ONE (NOTHING WRONG WITH ME)
Long time no see, RipLab! I've made maybe a dozen-ish posts since mid-2020, but I'm finally revising my Cube now that I'm letting other people enter my home again. I'm doing well! To get past the small talk and into this topic, here's what I've been up to lately: worked as a contact tracer for ~16 months, currently job searching and writing a novel. Things are good with me! I JUST THIS WEEK got a cat and therefore expect to spend a lot less time gaming and a lot more time Posting. Also I'm an Elden Lord. That was great, my first experience with the genre. Not playing any other card games at present but still enjoying Arena.
TWO (NOTHING WRONG WITH ME)
One of my greatest bugbears in the decade I've been thinking about Cube has been a general dissatisfaction with the monotony of Red's flavour. A few years ago my attempt to resolve this was dragons-matter. I still like the dragons-matter experience but am currently trying to shift my Cube's curve down a half-step and include more Legacy style gameplay, so cutting the number of Baneslayers at the higher end of the curve has been part of my 2022 revisions. Without dragons as 'Red's iconic creature', I have more space for a different red tribe that lines up more smoothly with a Legacy style curve: phoenices.
(pronounced as "penises" / "venus's" with a ph. I could write it as "phoenixes", but that's not as fun or pedantic.)
THREE (NOTHING WRONG WITH ME)
What is a phoenix? It's usually:
-a flier
-with haste
-that can be recurred from the graveyard
--> (sometimes for free if a condition is met)
These are very appealing abilities on a card. Hasty fliers mean answers to Villain's upticking planeswalker, as well as some additional reach. Recursive graveyard threats - well, those are great, obviously, but they interact so elegantly with self-mill, dredge, looting, rummaging, and just the general playing of cards over the course of a competitive game that a phoenix isn't just "a creature"; it's more than the sum of its parts; it's basically a mechanical identity for certain threats in certain kinds of gameplay AND a way for those decks to close out a game.
FOUR (NOTHING WRONG WITH ME)
ONE (SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE)
Syrix got me very excited. Syrix turns any Phoenix-condition into the Phoenix-nature (puts it on the battlefield), and pays you off with a piece of removal to make up for the resources you spent on generating the phoenix-condition. Syrix also pays off in this Bolt-y way with its own rez ability, a light push for our drafters towards 'phoenix tribal' as a mechanical deck identity (red, graveyard-y, hasty recursive threats). Sure, you need the phoenix on board, and Syrix in the yard. That is, unless:
-you're sacrificing a phoenix after combat
-you have a cubeable changeling that dies
-you milled two phoenices into the yard, and can meet the other condition. Let's say Syrix and an Arclight Phoenix. In a sense, Syrix is your 'second Arclight Phoenix'. She's also your second Managorger Phoenix, and does 3 in the air to recur your Lightning Phoenix. We can see from this that Syrix is both an enabler AND a payoff for Phoenix Tribal. Also, the ability overrides normal timing restrictions (per a Reddit thread - no Gatherer rulings online yet), so if you leave up mana, and meet the condition, you can cast Syrix on Villain's end-step, letting you start the Phoenix Chain all over again every time you meet a Phoenix Condition or draw a new bird. I think probably this is a strong thing to do in a game of Magic and worth drafting around.
TWO (SOMETHING'S GOT TO GIVE)
There are some ~32 phoenices in magic. All but one are mono-red. Here are the ones that I'm thinking about, as well as a few 'honorary phoenices' and support pieces:
THREE (CUBING'S GOT TO LIVE)
Change or die, bitch.
love you xoxo
--safra
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Syrix is the wrong colors for my cube, but it does look fun. For a cube that's making a conscious push to lower its curve, I wish Syrix's last ability didn't require you to pay its full cost though.
