I've been messing around with this innocuous little artifact in my cube and I have to say, I'm impressed. In my unpowered environment that no longer supports artifact strategies, it's basically a colorless cantrip that fixes your mana, which has made it one of the most maindeckable cards in my entire cube. It's not a super high pick or anything, but literally every 2+ color deck is happy to run it. For cubes that push artifact synergies I have to assume that the ceiling will be even higher.
Obviously, if you don't provide snow basics or have house rules errata for your current basics Astrolabe won't work.
Totally. I've been really happy with the new snow cards from MH1 so far. On Thin Ice is the best Journey to Nowhere ever printed, Dead of Winter is a sweet cross between Toxic Deluge and Infest, Icehide Golem is a 5 color Isumaru, and Ice Fang Coatl is a top shelf simic card that is very close to being a Baleful Strix. I get the aesthetic oogyness of running all snow basics, but if you can stomach it the benefits are great.
The card is obviously useful if you support snow mana, my question is "would I want to dedicate a cube slot to it?" The answer would probably be no since it would already be pretty tough for me to make cuts for the other snow cards that I would want to play.
It's very Gitaxian Probe-ish, but Probe gives free information, is more re-usable, and fuels delve / things that count the graveyard like JVP / Search for Azcanta. For me to be really enticed to dedicate a slot to this, I would have to find a lot of ways to re-use it.
Yea I hear you there. It's not a snazzy card by any stretch but it's the kind of inclusion that gives every other card in your deck a slight boost and increases overall deck consistency. Since I cut a lot of archetype support and some of the more broken cards from my list I have a little more room in my cube than most to play with effects like this.
I've been procrastinating making this thread, thanks noshadowkick.
I do the snowlands = basic lands house rule. The more I play with the astrolabe, the more I think it's probably the best snowland payoff card.
Sure, it doesn't have the power of an ice-fang coatl or trapped in the ice, but it's so unbelievably efficient at what it does, so versatile (goes in a lot of decks) and so good in the artifact deck, that out of all the snowland cards, I think losing it would hurt the cube experience the most.
While the card isn't obviously super impactful, it enables a bunch of greedy splashes of other powerful cards and fixes all your double mana issues (UU/BB) etc. at very little cost. 1 mana cantripping is close to free when you consider interactions like tinker, tolarian academy, monastery mentor, etc.
I've been messing around with this innocuous little artifact in my cube and I have to say, I'm impressed. In my unpowered environment that no longer supports artifact strategies, it's basically a colorless cantrip that fixes your mana, which has made it one of the most maindeckable cards in my entire cube. It's not a super high pick or anything, but literally every 2+ color deck is happy to run it. For cubes that push artifact synergies I have to assume that the ceiling will be even higher.
Obviously, if you don't provide snow basics or have house rules errata for your current basics Astrolabe won't work.
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StaffIt's very Gitaxian Probe-ish, but Probe gives free information, is more re-usable, and fuels delve / things that count the graveyard like JVP / Search for Azcanta. For me to be really enticed to dedicate a slot to this, I would have to find a lot of ways to re-use it.
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I do the snowlands = basic lands house rule. The more I play with the astrolabe, the more I think it's probably the best snowland payoff card.
Sure, it doesn't have the power of an ice-fang coatl or trapped in the ice, but it's so unbelievably efficient at what it does, so versatile (goes in a lot of decks) and so good in the artifact deck, that out of all the snowland cards, I think losing it would hurt the cube experience the most.
While the card isn't obviously super impactful, it enables a bunch of greedy splashes of other powerful cards and fixes all your double mana issues (UU/BB) etc. at very little cost. 1 mana cantripping is close to free when you consider interactions like tinker, tolarian academy, monastery mentor, etc.
Last Updated 02/07/24
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