Aside: Can we dwell a little more on how sweet
Jori En, Ruin Diver is? While I would have loved a sweet keyword like Prowess on there, the card has such a nice design for that colour pair. I have an unnatural urge to want to pair her with Moxen, but I feel I am going down the false synergy path there; has anyone had any experiences with
Gitaxian Probe?
Jori En is,
endeed, quite sweet-looking, and I got absurdly happy when she spoiled - somehow I feel they dropped prowess and 1 mana off her cost to make her more playable, but that's just my intuition speaking and I'm fine if that's the case. I currently don't have any U/R cards in my cube, which is hilarious, because UR is one of my more popular guild combos. I won't tangent too far on my personal beliefs and my own cube for this*, but UR is a very odd pair to me, in that it's a very cool pair flavour-wise (experiments! creativity! smart dragon guy! artifacts!), but has, imho, never had many cards that live up to that flavour that are also remotely cube-worthy (aside from
Izzet Charm) because the execution is often simply "spells matter". Note that I
LOVE spells-matter! But as far as linking cards go, there aren't many that really feed into this in an exciting way for me.
Jori En is a fantastic combination of spells-matter
and flavour. It captures so elegantly the notion of epic creativity; here you are, this dueling wizard, and you've called forward this legendary researcher. As you cast spells, she has a
"eureka!" moment, inspiring you in a very tangent-y, Riptide-y, oh-this-makes-me-think-of-this! way, and you draw another card. Your rapid-fire spellwork leads to a new idea coming to mind; a genuine example of the creative process. So elegant, so flavourful, and so precisely what that colour pair wants to do, and does do. Obviously everyone wants to draw cards, but Jori En also does it in a way that feels very true-to-flavour for me, which is fantastic. I lament
Grim Backwoods for being such a
very G/B card that allows for card draw while being unplayable in its costing.
Re:
Gitaxian Probe; I originally included this a while back as a flex card to support prowess (extra free pump that turn), storm (duh it's free), combo (dig for your shit), and discard strategies (
"hmmm... Cabal Therapy naming.. gosh, I don't know.. maybe, and I'm just guessing here... Cyclonic Rift? :^)"), and it does fine work in all of these decks, but it's mostly air. The most common evaluation scenario was: "Is there anything else in my pack I can use? If yes: don't take probe". In that sense, it's fine fodder for fluffing up your cube, but more often than not, it felt incorrect to essentially play 39 cards and start out -2 life in my format, because despite being a good wrestling ground for aggro vs control, there's a lot of damage flying around and not enough lifegain to profitably make having 39 cards in your deck worth the 2 life cost. And the card itself is barely worth
in a format with so many other, better cantrips. Sure, it's a fine curve filler, but I opted to cut it pretty early on when trimming down my cube size most recently, because it really was always just pure filler. I'd include it again primarily if I was obsessive over the exact number of cards I needed in my cube and wanted a place-holder, but I don't think it's really worth it unless your environment is heavy on discard effects and combo.
* = (like about how seeing Ral Zarek in saf's stream makes me want to try him again now that my cube is lower powered and how I want to use Izzet Charm and Electrolyze but can't find the space because they feel pretty dull for a multicolour pick and etc, etc..)
