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
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
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
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
, 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.