Sequence Cube

[Mown]

The Sequence Cube (woo!)
name and content pending
Draft philosophy
My goal for the draft is to produce an environment that encourages exploration and creativity, with a significant barrier to entry as a tradeoff. It approaches cube design with a focus more towards cards than decks, by providing a critical mass of individually playable cards whose value can be greatly recontextualized with a handful of more narrow archetype-defining picks. The card pool is at the same time very synergy driven, designed to make it difficult to construct a macro-archetype supported purely by card quality. There is some power-level disparity in the card pool for excitement and signaling purposes, while trying to stray away from power outliers of either kind.
any flaws of the cube are entirely the fault of WotC and their lack of support for my design vision
Gameplay philosophy
The focal decision point I want to center my cube around is when, specifically, to play a card. The card pool attempts to focus on instant-speed cards, effects with alternative costs, or incentives to cast your spells in specific contexts. Games are designed to emphasize decisive non-linear power progressions over consistency and predictability. Card advantage engines are sparse and largely narrow in application, and tapping out can easily be exploited by explosive plays.
I have barely tested the cube so just assume it plays out like I want it to ok
A p1p1 contains a thousand words

 

[inscho]

This is relevant to my interests. I'm looking forward to delving in deeper.

At a glance, I think the artifact count is on the low side to support cards like:



These all want a high density of artifacts to do their thing properly. Some of these are technically usable with no other artifacts, but they still send a signal to your drafters that there is more support available than you currently provide.

Artifacts are a more prevalent theme in my cube: I run 82 artifacts and artifact producing cards in a 384 cube which comes out to 21%. You are running 47/10.5% it seems. If the above cards are important pieces of your cube architecture, you should consider adding more artifacts to support them.

I'll try to do some test drafts this week and have some more detailed thoughts to share.

 

[Mown]

I've been thinking a bit about my land choices, and while I want to emphasize the use of interesting lands, I'm not really sure I gain all that much from it. The Castle Garenbrig ramp archetype is neat, but it probably doesn't provide all that much to my format. I've never really wanted to pick Mystic Sanctuary in any of my playtest drafts, and the remaining three are mostly just flood protection, even if the red and white one hypothetically have a home together with Loam. Getting rid of this entire "cycle" would free up 10 spots that I can probably make better use of.
Hardened Scales should also get cut I think, The Ozolith fills the function of narrow but powerful +1/+1 counter enabler while being more accessible color wise.

These all want a high density of artifacts to do their thing properly. Some of these are technically usable with no other artifacts, but they still send a signal to your drafters that there is more support available than you currently provide.

That is sort of what I mean by encouraging exploration at the cost of having a high barrier to entry. It is fundamentally very difficult to make any assumptions about the degrees of support different build-arounds have in my cube going in blind, and I'm not considering this to be a feature as much as a necessary evil. I need to gain more actual experience in terms of what is the lowest threshold I can go and still have a synergy piece be a reasonable inclusion, whatever the metric for that is, but just because ravager exists in the cube doesn't mean I want it to be a strong option a majority of the time, as much as just a viable option to pursue when it seems doable. Having said all that, I do want more incidental artifacts in my cube, I'm just not all that into the other options I've looked at. I think that realistically speaking Green and White are the best artifact enablers in the cube, with Green giving you Gilded Goose as the best repeatable artifact producer, and White having Stoneforge for Equipments, and Rangers for X-cost Artifacts (and Geese).

But just to comment on the cards you highlighted;
Arcbound Tracker is primarily there as a miracle-gro style card, the artifact synergy is mostly incidental (and appreciated)
Nettlecyst keys off two different card types, I think it is situationally powerful enough given how inherently strong the card is
Goblin Engineer can entomb Scrapheap Scrounger or Myr Battlesphere (one of the best reanimation targets), and set up value chains by looping Mazemind Tome, Epochrasite or Lesser Masticore with another artifact.
Armix I don't really think needs very many artifacts to be worth it, just a -2/-2 deals with a lot of things for no mana investment.
Urza is broken, I'm looking for a replacement that isn't Emry (too easy to use with Baubles) or Whirler Rogue (doesn't really reward you for having artifacts).
Arcbound Ravager is very committal, it gets to be more narrow by virtue of being colorless, I think that is fine, but I do want other colors to be able to take advantage of it more easily.
Tolarian Academy I'm not sure about. It has a weird sort of role as a storm-enabler with the 4 land-untappers, but the mana is also only useful in an artifact deck if you can spend it on something, so I'm not sure if I like the role it plays, even if it was more easily enabled.

I appreciate the response though. I'm walking a tight balance here, and I don't even know how loose the line is supposed to be in the first place to feel right. I've heard rumors that the upcoming sets will be artifact centric though, so maybe I'll be able to better realize that subsection of the cube during 2022.

 

[Nanonox]

Urza is broken, I'm looking for a replacement that isn't Emry (too easy to use with Baubles) or Whirler Rogue (doesn't really reward you for having artifacts).

?

Not only searches for artifacts but also encourages you to flood the board with them for a big turn.

but just because ravager exists in the cube doesn't mean I want it to be a strong option a majority of the time, as much as just a viable option to pursue when it seems doable.

I think this is the catch. Ravager is already a narrow card as you need a high artifact density as well as your deck being aggressive. So having it be weak a majority of the time and viable sometimes screams trap to me. If the ceiling on a narrow card is "viable", then I am going to be disappointed when I go out of my way to make it work for not much payoff. However, if the artifact density is present in the cube and you naturally pick them up along the way, then you can pivot to the Ravager and go from there.
What I am basically trying to say is what dbs said in the Spell Velocity thread:

But again, its the do-nothing spell velocity enablers that really need to be present in high enough density. Then diverse gameplans and archetypes should pop up naturally from there.

Get your enablers (artifacts) first and then find the payoffs (Ravager, Urza, Academy,...) you want to support (depending on power level, game play it promotes and archetypes).

 

[Mown]

I feel like The Antiquities War is kind of feelsbad, you rely pretty heavily on the third ability since a lot of artifact cards just don't have the typing.

To elaborate a little, what my gut feeling would consider reasonable is that out of 5 drafts, ~2 of them you'll get trainwrecked going hard on artifacts, 2 of them you'll have a reasonable deck, and 1 of them you get something amazing. An ideal world would probably have the major archetypes of the cube set the baseline, and you can accent those with the buildarounds, which present options that are more risky, but potentially also more rewarding. I don't think Ravager is too far from fitting this description, and I don't really think it requires an aggressive shell to work in the context of my cube, but I do think that the current selection of artifacts doesn't necessarily synergize all that well with Ravager in that a lot of them aren't really worth exchanging into a +1/+1 counter.

With that said, I don't emphasize balance from a "game theory" standpoint as one of the primary goals of my environment, I don't expect it to be playtested to the degree that people will reasonably solve it as opposed to just reaching a consensus based on flawed assumptions; as long as you can play around with the environment and create something you feel like has a reasonable shot at winning games then that is sufficient for me. I can accept a few outliers that are seen as subpar deckbuilding challenges if the support cards aren't a detriment to the format, the main issue would be substantial skews towards either certain colors or just sticking to the pillars of the format (that being flash or prowess, more or less).

I've looked at some options now that I have potentially 12 slots to use elsewhere, some considerations I have in mind:
Urza's Bauble: More baubles. I don't think I want to go up to 4 on this type of card, and specifically for Ravager it doesn't work all that well, but it could let me potentially consider Leonin Squire as an inclusion. I'm not wholly against it.
Chromatic Star: Another do-nothing artifact cantrip, this one has a lot more synergy with Ravager and other sacrifice outlets, it could potentially see use together with Smokestacks.
Liquimetal Torque: This card has a lot of potentially neat applications while being a baseline mana-rock, which isn't all that bad.
Barbed Spike: Kind of an unexciting card, but helps make use of Stoneforge as an affinity enabler.
Sram's Expertise: Sort of fits the spell-velocity themes, makes three artifacts.
Blade Splicer: Unlike a lot of cubers I don't really like this card, a 3/3 first strike for 3 bricks combat really hard.
Another Thraben Inspector
Witching Well: I'm not really sure this accomplishes anything unless I want to keep Academy or cube Thought Monitor (which, for what it's worth, I do like). Decent with Nettlecyst and to a lesser extent Armix I suppose.
Trinket Mage: With the baubles, potentially stars, bonesplitter, EE, Ozolith, LED and the X-drops, I think this is actually a pretty reasonable inclusion at this point. Probably going in.
Spellskite: This card seems really annoying in a format with buff-spells, but it is a good artifact creature.
Tezzeret the Seeker: idk, he's kind of neat
Skullport Merchant: Is this card at all good?
Voldaren Bloodcaster: I don't like DFCs, and adding another token-type is kind of a chore, but this card probably plays pretty well for this context. I could also sharpie the transform text and still probably have it be a decent card.
Bomat Courier: I will probably add this, just haven't gotten around to it. Kind of concerned it won't get to attack as freely as in cubes with more well-defined macro-archetypes and higher levels of removal.
Scrap Trawler: It's possible that this is a more reasonable colorless artifact build-around than Ravager. I don't like that it doesn't interact with tokens, but there are other artifact payoffs that do, so it might not really be necessary.

 

[Mown]

Alright, moderately-ish big update. Cut the aforementioned lands and added some artifact cards as replacements, plus a few other cards I'm not as high on, which is actually kind of nice knowing that there are some easy cuts for the next time I make an update. In terms of build-arounds, Ravager got cut for Scrap Crawler which I think is a more broadly appealing and interesting card, it has a pretty decent floor of rebuying an artifact when it dies even in less abusable shells. Urza got moved back to UR again with Galazeth Prismari dethroning Vadrik, which feels more power-level appropriate, and having two UR 3-drop creatures that kind of fit the same shell didn't feel too great. Sythis also got replaced with Yannik, Scavenging Sentinel, who is an interesting cross-section of power-matters, blink and +1/+1 counters. More importantly, the new enchantment-payoff is Replenish, which despite not working that great in decks just jamming enchantments, has a lot of exciting applications that I don't think are too hard to realize.

There are still some cards I am a bit skeptical of, so right now I'm more in a state of looking for additions than cuts, which is a weird new place to be. I've been considering trimming the cube down to 444 just for the meme value because I really like the number 4, and being different is it's own reward. I don't feel like the cube does an especially good job of approaching my second design goal right now, but given that I'm even putting day/night in my cube despite how much I abhor that mechanic I feel like that's more on the card pool than my choices. One way to approach it would be to pack the cube full of kicker mechanics I guess, but I don't think that really provides the feel I want since it would trend more towards individual impactful spells instead of chaining multiple smaller ones together.

I'll probably try and do some drafts to see if I can get a few example decks to showcase some of my favorite inclusions in the cube.

 

[Mown]

I've finally discovered a group of people who are willing to draft somewhat regularly, which makes me optimistic about the prospect of actually getting around to printing my cube and having it played.

Kamigawa update​

Cobra blog entry in header; I'll touch on some of the more interesting additions here.


I have touched on this several times, but I really like all the cross-synergies this card has. Naya has some support for Berserk-style aggro approaches. Lizard Blades plays very well with white's equipment focus, helping Stoneforge Mystic be a tutor for both the enabler and the payoff, and it's solid in green as a target of Become Immense and other giant-growth adjacent cards. You can also play it in aggressively-slanted decks with artifact-subthemes.


I'm more excited about what these cards can be, than what they currently are. A gameplay pattern I want to expand on in my cube, that there's currently a bit of a lacking support for, is cheating on mana values. Ascendant Packleader, Rushed Rebirth, Vial Smasher and Ride The Avalanche among a few others are there to encourage you to cast expensive spells for cheap for a greater reward, and while I am currently not entirely satisfied with the payoffs at my disposal, I do like how these serve as enablers, and down the road I might add the black one if I get more cards that can make the pitch-aspect more valuable.


I wanted black to have more incentives to sacrifice their own creatures, but I feel like a lot of the traditional sac-outlets in black sacrifice more for the sake of sacrificing than anything else. I don't want players to draft a bunch of cards that want to die and then find a way to get rid of them, I want players to be tempted by cards that ask you to feed them and then find proper fodder. I like what this card offers in this regard, and playing into artifact themes is just a bonus on top of that.


Reanimation is a weird thing in my cube. If you want to get back any creature from your graveyard, black's offer in this regard is just two copies of Animate Dead, and the more value-oriented Unburial Rites. I wanted my reanimation to be quite efficient, but not reliable enough to be an archetype of it's own, so that you could include them in a deck without being as dependant on your A+B combo to work. One of the weird outcomes of this is that Yorion becomes by far the strongest reanimation-target in the cube, but it also means that Colossal Skyturtle, which would normally be a good self-enabling reanimation target, loses a lot of value, as the ward ability does not protect the Animate Dead itself. However, by putting it into a white shell, you have the ability to get back a massive threat with Replenish, on top of whatever else the card provided you with, which is exciting/terrifying.

 

[Mown]

someone drafted a competent-looking no-nonsense UW control deck with very little in terms of synergies on Cubecobra and now I am furious

 

[blacksmithy]

this sounds like something i would do, i wish i could take credit

 

[Mown]

To be fair, while I do try to make card-interactions "the best thing", it's also true that I've tried to emphasize playing at instant speed, so it's somewhat natural that you would be able to make a pretty conventional-looking Ux control deck, and I appreciate someone taking the time to tell me as much.

It did make me wonder why I'm cubing Yimrith. The answer is I wanted some dragons in blue, and I realize I have now also cut Murktide Regent for probably being too good, but I'm not sure if it's a good enough of an answer. It's kind of just a stat-monster otherwise. I'd be sad to leave blue dragonless though.

 

[LadyMapi]

Honestly, if you want a dragon in Blue...

 

[blacksmithy]

 

[Chris Taylor]

Go big or go home

 

[LadyMapi]

Ah yes, my favorite mono-blue Dragon for my Ux deck.

 

[Mown]

Apologies to anyone who for whatever reason is subscribed to this cube, I assume I'm producing a lot of notifications. I just randomly decided to channel my negativity (this world's closest approximation to an infinite energy source) and get rid of cards I don't think very strongly about the inclusion of. I enjoyed sitting at a round 450, and I haven't really even made up my mind about what an ideal cube size is, I just got appalled at the audacity of some of these cards to sit comfortably in my cube thinking they can get away with only putting in 200% effort.

I should try to come up with a list of cards that are like "If these aren't exciting to pick then the cube is a failure" so I have some sort of measurement.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Apologies to anyone who for whatever reason is subscribed to this cube, I assume I'm producing a lot of notifications. I just randomly decided to channel my negativity (this world's closest approximation to an infinite energy source) and get rid of cards I don't think very strongly about the inclusion of. I enjoyed sitting at a round 450, and I haven't really even made up my mind about what an ideal cube size is, I just got appalled at the audacity of some of these cards to sit comfortably in my cube thinking they can get away with only putting in 200% effort.

I should try to come up with a list of cards that are like "If these aren't exciting to pick then the cube is a failure" so I have some sort of measurement.

I've been there

 

[Mown]

Ain't that the truth.

Just as a mental exercise I've been trying to think of the cards I would be disappointed were they not important cards to the environment.

​

I've growth very enamored with this card despite how parasitic it looks. Sagas, Animate Dead, Colossal Skyturtle, The Mirari Conjecture. I love that by how inherently broken of a card it is in a larger context, you can take it in several different directions with relatively little investment.

​

Reality Scramble is the most accessible polymorph enabler I have discovered so far. Not only can you engineer it to work with any permanent type, so it can backdoor into a Myr Battlesphere off either half of Hard Evidence, but the retrace also gives you an inherent resilience against interaction on a somewhat fragile gameplan, and it gives you an additional way to access it in black through Entomb.

​

Aeve is a stand-in for storm. I'm struggling a fair bit with how to facilitate this archetype. My primary payoffs as they stand are Aeve, Crow Storm, Galvanic Relay and Sentinel Tower, and I need some experience with the cube to get a better understanding of what they contribute, but intuitively I feel like a couple of them might fall a bit short. I just don't know what the "storm count" of my cube is, I think it's in the 3-4 range, but there's potential for truly explosive turns with an undisrupted Mirari Conjecture or with Underworld Breach.

​

I don't know that this card contributes anything I want, I just kind of like it. I have no idea how good it is. Dredge 3 in itself is a pretty useful line of text, you can sort of grind through opponents with it using creature lands, it "combos" with Throes of Chaos which otherwise offers very little to the cube, but for the most part it kind of just feels like a sideboard card, and I wish it did something exciting. But Loam is inherently just more of a grindy piece of cardboard.

​

Barely released and already topping my charts. I love the graveyard synergy, I love the artifact rider, but more than anything I love that it encourages me to play big mana creatures. I want my synergies to feel decisive, and I really appreciate that this guy can easily hit 6+ power together with delve creatures and other dorks with cheaty mana values. I just wish there were more appealing cards that also did so for instants and sorceries.

​

Ambusher is truthfully a somewhat gross magic card, so I don't think I need to do much to support it, but the essence of it is what I want. I like the incentive to be able to play at instant speed, and I like the incentive from your opponent to do so as well, in order to force you to play on your own turn. Games of magic are more fun when both players have agency on each other's turn, a lot of potentially frustrating play patterns like sweepers and counterspells become a lot more involved.

​

This card isn't actually in my current list. There's a lot of ways to cast spells from the graveyard, but the density of cards that also meet my other requirements just aren't there. I do like this card a lot though, and I wish it had a home.

​

Death's Shadow is a card I am considering. The support for it isn't there currently, but I wonder if it would be possible to get there with double Shadow, double Street Wraith, fetch+shock manabase, and not too much else. My gut feeling is that it wouldn't, but the mini-games this card creates do appeal to me a lot, and it would give black an identity that is more dynamic and less grindy, which I would greatly appreciate.

 

[blacksmithy]

​

Death's Shadow is a card I am considering. The support for it isn't there currently, but I wonder if it would be possible to get there with double Shadow, double Street Wraith, fetch+shock manabase, and not too much else. My gut feeling is that it wouldn't, but the mini-games this card creates do appeal to me a lot, and it would give black an identity that is more dynamic and less grindy, which I would greatly appreciate.

this actually can work (depending on cube size)! definitely recommend adding Scourge of the Skyclaves too.

 

[Chris Taylor]

Love posts like this btw

 

[Karshtakavaar]

Cemetery Protector, Sigarda's Vanguard and Phantom Steed are some spicy includes for bant flash. How are you finding Jolrael? I have a really high density of cycling and she just wasn't doing all that much for me.

You also look like you're juuust at the threshold of self-mill and creatures that bin themselves where Living Death might be a cool build-around? It's a sorcery itself, but it encourages responses like sac-ing or discarding creatures, and that then leads to the Living Death player drafting and playing around that possibility - plus it splits the graveyard/reanimator decks between "I'm willing to exile stuff to get the king into play" and "Can't afford to exile stuff, I need all of those lil guys to come back"

 

[Mown]

How are you finding Jolrael? I have a really high density of cycling and she just wasn't doing all that much for me.

I've broken singleton on Hard Evidence, Brainstorm, Consider, Frantic Search, Preordain, Street Wraith, Faithless Looting, Faithless Salvaging, Manamorphose, Mishra's Bauble and Chromatic Star, along with a decent number of other card draw effects, so I assume she has legs. That said, I've broken singleton on those because they are some of the more important cards to the environment, so how often you can get them in practice, who knows.

You also look like you're juuust at the threshold of self-mill and creatures that bin themselves where Living Death might be a cool build-around? It's a sorcery itself, but it encourages responses like sac-ing or discarding creatures, and that then leads to the Living Death player drafting and playing around that possibility - plus it splits the graveyard/reanimator decks between "I'm willing to exile stuff to get the king into play" and "Can't afford to exile stuff, I need all of those lil guys to come back"

Might be weird of me to say considering my love for Replenish, but I'm not really sure how much I like Living Death as a card, and why that is. I think the card might be a bit too swingy because of how it affects your opponent's tempo as well. I'll put it in the maybeboard.

---

Just a few sets ago, Fell Stinger was one of my favorite new cards because of how it recontextualized a slew of cards in the cube. Now I'm pretty sure there's an entire archetype around it in mardu that's probably the strongest card advantage engine you can find.

Spoiler: rBW Unearth

---

I think I'm going to swap out the two City of Traitors for Lion's Eye Diamonds. I am kind of concerned about the card, it might be too swingy, but it is a very exciting card as well. It has obvious uses with the classics of Time Spiral and now Yawgmoth's Will, but you can also get creative with it whether it's with flashback-adjacent effects, exile-draw, or the discard payoffs. It does however mean you can play a Colossal Skyturtle t1 off Unburial Rites, which is effectively unbeatable. I might regret it.

 

[safra]

That is sort of what I mean by encouraging exploration at the cost of having a high barrier to entry. It is fundamentally very difficult to make any assumptions about the degrees of support different build-arounds have in my cube going in blind, and I'm not considering this to be a feature as much as a necessary evil. I need to gain more actual experience in terms of what is the lowest threshold I can go and still have a synergy piece be a reasonable inclusion, whatever the metric for that is, but just because ravager exists in the cube doesn't mean I want it to be a strong option a majority of the time, as much as just a viable option to pursue when it seems doable. Having said all that, I do want more incidental artifacts in my cube, I'm just not all that into the other options I've looked at. I think that realistically speaking Green and White are the best artifact enablers in the cube, with Green giving you Gilded Goose as the best repeatable artifact producer, and White having Stoneforge for Equipments, and Rangers for X-cost Artifacts (and Geese).

Personally, uh, I don't think Ravager is "a viable option" when it isn't "a strong option". It asks you to cash in all your cards and resources for temporary advantages - these have to meaningfully contribute to ending the game to be worth it. And since you're playing Stoneforge, it makes sense to me to bring in a few more supporting pieces for Ravager that are also, like, the Stoneforge player's second or third equipment - Barbed Spike, Lion Sash, Rabbit Battery, Blade of the Oni....just a thought on cross-pollination of these two powerful synergy cards. I do also think that Arcbound Ravager and Scrap Trawler are BFFs 4ever in a way that creates some really exciting and compelling lines of play, so I'd encourage you to bring in the Trawler also.

And if you're thinking about (lol) Leonin Squire.....and also thinking about LED........why not bring in cool exciting graveyard combo deck 'Bomberman', at the cost of a single additional cube slot?

 

[Karshtakavaar]

Seconded on the Auriok Salvagers.

Scrapyard Recombiner is another very good friend with Scrap Trawler - at least, they get along very well indeed in my list. I don't run Ravager (Which is sadly a Beast not a Construct), but I assume they would get along too.
Hangarback Walker, Containment Crawler, Epochrasite, and Myr Battlesphere in your list are all tutorable with the Recombiner.

There are also a ton of good constructs, like the Gearhulks and build arounds like Metalworker and Kuldotha Forgemaster, if you ever want to head in those directions - but that's a whole different set of ideas.

 

[LadyMapi]

It does however mean you can play a Colossal Skyturtle t1 off Unburial Rites, which is effectively unbeatable. I might regret it.

I mean, that requires you to have an untapped land and three specific combo pieces in your hand on T1. In a format that's singleton for all three of those pieces.

If someone opens with that hand, clap them on the back and congratulate them on hitting the roughly 0.35% chance of that happening.

 

[Mown]

I do also think that Arcbound Ravager and Scrap Trawler are BFFs 4ever in a way that creates some really exciting and compelling lines of play, so I'd encourage you to bring in the Trawler also.

The cube has changed significantly in the 10 months since I made that statement. The artifact density is higher, and half of the payoffs I talk about in that post are gone, including Ravager being swapped out for Trawler as of post#6.

And if you're thinking about (lol) Leonin Squire.....and also thinking about LED........why not bring in cool exciting graveyard combo deck 'Bomberman', at the cost of a single additional cube slot?

Auriok Salvagers does roughly two things exclusively, neither of which I personally think are all that exciting. It's either an Azure Mage, when I try to avoid easy access to card advantage engines, or it randomly wins the game off four mana in a linear fashion, and I want players to forge their own path, not give them established combo decks to put together.

Not entirely sure what's so funny about Squire. Now that you reminded me of him I kind of want to put him in the maybeboard, but white already plays pretty commonly into the X-cost artifact creatures in a way I don't think I want to encourage any further, and it's probably a grizzly bear a little too often.

Scrapyard Recombiner is another very good friend with Scrap Trawler - at least, they get along very well indeed in my list. I don't run Ravager (Which is sadly a Beast not a Construct), but I assume they would get along too.
Hangarback Walker, Containment Crawler, Epochrasite, and Myr Battlesphere in your list are all tutorable with the Recombiner.

There are also a ton of good constructs, like the Gearhulks and build arounds like Metalworker and Kuldotha Forgemaster, if you ever want to head in those directions - but that's a whole different set of ideas.

I do like Recombiner a lot on a personal level. That said, here I think it's likely too narrow, and in the cases where you could consider playing it, it's not that exciting, even if it's a tutor for a couple of build-arounds. It's a card that requires two caveats to do one thing, when I ideally want a card that has two caveats to do two different things.

I mean, that requires you to have an untapped land and three specific combo pieces in your hand on T1. In a format that's singleton for all three of those pieces.

If someone opens with that hand, clap them on the back and congratulate them on hitting the roughly 0.35% chance of that happening.

The given scenario is certainly not that likely, but it's representative of some of the tempo swings you can get from adding a black lotus to a cube. And while I am having fun drafting it in some questionable decks, I have to acknowledge that there's a lot of cards in here that make it do some very silly things.
I should maybe consider Past in Flames instead of Yawgmoth's Will at least, even though I would prefer black to get some of the more exciting cards. Right now it's a bit too grindy for how I want my cube to actually play out, but to some extent that's just how black works as a color.