Sets (MH3) Modern Horizons 3 Previews
- Thread starter TrainmasterGT
- Start date
mana. It makes total sense it comes from the Eldrazi aliens super gods from the Blind Eternities.
To be honest, I think my disappointment with these mechanics comes more from the impact they have on constructed as opposed to how usable they are in Cube. The way I see it, 2016 and 2017 were largely responsible for the decline of paper constructed and creating the atmosphere for Commander to dominate Magic to an unhealthy degree. At the start of 2016, Standard was in a very rough place. The banning of Splinter Twin coupled with the cheap colorless Eldrazi in Oath of the Gatewatch breaking Eye of Ugin caused an exodus of Modern players who did not return for several years. Meanwhile, the poor management of Standard led to a string of back-to-back formats where a few select decks dominated the format. The decision to lower the power level of the format while neutering the effectiveness of removal spells meant that a few linear decks dominated the format without necessarily providing cards that people could play in eternal formats after they rotated. Energy was the worst example of this– a deck so dominant that it resulted in several waves of Standard bans, but so low power that the banned cards were variants of Lay of the Land and Wistful Selkie. These sets were so problematic that WOTC was forced to hire a bunch of new game developers just to try and stop the bleeding... which resulted in a few sets that were wildly overturned and ended up breaking things even further. Yes, Oko, Thief of Crowns, and all of the other design mistakes of the early FIRE era directly result from the damage caused by the Battle for Zendikar and Kaladesh. Standard never recovered from the damage caused by BFZ and Kaladesh, and it took the original Modern Horizons to reinvigorate Modern after a couple years of relative stagnation.
I am really worried that Modern Horizons 3 could bring Modern into a state reminiscent of this era that has caused so much damage to this game. The Eldrazi is literally being used as a selling point for the set, and I read that Energy is going to be very pushed in MH3. To be fair, it is possible that the "colorless matters" Eldrazi in this set will be designed to mirror the original Rise of the Eldrazi designs. While I personally fell out of love with the Eldrazi when Devoid and Ingest were underwhelming and the cheap colorless designs ruined Modern, the original massive Annihilator cards from Rise are still awesome to this day and it would be cool to see them return to viability. Likewise, Energy requires a pretty significant critical mass of cards to work, and that would be very difficult to achieve with a single set. Pioneer was able to fade the return of Energy since most of the original Kaladesh cards are fairly weak, but I fear Modern won't be so lucky.
You're probably right. I read that WOTC was going to push another quirky typal theme like Slivers and Ninjas from MH1 and Squirrels from MH2 in this set. When this was the first card revealed from the set, I thought that was the direction they were going. WOTC is really bad at doing cat tribal in my opinion– they always have some weird combination of house cats and sexy fur bait that feels... dissonant at best and actively uncomfortable at worst. I ended up writing my comment before Priest of Titania was revealed and never went back and edited it. I wonder if this indicates they will be doing some changeling shenanigans in this set... Changeling Outcast was one of my favorite cards from Modern Horizons 1, and I think it would be really cool to get more iconic creatures reimagined as Changelings. Imagine a changeling Llanowar Elves!
I agree with you on this point! It will be interesting to see how well the new energy cards and BFZdrazi mesh with the cards from their original blocks. Both Kaladesh and Battle for Zendikar were released in that weird transition phase where WOTC was figuring out how to make compelling limited environments but was still printing cards that were below-rate by modern standards. I personally remember trying to make both of these themes work in my first Cube when these sets were new, and I was thoroughly disappointed with the depth of the card pool, even for the incredibly low-power environment I was curating at the time. I'm not sure how well these cards will mesh with Modern Horizons-level printing, but it will be cool to see if it works!
I will push back on you a bit on this point, though. I think the pushed removal spells have consistently been among the best game pieces printed in these sets! Cards like Prismatic Ending, Lose Focus, and Flametongue Yearling use mechanics that are narrow enough that they can't cleanly be added into any old Standard set, but still have significant design space for one-off cards. Meanwhile, stuff like Unholy Heat is too good for Standard, but is a great payoff for doing delirium in limited and eternal formats. I think these cards add a lot of texture to a Cube by incentivizing players to build cool synergies into their deck in order to maximize the effectiveness of their removal spells. Sure, Unholy Heat is good on its floor, but it's absolutely insane if you can make the delirium work. It gives players a reason to reach for ways to get four card types into their graveyard in a timely fashion. A card from a similar vein that I have been loving lately (although not originally printed in a Modern Horizons set) is Galvanic Blast. A shock that is twice as effective just for having three artifacts feels like a great payoff for jumping through the hoop of assembling all the artifacts is awesome, especially because the floor is still decent. I think getting more of these high-synergy "bread and butter" cards is incredibly important for building well-rounded Cubes. I would be interested in hearing your thoughts, though!
I made these a couple years ago (and re-rendered them just now to Surveil 1 instead of Scry 1). Hope someone can play them now that I'm not.
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Well written @TrainmasterGT !
landofMordor
Administrator
Totally fine! I probably earned it
Many of these designs were broadly attempts to slow Modern down and make it less combo-centric, as I understand it. However, pushing hard on removal (Heat, PEnding, Fury, Solitude) vs. printing more powerful and unqiue 4-mana threats with high deckbuilding cost (Urza and Yawg from MH1) has had the side effect of ousting from Modern viability tokens- and types-matter decks, and small baneslayers like Goyf or Bob.
I definitely get where you're coming from, but like, we could have always just played more copies of Swords to Plowshares if we only wanted "powerful" removal per se, and we already had "removal with synergy" like Seal of Fire and Aether Spellbomb (especially graveyard and multicolor synergy, since those axes of synergy are already heavily subsidized in Magic's small-game fetchland Constructed formats). What we didn't have was "basic effect ABC that plays really well in this cube I built around Emerge Eldrazi".
indeed, I hope we do! But I differ because I'd like to see some bread/butter cards synergize with lesser-loved mechanics and themes. "Shock but deals 6 if you control an Elf" or whatever -- in other words, synergies that provide alternatives to the historically subsidized small-game synergies like artifacts, graveyards, and fetchland manabases.
In other words: Urza's Saga and Mirrodin and Kaladesh have been giving toys to artifacts-matter for 20 years. Let's see some love for Eldrazi Drones and "creatures and combat tricks" type-matters decks and wacko synergies like Energy and Mutate.
PS -- I, too, assign blame to Kaladesh-era design for the decline of Standard, but more for the reasons Pat Chapin outlines here. TLDR the best cards since 2016 have had very little risk or investment attached. (Why, you might ask? might have to do with a multiplayer format that started being officially supported shortly before that time).
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This is why I love these forums.
I feel like Attune With Aether deserves some more respect than being disparagingly called a "Lay the Land variant". 2 energy translates to a +1/+1 counter, +2 spell damage or an entire card, which is a pretty significant upside to staple on a 1-mana card. Seat of the Synod is also really just an Island variant. If wotc manages to make energy modern playable I would be a bit surprised if it doesn't end up in the 60, and I'm not sure that applies to any of the other energy cards.
Colorless or energy are probably not themes I'm going to ever support in my main cube, but in terms of mechanics for Magic I'm pretty fond of them. Colorless mana does a great job of recontextualizing the entire history of Magic's mana system in a really elegant manner, and Eldrazi Winter is more so a feature of one of the most busted mana bases seen in competitive magic. Design wise I think the colorless cards are largely perfectly fine. Energy is to me a very exciting mechanic that I think is difficult to design well, but has a lot of potential, and if MH3 manages to make it a legacy viable deck I'd be kind of hype for that.
Colorless or energy are probably not themes I'm going to ever support in my main cube, but in terms of mechanics for Magic I'm pretty fond of them. Colorless mana does a great job of recontextualizing the entire history of Magic's mana system in a really elegant manner, and Eldrazi Winter is more so a feature of one of the most busted mana bases seen in competitive magic. Design wise I think the colorless cards are largely perfectly fine. Energy is to me a very exciting mechanic that I think is difficult to design well, but has a lot of potential, and if MH3 manages to make it a legacy viable deck I'd be kind of hype for that.
I think it's important to remember that we may only see these mechanics on 2-3 rares each and the rest might be commons and uncommons for draft.
The other MH sets had affinity, snow, and slivers as some of the color pairs. Weird decks showing up in MH for a little fan service seems the norm.
The other MH sets had affinity, snow, and slivers as some of the color pairs. Weird decks showing up in MH for a little fan service seems the norm.
I'm glad the cubing world doesn't have this problem — if an archetype in one of our formats is dumb garbage, we can just rip the whole thing out and be done with it. Meanwhile, WotC has to power-creep themselves because they have a very minimal ability to remove cards from constructed formats, and they want people to buy the new cards they make.
I am so so happy.
Also, Amazon listings revealed that Disa the Restless is the Commander for the Jund deck for MH3, which is thrilling to me as a lifelong Ice Age block lover.
I totally agree with you! One of my favorite cards in the past year is Spell Stutter, specifically because it asks the drafter to care about something they almost never would in a regular draft. We've got a little bit of support for Faeries in the past, but this was the first Faerie's Matter support card in over 15 years! I think between Spell Stutter and Picklock Prankster, there is enough support even in singleton Cubes of various power levels to give Blue players a reason to care about drafting some Faeries. I want more cards like this!
The place I get worried is when the existing card support pool is a little too narrow to allow a new addition to help bridge the gap between the desired archetype and the rest of the Cube. Triumphant Chomp is a great example of this. In a similar vein to Spell Stutter, Triumphant Chomp is a good, if not replaceable, removal spell that rewards players for including Dinosaurs in their deck. The problem is that there just aren't a lot of Dinosaurs that both improve Triumphant Chomp while also having a reason to exist in various other decks. Right now, the Dinosaurs that improve Chomp are almost exclusively stompy creatures that really only work in a dedicated ramp-style strategy. There are a couple of Dinosaurs in Red that are just good in a generic sense like Rampaging Raptor, but the majority of the relevant cards to Triumphant Chomp aren't relevant anywhere else. That's not to say there is no overlap between Dinosaurs and other themes (there are a surprising number of Cycling Synergy Dinosaurs), but there is a relatively limited pool of options.
Compare this to Spell Stutter– there are a lot of great faeries at various power levels that can both improve Spell Stutter while also having synergy with other things. There are of course the obvious suspects of generically powerful Faeries, but then there are also cards like Sprite Dragon, Oona's Prowler, and Faerie Vandal that have cool synergies outside of the normal faerie play space. Even though you probably wouldn't play all six of these cards together because of varying power levels and archetypal concerns, Spell Stutter can bridge them all. This has the positive effect of giving players a reason to start crossing the streams for these cards even when they might not normally consider that course of action.
To be honest, I feel like we agree on the fundamental argument that more synergies exploring past archetypes is one of the most important parts of Modern Horizons, especially when more obscure themes are included. I think the main point of contention is differing visions about what a Horizons set would ideally look like.
When I was reflecting on why I had a negative reaction to seeing the return of Energy and BFZdrazi (beyond the aforementioned constructed game balance issues), I realized that my problem was with how these themes have been historically designed. Earlier, I mentioned how Triumphant Chomp has a relatively limited pool of enablers when compared to Spell Stutter. This actually isn't true. In fact, there are almost exactly 150 each of Faeries and Dinosaurs with power three or greater, plus or minus a couple of cards in either direction, depending on how you want to count tribal permanents and token producers. Despite this, Spell Stutter has a much more rounded catalog of cards to draw from for its pool. There's a very simple reason why is this is the case: Faeries have been in a diverse array of sets with various mechanical needs, whereas Dinosaurs were printed almost entirely in three sittings. Even though there are a full 60 more Dinosaurs and Dinosaur synergy cards than Faeries and Faerie synergy cards, there is a significantly higher amount of complexity in the pool of Faeries.
Energy and the BFZ implementation of colorless mana matters both suffer from the same issue as Dinosaurs: there is currently a small pool of cards that use the mechanics, and there isn't a lot of complexity within that pool of cards. While there are more ways to interact with energy counters and colorless mana beyond the cards from those original sets, the actual pool of cards that act as the core enablers and payoffs for those mechanics are still very insular. A card like Harnessed Lightning is still going to have the same issue that Triumphant Chomp has in that a lot of the cards that exist around it won't do anything outside of energy. These archetypes are probably more than a Spell Stutter away from being able to have a clean integration with the rest of the Magic ecosystem. I am not confident that Modern Horizons 3 will be able to the weight of multiple years' worth of cards and mechanics in the confines of a small portion of a single set. One new release might be enough to spawn some cool new dedicated set mashup Cubes, but I'm skeptical that it will be able to do enough for environments that aren't balanced around accommodating the power level of the existing cards for these archetypes.
We've actually seen something similar to the "Faeries vs. Dinosaurs" issue play out before in Modern Horizons 1! That set had both Slivers and Ninjas as supported tribal archetypes, with a WB changelings deck acting as glue to hold them together. The Sliver portion of the set didn't do too much in pushing slivers beyond it's previous iterations: The First Sliver was an interesting alternative commander to Sliver Overlord, but that was about it. Meanwhile, the new Ninja cards actually gave that deck a real shot in the arm, both in Cube and even a little bit in constructed! Changeling Outcast and Ingenious Infiltrator were both great enablers for the tricky ninja decks people were looking to build. They gave the existing Ninjas from Betrayers of Kamigawa some needed redundancy and synergy. A few people were even using the outcast-infiltrator combo to power up Yuriko, Tiger's Shadow in Legacy! The deck already had plenty of good on-plan evasive creatures and interaction pieces, MH1 simply provided the extra push over the finish line the deck needed.
My concern for Cube is that Energy and colorless matters in MH3 will fare more like the Slivers than the Ninjas, while still having a negative impact on Constructed. I think I was disappointed because there are several decks that are maybe one Spell Stutter-type card away from being able to fit into a non-dedicated Cube without feeling forced or out of place. For example, Enchantments have felt frustratingly insular from an archetype design perspective for the past several years. I have been trying to put together a low-power level Cube with an enchantment component without revolving entirely around enchantments. The problem is that a lot of the "enchantment matters" cards are very feast or famine–they either want you to be playing a deck that has a million enchantments (like Jukai Naturalist), or they aren't powerful enough to pull their own weight outside of an enchantment-heavy deck (like Eidolon of Blossoms). There is no "shock but with enchantment synergy" like Galvanic Blast beyond maybe Oblivion Ring effects, which don't really solve the issue of a lack of flexible payoffs. I was hoping this set could be a place for that sort of thing. There are a ton of other archetypes that fit this mold as well– Zombies, Dragons, Elves, Manifest, Adventure, Devotion, and so many more are just a few Spell Stutter type cards away from becoming something fully-fledged.
I have no doubt that WOTC has some cool stuff in store for us with the mechanics they are choosing to showcase, and if this set is anything like the last one, I'm sure some of the other minor themes that need attention will get some help as well. I think my initial negative reaction to the return of Energy and Colorless largely came from a lack of confidence in WOTC's ability to appropriately balance these two historically problematic mechanics in constructed and give them enough depth to do something cool in non-dedicated Cubes. It seems very difficult to me to get multiple themes like that correct in the same set, and I feel like the attempt will likely take away space for other cool things that would benefit more from a Modern Horizons push. I think both colorless and energy would be better suited to individual Standard sets where they can be the central theme without having to share the spotlight with other complicated mechanics. However, that's how I'm feeling at the moment. I had written a little something else about a different point you made, but honestly, I think this sums up my initial reaction to this group of cards pretty well. Hopefully this wasn't too much of a monster to read!
–GT
landofMordor
Administrator
hmmmmmm that feels like a analysis i haven't seen before. very interesting.
@TrainmasterGT
Do you think you'd still favor Spell Stutter if it had an initial "unless its controller pays"?
On the phrasing "concern for cube," that's the best part of cube. You can ignore whatever you want.
In terms of Lorwyn mechanical flavor, I consider any U/B creature with flash to be a faerie lol.
Do you think you'd still favor Spell Stutter if it had an initial "unless its controller pays
"?On the phrasing "concern for cube," that's the best part of cube. You can ignore whatever you want.
In terms of Lorwyn mechanical flavor, I consider any U/B creature with flash to be a faerie lol.
Probably not, because then the card would be completely dependent on Faeries to do anything in most contexts. The reason why Spell Stutter is so cool right now is partially because it doesn't actually need a ton of Faeries to be good, so it ends up functioning more like a glue card than an archetype-specific payoff. If the initial counter cost was@TrainmasterGT
Do you think you'd still favor Spell Stutter if it had an initial "unless its controller pays
, the card wouldn't work without a critical mass of Faeries.I agree, but it's more fun when you don't have to ignore anything.
Yeah, it took me a while to realize the depth of the card pool is important in addition to the size. I forgot to mention this, in my previous post, but the reason why the pool of Dinosaurs that work with Triumphant Chomp is so shallow is because the way the Dinosaur cards were presented in the relevant sets. In all three Ixalan sets, the theme for Dinosaurs was essentially just "play big creatures," with a minor damage matters theme in the first two sets. Likewise, the Ikoria dinosaurs were almost all characterized as generic big creatures, with a couple of cycling payoffs and "keywords matter" creatures like Labyrinth Raptor. These themes just don't interact very much with other existing archetypes, making the card pool of Dinosaurs feel fairly shallow despite it's respectable size.
My impression is that this is still mostly the case (which is perfectly fair). It feels like you're trying to rationalize it, but the reasoning behind it doesn't seem to me to be very internally consistent. I'll address them in some semblance of order, but the third part is the most relevant.
Faerie payoffs are better than dinosaur ones, because they have greater mechanical depth, because of more diverse set inclusions.
This is the premise of the sentiment, and I think it's largely true in this context, but not so much when applied to the mechanics in question. That said, I also think it's missing the mark a little here. Dinosaurs are just fundamentally stereotyped as big beaters, even when they appear in other sets, their core identity are generally expressed as ferocious creatures, which naturally lends itself to midrange threats and ramp targets. There are three of them in Doctor Who and they average a mana value of 6.6. Especially when the synergy card you're highlighting keys off power, further limiting the already limited inclusions that are more synergy oriented. Although even with that in mind I think Dinosaurs do a pretty good job with cards like Surly Badgersaur, Bronzebeak Foragers, Deathgorge Scavenger, Ripjaw Raptor, Topiary Stomper, Hulking Raptor, Rotting Regisaur, Tranquil Frillback, Spitting Dilophosaurus and Indoraptor, the Perfect Hybrid in terms of having reasonable cube inclusions.
Ninjas and slivers mimic the faerie and dinosaur dichotomy
At this point in time, slivers have appeared numerous times, dwarfing ninjas in representation. There are, in constructed, a lot of different ways you could build a sliver deck (which is not to suggest that they'd be competitive). It's just not an appealing cube archetype because of how extremely parasitic it is, but that's not really a trait it shares with dinosaurs. Slivers were never going to get a card like Ravenous Squirrel or Nested Shambler, but dinosaurs very well could have. (Although at the right power level you could experiment with cards like Dregscape Sliver, Hollowhead Sliver, and whatever else.)
It took me a bit to realize, but I assume ninjas here are more of a stand-in for evasive creatures, considering the ninjas here are the payoffs similar to Spell Stutter, although it's not like MH1 actually added much to the archetype, all it did was elevate the power level. They also don't really have the Spell Stutter property of a low floor, you'd never pick a ninja without a deliberate intent to consistently enable it. In terms of parallels, they seem pretty comparable to cards like Reality Smasher.
Colorless mana and energy doesn't have mechanical depth
Colorless mana is a payoff to being able to provide colorless mana. Painlands and filter lands, magic's entire history of utility lands, eldrazi spawn and mana rocks. You pick a Bearer of Silence as your black 2-drop and now you have an incentive to draft deserts or go tribal with Mutavault or find a use for Phyrexian Tower or oil it up with The Monumental Facade or whatever else themes you support through your mana base. Urza's Saga comes to mind. I'm trying out a couple of Hall of Oracles. You have to put some conscious effort into making colorless mana costs attainable in your cube, but it's very much feasible and with a lot of creative expression and archetype interplay.
Energy meanwhile is probably the mechanic with the greatest mechanical diversity in the entire game. Your Harnessed Lightning can synergize with your Lay the Land, mana dork, various aggressive beaters, some self mill, a spells payoff card, a go-wide one, whatever this thing is best described as, not to mention how many of them provide +1/+1 counters or artifact tokens, plus their natural synergy with blink effects (and ninjas even). Whatever archetypes appear in MH3 with color overlap I'd expect some energy card to cross-synergize with because of how flexible of a mechanic it is.
I really, truly, do not understand what faeries are doing with Spell Stutter that doesn't apply here.
Enchantments in particular are also very commonly a set theme in normal sets whether that's Theros, Kamigawa or Eldraine, or in random commander decks, so I do appreciate them giving the attention to ones that are harder to normally justify for a set like MH. (Plus they did already try to introduce enchantress into modern with MH2 including with new card designs, although not as a draft archetype.)
The Time Spiral Block Constructed Wild Pair combo deck where you went off with Dormant Sliver and then eventually Frenetic Sliver'd it off the battlefield so you could attack was absolutely wild
It was, technically, a Sliver deck. And it mattered, cause that's what made Gemhide + Reflex for mana and Dormant for cantrips and so on work. But it didn't feel like a Sliver deck to most people.
(It did for me, I loved that deck. Also, I cannot believe that the name on this deck is Guillaume Wafo-Tapa when Mystical Teachings was not only legal but the best deck in the format.)
I think you're kind of missing the point here. I'm not saying that Colorless mana and Energy don't have mechanical depth, I'm saying that the two mechanics have card pools that are shallow. Likweise, I am not confident MH3 is going to be able to able to a large amount of depth to the card pools for these mechanics.
Colorless is almost like a sixth color and energy is a fairly open-ended resource– both of these mechanics have a lot of inherent design space. The problem is that the current set of cards with the two mechanics do not present a lot of design opportunities. Colorless is a good example of this– there are only thirty or so cards that have a colorless mana cost, and you'd be hard-pressed to fit more than a dozen into a Cube at a given time. They're not particularly hard to enable at the moment, which is great, but the cards that exist don't present a ton of cool opportunities. Sure, you can get a weird version of Zealous Conscripts, or a somewhat interesting edict guy for a black aggro deck, but that's about it. These cards ask that the player put in a fair bit of effort in their drafting process to get enough colorless sources to enable these cards, but the rewards aren't that huge compared to the effort and the floor on most of these cards is pretty mediocre. The main exception is Eldrazi Displacer, which is a cool engine that can enable a blink deck by itself. I think colorless mana costs would be an easy mechanic for WOTC to do something cool with, but I think a broader theme than Battle for Zendikar-style Eldrazi designed to revive Eldrazi Temple and Tron decks probably isn't the answer. If the temple tribal version is not what ends up in the set, great! If it is, that's less great.
By contrast, Energy suffers from a weird balance between enablers and payoffs. Most of the energy cards exist in a space that is only appropriate for an environment mirroring Kaladesh limited in some capacity. What's more is that there are very few cards that want to be in the same non-energy shell, resulting in a lack of cross-pollination between decks. For example, there are not enough good energy cards for a ramp shell to want to incorporate an energy package– a single Servant of the Conduit is not doing enough by itself to draw someone into playing a bunch of energy enablers and payoffs. The result is the dominant strategy for a deck using energy devolving into "play as many energy cards as possible and hope for the best." While there might be a diverse pool of effects for an energy player to draw on when constructing their decks, there isn't enough depth in any one category to make an energy sub-theme attractive to other archetypes. A non-singleton approach can address this problem a little bit, but not enough to be meaningful in a lot of situations. I think MH3 is going to struggle to complete this objective, unless the new energy cards provide deep support for themes beyond "generate as much energy as possible and find a good payoff to spend it on."
Well yeah, the "big idiot" stereotype is at least in part responsible for throttling the depth of the Dinosaur card pool. They're not really trying to make Dinosaurs dynamic or synergistic with other decks for the most part. As such, any attempt at building Dinosaurs in Cube is going to result in something fairly insular. Even a ramp build, which may have mutliple decks fighting for it's enablers, probably won't have much fighting for the big chungusauruses. While there are a handfill of decent dinosaurs at any given power level, they don't do much.
The issue with Slivers isn't a diversity in the individual abilities of the cards, but rather the lack of depth in playstyle they create. Most proper sliver decks are some variation upon "play the +1/+1 lords legal in the format and your favorite support cards." As such, despite the broad pool of Sliver cards they end up not having a lot of depth. This is largely the issue that Energy has at present– the card pool lends itself to "play as much of this thing as possible," but it has even fewer ways of cleanly extending into other spaces.
By contrast, Ninjas only needed more reasons to build their deck– there were plenty of good enablers that had synergy with other archetypes. Basically every evasive creature or weenie with an ETB could enable a Ninja! The proble was just that there wasn't a reason to build the deck– there were maybe 6 ninjas before MH1 that actually made sense to put into a deck or a Cube, and most of those were just for added density. Adding more Ninjas, including some with internal synergy, to the card pool made the deck a lot more viable. You're right with your Reality Smasher comparison in regards to the Kamigawa block ninjas: they were comparable to Smasher in the sense that they had enough enablers to work but needed some more friends to become compelling Cube inclusions.
Anyway, I appreicate your in-depth response. Hopefully I was able to provide you with some clarity!
Onderzeeboot
Ecstatic Orb
I think that slivers and energy are both poisonous mechanics. You basically want as many as you can get, because each extra sliver or energy card you can get makes the mechanic perform better, and non-sliver/non-energy cards are consequently less interesting. For energy this problem is more easily mitigated than for slivers. As long as an energy card is good enough to run on its own, playing more energy cards is a bonus instead of a requirement, so it might get there I feel, if MH3 offers enough energy cards that are good in their own and that fit in broadly the same strategy.
It's gonna be really funny if that gremlin card is just a one-off lol.
Energy can at least interact with things like Proliferate and Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider. Slivers just interact with other slivers.
I have a pretty large energy theme in my custom PokéMagic cube, counting 28 cards that do stuff with energy across three colors in 375 cards total, and it doesn't feel parasitic. It's like a tribal theme in the sense that your energy cards get better with others, but only in terms of flexibility. So, the gap between floor and ceiling is much smaller than for other cards like I don't know, a Goblin Warchief. You can also use energy as an output to bridge between archetypes. One example:
Raichu, Thunder Mouse
Pokémon - Electric
Whenever you cast your second spell each turn, you get EE.
Thundershock -, pay EEEE: Raichu deals 3 damage to any non-ground target. Activate as a sorcery.
3/2
There is the energy theme in Grixis and a double spell theme in Naya, so Raichu here works in every red color combination. There is also some overlap between energy and the proliferate effects you find in Temur for +1/+1 counters and in Jund for the poison (-1/-1 counters) theme. Energy is not inherently parasitic for draft environments. I can't talk about constructed very much.
Raichu, Thunder Mouse
Pokémon - Electric
Whenever you cast your second spell each turn, you get EE.
Thundershock -
, pay EEEE: Raichu deals 3 damage to any non-ground target. Activate as a sorcery.3/2
There is the energy theme in Grixis and a double spell theme in Naya, so Raichu here works in every red color combination. There is also some overlap between energy and the proliferate effects you find in Temur for +1/+1 counters and in Jund for the poison (-1/-1 counters) theme. Energy is not inherently parasitic for draft environments. I can't talk about constructed very much.
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. Prior to MH1, ninjas were quite unexciting. I'd wager to say the set doubled the number of reasonable ninjas. Ninjas are also narrow build arounds that only function in an environment that supports it, and are mechanically very shallow. Their situation seems identical to me, although colorless cards are kind of weird in that their power lies in letting you make use of colorless mana which is usually a tradeoff on more powerful cards, but depending on power level you could also just play colorless cards of a higher power level.
This for instance seems like a kind of neat support package with a lot of archetype synergy that also facilitates casting colorless cards. The main thing that's missing are the exciting cards to cast, which is the kind of thing that MH can provide, but they also just let you be a bit more greedy without being punished. I share some of your concerns in terms of what archetype it is probably designed to push, but if this ends up being a limited mechanic I don't think they can just try and make eldrazitron.dec.
Meanwhile for energy, you can have something like:
The power band here is a bit iffy, but overall I find this pretty compelling, there's some very strong cards in the latest Fallout set and with some more MH ones I think you could have a nice synergy cluster that are powerful together but also in disparate archetypes.
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.
I'll concede that with energy it's possible my more lightweight approach to synergy in cubes gives me a lower expectation of density than you have and that is where my disagreement stems from, there are probably more faeries overall I would consider cubeable (although they are all in blue so there's a limit to how many you can play without it being blue's only identity.) That said, I also don't think energy is all that parasitic. Brotherhood Scribe, Synth Eradicator, Assaultron Dominator and Aether Chaser are just individually quite good on face value, and a lot of energy cards don't intrinsically get more raw power when played together (with a few exceptions like scribe.) What you do get is more flexibility in how to use the resource, you get less punished if your cards is answered as you have more payoffs to spend them on, and it does enable you to include cards that typically wouldn't fit your gameplan as you can leverage the resource for something that is more relevant to your deck. As a cube mechanic it honestly just seems excellent to me, outside of some play pattern aspects that I would attribute to their approach to designing energy cards, and the kind of scuffed card pool. But that's why I'm hoping they're making more.
Meanwhile for energy, you can have something like:
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.
I'll concede that with energy it's possible my more lightweight approach to synergy in cubes gives me a lower expectation of density than you have and that is where my disagreement stems from, there are probably more faeries overall I would consider cubeable (although they are all in blue so there's a limit to how many you can play without it being blue's only identity.) That said, I also don't think energy is all that parasitic. Brotherhood Scribe, Synth Eradicator, Assaultron Dominator and Aether Chaser are just individually quite good on face value, and a lot of energy cards don't intrinsically get more raw power when played together (with a few exceptions like scribe.) What you do get is more flexibility in how to use the resource, you get less punished if your cards is answered as you have more payoffs to spend them on, and it does enable you to include cards that typically wouldn't fit your gameplan as you can leverage the resource for something that is more relevant to your deck. As a cube mechanic it honestly just seems excellent to me, outside of some play pattern aspects that I would attribute to their approach to designing energy cards, and the kind of scuffed card pool. But that's why I'm hoping they're making more.
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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 didn't read any of the E cards from PIP because I don't really want an extra resource to track and I assumed it would be shallow and parasitic, as it has been, but the ones Mown linked look pretty cool! I'll definitely take a second look after MH3.
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 didn't read any of the E cards from PIP because I don't really want an extra resource to track and I assumed it would be shallow and parasitic, as it has been, but the ones Mown linked look pretty cool! I'll definitely take a second look after MH3.
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.
I'm kind of understanding when it comes to energy at this point, although I'm not sure how important it is for the mechanic. There's a couple things that still feel a bit off, but I'm not sure I'd be able to put them into words.
I'm kind of understanding when it comes to energy at this point, although I'm not sure how important it is for the mechanic. There's a couple things that still feel a bit off, but I'm not sure I'd be able to put them into words.
I think colorless mana is easier to support than most strategies because it can be supported through (fixing) lands. If you don't run shocks and fetches, painlands are close to the next-best thing. With enough colorless mana support they kinda tap for 3 colors. A similar thing can be said for the shadowmoor filter lands.