General Lucky Paper Radio's cube year review.

Nanonox

Nanonox

We posted a thread about this last year and I enjoyed reading people's answers, so I figured I would post it here and see what people share. I guess that means I have to go first though :p

Cube Hit:

Open-ended cards.



Why yes, I would like to recur my Mishra's Bauble with my Serra Paragon, which allows me to blink Bitter Reunion with Displacer Kitten, triggering Third Path Iconoclast.

These types of cards allow for more whacky and unique decks, giving cubes more replay value. It's also allows the drafters to feel smart when they discover cool synergies.

Cube Miss:

Last year, my answer was complexity. This year, nothing has changed! Not all my players are up to date which means I cannot overload the cube with complex cards, which is a real shame. Let's look at an example:



This is a perfect card for my cube. It has artifact and discard synergies, encourages attacking and the backside copying a creature can lead to some memorable plays.
It's also atrocious to parse on first read. It's a dual-faced card, it's a saga, it creates 3(!) distinct tokens + a copy of something on board. The only thing going for it is that it's a constructed powerhouse, but my least enfranchised players don't all follow the competitive meta.

Cube card of the year:



Kind of in reaction to the previous point, Shivan Devastator is proof that you can make some cool cards that are simple enough for anyone to grasp. It's not the most powerful card released this year, but a scalable, evasive and hasty dragon hits the spot for me.

Cube set of the year:

Abstract from flavor and setting (40K means nothing to me), I have to go with Warhammer 40k. Not exactly a set, but this product injected a lot of novelty to the card pool.



And a host of others. Black now has some good options to support an artifact theme. The counter deck got some tools and there are some spicy cards (Tyranid Prime anyone?!) hidden in the list.

Personal Level up:

Remembering who I am designing the cube for.

I play way less often than before and because of that, it's easy to get caught up in an abstract ideal instead of a local playgroup ideal. If it were up to me, I would include a bunch more complex and wordy cards because I know they would do well in my environment. However, my players wouldn't enjoy the experience. That means I have to make some concessions to my vision of an ideal cube in order to increase the fun for my playgroup. That is the ultimate goal and the barrage of new cards makes it hard for me to remember that sometimes. So I'll include fan favorite Anafenza, Kin-Tree Spirit over Luminarch Aspirant and try to hide my pain when playing.

Enough about me, I'd love to read your takes on these questions!
 
B

blacksmithy

Was an odd cube year for me, as i have gone from following every spoiler season to basically not even looking at them, but i’ll give this a go anyway. and if i post some “unofficial” cards in the mix, sorry in advance but it’s just how i cube haha

CUBE HITS
NEO was a huge set for my cube with stellar designs, development, and even flavor!
honestly the first half of the year in general gave me lots of fun new toys.
despite how much i HATED the draft format, SNC had some nice pickups as well, and was the final push to have me include a 3 color section in my cube.
Fable of the Mirror-Breaker, Ledger Shredder, Sole Performer, and Mob Nixilis were all designs that i loved enough to translate into my own style despite not wanting to include the “real” versions for various reasons.
https://imgur.com/a/aBZCQtb

CUBE MISSES
Unfinity was a set i got perhaps notoriously hype about, but in the end, i scrapped most of my includes just for the simple fact it was too much of a pain to acquire/create the needed Attraction cards for all of the fun Attraction stuff to function. We barely knew thee, Most Dangerous Gamer…

CUBE CARD OF THE YEAR

yeah it’s Ledger Shredder, who else would it be? i’ve been slowly brewing up a Grixis Madness archetype in my cube for years, and this bird is THE WORD in not only that deck but basically any deck that runs blue. what a champion. so fun, so strong, so simple.

CUBE SET OF THE YEAR
Gotta be NEO. as i said in the first section, this set did EVERYTHING right for me, to the point i made a (piss-poor) set cube of it on Arena just to keep reliving its magic after i ran out of draft currency.

PERSONAL LEVEL UP
Logistical complexity budget. After several drafts featuring a full suite of: spellbooks, lessons, customs, buffed “real” cards, squadroned cards, and probably other stuff i can’t remember, i am finally ready to rein all that craziness in a bit.

all in all, it was a fun year for cubing, and i’m just glad i was actually able to draft a fair bit with real people! i hope the rest of you get to do the same in 2023.
 
TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

Here is this year's Season of Cube podcast for people who want to give it a listen. I found this episode very intriguing!

Cube Hit: The Coolest Cards were Synergy Cards

Ever since Modern Horizons 2 last year, the majority of the interesting and powerful Cube cards that WOTC has printed have been synergy cards. Pretty much every powerful new card either is a synergy enabler, requires heavy synergy to unlock its full potential, or fits into a synergistic shell. In years past, most of the "exciting Cube cards" were either generic powerful cards or incredibly niche micro synergy cards. This year, WOTC seems to have bucked that trend by combining the power with the synergy, making for a much more interesting slate of cards than normal. Hopefully, this trend continues, as late 2021, and most of 2022 have been the most inspiring period in Cube history for me.

Cube Miss: The Supplemental Products were worse than the Premier Sets

This year's supplemental products were as wide as the ocean but as deep as a puddle. We had multiple full-sized supplemental sets this year in addition to 5 commander add-ons. However, outside of Streets of New Capenna's Commander, none of them came close to being as interesting as their Premier set counterparts. On average, I have been interested in testing about 40 cards from each premier set and I end up actually testing around 10-15 this year. For the supplemental products, many of which are just as large as the premier sets, I was interested in testing about 10-15 cards per set and included around 5. While this is still better than years past (where even the premier sets may only have a handful of interesting cards), I think it is highly unfortunate that we are seeing such a high volume of supplementary sets with mostly uninspiring cards. Battle for Baldur's Gate was cool, but most of the cards were overcosted, underpowered, or just flat-out bad. While the initiative mechanic was good, adding an extra token thing that had to be tracked was super gimmicky and not necessarily worth the trouble. Unfinity was a masterfully designed set, but the combination of weird Acorn Cards, Stickers and hard-to-use Attraction made most of the cards difficult to use outside of constructed. Warhammer 40K was interesting, but a combination of the weird Universes Beyond frame and the cards not really being balanced for anything other than looking cool makes them a hard sell in a lot of environments. I have no idea what they were doing with Jumpstart 2022– that product was a complete mess. Most of the set-commander products were wordy and underpowered.

People have been talking a lot about product fatigue lately, and I have a sneaking suspicion that this is being caused by a critical mass of Secret Lairs that aren't worth the money, Supplemental sets with limited applications, and Commander products dragging down great premier sets. I think this is a huge shame, because the constructed-oriented sets are so much better than anything that was being released when I first started playing. Not even Khans of Tarkir looks great next to Neon Dynasty, Modern Horizons 2, and Dominaria United! But this year's slate of supplemental sets really dragged down some otherwise fantastic premier sets. As is, the only truly great supplemental set of the year was Double Masters 2022– the one set that had nothing new to offer.

Cube Card of the Year: Fable of the Mirror Breaker

This card is just perfect. It makes relevant tokens, has artifact and enchantment synergies, feeds the graveyard, provides card filtering, and has resonant lore. I think this card is really fun to play with and incredibly interesting to use.

Cube Set of the Year: Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty

Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is quite possibly the best Premier set of all time. The mechanics were spot-on, the Power Level was high on average, but none of the cards were broken, the DFC Sagas were super cool, the Planeswalkers were unique, and the updated Kamigawa felt fresh and interesting. The set opened up a ton of new design space for Cubers to play with. The Reconfigure mechanic has really helped to solidify "equipment matters" as an actual reasonable theme for more environments, when before the archetype was super forced. The other artifacts matter cards have helped to make artifact decks less parasitic and more fun. The Sagas have helped to improve Constellation strategies as well as delirium decks. Basically everything about this set was perfect– while there were a few things that could have been improved upon (Samurai), Neon Dynasty is still the best Premier set in years, and possibly ever.

Personal Level Up: Rediscovering the art of Layering Archetypes.

When I was younger, I mastered the art of layering together cards from different archetypes to create interesting, diverse Cubes. Unfortunately, I didn't have a good grasp on what a "power band" was, and how that factored into the way the environments actually played. Over time, I realized that the way for me to achieve my design goals was by trying to make sure decks were well supported mathematically speaking, regardless of how well the different cards actually fit together outside of my desired archetypes. This worked reasonably well, but I think formats lost some of the definition that made them unique. The last year and a half of great powerful synergy cards has let me re-connect with some of my old skills, as I am now building heavily layered unique cubes again like I haven't in years. Additionally, discovering Battle Box has helped me hone my design skills with a set of cards that I don't usually use. As a whole, I think the better game pieces we have gotten from WOTC recently have helped me become a better designer by letting me use all of my design skills in crafting the environments I want to make.
 
Erik Twice

Erik Twice

Cube hits:

​


Tchotchke Elemental is just a lot of fun. It really should be in more cubes, it supports a lot of stuff and is not oppressive. It is one of the few good green aggro cards and it goes with both tokens and counters, which is broad enough to be useful while specific enough to be fun to draft. While it goes infinite if you clone it, I have yet to see it happen. I would actually enjoy the possibility.

The Raven Man is the second Young Pyromancer we have always wanted. It's a perfect staple and should be even more popular than it already is.

Currency Converter and Containment Construct have made discard-based decks truly viable. Since they are colorless, they cost very little space in your cube. I just keep coming with decks that want these cards! Unlike a Basking Rootwalla, they don't really care what type of strategy you pursue, only that it uses discarding. If you want to add some "madness" decks to your cube, this is where I would start.

Cube misses:



I just keep going back to it, but it doesn't work in my cube. While my power level is high, decks aren't actually too aggressive. Most pile up and setup for value. Most notably, creatures are small, which means that the only way to make Berserk pack a punch is through equipment. That's a bit naff, so I'm giving it up. At least until next time!


Personal level up: Fewer forced archetypes

I think previous versions of my cube were kind of narrow. It's not that you couldn't switch from one archetype to the next, but that it was clearly done in chunks. That is, you either were in the deck or not and while you could switch, that always relied on whether you could draft the matching cards.. Now it's not like that. Now I feel the support is always there, in the background, and you may build different versions of the same deck in a more natural manner.

For example. Before, I would try to add more stuff to support Earthcraft and it failed because you needed to either draw it or force yourself into the archetype. But now I run more cards like these:



Instead of supporting the archetype with narrower, more bombasting cards like:



The biggest advantage of this is not the poison principle. No, it's something simpler: You only have space for so many "engine" or "synergy" cards in a deck, particularly once you take mana cost into account. Hence, you cannot draft your way into a good deck by adding more and more narrow picks, it's the smallest cards that matter the most. The fact that Duskwatch Recruiter and Augur of Autumn are good on their own terms, versatile and have a matching tribe type allows you to shift more naturally into several decks instead of drafting a mess and then complaining you didn't get enough creatures.
 
Chris Taylor

Chris Taylor

Contributor
From my local discord:
Prismatic Ending, March of Otherworldly Light, Leyline Binding and Lay Down Arms within a fairly short span - like they're all technically 1 mana removal spells in the same colour, but i love the dynamic of choosing the right one for a given deck or even building a deck specifically to maximize one or another
much more interesting than 'welp i guess 4 path to exile'
(solitude also, although it does and demands slightly different things than the above)
Click to expand...
Obv a bit more constructed focused but still applies.

Personal hit: 40k was way better than it had any right to be.
Also like, what the hell Parker, the song at the beginning of this episode was insane. Mad props to your partner (Who if I'm getting Andy's context right was the brains of this operation?)
 
MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Note: been trying to post this for a while and it hasn't been working, so here we go trying it in two parts

Excellent episode, I've been recently obsessed with catching up on Lucky Paper episodes from the past since I had somehow avoided actually listening to it for this long while being a mainstay on the website and reading great arguments from the dynamic duo for years. With that, here's my answers!

Overall: A great year for cubing!

I added 85 cards printed this year, or just over 10% of my cube's list. While recent additions are typically the likeliest to get cut when the next hotness comes along, I'm deeply satisfied with my additions, the new archetypes being supported, and the general gameplay they support. Compared to last year, I'm feeling less disappointed about cards I end up omitting due to comprehension or complexity issues, as we thankfully only had a single set with DFCs. I also feel like the new cards added were not just marginal upgrades/sidegrades, but broke new ground that I'm happy to explore.

Cube Hit: Artifact Support

Between the unexpectedly fun designs of Warhammer 40k, an expansion dedicated to the most storied saga in Magic's history (which, by the way, I still can't believe was our most recent premiere set!), and Neon Kamigawa bringing us a delightful new mechanic in Reconfigure, my artifact strategies have gotten some long-awaited support, and in a non-parasitic way at that! While I would've loved to have a few more giant Prototype mechs, the ones we did get were beyond exciting, and the incidental artifact count going up allows for fun dynamics, like Naturalize effects being stronger, Welder strategies to become even more insane, and for opportunities to go even deeper on niche archetypes in future cube updates. Some notable artifacts worth shouting out include:




Cube Hit #2: Single-Card Archetype Generators

One of my favorite things to do in cube, especially in a list as big as mine (720 cards), is seed in cards that work just fine in larger archetypes, but also change a player's draft strategy when they encounter them. Whether it's repeat token producers, discard spells, or dudes with haste, a new priority for drafting can jazz up the whole cube night for a player who realizes they have powerful interactions at their fingertips that they may not have considered otherwise.

This year has been the best year for the kinds of powerful cards that can singlehandedly spawn archetypes in my memory, and I think this is a huge advantage of the otherwise tiring commander-first mentality that R&D has adopted in their designs. While this isn't exactly a new thing, cards in this vein before were often a) not as powerful, b) so linear as to be parasitic, or c) were stuck in the more-competitve world of gold cards. This year, I introduced quite a few of these cards that have been totally fine in decks that didn't revolve around them but were also able to do dirty things when they did. Here's a few of the first to come to mind:


Tameshi, Reality Architect
The Raven Man
Ardoz, Cobbler of War
 
MilesOfficial

MilesOfficial

Cube Miss: Alchemy & Overly-Complex Cards

Alchemy wasn't even popular enough to justify the amount of time I spent thinking about it (I've got some infographics coming out soon to represent just how deeply unpopular Alchemy is) but think about it I did. I know it's silly to think about "what could have been" in almost any circumstance - and something I advise against to peers and friends in any context, but certainly when in regards to a card game - but even with the poor quality of the overwhelming majority of Alchemy designs and the glut of new cards printed otherwise in 2022, I found myself looking wistfully at the occasional digital-only design, knowing that I would not find satisfaction even if I printed them out. Some Alchemy designs I wish I had in paper include:

Gixian Recycler
Big Spender
Foundry Beetle

And this is without having looked terribly deeply at the Alchemy cards (and having avoided most of their draft formats).

It also sucks that there's not a version of these cards that looks nice anywhere on the internet to print; I'd have to remake them all in a card generator to avoid hurting my eyes as a baseline.

On a related digital note, as has been the case the two years prior to 2021, R&D has leaned on some design philosophies that seem to overly rely on the average Standard player using Arena to enforce wonky mechanics, making dozens of cards untenable for paper play with those less than initiated. While I can get away with a Fable of the Mirror-Breaker because of its ubiquity in other Magic formats (not to mention it being so cool as to justify itself even at great cost), the same can't be said across the board. Whether a card has an ability people will misplay/severely misjudge, one that requires multiple read-throughs to grok, or simply has too many words, I tried to be somewhat more restrained in my inclusions for 2022.


Some cards I wanted to include this year but couldn't subject my generally casual playgroup to are:


Zethi, Arcane Blademaster
Planar Atlas
Ratchet, Field Medic

Many of the cards I did end up including are beyond my normal standards for how wordy/initially complex a card should be for my cube, but I'll be doing careful reevaluations of those as well.

Cube Card of the Year: Triarch Praetorian



My boy! This guy does it all in my cube, supporting so many of my favorite ways to play Magic. Whether he's goofing off with his best friend Lurrus, getting sick value off a situation involving Faithless Looting & Unearth, or just swinging in the air for 5 on turn 3 with a trusty Grafted Wargear. I've written about this guy here before, so please don't mistake my (comparatively) short explanation as anything less than the greatest praise possible!

Runner-ups: Currency Converter and Containment Construct

Personal Level-Up: Online community participation

Especially since the pandemic, I realized that I have become overly withdrawn from engaging with folks on social media / online platforms as a consequence of it being so deeply tied to my last job. My Twitter activity has shrunk by several orders of magnitude in the last few years, and I used to use that as a rich place for participating in communities of like-minded folks. I've missed that, and between leaving my last job and moving across the world, it's easy to feel isolated when you're the type who's used to always having friends around.

Pre-pandemic, I had cube events every month or so, and we'd generally get between 10-15 people! They were raucous affairs with enough beer variety for tastings, enough +1s around to keep my wife occupied, and enough friendship to spare to warm even the coldest hearts. With friends on lockdown, moving, playing it safe during COVID, and more, the last few cube nights have been harder to schedule, but now that I'm a few thousand miles away, they'll be nearly impossible (though I did get a nine-person event going with my travel cube during the holidays!). But this means that, at least until I get a new playgroup up and running, this outlet is going to be my primary way to engage with the zen garden that is my cube. And I made it work!

I've been incredibly happy to overcome the hurdle of jumping into a new group by making a meaningful effort this year to engage in the Riptide Lab community. While I may still not participate as much as I'd like to for practical reasons, I've been delighted to discuss and argue about some of my favorite topics and about the minutiae of game development on this forum with thoughtful folks like yourselves. It's made me a better cube curator, sure, but it's also been immensely personally satisfying, and I can't be grateful enough for to all of you. Thanks, everyone!
 
N0oh

N0oh

I still like praetorian but really dislike that i will have to explain 50 times why it doesnt work to my playgroup, and wish it did work.
 
Dom Harvey

Dom Harvey

Contributor
Cube Hit



This year continued the trend of great Watchwolves (or rather Fleecemane Lions): hard-hitting two-drops with some other utility. Increasingly I think two-drops are a crucial spot on the curve for a Cube deck or a Cube environment as a whole - three mana gets you everything these days and one mana can only get you so much before you get Ragavan but two mana gets you these Baneslayers/Tarmogoyfs that help to shape the game early and have relevance later but are worth removing at parity throughout.



Meanwhile, we got some even greater Armodons this year - a lot of the cheaper Commander-minded build-arounds have stats that make them at least reasonable game pieces when they aren't doing their thing (without being so good that you're meant to just bludgeon them instead of doing the cool thing). As I start thinking about Brawl/Commander Cubes more that quality looks even more essential.




Cube Miss



Here I'm mostly repeating my answer from last year. Many of this year's mechanics and themes spill a lot of ink to do something that is insular but not rewarding and double down on a recent trend of extreme wordiness. The worst offender here is Unfinity, which should be a set full of joy and whimsy and ends up being a rather tedious exercise in bookkeeping. What the hell is Myra and who asked for that?!


Cube Card of the Year



Fable of the Mirror-Breaker will be a staple in my Cubes for a long long time. Ledger Shredder is a very neat card that links themes I like. Currency Converter is one of the Commander deck oddballs that stole my heart. My actual card of the year is a rather unconventional choice that I totally overlooked at first.

It's hard to make a good Baneslayer these days that doesn't just have piles of words/keywords or raw stats. Sheoldred's apparently simple symmetry gives it an elegance that is sadly rare but also invites you to break it somehow. Its baseline impact makes it an impressive four-drop that shapes the game but it is highly sensitive to what either player is doing - you can load up on draw effects to gain a bunch of life, punish opponents who have a lot of those effects, or pair it with Wheels etc for a flashy combo finish.

It also fills a big hole in black's card pool. Black really missed a generic mid-game stabilizer/finisher that it can force through with discard, reanimation etc and there really hasn't been anything like that below 5 mana (which was itself a barren slot in the curve for a while). Sheoldred fits the model of cards I enjoy: powerful cards in the abstract that also get you thinking.


Cube Set of the Year

Dominaria United?

My original take was going to be "of course the raw answer is Neon Dynasty but the Warhammer 40K decks offered a shockingly good haul". After reading the Lucky Paper Radio review of the year I'm coming around to Andy's choice of Dominaria United because of that emphasis on clean and clear designs. I love Fable of the Mirror-Breaker but it carries a big mental burden with it - something like Haughty Djinn or Sheoldred is much easier to grok.


Personal Level Up

Get on with it!

As I mentioned in my LPR appearance (thanks again guys!), I have a very debilitating perfectionist streak when it comes to Cube and I need to either stop wasting time beating myself up about it or dedicate that time making concrete progress on my Cube(...s)
 
landofMordor

landofMordor

Administrator
Oh, by the way, here’s this year’s LP year-end review: https://luckypaper.co/articles/2022-cube-in-review/

I had refrained from chiming in on this thread because I knew this was coming down the pipeline :) really cool to read everyone else’s responses!

tl;dr:
My cube hit is affordable, accessible cards
My cube miss is complexity, as epitomized in UNF
My cube card of the year is The Wandering Emperor
My cube set of the year is NEO 2X2
My level-up is using retrospection to find my biases as a designer, and then correcting for it
 
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ravnic

ravnic

Cube Hit: Artifact Themes



Between Kamigawa and the Brother's War we got a bunch of cool artifacts and worthy payoffs as well. It seems that this years options finally let me flesh out the archetype in a way I've always wanted: nonparasitic. You CAN go all in and draft an artifact tribal deck, but you can also go for it and include it within different shells like aggro, blink, sacrifice, wildfire ... with the mostly incidental artifacts you picked up early. BRO also made drafting artifacts much more visually pleasing with so many awesome retro frames <3


Cube Miss: Creature Power Creep



It's not really a new thing anymore, but it continues to annoy me during every spoiler season. I'm not exactly sure if it's commanders fault or just because R&D thinks they can relatively safely push creatures to make them exciting without breaking eternal formats, but to me it burys a lot of potential fun. I always loved to turn drawbacks into upsides, build around symetrical effects or jump through hoops for overstatted creatures. With todays creature designs, synergies often become unnecessary in limited. Why draft a soldier deck when Harbin is insane in any deck that can cast him on turn two? Even within a format, it feels bad to work to get Warlord's Elite down early and then have it trade with their Giant Cindermaw.

One example for cube design:

Kor Skyfisher is a much, much cooler design than Zephyr Sentinel. Not despite, but because you have to work for your 2-mana 2-power flier, but it feels much more rewarding when you find a way to make an upside out of that drawback than having it as an all upside option.


Cube Card of the Year: Tolarian Terror



So elegant, so well balanced, such a sweet artwork. It took me a moment to realize that TT was the spells/control finisher I always wanted. And there is no card, that I would want more in a retro frame, since its artwork looks so oldschool.


Cube Set if the Year: Kamigawa Neon Dynasty



Kamigawa 2 not only has the most cards in my cube, currently from 2202's sets, it also gave me the most impactful, probably most long-term additions. With three new ninjutsu creatures it really made the ninja deck a thing, somewhere between tempo and blink.dec
Additionaly it helped out artifacts and sacrifice and gave me a nice mono blue incentive in Invoke the Winds, which helps with one of blues weaknesses: Not having an answer for resolved threats.

DMU and BRO both deserve a honorable mention here. They each gave me a gold card that I am confindent in keeping around, which is difficult since I only run one gold card per guild, so I am very picky. With Baird, Argivian Recruiter and Third Path Iconoclast Boros and Izzet finally found some cards that fill that sweet spot between buildaround and still being open ended enough to link multiple themes.


Personal Level up



Changing my mana base to almost half Prismatic Vistas (18 copies) was my genius moment of this year lol. I expected it to play well and so far it's been even better. With that change:
• I was able to go down in fixing lands from 45 to 38 and still have more to offer. It freed up sweet, precious space while increasing my fixing quality significantly.
• I have fixing much better suited for drafts with fewer people, where the chance that no one could pick up a certain dual is increased
• I made it very unlikely that anyone ends up with not enough fixing. Even players who value them highly start to pass them more once they have ~3-4 Vistas (and/or other duals) in their pool; which means it is unlikely too that someone will end up with no fixing.
• I made my mana base more synergistic. In addition to 20 landfall triggers across all nonblack colors, gy stuff like Crucible of Worlds or Worm Harvest, threshold or sacrifice stuff like Gixian Infiltrator ensures that you even play some Vistas in most mono color decks.

After a very rough 2021, the last year has been pretty great for my cube. I got to draft more again and had the tools and ideas to significantly improve it :)
 
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