Hey there! Welcome to the forum! I hope to see you posting about more often
In regards to your questions about your 540, here are my thoughts.
Reanimator: Given how powerful your cube is, this seems like it needs a significant push, in my opinion, especially given the size of the cube.
- I think some of your enablers are probably too slow.
Forbidden Alchemy is a pet card of mine that never did enough back when my cube was of a similar power level as yours; if it proves underplayed (or not very useful), cut it promptly and don't look back! There's better enablers.
- Speaking of,
Faithless Looting is a fantastic enabler for reanimator and is a fine draw smoother in other decks. I really enjoy it and have ran two copies many times, much to my drafter's delight.
-
Victimize never worked here, and I think it just barely passes muster in much lower-powered environs.
- I'd like to see
Animate Dead,
Necromancy,
Life // Death,
Exhume, and/or
Unearth in this list if you're serious about supporting reanimator. I understand reservations about
Reanimate itself (it's pretty powerful), but the rest of these seem very reasonable to me.
Torrent of Souls is a fine option if you want to keep reanimator as a strictly "value" strategy, especially if you end up running
Pyromancer's Goggles.
- The lack of
Entomb and
Buried Alive make reanimator a lot harder to pull off. If you increase the density of reanimator spells, perhaps double up on
Bloodghast (a fine choice imho), and/or add in
Phyrexian Reclamation, both cards become a very reasonable choice, and, better still, they're fairly narrow, and will typically make it to the decks that want to play them without feeling poisonous (see
this thread for more discussion on narrow cards, and my reply on narrow supporters vs narrow enablers and why you should run them).
Entomb is an extremely effective tutor for a lot of different plays, and is criminally undervalued. It helps reanimator, gets you things to flash back, and can be a slightly overpriced tutor effect when combined with the likes of
Eternal Witness,
Snapcaster, and their many friends.
Spells-Matter: Overall looks pretty good, though the size of the cube makes it a lot shakier. Some suggestions...
-
Seeker of the Way is a phenomenal card. It's quite powerful, so doubling up may seem a bit scary, but I think it's well-worth it if you want to support the deck at this size.
- The absence of
Jhessian Thief is quite notable, because it's proven itself to be quite a valuable role-player over here. I'd strongly recommend including it.
- Double
Young Pyromancer seems pretty reasonable in a cube of this size.
-
Guttersnipe is a very powerful incentive towards the Spells-Matter deck, and lots of fun trying to use as a centerpiece.
I hope this helps!
