I adore
Vraan, Executioner Thane.
As
@TrainmasterGT said, it doesn't
necessarily compete for a
Blood Artist or
Zulaport Cutthroat "slot"; not in terms of a vague "# of cards to support an archetype" sense, at least. Where it does become a "This vs. That" situation is in "how do I fit this into my cube?"
Exactly 1/3 of my black 2-drops were first printed in 2022. That's
wild. This was a relatively competitive slot beforehand; it wasn't long ago that I was tearing my hair out to make room for Jadar during Midnight Hunt, and lowered my mana curve to avoid strictly making that decision (and accidentally make cube more playable overall, tbh).
Looking at just those six newly-added 2-drop creatures, all of them but one are cross-archetype hits: very flexible cards that make a real impact on the board state and contribute towards many different goals. (The Raven Man is my dude and contributes to the "build a novel deck around this one dumb card" goal that I try to support with ~1% of my list to make the cube maximally replayable).
Where
do I want my
Blood Artists and
Zulaport Cutthroats? For my 720 list, I like them in the RB recursive aggro decks primarily, the Abzan and Jund token/attrition decks secondarily, and beyond that, the much rarer-to-come-together BR or BW combo-focused aristocrats deck third. Because my cube is so big and has no duplicates, it's very rare for that third option to come together succinctly.
And I'm OK with that! When your cube is the size of two draft pods, you sacrifice consistency and you need your cards to be more flexible across different archetypes rather than planted as an established "deck". This is a feature rather than a bug and is why, now that I'm 8,000 miles away from my old playgroup and without any expectations of having a new one that requires a 720-card list in the next two years, I've kept my cube the same size.
But
because of that,
Vraan, Executioner Thane is probably better in most decks that
actually get drafted than either
Blood Artist or
Zulaport Cutthroat for my list. It would take 3-5 creatures dying in a turn cycle to beat life drain that the 1-2 I can reasonably expect in a recursive aggro or tokens build to provide for Vraan to be bested, and it's a beater in its own right.
So am I replacing either of them with Vraan? No, I'm replacing
Dauthi Voidwalker because I've been fully convinced by you all that it has little place in anything except a powermax cube with more concern for the "strongest in slot" than for maximizing interaction. So I get to cheat.
But yes, otherwise, I would. Probably.
