I'm still a fan of Primal Command. Each mode has uses and while it's not amazing value for the mana in any combination, it's green where 5's often feel more like they cost 4. Most common use is the search for a creature card one. Generally it gets coupled with the life gain since that acts as a bit of a fog and helps to mitigate the fact that you are spending 5 mana to not immediately impact the board (generally a deal breaker in cube). Tutors are really powerful though. A lot of matches come down to whether you can find the right creature for whatever the game state calls for. Have an overrun effect in hand? Well, Deranged Hermit might just win you the game if you can find it. Need something to block a flyer wrecking you? Need a life gain creature? Command does all that and buys you a little time while you fool around assembling your win condition. Unexpectedly Absent is a really powerful effect. At 5 mana, and trading creatures for lands as targets, it's not a deal by any stretch but it's still a really powerful effect. Worst thing I've seen it do was put Form of the Dragon back on top of a library. That won the game on the spot. I imagine in cubes with walkers, this mode is going to be useful even more often to prevent an ultimate or whatever. I very rarely see the shuffle effect used, but there are times a game goes long and all your win conditions are in the yard or you are in danger of decking. Primal Command to the rescue. That's a lot of stuff all on one card.
All that said, most high powered lists are probably just too efficient these days for this command. If you are running something a little lower in power though, I would definitely try this one out. It plays much better than it reads.
Eternal Witness is the quintessential green 3. I cannot imagine a cube concept where I wouldn't run this in the list (a "no green" cube I guess?). It scales with power level too. It's just a really great cube card. There are obtuse ETB effects (and too many cards like this in some cubes IMO), and then there's sweet ETB's like this one. It's the goldilocks of ETB creatures. I don't think there's a better designed one honestly.
Best play is probably looping Eternal Witness for a time walk effect. I don't run time walk but I do run Time Warp. A lot more expensive obviously, but still just as good if you can get there.
I think Regisaur Alpha is too slow for aggro. 5 drop that swings for 3 on the ground? I don't think that's cutting it on T5/6 in most environments. More of a midrange card I feel (and not a great one at that). Ghor-Clan Rampager is fine but I'd rather run Kird Ape or even Orcish Lumberjack (if you want to enable some bursty nonsense).
Keep in mind, not all "terminate test" evaluations should be given equal weight. Another aspect of this is how the creature is used. Specifically, what type of deck will it show up in?
A control finisher (intended for creature light decks) failing the terminate test is typically a bigger issue than a top end aggro/midrange threat failing it. And that's because your opponent can only run so much removal. And if your opponent had to deal with your early creatures, it's more likely they won't have the answer later in the game.
Even still, expensive creatures without immediate value tend to need to win/lock the game very quickly in order to justify the risk. So think things like Kalonian Hydra or Baneslayer Angel - the first is a 2 turn sledgehammer for 5 mana, the second ices many aggro decks on the spot if they can't answer it immediately. As someone mentioned above, lower power lists have more flexibility depending on the design constraints. If you are building a traditional power cube though, I would not include a lot of 5+ mana cards that fail the test unless they meet very specific criteria.
Right now, I really want a solid Boros control card. An upgraded Firemane Angel would be cool or really just some reason to consider anything other than Boros aggro.
I agree with WTWLF here to a large degree. Having experimented with a wide range of power levels, I see pitfalls and flaws with each approach (along with benefits to each). Magic is an inherently flawed game and so I don't know if there is a perfect solution to all of the games issues. Therefore, it's going to be largely dependent on a group's preference as to which approach works best.
My take on rare cubing is you have three viable approaches:
Power cubing: This is mainstream cubing and encompasses both P9 and "unpowered" (complete misnomer IMO) cubing. Discussion on this forum focuses largely on this approach. For the most part, the best and most powerful cards are run in these lists. Because the power band between the best cards and the worst cards is so large, you get the benefit WTWLF describes. There is a natural balance that happens when 25 or so of the cards in your cube are that much better than everything else - the scarcity of the effect works to your advantage here. On the negative end of this is that most of the gameplay revolves around those degenerate high powered cards. Synergy drafting that doesn't involve those cards is heavily suppressed as a result. And the less restraint on power level the more severe this effect tends to be. It's not that you can't win with a deck with zero degenerate cards, but you are going to be playing very much behind the 8 ball. 2 power 1 drop aggro becomes a critical equalizer and has to be supported heavily in most of these types of lists or you wind up with the MTGO Vintage cube and haymaker Magic.
Low power cubing: Tends to revolve heavily around synergies since individual cards are generally weak on their own. Done correctly though, it is possible to create a very rich environment with deep decision density and very diverse deck building choices. This doesn't have to be a meta that is easily solvable, in fact it can be extremely dynamic (think OG Innistrad block). The problems though with this approach... First, each of these metas is highly custom since the card pool for this type of cube is absolutely massive - no two people will do it the same way and gameplay will often vary greatly between them (and be wildly different from power cubing above). As a result, you are building a very specific environment that requires a ton of testing and a diverse group to get it right. You cannot really rely very much on outside information (forums, etc), since much of this data will not easily apply to what you are doing. That's the largest drawback for me and why I never really got down quite this low in power (though I flirted with it for awhile). Sadly, I personally don't have the resources or time to make this work the way I would want.
Somewhere in the middle: Keep power level relatively high but try and infuse synergy/archetypes as the focus versus raw power. I like synergy drafting and I like powerful cards, and so I've tried to have my cake and eat it too to varying degrees of success (I think a lot of people end up here FWIW). There's always a compromise to be made somewhere though. If the overall power level is too high and the power range is too low, you wind up with something IMO even worse than on-the-rails archetype drafting. I call it the "good stuff" problem. Essentially everything is equally playable in pretty much anything (because all cards are above curve but nothing is truly broken), so decks draft themselves. This is great for casual players - anyone with a pulse can draft this type of list - but IMO it's very unsatisfying for those looking for depth during a draft. One nice upside is that gameplay tends to have high decision density due to a much flatter power curve (much like lower power cubing), but again the draft and deck building experience is just painfully bad (for me at least) to the point that it ruins most of my enjoyment. I absolutely love deck building (even more than playing the actual games) so if the drafting experience itself sucks I'm not going to want to cube. Alternatively, you can lower average power level to remove good stuff drafting and move more towards archetypes/synergies, but the more you bend this way the more you suffer from the type of drafting WTWLF mentions (draft archetype deck "X" or you have a pile of unplayable garbage and you lose). Game decision density can also suffer since archetype cards often have less flexibility than general good stuff cards - in other words, you build a deck that does X and that's basically all it really does - you only have the illusion of choice on your turns since you are really just sequencing out your strategy versus interacting with your opponent and making meaningful decisions. I've been experimenting with combo elements recently to try and bridge the gap of these two extremes (good stuff drafting vs on rails archetype drafting), but too much degeneracy and you undermine incremental gameplay which hurts synergy decks and discourages exploration and creativity during drafting in much the same way archetype drafting does. Feels like I keep robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It's very easy to get overwhelmed by cube design.
TLDR:
Every approach to cube design has benefits and drawbacks. No one approach is perfect. Each group has to experiment and see what works best for them.
Parallax Wave... lots of great stories with that card in cube. It's very powerful and flexible. You can use it offensively or defensively. I've seen a ton of creative plays with it. Gameplay is deep. Sad to see it getting pushed out of power cubes though. That's a bummer.
Blink and bounce are both super strong effects and wave in particular was too powerful for my lower powered midrange list. It's also out of place in my retro cube based on how I designed the parameters (much weaker creature suite so this effect is too good for the mana cost despite being itself a retro card). I sort of miss running Wave though. Card is definitely sweet and fun to play with.
Weirdest deck... so one guy drafted this pile of basically random cards. It was like 4 colors, a "good stuff" deck I suppose but totally aimless and nonsensical. It had aggro creatures with wrath effects, other random things that didn't go together at all. It made no sense. I swear he did some kind of secret stipulation draft with himself and didn't tell anyone. But it was his night I guess and he just pulled every card he needed when he needed it like voodoo. I wish I saved the deck list to this ridiculous thing.
That's an interesting point. Do you all feel like this? Because I actually want pretty much the opposite from my particular cube. That's actually one of the reasons, I went for a lower power level: I don't wan't cards that give you a cheap win or win the game by their own. I want skillfull, synergistic deck building to be as important as possible.
I think my current list represents this quite well, but you're also correct about the downside. When we draft with less skilled players, they often lose a lot, like really a lot.
I'm torn personally. I like the idea of lowering negative variance in general, but the reality is there's a large skill gap in my group. I take the game a lot more serious than most others, I design the cubes we play and do most of the testing so I have a natural advantage. I have another friend who is very good at the game and we both tend to win a lot when we take it seriously. High variance can be useful in balancing this even while it can lead to a lower overall quality of Magic played. If I had a more consistent and dedicated group, I'd be solidly on your side of the argument FWIW. As it stands for me though, if my meta gets too skill intensive people are going to be less inclined to play it because they simply aren't that invested.
The mothership wrote an article that touched a bit on this. More focused if I recall on the variance from the randomness the game has versus super broken cards ruining games of Magic. But it's under the same umbrella. Sometimes you make a play mistake and it's easier to blame the draw or Mind Twist for why you lost. At least in cube though, sometimes you really did lose to Mind Twist and for no other reason. I think they both can be OK and serve a useful function and contribute to fun.
Nice to see some love for Ogre Battledriver. The ceiling on that card is very high. It's more aggressive midrange though so I can see how the fastest cubes might not have a place for him.
Mind Twist is absurdly good on the play, particularly against slower decks where it basically reads "I win". It's much more abusive with fast mana to the point where I'd call it legitimately broken. Not my bag but I see the appeal it has to many people. One nice thing I feel about cards like this in cube is even if your deck sucks, you can still get cheap wins by simply drawing cards like this. It helps even the playing field somewhat between your weaker and better players since anyone can rip a card like this and just beat you with it regardless of what else you might be doing.
My personal least favorite card to have resolved against me is Balance. It's just a slap in the face. The farther ahead you are on board the more you tend to be impacted by this. It's just an unreasonable card which I find very unfun. Most other members of my group would probably say Bribery though. I had a full on revolt against that card back in the day.
I tested Desperate Ravings for a short time and the random discard on a CA spell is not as bad as it looks. It tends to work out better than you expect especially when you have a hand that is flooded or choked with stuff you can't cast anyway. Sure, sometimes you get unlucky but I found it happens less in practice than you might expect and you can always cast your super critical spell before you cast ravings. And CA is still CA.
Now, this effect will be more or less punishing depending on your cube configuration. The wider the power gap you have between the best and worst cards the more severe random discard punishes you. So IMO this is better in lower power lists with a flatter power curve (or at least better in decks not focused around a handful of OP cards).
What I dislike more than the random discard on Rowdy Crew is the body. 3/3 trample for 4 is not good. And unlike the draw 3 random discard 2 (which I think will be good most of the time), the +2/+2 is probably rarely going to trigger making the base body what you get stuck with a lot of the times. That said, the incidental GY component to this is nice to see. Red could use more cards like that. For those pushing a heavy GY component in red already, I could see testing this to see if it plays better than it reads.
I just recently added Blast from the Past. Great card. The cycle+madness trick is a sweet way to essentially get the spell effect + a card by making it 1RR in stead of 2R. I have kicked and flashback'd a bunch of times. Never buyback though. That mode is just too pricey (but no strike against the card for that IMO).
Favorite old bordered cube card? I have no idea. Too many choices. Literally half my cube is old bordered. Karmic Guide is one of my favorite cube cards of all time. So I'll go with that I guess.
I love old school cards and tried Burning-Tree Shaman not too long ago. For me, it brings back memories of my most active days in the game and the art on the card is lovely. Sadly, even in my lower powered lists this card is not doing enough to justify a gold slot IMO. It's probably worse in my cubes in that I don't run walkers or a whole lot of equipment (so the damage trigger is weaker for me). It's a tad slow in aggro (needs haste) and a tad under sized for midrange.
If you are looking for more aggro support in Gruul, Boggart Ram-Gang is probably better. Or Kird Ape if you really want to do all in. BloodBraid Elf I'd run in pretty much any list whether you supported green aggro or not (assuming you can support the power level the card brings). It's a tremendous tempo card that is just as cool in a rampy sort of elf build as it is in straight aggro. Cascade is a pretty busted mechanic.
Fastbond is broken. But like a lot of older powerful cards, it's a bit polar in its effect - either it does unreasonable things or it does very little. In my experience, Fastbond is really only busted in your opening hand with a bunch of ways to draw cards (and big things/effects to spend the early mana advantage on). Storm likes this card. Gush loves this card. I would classify Fastbond as pretty narrow though and probably only worth including in a combo focused cube. Could be wrong on that though as I've only run it in that type of cube to be fair.
Longest turn was definitely a storm turn. Or when we paused one time mid game to go get some food. I suppose that turn lasted an hour and a half technically.
I didn't mean to suggest I thought it was slower than Phyrexian Arena. My point was they are equally slow. Getting a card at EOT is the same thing as getting it during your next upkeep unless you have a deck with a lot of instant speed spells. On T3, it's exactly like arena since you probably won't have any mana to cast whatever you draw until the next turn anyway.
As far as removal goes, arena is much harder to remove than this creature so again I sort of see this as a wash. Card is more guaranteed in a sense since it comes before your opponent untaps but they can more easily deal with a 3/2 than an enchantment.
I also don't think we should overlook the difference between losing 1 life for a card versus losing the CMC of the card you draw. Arena can go in midrange and control decks because it's safer and more consistent. Bob is a lot riskier to play in slower decks. I still jam him in a lot of builds anyway but truth is Bob's are suboptimal in more decks than Arenas.
All that said, most high powered lists are probably just too efficient these days for this command. If you are running something a little lower in power though, I would definitely try this one out. It plays much better than it reads.
Best play is probably looping Eternal Witness for a time walk effect. I don't run time walk but I do run Time Warp. A lot more expensive obviously, but still just as good if you can get there.
A control finisher (intended for creature light decks) failing the terminate test is typically a bigger issue than a top end aggro/midrange threat failing it. And that's because your opponent can only run so much removal. And if your opponent had to deal with your early creatures, it's more likely they won't have the answer later in the game.
Even still, expensive creatures without immediate value tend to need to win/lock the game very quickly in order to justify the risk. So think things like Kalonian Hydra or Baneslayer Angel - the first is a 2 turn sledgehammer for 5 mana, the second ices many aggro decks on the spot if they can't answer it immediately. As someone mentioned above, lower power lists have more flexibility depending on the design constraints. If you are building a traditional power cube though, I would not include a lot of 5+ mana cards that fail the test unless they meet very specific criteria.
And print the enemy bicycle dual lands please.
My take on rare cubing is you have three viable approaches:
Power cubing: This is mainstream cubing and encompasses both P9 and "unpowered" (complete misnomer IMO) cubing. Discussion on this forum focuses largely on this approach. For the most part, the best and most powerful cards are run in these lists. Because the power band between the best cards and the worst cards is so large, you get the benefit WTWLF describes. There is a natural balance that happens when 25 or so of the cards in your cube are that much better than everything else - the scarcity of the effect works to your advantage here. On the negative end of this is that most of the gameplay revolves around those degenerate high powered cards. Synergy drafting that doesn't involve those cards is heavily suppressed as a result. And the less restraint on power level the more severe this effect tends to be. It's not that you can't win with a deck with zero degenerate cards, but you are going to be playing very much behind the 8 ball. 2 power 1 drop aggro becomes a critical equalizer and has to be supported heavily in most of these types of lists or you wind up with the MTGO Vintage cube and haymaker Magic.
Low power cubing: Tends to revolve heavily around synergies since individual cards are generally weak on their own. Done correctly though, it is possible to create a very rich environment with deep decision density and very diverse deck building choices. This doesn't have to be a meta that is easily solvable, in fact it can be extremely dynamic (think OG Innistrad block). The problems though with this approach... First, each of these metas is highly custom since the card pool for this type of cube is absolutely massive - no two people will do it the same way and gameplay will often vary greatly between them (and be wildly different from power cubing above). As a result, you are building a very specific environment that requires a ton of testing and a diverse group to get it right. You cannot really rely very much on outside information (forums, etc), since much of this data will not easily apply to what you are doing. That's the largest drawback for me and why I never really got down quite this low in power (though I flirted with it for awhile). Sadly, I personally don't have the resources or time to make this work the way I would want.
Somewhere in the middle: Keep power level relatively high but try and infuse synergy/archetypes as the focus versus raw power. I like synergy drafting and I like powerful cards, and so I've tried to have my cake and eat it too to varying degrees of success (I think a lot of people end up here FWIW). There's always a compromise to be made somewhere though. If the overall power level is too high and the power range is too low, you wind up with something IMO even worse than on-the-rails archetype drafting. I call it the "good stuff" problem. Essentially everything is equally playable in pretty much anything (because all cards are above curve but nothing is truly broken), so decks draft themselves. This is great for casual players - anyone with a pulse can draft this type of list - but IMO it's very unsatisfying for those looking for depth during a draft. One nice upside is that gameplay tends to have high decision density due to a much flatter power curve (much like lower power cubing), but again the draft and deck building experience is just painfully bad (for me at least) to the point that it ruins most of my enjoyment. I absolutely love deck building (even more than playing the actual games) so if the drafting experience itself sucks I'm not going to want to cube. Alternatively, you can lower average power level to remove good stuff drafting and move more towards archetypes/synergies, but the more you bend this way the more you suffer from the type of drafting WTWLF mentions (draft archetype deck "X" or you have a pile of unplayable garbage and you lose). Game decision density can also suffer since archetype cards often have less flexibility than general good stuff cards - in other words, you build a deck that does X and that's basically all it really does - you only have the illusion of choice on your turns since you are really just sequencing out your strategy versus interacting with your opponent and making meaningful decisions. I've been experimenting with combo elements recently to try and bridge the gap of these two extremes (good stuff drafting vs on rails archetype drafting), but too much degeneracy and you undermine incremental gameplay which hurts synergy decks and discourages exploration and creativity during drafting in much the same way archetype drafting does. Feels like I keep robbing Peter to pay Paul.
It's very easy to get overwhelmed by cube design.
TLDR:
Every approach to cube design has benefits and drawbacks. No one approach is perfect. Each group has to experiment and see what works best for them.
Blink and bounce are both super strong effects and wave in particular was too powerful for my lower powered midrange list. It's also out of place in my retro cube based on how I designed the parameters (much weaker creature suite so this effect is too good for the mana cost despite being itself a retro card). I sort of miss running Wave though. Card is definitely sweet and fun to play with.
Weirdest deck... so one guy drafted this pile of basically random cards. It was like 4 colors, a "good stuff" deck I suppose but totally aimless and nonsensical. It had aggro creatures with wrath effects, other random things that didn't go together at all. It made no sense. I swear he did some kind of secret stipulation draft with himself and didn't tell anyone. But it was his night I guess and he just pulled every card he needed when he needed it like voodoo. I wish I saved the deck list to this ridiculous thing.
I'm torn personally. I like the idea of lowering negative variance in general, but the reality is there's a large skill gap in my group. I take the game a lot more serious than most others, I design the cubes we play and do most of the testing so I have a natural advantage. I have another friend who is very good at the game and we both tend to win a lot when we take it seriously. High variance can be useful in balancing this even while it can lead to a lower overall quality of Magic played. If I had a more consistent and dedicated group, I'd be solidly on your side of the argument FWIW. As it stands for me though, if my meta gets too skill intensive people are going to be less inclined to play it because they simply aren't that invested.
The mothership wrote an article that touched a bit on this. More focused if I recall on the variance from the randomness the game has versus super broken cards ruining games of Magic. But it's under the same umbrella. Sometimes you make a play mistake and it's easier to blame the draw or Mind Twist for why you lost. At least in cube though, sometimes you really did lose to Mind Twist and for no other reason. I think they both can be OK and serve a useful function and contribute to fun.
My personal least favorite card to have resolved against me is Balance. It's just a slap in the face. The farther ahead you are on board the more you tend to be impacted by this. It's just an unreasonable card which I find very unfun. Most other members of my group would probably say Bribery though. I had a full on revolt against that card back in the day.
Now, this effect will be more or less punishing depending on your cube configuration. The wider the power gap you have between the best and worst cards the more severe random discard punishes you. So IMO this is better in lower power lists with a flatter power curve (or at least better in decks not focused around a handful of OP cards).
What I dislike more than the random discard on Rowdy Crew is the body. 3/3 trample for 4 is not good. And unlike the draw 3 random discard 2 (which I think will be good most of the time), the +2/+2 is probably rarely going to trigger making the base body what you get stuck with a lot of the times. That said, the incidental GY component to this is nice to see. Red could use more cards like that. For those pushing a heavy GY component in red already, I could see testing this to see if it plays better than it reads.
Favorite old bordered cube card? I have no idea. Too many choices. Literally half my cube is old bordered. Karmic Guide is one of my favorite cube cards of all time. So I'll go with that I guess.
If you are looking for more aggro support in Gruul, Boggart Ram-Gang is probably better. Or Kird Ape if you really want to do all in. BloodBraid Elf I'd run in pretty much any list whether you supported green aggro or not (assuming you can support the power level the card brings). It's a tremendous tempo card that is just as cool in a rampy sort of elf build as it is in straight aggro. Cascade is a pretty busted mechanic.
Longest turn was definitely a storm turn. Or when we paused one time mid game to go get some food. I suppose that turn lasted an hour and a half technically.
As far as removal goes, arena is much harder to remove than this creature so again I sort of see this as a wash. Card is more guaranteed in a sense since it comes before your opponent untaps but they can more easily deal with a 3/2 than an enchantment.
I also don't think we should overlook the difference between losing 1 life for a card versus losing the CMC of the card you draw. Arena can go in midrange and control decks because it's safer and more consistent. Bob is a lot riskier to play in slower decks. I still jam him in a lot of builds anyway but truth is Bob's are suboptimal in more decks than Arenas.