General (SOS) Secrets of Strixhaven

[TrainmasterGT]

I'll be honest, I don't think any of the prepared creatures are any good for cube. Like, Limited must be a ton of fun, it's a shame I cannot play it anyhow. But I don't seem them making them into most cubes.

"Aren't any good for Cube" seems like a bit of a stretch to me. The "front halves" on a lot of these are good enough for players to want to run, even if they aren't always casting the prepared spell side. Emeratus of Conflict is actually a good example of this; a 2/2 First Strike for is still above the average base stats for a red 2-drop, and if you are playing a spellslinger-y deck, it draws you free lightning bolts. I'm not convinced the card is great, but I don't think you could reasonably call it bad. Likewise, Emeratus of Abundance is another card with a good base rate; you can run it out as a bulky creature whenever you want, and then cast Regrowth if you find a reasonable target. I think it seems stronger than Timeless Witness at the very least.

The bigger issue I see with the mechanic is that it's yet another complicated "backbone mechanic" with only a few cards existing at any one power level. The power band for Prepared cards is too wide to get more than a handful into a Cube of any given power level, meaning that this high-complexity mechanic is going to be practically impossible to get en masse without essentially building a Magic: The Gathering: Secrets of Strixhaven (TM) set Cube. As much as I think getting rid of blocks has been a net positive for set design, I think mechanics like prepared would be better served by appearing in multiple sets throughout a given Magic year.

 

[Dom Harvey]

I'll be honest, I don't think any of the prepared creatures are any good for cube. Like, Limited must be a ton of fun, it's a shame I cannot play it anyhow. But I don't seem them making them into most cubes.

They are just too expensive. After all, how good is a Seething Song that requires you to play a 3 mana, 2/3 creature before hand? How happy are you to spend a total of five mana for Regrowth, regardless of the body stapled to it? You have simpler cards that do almost the same thing, or better, and aren't exactly breaking the hell

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Some of them just don't work in any reasonable sense because the body or requirements have nothing to do with the actual spell: How many decks that attack with 2 creatures want Replenish? How many blue decks have 3 creatures to tap for Brainstorm? What aberrant monstruosity of a deck runs +1/+1 counters and wants a turn 6 Channel?



I think the ones with actual cube potential are:



It's a shame because I feel there's this huge gap in quality between some prepared cards and others. Like, some limited cards look fantastic in comparison to the Channel or Replenish stuff:



It seems to me that the designers are looking for alternatives to ETB or on-attack effects because they are overly tempo-positive and promote snowballing. Adventures was one of those alternatives, of course, but they proved too strong because they are de facto card advantage. So they played it safe this time, enough that I imagine Limited will be fun but that all these flashy cards won't be good in a "cube of mistakes" like most of ours are.

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Also, I hate how much flavour text and art are just jokes. It's overwhelming, a constant source of quips from a bad Marvel movie.

In many cases this is how you smuggle the iconic/dangerous spell onto the card - it's hard to imagine a printable Channel design where the Channel is easy to unlock or gels nicely with the rest of the deck - but I think some of the 'normal' ones are stronger than this implies. The green Emeritus is a lot better than Timeless Witness unless you're heavy on blink/self-mill stuff, for example - a body with decent stats even when the effect you came for isn't relevant is a big deal. Grave Researcher is a nice way to do the Doomed Necromancer thing.



Haven't seen anyone talk about my boy yet but 4/4 deathtouch for 3 is already impressive and I've wanted some Smuggler's Surprise/See the Unwritten variant for a long time - this is a good one that's on the house!