It's kinda funny because I really liked drafting RAV RAV GLD and RAV GLD DIS but I look back at those drafts now and realize those really fell apart when they didn't didn't come together and not too many formats will be able to resemble those ones.
Maybe it was the card advantage lands and the incredible availability of removal and solid midranged creatures that made that format feel right to me. I guess it was like playing a bad dragon cube with less of a forgiving level of card quality.
I think the cards I was referring to are all those you mentioned. It sorta reminds me of glorious anthem. Boy you hope you stuff around that makes this card good. You can draft around it too but is that a good idea? What is everyone else picking up right now? Cards that need to be turned on can also be morbid or sacrifice guys. Creature battling might be more common in limited but building around recursion and graveyard triggers often feels to me like it requires a lot of pieces to really get working, or to exist on cards that can stand on their own two feet without the graveyard trickery. I guess I'm probably just worrying for you.
I guess adding in these layers forces new depth into deck building and in game decision making in a pretty deliberate way so I can't fault you there. As I said, it's probably just preference that I don't like multicolor as much as a lot of people do. I trust you know how to make a format where getting your cards working for you in interesting ways is painless and getting them into overdrive is a matter of experience.
I do recommend going with the invoker method of unlock guys as opposed to the battlemage one. Make all the cards good on their own, and if you can turn them on you get something to be excited about, not cards that are embarrassing without their additional requirements met and are unforgiving about when you play them. I guess what is good enough is sorta a question of the bar you set within your cube, but I find most of us take to cubing to escape from clutches of grey ogres and the like.
When I see a card like eldrazi monument I wonder about if someone is shooting pretty low with their power level or if they are just really excited about a quirk of their format and think the card suits it.
Well, there's certainly a spectrum with "synergy unlocks". My main cube has various cards like Furnace Celebration, Goblin Bombardment and even the aforementioned Eldrazi Monument, which are all really awful on their own. But they bring a lot to the environment, and the fact that there are so many synergies allows for players to creatively "unlock" them. I don't think the "all cards have to be good on their own" thing holds up. Again, it falls on execution.
Perhaps this is a relevant article:
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/cube-design-the-poison-principle/
That said, it can certainly be overdone. Environments need a certain density of just "good filler cards" to operate smoothly. What I've tried to do with a lot of the themes is to fill them in with cards we already need. I have some proliferate cards, and also the ____blade cards. Why not turn them both on with something like Rakdos Cackler? Even then, many environments really work well with a few "archetype anchors", cards that are pretty narrow but allow you to build a unique deck if you want. An example here is Horde of Notions. There are various elementals around all the colors, and this one card makes there be some incentive for a "five-color elemental" deck.
Note that at the same time the elementals themselves are doing work in turning on Morbid (via Evoke) and making tokens for Populate, and interacting with cards like Undying Evil.
There are probably a many duds in the file. Fleshformer comes to mind:
If I were going to bet, I'd say this card won't work out. But for now I'm testing it out.
