Yeah, Hawk comes with a posse. Descendant and Renewed Faith are both for the Gilded Lotus control decks which really want to have something good to play on the same turn off Lotus, and Descendant is a Human while the cycling on Renewed Faith works with the Miracle subtheme.
Surprised I didn't chime in on this earlier as this (though I'm five months late to the party) is very bad thinking, which, as you, Dom, are brilliant, surprises me. It's a pleasure to read about how your thinking has changed throughout the thread, though. RiptideLab has been good for all of our brains in a way that Sam Black, in his insular and weird universe, cannot possibly put into words in any StarCityGames article that's ostensibly about pedagogy.
Parsing the above quotation as "in a control deck that really wants 1-2 copies of a particular card to run all that well, the player who drafted these cards, ideally early in the draft, needs to draw at least a copy of that specific card, then play it, then have another specific card that costs 3 but, for some reason, was not played earlier in the game, to justify this inclusion" is enough, but I'm going to tell a few anecdotes too:
-Once at a PTQ from which I had scrubbed out a Canadian gentlemen and I ate some overpriced and mediocre pho; he told me of his banking career, which was not something I imagined Canadians doing, and was quite successful, then he regaled me with plans for a Modern deck. It would be built around
Jund Hackblade; it would pair with
Civic Saber; these cards could not be replaced by
Spike Jester or
Bonesplitter as it would disrupt the delicate combo of Saber and Hackblade. Though he was serious about the idea, he couldn't understand why the idea wasn't a serious one.
-Another time, I brought some
Magic cards to a kid I was tutoring; though
Lightning Bolt was 'nice,' it was really
Hundred-Handed One that dazzled him. He was skeptical that
Clay Statue, let alone
Crypt Incursion, could possibly be legal for tournament play, and he arranged his modest collection of cards with the fastidiousness and obliviousness of an MTGS Cube designer fiddling with his spreadsheet, or a Modo business analyst glumly inputting, by hand, the next week's schedule for Daily Events and PTQs.
-Yet another time, a fellow short of superfluous education and homely wife strode into the card shop to expound on his new Standard deck. "I think the
Wrecking Ogre can
get there in Standard," he pronounced then. While the regulars dismissed him with bored condescension, he became more and more flustered; after someone threw a jaded left hook, it will distress you to learn that his rejoinder was, "But
guys, you don't
understand; I'm a
libertarian." It was hilarious!!!! Now whenever he says anything like that we just quote it and he, to his credit, takes it all in stride; he's a good-natured fellow.
What's my point? I don't really have an overarching one, but if I did, it would be something like "I love how card games humble brilliant people." I am not good at
MtG, really, but playing competitively has taught me a thing or two about game design, or how the moving parts of a Cube work together. Revising my Cube is really a far more brutal process than revising my writing, though (as I am now) I use the former to procrastinate on the latter. In both, my advice is, "throw out your babies." Renewed Faith is cute, but "Magical Christmasland" is an evocative phrase for the kind of scenario I described above. Now Renewed out of the Cube, and I approve, but it's been replaced by either
-Themes that are either too few in number and many in cards to be a risk or challenge to draft, or, in a few cases, are barely supported at all
-Cards that are nuts all the time
No Cube can recreate the feeling of Legacy, though I strongly agree it's an end worth pursuing. In that format, there are just too many weird cards and interactions that don't work in a vacuum, to say nothing of the density of cantrips, to directly import much of anything into Cube; a good example is how Tarmogoyf is a horrible card in the Modo Cube, but a better one is the failed Delver experiment in my Cube, in spite of the 10 one-mana cantrips! Yet, it's weird that this Cube is the "Eternal-informed" Cube but is largely made up of cards that do not fit that description; the power curve is too steep, and the synergies and interactions and brain-asploding difficulties of Legacy are pretty sparse.
To put it another way, I love that we're thinking in terms of "decision density" in this thread, but the design of your Cube makes me think that you could get far, far more decisions in your drafts and games with a few steps I'll type out below.
Cards like Azure Mage, Safehold Elite, Everflowing Chalice, are all "fine cards" to have in your Cube, but when they're juxtaposed with
Recurring Nightmare and
Skullclamp, I begin to wonder what kind of drafting and playing experience you want and expect your playgroup to have.
Here's a long list of suggested cuts (too lazy for suggested adds, besides, most anyone's Cube could benefit from a little slimming) -- if you wanted to strip your Cube down to its bare bones, which seems like a great idea with the expansion packs (keep us updated on this!), this would be where I'd start:
Mom #2 -- one copy of history's finest 1-drop is enough
Duplicate 187 cards (Blade Splicer, Wall of Omens, Reveillark, Snapcaster, etc.) -- unlike Renewed Faith these cards are strong on their own and I doubt that you need more copies of them, maybe you need more cards that blink things, though.
3 Legionnaires, 4 Cacklers, etc. -- resorting to this to prop up aggro seems gross to me, and eventually it runs into the problem of "3 Figures of Destiny" that end up going 13th, 14th and 15th and damnit it's time to listen to my playgroup.
Elspeth KE -- eh who has ever beaten this card, it's way more powerful than JTMS in Cube
Balance -- in Vintage this is a silver bullet that often does not work due to artifact mana, creatureless decks, and White being a poor color besides, yet it is still restricted. In your Cube it ... ruins games?
Land Tax -- yuck
Waterfront Bouncer -- eh kinda bad
Palinchron -- terrible unless you're combo-ing
Stifle -- probably too narrow (I couldn't even get away with
Voidslime in my Cube)
Mana Drain -- geez this is a little much
Traumatic Visions, Rewind -- way too weak without enough of a draw-go theme
FoF #2 -- dunno why you want this in a format that has, if anything, an overabundance of 4-mana Blue draw spells
Dream Halls -- busted or useless
Opposition -- always busted
Apprentice Necromancer -- just bad, I'd sooner double up on Reanimation spells
Pack Rat -- busted or useless
Nighthowler -- unplayable (though
Bonehoard is cool)
3x Thoughtseize -- I'm beginning to agree with Kibler et al. when they bitch about how "Thoughtseize reduces choice" and "Standard
is Thoughtseize," what's your beef with the other handful of strong 1-mana discard spells?
Dread Return -- just bad (example of a Legacy port that doesn't work)
Recurring Nightmare -- easily the most powerful Cube card outside of power, thinking about its interactions with your overdetermined 187 theme is leading to a ghoulish vision of ever-cycling Kitchen Finks and Shriekmaws
Inner-Flame Acolyte -- eh, is this really good enough?
Spitebellows -- ditto
3x Gargadon -- I question that this is the best way to build a sac theme
Sudden Shock -- funny to see this pop up in Legacy the other day on Modo (RIP Modo), I don't think the Split Second is good enough outside of Constructed to justify running a two-mana Shock
Firestorm / Devastating Dreams -- I would be surprised if these worked
Empty the Warrens -- I prefer a tiny Storm theme to a big one, but, I prefer no theme to a tiny one
Satyr Hedonist -- eh, not even playable in Theros draft honestly
Briarhorn -- meh
Krosan Tusker -- meh
Nostalgic Dreams, Regrowth -- see Storm comments
Demigod of Revenge -- I love this card dearly and wish I could put it in my Cube, except, well, you know how well the triggered ability works with a singleton
3 BTE -- few cards have led to as many lopsided, decision-light Standard wins and losses than this one
Safehold Elite -- meh
Cartel Aristocrat -- too hard to cast with too small an upside to do much
3 Reckoners -- I would not do this in a format as defined by creature combat as Cube
Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker -- really as fun as Cruel Ultimatum?
Skullclamp -- "remember the time I had six 1/1's, so I paid 1 mana apiece and drew 12 cards and it was totally fun?"
5 Signets -- these cards are really powerful, be careful. My rec is for 0-2
Swords, Jitte, Batterskull -- you guys know how I feel about these
Maze of Ith -- WHY
The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale --
WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
I wanted to quiz you about your experience with these cards: Lighthouse Chronologist, Braids, Necrotic Ooze, Pattern of Rebirth (and Defense of the Heart)
How often does this get drafted? By whom? By how many?
As for the devotion theme, TBH I think that most Cubes have enough permanents, especially permanents of a color-intensive variety, that only Blue needs explicit support. White doesn't because there are no cool White devotion cards out yet, but my guess is that there will eventually be those and with Knight of the White Orchid et al. in there I think you're already fine (Light from Within can even double here). I am not sure why you would add Devout Lightcaster.
My ideas for Blue are:
Nightveil Specter
Tidebinder Mage
Cloudfin Raptor
Coralhelm Commander
Old Man of the Sea
Vexing Sphinx
Plumeveil
Honorable mention:
Frostburn Weird
Ghastlord of Fugue and friends (they didn't much push the Blue ones)
Glen Elendra Liege and friends (they actively made the Blue ones the worst)
OK, sweet. I hope that's enough for now.
If you're looking for a similar effect, Ring of Gix is one a few people still remember, and there's always the good old bone crank (Icy Manipulator)
