Card/Deck Single Card Spotlight

ravnic

ravnic

Thank you. I didn't convert to cube to hear people make power level judgments. At the last draft table I also heard two guys claiming that a card was "not good enough for cube" as if that made any sense. It made no sense in 2012 and it's a real crime to still say nonsense like that in 2026. Could we AT LEAST here at the riptide labs stop doing that?
 
Brad

Brad

Speaking of "not good enough for cube," ;)

Give me your best bounceland synergies.

Right now I'm looking at returning MDFCs to "draw" a spell and, obviously, it's worth an extra land. Anything else cool about them?

EDIT: Untappers.
 
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inscho

inscho

Brad said:
Speaking of "not good enough for cube," ;)

Give me your best bounceland synergies.

Right now I'm looking at returning MDFCs to "draw" a spell and, obviously, it's worth an extra land. Anything else cool about them?
Click to expand...
The channel lands like


and the adventure lands like



are sweet with bouncelands

I also like them with land counting effects like:
 
LadyMapi

LadyMapi

Brad said:
Give me your best bounceland synergies.
Click to expand...

I'm going to assume that you're not interested in Amulet of Vigor and related stupid nonsense, so...



OK, they don't have to be the blue ones, but stuff that untaps lands or lets you play multiple a turn are good, and utility lands that do something on ETB also benefit pretty well.

---

OK, for those of you in the audience who are willing to consider silver-bordered cards, I just noticed something:



When this was printed in 2018, the second ability was a little goofy because the range of counters you could pick from honestly wasn't that big, and most of them didn't have intrinsic rules effects.

In this post-Ikoria era, that is no longer the case thanks to ability counters (and Finality, Shield, and Stun counters) now being a thing. And that's before you include the weird stuff from playtest cards like manabond and base power 4.

What a weird extreme power-up.
 
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TrainmasterGT

TrainmasterGT

LadyMapi said:
Yes we can, because whether or not a card is "good" or "bad" is ultimately a subjective value judgment unless you have a specific context for it to be good or bad in. A classic example of this is Lightning Bolt being a good card in draft and constructed but a bad card in Commander, simply because the relative value of "3 damage at instant speed" varies from format to format. And that's before getting into Cube, where the format can be literally whatever you want.

To bring it back to Sunken Palace, it's obviously bad in a fast, tempo-focused format, but it has potential in a more old-school attrition-focused format where topdecking is a thing and trading your graveyard for a second copy of the threat you just topdecked is a tempting tool to have smuggled away in your manabase. And that isn't even something that you'd have to warp your card choices too much to achieve - you'd just need something where Train's boy is a reasonable threat.
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I think Sunken Palace specifically has the issue where it's unlikely to ever be generic goodstuff due to it's low power level. Even in a weaker environment where something like Colossal Dreadmaw is the unquestioned king of the format, spending a net two mana and needing to exile seven cards from your graveyard in order to copy something once is unlikely to be something you can reasonably set up without additional support. It just requires way too much setup to work as goodstuff even in situations where it's around other mediocre cards.

Context is definitely an important element to card evaluation, but there is a huge diversity of cards that are so niche or support dependent that they can never truly be generic goodstuff.
 
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