TrainmasterGT]

View attachment 7463

Man you're on fire today!

 

[Velrun]

Aether Channeler is a perfectly good card... just not a "second most popular card in the set" good card. I could see 10% or 15% of people responding to the survey playing this card. That's roughly where the other reasonable archetype roleplayers landed. 52% of respondents' testing is a lot, though. That's more people than tested some all-stars like Dragon's Rage Channeler (29%), Woe Strider (40%), and Power Word Kill (48%), and these are only cards where people were generally pretty close in evaluating how the cards actually played in practice.

When a card that's really not that powerful or interesting is getting better numbers than some of the most well-regarded cards in previous sets, calling it overrated is a perfectly fair conclusion. As I said, I think the number of people playing this card is going to drop significantly in the future. I don't even think that's a stretch position, the card is just overhyped.

I should hope most people don’t test cards because they are powerful but because they go into the themes and strategies that the cube offer well.

In general: When talking about overrated and underrated we do it from a different viewpoint as cube owners as we do when we are constructed and limited players. A contructed or limited player will almost only think about the power level of a card. As cube owners we sculpt the environment for the players so the power level shouldn’t be MUCH of a concern (within the boundaries of the cube power level span) because the environment we create is a zero sum game.

To me it is logical that all cubes that use to run Man-o’-War is now testing this new variant.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

Most excited for...



Also will eventually test...

 

[Peter LaCara]

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse– I think this card, by contrast, is being overrated because of it's showing in standard. Mono-Black is the best deck in standard right now, and Shelodred is missed by the majority of highly-played removal spells. Because of this, people almost always see her when she sits on the battlefield for 3+ turns and kills you, but almost never when she just dies within a turn of being played and effectively acts as a fancy paperweight. I think outside of low-removal environments, Shelodred is going to die before her full value is unleashed.

Sheoldred, the Apocalypse going to be fine in MTGO knockoffs, but everywhere else she's probably just worse than Siege Rhino. Why mess with perfection?

First, I'm astonished to hear you denigrate a card that is so close to Siege Rhino. Second, the fact that you're saying it's overrated tells me that you haven't played with the card. Sheoldred plays much better than she reads. 5 toughness dodges a ton of removal, deathtouch is hugely relevant, and she ends games against some decks by herself. I've been playing her in Historic, which is easily as powerful as most Riptide-level cubes, and she beats face extremely hard there. You can just hear some decks shatterpause when she hits the table because they just have no answer. I would play her over a thousand Kalitases.

 

[safra]

First, I'm astonished to hear you denigrate a card that is so close to Siege Rhino. Second, the fact that you're saying it's overrated tells me that you haven't played with the card. Sheoldred plays much better than she reads. 5 toughness dodges a ton of removal, deathtouch is hugely relevant, and she ends games against some decks by herself. I've been playing her in Historic, which is easily as powerful as most Riptide-level cubes, and she beats face extremely hard there. You can just hear some decks shatterpause when she hits the table because they just have no answer. I would play her over a thousand Kalitases.

Strongly co-signing this. Sheoldred even came 4th in a big Legacy tournament this week - as a four-of, no less. The card is SO real and GENUINELY thrilling to play with.


Yes, to Train's point - sometimes she does eat a kill spell on your upkeep. But "dies to Path" isn't really a very interesting way to evaluate a Baneslayer - and Sheoldred is a really exciting and powerful Baneslayer that has a lot of synergy to go with her raw power.

 

[TrainmasterGT]

First, I'm astonished to hear you denigrate a card that is so close to Siege Rhino.

I denigrate this card because it's not Siege Rhino and I think treating them the same does an injustice to both.

The fact that you're saying it's overrated tells me that you haven't played with the card. Sheoldred plays much better than she reads.

I'll come back to this point, but the fact that it plays better than it reads is the crux of why I think it's being overrated now.

5 toughness dodges a ton of removal, deathtouch is hugely relevant, and she ends games against some decks by herself. I've been playing her in Historic, which is easily as powerful as most Riptide-level cubes, and she beats face extremely hard there. You can just hear some decks shatterpause when she hits the table because they just have no answer. I would play her over a thousand Kalitases.

So I think the big reasons why Sheoldred has been so good in some of the smaller constructed formats is that a lot of decks don't play very many cards that can cleanly answer her and because she dunks on certain types of decks very hard. If you're playing Izzet Phoenix or something, chances are your deck is both drawing multiple cards per turn and doesn't have something that can kill her. In this use case, she's great, because she's both hosing the opponent and not losing to her primary weakness. We also see this dynamic play out in Standard, because even though black midrange can kill a Sheoldred, they usually don't draw their removal because they don't generally run more than 2-4 hard removal spells in a deck (not counting some meaty bois cast for 7 mana). The point being: we see a massive lack of things that actually kill Sheoldred in matchups where she is good.

Obviously, in matches where Sheoldred does die consistently, she's a lot worse. Midrange mirrors (in formats with actual removal), the Control matchup, and some Combo matches are all pretty bad for Sheoldred because she'll either get countered or die before doing anything useful. Of course, this is format-dependent. Just saying "card dies to removal and therefore is bad everywhere" is not a particularly good position, but that's not the argument I'm trying to make. I think she's being overrated by the community at large now.

Let's go back to this point:

The fact that you're saying it's overrated tells me that you haven't played with the card. Sheoldred plays much better than she reads.

Sheoldred underwhelmed a lot of people when she was first previewed. She just looked like a bad Siege Rhino. And by all accounts, that should have been how she played. However, her body and abilities meant she managed to be relevant in a couple of constructed formats. Good for her, and good for WOTC for designing a cool and well-balanced midrange card. But I think people are seeing Sheoldred put up some real results in tournaments and thinking "wow, this is a cool card for my Cube. I was ignroing it 15 minutes ago but now I think it's the bees knees!" While there are almost certainly people who legitimately did not understand how powerful this card could be, I think a lot of people are just looking at random top 8 results and saying, "oh this card is good," without actually asking why.

Sheoldred is only good when she's not dying. This means she wants to be played against decks that can't remove her. In constructed, this is not a difficult ask depending on the meta. In Cube world, things become muddled. A lot of Cubes tend to have the majority of their field consist of midrange decks with some additional aggro, control, and combo decks. This means that most matchups aren't necessarily favorable for Sheoldred in a given Cube. Sure, she dunks on aggro and some combo decks pretty hard, but these matches are unlikely to be more than 25% of the field in any given draft. The rest of the table will probably be some combination of Midrange or Control, both of which have good matchups against Sheoldred when the format has good removal. In formats with good removal and good matchups against Sheoldred the "why" she's good just isn't there.

This isn't to say Sheoldred is bad card or anything, far from it. She's just being overrated by Cubers. Sheoldred is not a format-defining card, she's defined by the format. She's good in formats where she survives and mediocre in ones where she does not. She's quintessentially a Baneslayer Angel, just with a better rate than the namesake of her classification. There are plenty of places where Sheoldred is good, but I think a lot of people who jumped on the Sheoldred bandwagon after seeing her in standard don't have formats where she's going to excel. Her lack of immediate value really hurts her in matchups where getting an incremental advantage is vital.

I believe Sheoldred is not going to have a long-term home in many of the Cubes currently testing her. That's ok, because some people are going to find her and love her. But I think a lot of others are buying into the hype from Standard without asking why she's good.

 

[Onderzeeboot]

I can't get over the fact that you're calling her Shelodred in your entire post

 

[TrainmasterGT]

I can't get over the fact that you're calling her Shelodred in your entire post

Dyslexia strikes again!