Interesting note from last night concerning this card.
This is a very popular card on this board for the technical play decisions it elicits, but it has a long history of people forgetting about the trigger, which was an issue again last night.
Someone mentioned that Cloudblazer is exactly the five drop you are looking for in , and I think that person is right. It fits nicely into blink strategies as well as in control strategies, and it won't be sniped away by other blue players like Mulldrifter is. Cloudblazer might look innocious, but I think it's the perfect cog. It provides you with a bit of card advantage and a bit of life, and it chump blocks for a turn, staving off the opponent while you are looking for mass removal and/or finishers. Perfect for control strategies. Or, alternatively, you drop Brago on turn four, and follow it up with this on turn five and go to town. Really, this is a simple card, but I am positive it also plays very, very well, without being overbearing and super in your face power max like, I don't know, Baneslayer Angel? I like Cloudblazer a lot, and if was a thing in my cube, I would certainly make room for it. But don't cut Brago for it!
That's what I mean when I say it: "what my format does/doesn't need, particularly archetype support"Elegance is when cards have more to them with little text. Cloudblazer isn't particularly interesting, although it looks pretty good in terms of power level.
The discussion about UW not needing a card sounds weird to me too. Do you mean "need for shaping the strategies I want to shape"? Because there apart from archetypes, a color never really needs a given card.
I... think you read my posts with extreme prejudice? The first mention of elegance, by me, was in reaction to you calling Cloudblazer an extremely lazy (and boring) design.This is why I got kind of irritated about cloudblazer's inclusion being justified on the basis of giving one factor (elegance) a disproportionately high weighting. Its a poor factor, and should be weighted slightly, due to how ambiguous the concept is. On every other relevant metric, skyblazer bombs out pretty hard, most significantly the "don't be generic ETB filler" factor.
What happened to #teamelegance? This is a clean and good card. Lightning Strike plays well, despite being a "lazy" design.
Elegance is when cards have more to them with little text.
Honestly it reminds me of of the un-polished half-baked designs you sometimes get in new Commander cards. It's too on the nose; it lands too squarely in the blue-white slice of the color pie; it spreads value around too blindly.
Cloudblazer is a bit too expensive for just any aggro or "tempo" (cough) deck, and perfect for blink and control decks, which both happen to be archetypes! You keep hating on a, and I mean this, perfect cog for archetypes people want to support.
There's been a lot of discussion/debate recently about this card over in the spoilers thread. I think that this is a very interesting card to be having this debate about, because I think it highlights being careful with how much a designer uses any one comprehension/design tool. To take from my working life, I've had to bust out the graph paper before and run entire calculations by hand, because even though I had just checked the new design program with the old one, nothing beats good old fashioned long division (so to speak). What I'm getting at is 'elegance' as a cube design tool, isn't black and white, isn't flawless, and has to be supported with other methods.
Everyone has a slightly different definition of what elegance means, so its no surprise that discussing it can lead to debate. I think my simplest internal definition is 'the most for the least'. Now, that's not to be confused with raw efficiency, which is simply the most spell/creature effect for the least mana/tempo cost. A more complete sentence for my definition would be 'the most for a format for the least inherent card complexity'. I think an ancillary concept for my definition is that it performs a needed, unique, or useful role. That is to say it 'has a slot' where you want the effect. If it doesn't pass any of my other basic design decisions, it doesn't really matter how elegant it is. There are a ton of elegant cards that just aren't right for other reasons.
All that blubbering in mind, do I think this card is very elegant for cube? Not really. Its a great design for UW, provides a lot for that color pair to benefit off of, and it reads simply, but it doesn't really have a slot, and doesn't add overly much to any one theme. I think it gets crowded out by cards that are much more beneficial for UW in a cube format, for instance:
These all point to a strategy, provide depth for a deck, but also provide broad utility if needed (Brago probably being the narrowest). Reflector mage just yells at you to use UW as a tempo color, Rev is a goto build-a-UW-control-deck-for-dummies card, and Brago signals blink like no other.
Point is, Life Drifter doesn't really solve any problems for a format. Sphinx's Rev can be a key piece to helping UW control be a 'thing', but this card just doesn't really fill any holes, imo. Another counterexample from my format, and several others around here is
This is a solid removal spell, gives equips/auras a little breathing room, and is incidental graveyard recursion hate, all in one clean package. That's a solidly elegant component for a format that wants that sorta stuff!
Allllll of that means basically that I look more for elegant solutions than elegant cards, while still having a healthy appreciation for a good individual design.
I maintain that it's different based on the format and designer, and it's not all about simplicity, rather simplicity with purpose. Less Disperse and more the Pillar of flame and Dissipate, cards that solve complex and necessary problems (GY hate in this instance), while being simple.I really like how this card got people talking about what constitutes "elegance" if nothing else.