Appreciate the response. I'm still struggling to understand the lines you're drawing in the sand. The Ninja and Colorless comparison seems pretty relevant to me in this regard.
Not entirely. With colorless I'm trying to make a parallel that more or less is saying "if they receive as much support as ninjas did in mh1, they would be equally if not more viable". I think it's more demanding of your cube to support colorless, but I don't see the central argument of how deep the card pool is applying to them and not ninjas given all the parallels.
It really comes down to how the cards fit together. With something like Ninjas, there's a fairly deep pool of interaction, enablers, and payoffs even though the actual number of cards is small. Colorless doesn't have this yet. One of the reasons why I was specifically calling out the "BFZdrazi" model instead of colorless in general is because of the narrower scope and use case of the cards.
It that Hearalds the End is a probably a good card for Eldrazi decks, but it doesn't have many use cases outside of that. Artifacts might be able to do something with it, but that would require a critical mass of colorless creatures in addition to colorless mana production. Compare this to something like
Mist Syndicate Naga which can basically go into any proactive blue deck in an appropriately powered Cube and be fine. If they use colorless in a more open-ended way, it could very well be a viable Cube theme outside of dedicated environments! If it's mostly Eldrazi support, then the usability of the mechanic will be more tedious. I'm honestly just hoping they take the former route and give Cube designers some open-ended toys rather than pigeonholing the mechanic into weird Eldrazitron support that may or may not make Modern worse.
You mention that there aren't many energy cards that want to appear in other shells and therefore struggle to cross pollinate, what I don't get is how you also highlight how Faeries can have cool synergies with other archetypes through cards like
Faerie Vandal and
Oona's Prowler. How deep is the faerie support for card-draw matters and madness/reanimator? It doesn't seem very deep from what I can see, so it feels like there's a double standard at play.
One of the main differences is that many of Faerie cards for other decks can be central to those strategies, while Energy cards often are not.
Oona's Prowler and
Faerie Vandal (plus it's friend
Improbable Alliance) can both be the main enabler or payoff for their respective strategies. Prowler is a decent body by itself that can trigger anything that cares about discard, plus bin cards for reanimation/delirium/escape/whatever other graveyard synergy you like. Meanwhile, both Vandal and Alliance can be
the payoffs for their draw 2 strategy. When you look at energy, there just aren't a ton of cards that are phenomenal in another deck while also being able to play a key role in turning on an energy strategy. There are a couple of cool cards like
Dynavolt Tower that can really work well as a central piece in another deck, but these cards are the exception and not the norm. Many of the reasonable energy glue-ish cards are things like
Longtusk Cub, which are fine in other decks but are really at their best in Energy proper. I suppose you could make the argument that a couple of the generic value energy production cards like
Rogue Refiner are decent in non-energy decks, provided that the Cube is of an appropriate power level. However, you run the risk of players not wanting to include the random energy cards because the energy counter ends up being an additive distraction.
I'm not saying that energy can't work in Cubes or anything along those lines, just that the pool of energy cards is fairly insular. There aren't a huge number of energy cards that are good on rate, there aren't a huge number of cards that are excellent in other archetypes, and there aren't a huge number of cards that reward you for doing anything other than playing as many sources of {E} as possible. MH3 could definitely fix this, but designs like
Scurry of Gremlins which are just weird side-grades to existing cards that ask for a lot of energy production capacity to be interesting pieces beyond the base mode are probably not going going to get there by themselves.
I think the disconnect here is that you two are focusing on different aspects of the mechanics.
Train is looking at the shallow card pool, whereas Mown is looking at the potential.
Neither archetype is very well fleshed out right now. MH3
might make them more universally playable, but there's likely still shortcomings as well as infrequent future printings to support either.
For cube, you can totally run C and/or E if you focus your design on it. Again, MH3 could push these decks enough that this changes and the decks are more universal.
Both perspectives are correct.
Unless
I'm wrong.
Something I'd like to add is that, while both have a shallow card pool, a Horizons set has the most potential to deepen the
playable card pool for these decks.
I think you're right on all of these points Brad! Going back to
@landofMordor 's original comment, even if MH3 isn't able to diversify the card pool for these mechanics enough to make them useful in a wide range of Cube formats, we will almost certainly get cool support for "set Cube" type formats. I am primarily worried that WOTC is going to squander the potential to bring some much-needed depth to these mechnic's respective card pools while also boosting some fairly toxic archetypes into constructed playability. The question is: will they work to make the card pools for these two mechanics deeper, or will they expand the shallow surface?