Cutting down the losers and shoring up major archetype weaknesses through power cards has been a real breakthrough. I'm still seeing exactly the same archetypes as before, but I spend less cards doing so. This liberates space to support more archetypes and improve the cube.
Some changes:
1) I added some planeswalkers, despite my general opposition to them. The reason is that Magic as it stands today is a tempo-based game and the traditional control strategies I had in my cube just couldn't compete. Perhaps the best example of this is Pernicious Deed. That card is extremely strong and yet it keeps dropping in value thanks to its reactive nature and high mana cost.
I did not intend to end up with a planeswalker in every color nor include three of the original walkers, but I ended up naturally in them. They are weaker and with tighter loyalty totals than many of the modern designs which soak up a lot of damage and produce dull games. I'm not as fond of Garruk because he's very efficient and good-stuffy and ends up being more of a crutch than an actual solution.
I'm also less afraid of planeswalkers because my cube is very aggressive on the board. All decks end up playing a lot of 2 and 3 drops and 1 drops are powerful and not poisonous. It should be difficult to keep planeswalkers on the board without significant support. Only issue are tokens which are very abundant in my cube. However, token producers are not in the colours with planeswalkers except Garruk.
Liliana is a bit weak, but I like the design and I wanted her or another woman. Sadly, her 3-drop versions are extremely strong and I'm not comfortable running them.
2) I've been replacing the losers with better, but still synergy-heavy cards like:
I'm going to keep working to make this kind of support more common, broadening the archetypes rather than having the same few cards pull up everything.
I've also added cards to better support control, like
Exclude.
3) I've reworked green entirely. I removed cards like:
In favour of
--
Now the cube feels fresh and natural in ways it didn't before. Good cards like Bazaar Trademage, Goblin Welder and Dismissive Pyromancer now see themselves in decks more often and have a more defined role in each decks and in games as a whole. Still, there are several cards I'm not very fond of and plenty of room for improvement. For example, I'm still not sure what to do with one of my 3-mana green slots and I think I run a few too many white creatures, specially in the 1-2 range.
But overall, I'm very hapyp with how things have turned out. I wish I had done this sooner.
