According to this incredible tool I recently found called Griselbrand.com,
a Cube of my size should be running approximately 9 cards from MSH/MSC if I were to behave like the rest of my peer group (warning: long loading time, but it's worth it). After a bit of online testing, it looks like I'll be ending up with double that. Getting around 20 new cards in such a massive amount of new cards makes sense for a 720er like mine, and while I'm less than pleased with the flavor of many of these cards, my favorites of the set graciously range from
inoffensive to
all-timers in the art department. It's weird to be adding
yet another Spider-Man (
I was already heavier than needed on those) but I seriously can't complain about the individual card design quality on display from this suite of cardboard.
If you saw my preliminary testing results from two weeks ago, this is updated with much more practice drafts, pre-release experiences, and lots of additional reading/listening.
Super Super Heroes
My top picks from the set are mostly the same, and I'm even happier with all of them than I was before. These are the cards I imagine will stick in my Cube for a long time to come.
Night Nurse, Healer of Heroes is the flashing, lifelinking hero I've been waiting for. It's even better than Samwise in my Cube, grabbing cards that get milled and providing card advantage in a color that struggles with it. How many times have you brought a fetch land using a
Sun Titan and been more-or-less happy? I'll never be sad grabbing one with Night Nurse. Plus, she's legendary, which is a nice boon to white in my Cube.
Royal Talon Fighter Jet has only grown on me. It's a nice intersection between token cornerstone
Jacked Rabbit and the master of midrange
Esika's Chariot. At 4 mana, it can crew itself a la the Chariot, which lets it snowball real good. I like how good it is at getting in undisturbed while still being easy to remove. Being an incidental artifact is nice, as is using the same tokens as
Elspeth, Storm Slayer (and more generally,
Elspeth, Knight-Errant,
Ancestral Blade,
Hero of Bladehold,
Torsten, Founder of Benalia,
Elspeth, Sun's Champion, and
Raise the Alarm).
@shamizy covered everything you need to know about
Mole Man, Moloid Master and
Iron Man Armor is pretty straightforwardly an extremely good cross between the respectable
Maul of the Skyclaves and the imposing
Nettlecyst, with flexibility that allows it to succeed even in decks that wouldn't be interested in either of those two on their own.
"Worthy" Heroes and Villains
These ones are all currently in my Cube even after trying to cut down on UB a little, and I'm generally satisfied.
We Say Thee Nay! is probably near the bottom of the #16-#20 range of coutnerspells I run in blue, but I run 20 of them currently so it works out. I like it more than
Make Disappear, although that card is slightly more powerful, simply because my players are less excited to sacrifice their dudes, and Casualty 1 in a blue deck usually sucked up a 2-drop anyways.
Victor Timely, Wily Tycoon is a
Diviner of Mist that gets the trigger off ETB instead of attack, more than making up for its worse body. Plus--and this is important--it gets artifacts too! Thinking of it as a souped-up
Goblin Dark-Dwellers in blue is underselling this card, but it's a good place to start. I wish it had flying! It's probably not long for this Cube, but that's just because of how competitive blue is, even when you have 92 cards dedicated to each color.
Timeline Inquiry is a bigger instant speed
Chart a Course for the graveyard decks, and is similarly a Swiss army knife of a draw spell. (I understand this rewards you for holding back your guys rather than attacking with them, but most often chart a course is just a draw 2 discard 1 for reanimator or the like). In my environment, think it's slightly worse than
Fact or Fiction or
Consult the Star Charts, about on par with
Winternight Stories or
Memory Deluge, and a bit better than
Pull from Tomorrow, which is still in quite a lot of Cubes. The art's great, it's not asking for that much, and I hope more people check it out.
Ultron the Annihiliator is a
Royal Warden that comes with a win condition instead of an unearth ability.
Marionette Apprentice,
Marionette Master, and
Al Bhed Salvagers have shown how quickly this ability can become dangerous, and this one feeds itself whenever it attacks as well. Neat, if replaceable, 5-drop.
Spider-Man, New Champion proves no matter how shapely your butt is, you're still not tough enough to survive a bolt. This is a great way to get incidental value out of the discard synergy decks that have been increasingly exciting in Red (and a little in Black and Blue) while still being perfectly serviceable in more generic midrange decks that happen to run a
Faithless Looting or a
Fear of Missing Out. Requires quite a bit of discard-matters to make this make sense, but if you have it, this is a sweet option.
HYDRA Assault Robot is another marginal pick, but I like pushing players more towards artifact ETBs in red rather than general token support like
Agate Instigator or
Shocking Sharpshooter. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if I end up swapping this back in for one of those in the future.
Mjölnir, Hammer of Thor has impressed me as a
Twinshot Sniper variant I feel great about. I'm sad to lose the card draw from the discard ability compared to the Sniper, but I like 4 damage a
lot more than 2 on ETB and a Pyroclasm is an even better card to see on one side of a de-facto split card. Red's always happy to have more artifacts, and really, the equipment is gravy here, but it's gravy that encourages my primary RW archetype and feels super satisfying to pull off. Love this card.
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is probably not the best for my Cube, but my players love the card, the character, and squirrels. I've only got a few squirrel cards at the moment, but this one is perfectly acceptable and becomes insane by the time you untap with it. The power level is ideal, so even if it is replacement-level, it may end up staying around Cube for a while as a fun midrange/token card to work towards.
Super-Adaptoid is one I fear won't stick around long due to lack of interest by my playgroup, but I want it to work. There's a huge amount of legendary creatures in every color in my Cube, so while I dislike the keyword tokens, this is going to be a fairly assertive and under-costed beater most of the time. I think it's neat!
H.E.R.B.I.E., Lovable Robot is also more on the tentative side of things, but I like my artifact mana to mostly ramp you in colorless so that green can be king of fixing. I like repeatable surveil and I like encouraging different kinds of deck-building. This is a worse
Ornithopter of Paradise but one better positioned for my needs.
Ultron, Artificial Malevolence is a colorless
Digsite Engineer that flies. That's good enough for me! I desperately want to play Digsite Engineer but feel I need to work more on white's artifact decks to make it make enough sense.
Dragon Man, Reformed Robot is another marginal pick, but I love recursive threats / dudes that can benefit from being milled. In my practice drafts, it's hard for it not to seem pretty fair considering what else ends up in the yard (usually a 3/4 flying for 4) but I'm going to try to get some reps in with this.
First Family is probably not sticking around, but I like how often it plays out like a
Sphinx's Revelation for half the mana. We'll see if I can't make this work.
Jennifer Walters /
The Sensational She-Hulk is only in because I was a little unsatisfied with my GW section and she seems
fine. If she didn't have the baggage of being a MDFC, I'd be much less grumpy in playing her, as I like what she does plenty.
Castle Doom is a
Legion Extruder on a land...that seems pretty good. It's somewhat more practical than
Abundant Countryside, which I tried out but couldn't justify keeping in for even a single paper draft.
West Coast and Great Lakes Avengers Tier
These are the close calls, the compelling cards that I'm sad to not be running.
King T'Challa would probably be in if not for it being an MDFC -- I think it's often going to be a mistake to flip it. It's very close.
Loki's Scepter would be in if I weren't already playing
Cursed Mirror and if I hadn't just added in
Tablet of Discovery, both of which I think I like more. If I had more sacrifice outlets, this would kick out the Tablet, but I like the mill and the occasional card advantage of the Tablet more, in addition to more obviously encouraging Big Red.
Loki Laufeyson is a repeatable copy spell for just one mana an activation! Power-up is actually a pretty sweet ability, since it can either be kicker or monstrous, and the mana discount is pretty compelling. Thinking of this as a split card of a 2/1 for 2 or a 4/3 for 5 does help it seem a bit more reasonable, and it feels pretty close. Not quite there, but interesting enough I need to keep one in my binder.
Tippy-Toe, Terrific Partner is very tempting.
Peregrin Took is an effect I'd like to have in Cube, but even when you're doing a bunch with food/trinkets it's hard to want it more than
real tokens like you get out of
Chatterfang, Squirrel General or
Quina, Qu Gourmet. So also being a constant card-drawing engine a la
Haliya, Guided by Light and
Exemplar of Light is pretty compelling. I know it's not very Riptide of me to be excited for a card that's both enabler and payoff, but hey, it's also a squirrel.
Return of the Mole Man was a card I expected to like, as I was pretty stoked to have a non-specific
Morcant's Eyes for my Cube, but for six mana at sorcery speed, I'd rather have
Elemental Spectacle as the big payoff and actually get real card advantage on the front side like in
Dredger's Insight. It just doesn't do enough!
Matt Murdock, Justice Seeker is interesting to me as someone who's been feeling like
Luminarch Aspirant is so good it invalidates a lot of my other +1/+1 matters cards (and other 2-drops in general). I think it'll still be fine, but I may eventually want to swap these two out, in the same way I purposely no longer run
Ouroboroid and have decided against
Agent Bishop, Man in Black.
Council of Reeds is another card that I've been thinking a lot about. This snowballs quickly and is a fun single-card build-around that I think works when you think of it as a 4-drop after a cantrip (or a lucky 3 off a bauble!) a la
Dion, Bahamut's Dominant, only this one threatens to multiply at an exponential rate. I'm very close to slotting this one in.
Dora Milaje Elite is really good and plays well with what my Cube is trying to do. I think it just doesn't spark joy for me in a way I'm not able to figure out. Will likely give it a go in time.
The Fantasticar is too busted, even in my Cube. I like how it's a puzzle that wins you the game for playing on a different axis, but it's not immediately obvious to folks who don't play Legacy/Vintage or follow the scene that this is what the card does. Also, I don't want one of my Exodias in Cube to be The Fantasticar.
It's Clobberin' Time! is fantastic value. I don't like a bite spell being both a) sorcery speed and b) indicated in advance, but it's still fine. I like it less than my current naturalizes in green (
Origin of Metalbending,
Pest infestation, and
Boseiju, Who Endures) and there's probably another one or two I still like more, but it's close.
Rhino, Terrible Trampler would've been a Cube all-star not that long ago! It seems pretty close to
Titan of Industry for a whole less mana; the 3 counters are worse than a 4/4, but again, it's one whole mana less!
Spider-Man, Miles Morales was pretty good for us and only was removed since I didn't want one of my game-ending green fatties to be Spider-Man, but Rhino feels a bit closer to Magic, and this seems better than that card.
Panther Robot is an interesting top-end for your mono-brown decks. Not having a ward or haste makes it feel a little too fair, even for a colorless card with the phrase "affinity for artifacts" on it.
Brawn, Amadeus Cho, as Usman discussed with Train on their pod, is a really cool card. A hybrid ETB draw a card dude for 2 is pretty good already. That's close to playable in my Cube. But it's also a legendary creature, and a split card! You can play it for 5 mana and have it come in bigger. The flexibility is really the key here, and I'm very temped by the brawn of Brawn.
Other interesting cards:
