General Favorite Cards You Don't Run

I love

And couldn't run either for a long time, I've gotten around to making the Heartless Summoning archetype work in one of my Cubes by the drafters getting two when they pick it, but can't figure out Ula, it really needs a high density of cards that don't really fit into many decks. There have been some better lower-cost cards, but they'd make my blue section into archetypes I'm not sure I love... so love the card, don't love the archetype that it needs I guess.
 
There are so, so many.

I'd kill for a cube where Dust Elemental is a top pick -- and am going to build it as a side cube, knowing that I don't get enough chances to cube to ever really try it out, but I can't help myelf.



I used to have a fun 60-card casual/extended deck with 4x him, Stonecloaker, Whitemane Lion, and the (then) two playsets of white soul sisters. It was a blast, and I just want to cube with something that durdly and fun at some point.

Other favorites that I don't cube with but wish I did are things that I had to eventually begrudgingly cut, like these:



I also don't want to make all my basics snow because it's dumb imo but I love love love these:

 


One of my favourite cards of all time but almost the exact definition of a card that doesn't work with Cube unless you're on a real trip

For cards that I could conceivably Cube but have to be honest with myself about:

i was playing standard when Ascension was a thing, such a cool card!
and… i’m working up a proxy to start testing Trading Post at 1 mana up front…
 
I've never seen Winter's Chill before! It looks cool. I would look into snow if you really like those cards, though, the cost is very small. Perhaps just adding snow basics to the box would be enough. Frankly, the long text on Winter's Chill seems the biggest roadblock to me.

Personally, I love Storm. I would love to run Storm in my cube but I recognize it's a parastic, uninteractive mechanic that it's very difficult to make it work. You really need a bunch of broken enablers or a lot of mana rocks around for it to work and I don't think I can do that.

 
A lot of posts I want to reply to, but don't want to make a wall of quotes. It's really interesting to see the differences in each person's forbidden fruit. Everything from cards that barely missed the list to nostalgia picks.

I guess you can add half of Onslaught block to my list as a nostalgia pick. I have the Onslaught themed list in my signature, but I doubt I'll ever make it in paper. Not deep enough compared to a wide open pool.
 


By god did I try to make this work for years, but it was so difficult to get anyone else remotely interested. Why do all that work for something at 7 mana when they could just play multiple good cards while curving out instead? Ended up just using that tri-color slot for Kess, Dissident Mage and have been pretty happy with her over the years. Still, the high you got from casting that fair Ultimatum can't be matched.
 
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Jason Waddell

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Is there a way to 'fix' pyromancer's ascension for cube? What if it got counters when you played a spell with the same cost or CMC as a spell in your graveyard?
 
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Astral Slide and friends just do not work without really warping your cube around them, unfortunately.
Is it that hard? Many cubable cards have cycling (or add bicycle lands instead of duals, or add cycling basics to the basic land box).
 
Cruel Ultimatum
This is probably the unanimous favorite card in my playgroup! I think your cube looks too fast for it, though.
Is it that hard? Many cubable cards have cycling (or add bicycle lands instead of duals, or add cycling basics to the basic land box).
I think it isn't too hard, but there's certainly some concessions that need to be made. Depends how badly you want it.
BLB cycling lands
Spent a few seconds trying to figure out which set BLB was...
 
The thing for me is that cycling as an archetype is really hard to support. I'm only actively looking to cycle cards that cost {1} to cycle; any more and I want to be casting them for the card the overwhelming majority of the time, as the rate becomes pretty bad. However, most of the cycling {1} cards are really underwhelming in their own right, and I don't want them in my cube because I think that they tend to feel bad to play the same way that most people would be unhappy to play Kavu Titan as a bear even when that tends to be correct or they'd feel like Ashcoat Bear making their 40 is a fail case even when it's actually a decent card. I want my good choices to feel good, dammit.

Breaking singleton on the cycling {1} cards might be viable; however, deckbuilding has a decent chance of turning into an exercise in making sure you can cycle to your most broken X cards when you have access to a functionally infinite number of cycling cards, barring really strong aggro deck pressure (I think. Admittedly, I have not tested this hypothesis, and I do know that some of us have played with cycling custom lands, so they might know more.).

This leads me to the conclusion that cycling decks are bad, but that I still really like having a number of cycling cards in my cube because of the options they provide. I want it to be a garnish, but when it's the focus of a dish like in the Ikoria RW cycling deck it becomes overpowering much in the way that combo decks do--and I'm now realizing just how much crossover this has with the combo thread we've got going right now.

If we had more cycling cards that are attractive to both play and cycle, like a version of Cruel Ultimatum with cycling {U/B}{B/R}, I'd be over the moon, much in the way the ZNR MDFCs astounded me. But I don't think they'll be many decent cycling cards printed for another couple years after the admittedly beautiful mess that was the cycling deck in Ikoria.


Edit: now that I think about it, the ZNR MDFCS really stole cyclers' lunch in that you can still trade in the base card for another but you always know what you're getting, making it a lot more attractive to do so and kind of a better mechanic overall. I still don't like cramming seven lines of text in on each side, so there's a complexity downside, but the tradeoff is perfectly reasonable to me. I don't mind them coexisting, because it's a real thing you're forfeiting in the swap, but I think MDFCs are the clear winner to me.
 
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