MTG Salvation

Great write up, as always, thank you very much !

Nobody in the cube community speaks of doom foretold and this really surprises me!
It looks like great Spice for the orzhov Guild where aristocarts is often supported and it will be a 3rd braids/smokestack that are almost always played.

You're welcome! Thanks for commenting.

Doom Foretold is a sweet card, but one of the issues I have with it is the nonland/nontoken clause. My Stax decks really like to be able to sacrifice those kinds of permanents to make the effect asymmetrical; especially in Stax, where a lot of my sacrifice food comes in the form of token creatures.

The way I see it, nontoken is an upside.
Play braids into an opposing elspeth and they'll feed your braids forever. Play doom foretold and congratulation, you dealed with their planeswalker!

With bloodghast, gravecrawler, and other blade splicer... if you build your aristocrate deck with doom foretold in mind you won't have trouble maintaining it.

Sure. But I am more interested in cards that have interactions with my own deck, and all the rest of the non-Doom Foretold Stax enablers want token engines as fodder. So it's a nonbo with deck construction for a good percentage of shells that might want to play it.

In short, if something is a situational upside but has a deck design limitation, I consider that a net drawbabck.

@wtwlf123 @BlackWaltz3 I assume you're both talking about white 6-drop creatures, cause if it's just white 6-drops generally Elspeth Sun's Champion is the best one by miles IMO.

Edit - I also have had doom foretold played against me twice in normal limited, and both times it was supremely meh. I know that that's not a perfect analogy for cube play, but I think the card is likely fairly weak.

edit edit - and thanks as always for these wtwlf123. Whenever I'm making sure I'm not missing any obvious cards from my wishlist I always check your posts cause I know you'll have anything that's reasonably cubable on your lists. It's a great resource.

You're welcome. And yes, 6cc white creatures.

Thanks for the excellent write-up, once again!

What a set for cube! At 465, I'm adding or trying to add your top 7 plus Questing Beast. Finding a cut for Brazen Borrower is difficult. Maybe Daze? Thing in the Ice? Ugh!

Cheers,
rant

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for commenting. And ya, cuts in blue are excruciating.

Great article as usual!
Great set as well! I am getting the top 8-9 sans Shieldbteaker for unpowered 450.

My artifact cube is happy as well especially green getting a lot of cards (food related stuff)

Thanks! Ya, the food mechanic is sweet with lots of artifact interactions.

What are your thoughts on Realm-Cloaked Giant? A sweeper that effectively draws you a finisher seems really good. A near miss, perhaps?

It's okay. But 5cc Wraths have historically been bad for me in this format. A mediocre one that draws a french vanilla 7-drop is not where I want to be. I'd rather play Fumigate or Rout first, and I don't play either of those cards.

My expectation would be that the more sets we go through, the less newcomers we get as there is increased competition, but that hasn't been the case.
Obviously power creep is part of this. Also, sets like Modern Horizons focused upon having cards which compete with the best of modern is going to also lend a lot to cube. Still, this is a regular set and there are cards that didn't even make the top 20 which wouldn't look embarrassing in even a powerful 450 list. Equally notable only a single instant made the top 20. Sure ELD has a bunch of spell/creature type cards so in that sense some instants/sorceries made the list. Still, I'd really like to see a set that swings the pendulum back towards non-creature spells a bit more (though I'm sure their market research says I can go fly a kite because people love creatures.)

We have gotten some incredibly strong modal cards as of late Rankle, OUAT, Knight of Autumn, Charming Prince. Even all of the adventure creatures are modal in a sense, PW's are of course modal. The trend for a lot of new cube inclusions seems to be cards that do a crap-ton of things simultaneously (Hydroid Krasis, Questing Beast) or cards that can do one of a variety of things depending on what you need. It seems increasingly rare to get a card that just does one specific thing -- even if really well -- that makes it into the cube unless that thing is be aggressive.

I also want to return to a time with weaker creatures and more powerful spells. *sigh*

For me, adventure has been a huge win in this set. I included 4 of these cards (Giant Killer, Bonecrusher Giant, Brazen Borrower and Murderous Rider) and today all of the were played and useful.
I also like that they still test out design space for land fixing, like with Fabled Passage.

Adventure is an awesome mechanic!

Stonecoil Serpent and Wildborn Preserver seem really strong to me. Thought they'd make the list. Emry, Lurker of the Loch seems good for powered cubes too. Just shows how deep this set is. Appreciate you taking the time to write these!

Preserver is especially good if you're deep on a Bant flash archetype. And Emry is fantastic if you're supporting a handful of artifacts that pair especially well with it, like Mindslaver, for example. I'm not big on the Serpent tho.

Set is deep for sure, with a lot of great cards worth discussing.

Any different thoughts on Oko after all the current...drama ?

Quote from ondansefur »

Any different thoughts on Oko after all the current...drama ?

Nope.

Oko's a good card, and you should play it if you have room for it. But it's easy to not have room for a generic goodstuff card in a guild that's filled with cards that support specific strategies. If you play all those strategies, you might not have room. If you don't play any of those decks, it's easy to find a slot for him. Easy as that.

My luke-warm take? I don't even think that Oko is the best Simic card in Standard right now, and I don't think it needs a ban.

Here's the breakdown of the most played cards at the current Mythic Championship:


I think Krasis takes up a bigger section of the current metagame because it contributes to the success of more decks. And this is in a format that can utilize every aspect of Oko perfectly, since the decks that play him often have multiple other uses for the food tokens. I think Krasis (and Nissa) are arguably more important cards for the cube for similar reasons. And those are the only 2 cards he can really compete with for me (at the moment).

If GU plays a significant role in artifact strategies for your playgroup, Oko gains quite a bit of value. I also like him quite a bit with exactly Oath of Druids. But outside of that, I think the cards currently in my Simic section are either better or more important for the specific decks I choose to support. Right now, I don't have room for him. But I'd be excited to play Oko in the future if that arrangement changes, because he's a very good card.

Oko is a “generic good stuff card” in the same way JTMS is, and I don’t know how that quality significantly lowers his Cube value. He’s a 3-mana walker that totally takes over the game by himself and is great against every Cube archetype.


From our testing Oko and Rankle have been early pick bombs. The adventure cards plus Fabled Passage have been solid mid-picks and Venerable Knight plus Charming Prince have been good yet fairly redundant white filler, albeit great for curve needs at 720. Questing Beast is a solid stat monster and probably isn’t going anywhere for a while.

Being a generic goodstuff card isn't a negative quality for cube cards. There are a ton of them in the cube, and lots of them are awesome. It becomes relevant is when it is directly competing against cards that are important because of the specific decks they help enable. Oko is one of the cards in that position.

I've been playtesting Oko since he was spoiled, and the card is good. Once I can settle on a cut I'm comfortable making for him, he'll likely get slotted into the cube. But it won't be at the expense of a card that supports a specific archetype, because those cards are too important.

Quote from wtwlf123 »

Being a generic goodstuff card isn't a negative quality for cube cards. There are a ton of them in the cube, and lots of them are awesome. It becomes relevant is when it is directly competing against cards that are important because of the specific decks they help enable. Oko is one of the cards in that position.

I've been playtesting Oko since he was spoiled, and the card is good. Once I can settle on a cut I'm comfortable making for him, he'll likely get slotted into the cube. But it won't be at the expense of a card that supports a specific archetype, because those cards are too important.

Can you briefly outline your Simic section and the role/importance of each card (e.g. for their specific archetypes)?

All of the cards other than Nissa and Krasis support a specific deck (and even those technically support Simic Ramp, which is a popular shell). Which decks they go into should be relatively apparent, and a card-by-card analysis isn't something I have time to outline at the moment.

I plan on testing Oko over one of those two cards since there's some redundancy between those two. Over the coming weeks, I'll test out and see which of those XGU spells is bebtter suited sit out to give Oko a chance to prove his worth, but nothing is finalized as of yet.

Oko is cancerous. Putting him into a cube is insanity.