You may have Glasspool Mimic enter the battlefield as a copy of a creature you control, except it's a Shapeshifter Rogue in addition o its other types.
0/0
"When I touch the Glasspool, I tasted infinite possibility."
- Ashen Wal, Akoum Expeditionary House
Glasspool Shore
Land
Glasspool Shore enters the battlefield tapped.
{T}: Add {U}.
"Past and possibility come together in the vastness of infinite reflection."
- Ashen Wal, Akoum Expeditionary House
Clone for your guys only and a CIPT land. This definitely seems testable to me.
Im my experience, spells that have only cloned my own creatures have continually underperformed for me. My blue decks just tend to be too creature light for this type of effect.
This looks good to me. The self-Clone is restrictive, but it's always a tapland too. And when you do have a target, 2U is a great rate. I'll be testing this one too.
No one even made a thread for Mirror Image when it came out in M19. And it wasn't in wtwlf123's Top 20, from a notoriously weak set for cube. Does adding the option to play it as a tapped, single-color land really make playable a card that couldn't beat out Goblin Instigator?
That's fair enough, I think Recovery is pretty darn good. I'm lukewarm on Mimic but I don't think that having an upside that's a card which isn't cubeworthy on its own is necessarily a deal-breaker.
Does adding the option to play it as a tapped, single-color land really make playable a card that couldn't beat out Goblin Instigator?
Yes.
We don't play Quench, but Miscalculation is great. We don't play Naturalize, but Wilt is fantastic. I think adding a tapped land option to a spell is even better than cycling (and by a pretty big margin, too). So ya, it's entirely possible for a card to go from bad to good because you add a flexible option to it. Any options we add on to the card that give us more ways to use them have historically been good. Kicker, cycling ...they all give us more than one thing we can do with our cards. There's no greater gap to leap than land to nonland and vice versa, and these MDFCs are going to be awesome. The land option is likely worth about 1 in terms of the acceptable "tax" that it adds to the non-land side ...that's the equivalent of adding 1-mana cycling that can't miss a land when you need to dig for one. So when I look at the Spell//Tapland combo card, if I would cube the spell if it cost 1 mana less, I'm interested in the MDFC. So in this case, I would play a 2-mana clone. So a 3-mana one with a land stapled to it looks great to me. And they change the keepable range of opening hands they're a part of too. Just amazing designs, really.
We don't play Quench, but Miscalculation is great. We don't play Naturalize, but Wilt is fantastic. I think adding a tapped land option to a spell is even better than cycling (and by a pretty big margin, too). So ya, it's entirely possible for a card to go from bad to good because you add a flexible option to it. Any options we add on to the card that give us more ways to use them have historically been good. Kicker, cycling ...they all give us more than one thing we can do with our cards. There's no greater gap to leap than land to nonland and vice versa, and these MDFCs are going to be awesome. The land option is likely worth about 1 in terms of the acceptable "tax" that it adds to the non-land side ...that's the equivalent of adding 1-mana cycling that can't miss a land when you need to dig for one. So when I look at the Spell//Tapland combo card, if I would cube the spell if it cost 1 mana less, I'm interested in the MDFC. So in this case, I would play a 2-mana clone. So a 3-mana one with a land stapled to it looks great to me. And they change the keepable range of opening hands they're a part of too. Just amazing designs, really.
I've been keeping out of these discussions up to this point, but was about to weigh in by saying exactly this! Glad to see that we're on the same page
You can use the "1-mana cycling" viewpoint to analyse both sides of the card. Would I play a 3 mana clone with with islandcycling 1 (I'm counting the ETB tapped as the loss of 1 mana)? Would I play a land with that cycles for 1 and always finds a 2 mana clone? Taken together I think the answer is yes.
I've found the discussions on the MDFCs interesting. People seem to be really focused on the idea that cube is an unfair format where you have to be doing something inherently busted to win. My experience is a bit different. I find that my drafters lose as many cube games to flood/screw as anything else. Beyond that, people HATE losing to flood/screw. It's miserable to draft a sweet deck just to have variance get the best of you. These are great because they will help you win games, while also reducing the number of non-games.
Okay, the kids are in bed so lets try to put a proper thought together.
At this point everyone understands these MDFC's will almost always make the decks of their respective colors and that they will prevent non-games by helping prevent flood/screw. As well, everyone hopefully understands that the cost of including these cards comes at cutting another card from you Cube not your deck. Cube real estate is hard to break into these days with so many archetypes and generic high powered cards. That means even though each of the MDFC's would be played, does not mean they are auto-includes in a Cube.
So, where is the line drawn? How often does the card need to be played on it's front to be worth the inclusion? If it's a tapped land 75% of the time then it's almost certainly not worth it. What if it's a tapped land only 50% of the time. Is it worth it then? As well, the impact of the card needs to play into the equation. The mythic cycle for example are high-cost high-powered effects. Yes, they'll be cast less often but when they are, they'll have a large effect on the game.
I don't know where the line is drawn, but my instincts tell me that the players should WANT TO cast the spell, only using it as a land as the fail safe. I don't want players to include a card in their decks that will be a tapped land nearly every game with the off chance it might be something else a fraction of the time. Glasspool Mimic would get played in a lot of blue decks, but I feel would be a tapped land far too often for it to be worth an inclusion in my cube. I played Cackling Counterpart for a long time because the card looked to be so broken. Two creatures at instant speed for one card. This has to be good! Well, it turned out to be a trap. It just sat in players hands far too often or ended up copying something inconsequential just to be played.
That experience told me I'm not looking for this effect in my Cube. Putting a land on the back makes it playable in decks but I don't want to cut a card that has a role in my cube for a card that I feel will be a tapped land most of the time.
I explained where I personally draw the line in my post above. Maybe you missed that part.
For me, I value the tapped land to be worth approximately 1 as a "tax" on the nonland side. So if the spell is something I would cube for 1 less, than the tapland MDFC is something I'm interested in. Mythics have a different metric since the land can enter untapped.
Obviously if the card isn't a card you'd ever want, then don't play it. But a 2cc self-Clone would be sweet. So I'll give a 3cc one a shot since it has a land stapled to it.
In reality, I expect this mechanic to be worth far more than 1. So even spells that are overcosted by 2 or even 3 mana might very well be amazing cards we should be cubing with. But even in an extremely conservative evaluation, a 1 tax is more than safe, and all the cards that fit that criteria should play well in my estimation.
As well, everyone hopefully understands that the cost of including these cards comes at cutting another card from you Cube not your deck. Cube real estate is hard to break into these days with so many archetypes and generic high powered cards. That means even though each of the MDFC's would be played, does not mean they are auto-includes in a Cube.
This is a good point, but I think I come at it from a different perspective than most people. My experience has been that it isn't hard to pull together 23 non-land cards for a cube deck. Even my weaker drafters who basically just pick random cards in a colour pair tend to end up with at least a semi-coherent pile. This suggests to me that, while cube slots are competitive, there's a lot of cards that are going to waste, sitting in sideboards during games. As a result, cards like this that will never sit in sideboards are super appealing. Basically, I'd rather have cards that I'll include in my land slot 99% of the time, than the 9th best 3 drop in a colour or the 10th best draw spell, which aren't high picks to begin with.
I do agree that this can be taken too far. I don't want to end up in a situation where my drafters are struggling to pull together a solid deck, with an interesting gameplan. That being said, I think we're pretty far from that point. I'm likely going to be testing around 10 of these lands in my 500 card cube and I don't expect there to be any significant issues. I guess I'll find out though!
This card seems pretty good, but I already painfully cut Phantasmal Image from my 360 cube a while back (which I think is a better card) - so no, I won't be playing this. Would probably play this at 540+.
[quote] My experience has been that it isn't hard to pull together 23 non-land cards for a cube deck.
This is, I think, the crux of the discussion. It's a really different question to ask "would this make my deck?" than "should this make my cube?"
Obviously most decks that play white would rather replace a basic plains with Flagstones of Trokair, but that doesn't mean that card belongs in most cubes.
That example gets brought up a lot, but I think it's a big misstep in evaluation. There's a HUGE difference between a land with a marginal (and often nonexistent) upside, and a card that is both a spell AND a land. I know we want to try to quantify these MDFCs with a known existing mechanic, but they're not really comparable. Flagstones can't ever function as a meaningful spell, and it can't ever change an unkeepable opening hand into a keepable one by meaningfully changing the land/spell ratio. And it doesn't have anywhere near the ceiling of having access to a 3-mana clone copying a bomb can.
This is, I think, the crux of the discussion. It's a really different question to ask "would this make my deck?" than "should this make my cube?"
Obviously most decks that play white would rather replace a basic plains with Flagstones of Trokair, but that doesn't mean that card belongs in most cubes.
Yea, that's a good point.
I think that the ultimate question is, obviously, "should this make my cube?", but then there are 2 sub-questions as well:
[1] "would this make my deck?"
[2] "would this make my deck better"
One the first point, I think it's fair to make the comparison between these MDFCs and Flagstones of Trokair. These are both cards that will almost always make your deck. Where things differ is the second point. Whereas Flagstones won't typically have a meaningful impact on you winning games, I think that these MDFCs will.
So, overall, I think people are in agreement regarding the first point, but the real point of contention is the second point.
This card seems pretty good, but I already painfully cut Phantasmal Image from my 360 cube a while back (which I think is a better card) - so no, I won't be playing this. Would probably play this at 540+.
Yeah, I would NEVER run this over image, which is hands down the best clone. Of course, I also can't imagine not running image in a cube of any size, unless it's some kind of themed cube that doesn't run creatures.
Our respective lenses of evaluation are different too. Deciding whether or not a card can make the cut in a powered 360-card cube is a different question than it is for an unpowered 1440-card cube, for example. I used to be guilty of the "it's not good enough for the current iteration of my cube so therefore it's not good enough for cubes" stances, but even at 720, the powerlevel of some of the cards in my on-deck binder is staggering. Cube is a living format, so don't dismiss cards that may not make your initial wave of additions too hastily, because there could be some real gems that get overlooked.
The upside on these comes up way more often than Flagstones. I think Minamo, School at Water's Edge and Shizo, Death's Storehouse are better comparisons, as the upside is fairly likely to be relevant. That comparison is more germane to the conversation of the mythic cycle since they can etb untapped.
I think this card, along with a lot of the other mdfc lands is fantastic, and like the others I think it should be evaluated as a tapland with upside. This is a land that can do a thing, not a thing that can be a land.
I'm certainly willing to say this card is a darn sight better than Flagstones. But I still don't think it's good enough to warrant a cube slot.
Obviously this is all theorycrafting until we get some reps in with it. I think you're going to find the spell side to be dead a good bit of the time and be wishing for an island. This is far less of a problem with the mythics that at least give you the option of coming in untapped.
you're going to find the spell side to be dead a good bit of the time and be wishing for an island.
This is the case with almost every non-land card. Every spell can be a dead card in your hand based on the board state or lack of available mana. But at least with MDFCs, they can be a land in cases where you really need them to be. This likely won't replace a basic for me during deckbuilding in the same way the mythic MDFCs do, since they have to enter tapped. It'll be a playable non-land card that can be used in a land in situations where you'd otherwise be stuck with yet another uncastable card in your hand.
you're going to find the spell side to be dead a good bit of the time and be wishing for an island.
This is the case with almost every non-land card. Every spell can be a dead card in your hand based on the board state or lack of available mana. But at least with MDFCs, they can be a land in cases where you really need them to be. This likely won't replace a basic for me during deckbuilding in the same way the mythic MDFCs do, since they have to enter tapped. It'll be a playable non-land card that can be used in a land in situations where you'd otherwise be stuck with yet another uncastable card in your hand.
SO SO SO SO SO MUCH THIS
Magic is a game of probability. The reason we play cards like Preordain is that they skew the probability distributions of our draws in the direction we need (agency via card selection). MDFCs do something very similar. By having spells attached to lands, this provides a player agency over that variant distribution. What do you need more, a spell or a land? MDFCs will ALWAYS be whichever you need. That certainty is important. It means these cards need to be evaluated with more optimism than we are used to. Why? Because when you cast the spell side, it is almost always going to be when that spell is good. So there's no more WCS vs ACS vs BCS. To be as specific as possible, most cards are valued at:
Where P(x) is the probability of x and V(x) is the expected value of x. These MDFCs have a different equation:
P(BCS) * V(BCS) + (1 - P(BCS)) * V(TapLand)
Observer that V(TapLand) is almost always greater than V(WCS). That observation is what makes me believe these cards are all MUCH MUCH better than we're giving them credit. To me, this card is an absolute slam dunk. Same with the regrowth. Same with the elephant. Same with the removal spell. Hell, I'm even considering the 3cmc fling. Why? Because I believe that the probability that access to fling wins a game in a red deck is high enough (say 5-10%) to justify the inclusion of a tap-land. Fling is bad because P(WCS) is too high, and V(WCS) is literally close to zero. So including it in your deck leads to just a mulligan a great percentage of the time. Now it's never a mulligan.
I chose to use fling because it's not one of these rares that has an effect you would actually consider cubing. I'm higher on these effects than WTWLF123 by his example because reducing cost by 1 yields 2cmc fling, and I am nowhere close to playing fling. But I hope my explanation explained why I think these cards are all pretty ridiculous.
First of all, I agree these half land cards are awesome, and I am going to add many of these to my Cube.
However I disagree with the specific presupposition that the tap land option is always better than cycling "by wide margin." Sure, I agree that for the majority of cases that's true, but it depends on what the spell is. For a powerful and impactful spell with cycling option you usually want draw a land if you cycle, and in those cases an actual land option is better than cycling. See the mythic cycle in this set - even without the pay 3 life mode those are obviously better with the land mode instead of cycling. But situational early game reactive spells often prefer to cycle into a better spell if the card is no longer useful. Censor vs the new 2-mana Force Spike is a great example of this. Both halves are bad at a certain point in the game, and the land vs 'maybe another spell' consideration is different.
I think you can apply some of that logic to the clone. If you have enough lands you're left with a situational self-clone, and the card is sometimes completely dead. Cycling is never completely dead because there's a chance you draw an impactful spell. I think the land still makes this card better than if it had cycling, but it's closer than many of the other cards in the set, and the point is that it's more nuanced than "the land option is so much better than cycling on every Magic card."
I don't think anyone said it's always better than cycling. But I do think it's better than cycling, and by quite a bit.
There's two reasons why I might be cycling a card. It's either because I want to, or because I need to. When I want to cycle a card it's because I think any random card might be an improvement, so I'm willing to trade it for an unknown card. However, when I NEED to cycle a nonland card, the vast majority of the time it's because I need to hit a land. And in those instances, which I believe occur more often than the others, the land option simply can't miss. Whereas cycling won't hit any specific type of card you're looking for with any level of certainty.
Between being capable of finding a land 100% of the time I need it to and the impact that MDFCs have on the landscape of opening hand land/spell ratios, I think they're a significantly bigger advantage than cycling is. The existence of situations where cycling is better doesn't change these aspects of the evaluation. Originally I thought that the "situational" cycling cards would be better off with cycling following the same logic you did. But after simple goldfishing with Jwari Disruption it became apparent that my logic was flawed. 100% land when you need one + guaranteed land instead of cycling when you're making mulliganing decisions has just been much better than cycling so far. This mechanic allows you to keep otherwise unkeepabble hands, and cycling when you NEED to hit a land can't miss. Just so good.
Creature - Shapeshifter Rogue
You may have Glasspool Mimic enter the battlefield as a copy of a creature you control, except it's a Shapeshifter Rogue in addition o its other types.
0/0
"When I touch the Glasspool, I tasted infinite possibility."
- Ashen Wal, Akoum Expeditionary House
Glasspool Shore
Land
Glasspool Shore enters the battlefield tapped.
{T}: Add {U}.
"Past and possibility come together in the vastness of infinite reflection."
- Ashen Wal, Akoum Expeditionary House
Clone for your guys only and a CIPT land. This definitely seems testable to me.
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On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
This looks bad to me.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
It is, but I'm pretty low on Bala Ged Recovery too. I think Regrowth is a ton better, and even Regrowth isn't an all-star.
On spoiled card wishlisting and 'should-have-had'-isms:
That's because that card is bad.
Yes.
We don't play Quench, but Miscalculation is great. We don't play Naturalize, but Wilt is fantastic. I think adding a tapped land option to a spell is even better than cycling (and by a pretty big margin, too). So ya, it's entirely possible for a card to go from bad to good because you add a flexible option to it. Any options we add on to the card that give us more ways to use them have historically been good. Kicker, cycling ...they all give us more than one thing we can do with our cards. There's no greater gap to leap than land to nonland and vice versa, and these MDFCs are going to be awesome. The land option is likely worth about 1 in terms of the acceptable "tax" that it adds to the non-land side ...that's the equivalent of adding 1-mana cycling that can't miss a land when you need to dig for one. So when I look at the Spell//Tapland combo card, if I would cube the spell if it cost 1 mana less, I'm interested in the MDFC. So in this case, I would play a 2-mana clone. So a 3-mana one with a land stapled to it looks great to me. And they change the keepable range of opening hands they're a part of too. Just amazing designs, really.
I think you should probably be higher on it.
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I've been keeping out of these discussions up to this point, but was about to weigh in by saying exactly this! Glad to see that we're on the same page
You can use the "1-mana cycling" viewpoint to analyse both sides of the card. Would I play a 3 mana clone with with islandcycling 1 (I'm counting the ETB tapped as the loss of 1 mana)? Would I play a land with that cycles for 1 and always finds a 2 mana clone? Taken together I think the answer is yes.
I've found the discussions on the MDFCs interesting. People seem to be really focused on the idea that cube is an unfair format where you have to be doing something inherently busted to win. My experience is a bit different. I find that my drafters lose as many cube games to flood/screw as anything else. Beyond that, people HATE losing to flood/screw. It's miserable to draft a sweet deck just to have variance get the best of you. These are great because they will help you win games, while also reducing the number of non-games.
At this point everyone understands these MDFC's will almost always make the decks of their respective colors and that they will prevent non-games by helping prevent flood/screw. As well, everyone hopefully understands that the cost of including these cards comes at cutting another card from you Cube not your deck. Cube real estate is hard to break into these days with so many archetypes and generic high powered cards. That means even though each of the MDFC's would be played, does not mean they are auto-includes in a Cube.
So, where is the line drawn? How often does the card need to be played on it's front to be worth the inclusion? If it's a tapped land 75% of the time then it's almost certainly not worth it. What if it's a tapped land only 50% of the time. Is it worth it then? As well, the impact of the card needs to play into the equation. The mythic cycle for example are high-cost high-powered effects. Yes, they'll be cast less often but when they are, they'll have a large effect on the game.
I don't know where the line is drawn, but my instincts tell me that the players should WANT TO cast the spell, only using it as a land as the fail safe. I don't want players to include a card in their decks that will be a tapped land nearly every game with the off chance it might be something else a fraction of the time. Glasspool Mimic would get played in a lot of blue decks, but I feel would be a tapped land far too often for it to be worth an inclusion in my cube. I played Cackling Counterpart for a long time because the card looked to be so broken. Two creatures at instant speed for one card. This has to be good! Well, it turned out to be a trap. It just sat in players hands far too often or ended up copying something inconsequential just to be played.
That experience told me I'm not looking for this effect in my Cube. Putting a land on the back makes it playable in decks but I don't want to cut a card that has a role in my cube for a card that I feel will be a tapped land most of the time.
I explained where I personally draw the line in my post above. Maybe you missed that part.
For me, I value the tapped land to be worth approximately 1 as a "tax" on the nonland side. So if the spell is something I would cube for 1 less, than the tapland MDFC is something I'm interested in. Mythics have a different metric since the land can enter untapped.
Obviously if the card isn't a card you'd ever want, then don't play it. But a 2cc self-Clone would be sweet. So I'll give a 3cc one a shot since it has a land stapled to it.
In reality, I expect this mechanic to be worth far more than 1. So even spells that are overcosted by 2 or even 3 mana might very well be amazing cards we should be cubing with. But even in an extremely conservative evaluation, a 1 tax is more than safe, and all the cards that fit that criteria should play well in my estimation.
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This is a good point, but I think I come at it from a different perspective than most people. My experience has been that it isn't hard to pull together 23 non-land cards for a cube deck. Even my weaker drafters who basically just pick random cards in a colour pair tend to end up with at least a semi-coherent pile. This suggests to me that, while cube slots are competitive, there's a lot of cards that are going to waste, sitting in sideboards during games. As a result, cards like this that will never sit in sideboards are super appealing. Basically, I'd rather have cards that I'll include in my land slot 99% of the time, than the 9th best 3 drop in a colour or the 10th best draw spell, which aren't high picks to begin with.
I do agree that this can be taken too far. I don't want to end up in a situation where my drafters are struggling to pull together a solid deck, with an interesting gameplan. That being said, I think we're pretty far from that point. I'm likely going to be testing around 10 of these lands in my 500 card cube and I don't expect there to be any significant issues. I guess I'll find out though!
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This is, I think, the crux of the discussion. It's a really different question to ask "would this make my deck?" than "should this make my cube?"
Obviously most decks that play white would rather replace a basic plains with Flagstones of Trokair, but that doesn't mean that card belongs in most cubes.
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Yea, that's a good point.
I think that the ultimate question is, obviously, "should this make my cube?", but then there are 2 sub-questions as well:
[1] "would this make my deck?"
[2] "would this make my deck better"
One the first point, I think it's fair to make the comparison between these MDFCs and Flagstones of Trokair. These are both cards that will almost always make your deck. Where things differ is the second point. Whereas Flagstones won't typically have a meaningful impact on you winning games, I think that these MDFCs will.
So, overall, I think people are in agreement regarding the first point, but the real point of contention is the second point.
Yeah, I would NEVER run this over image, which is hands down the best clone. Of course, I also can't imagine not running image in a cube of any size, unless it's some kind of themed cube that doesn't run creatures.
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I think this card, along with a lot of the other mdfc lands is fantastic, and like the others I think it should be evaluated as a tapland with upside. This is a land that can do a thing, not a thing that can be a land.
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Obviously this is all theorycrafting until we get some reps in with it. I think you're going to find the spell side to be dead a good bit of the time and be wishing for an island. This is far less of a problem with the mythics that at least give you the option of coming in untapped.
This is the case with almost every non-land card. Every spell can be a dead card in your hand based on the board state or lack of available mana. But at least with MDFCs, they can be a land in cases where you really need them to be. This likely won't replace a basic for me during deckbuilding in the same way the mythic MDFCs do, since they have to enter tapped. It'll be a playable non-land card that can be used in a land in situations where you'd otherwise be stuck with yet another uncastable card in your hand.
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SO SO SO SO SO MUCH THIS
Magic is a game of probability. The reason we play cards like Preordain is that they skew the probability distributions of our draws in the direction we need (agency via card selection). MDFCs do something very similar. By having spells attached to lands, this provides a player agency over that variant distribution. What do you need more, a spell or a land? MDFCs will ALWAYS be whichever you need. That certainty is important. It means these cards need to be evaluated with more optimism than we are used to. Why? Because when you cast the spell side, it is almost always going to be when that spell is good. So there's no more WCS vs ACS vs BCS. To be as specific as possible, most cards are valued at:
P(WCS) * V(WCS) + P(ACS) * V(ACS) + P(BCS) * V(BCS)
Where P(x) is the probability of x and V(x) is the expected value of x. These MDFCs have a different equation:
P(BCS) * V(BCS) + (1 - P(BCS)) * V(TapLand)
Observer that V(TapLand) is almost always greater than V(WCS). That observation is what makes me believe these cards are all MUCH MUCH better than we're giving them credit. To me, this card is an absolute slam dunk. Same with the regrowth. Same with the elephant. Same with the removal spell. Hell, I'm even considering the 3cmc fling. Why? Because I believe that the probability that access to fling wins a game in a red deck is high enough (say 5-10%) to justify the inclusion of a tap-land. Fling is bad because P(WCS) is too high, and V(WCS) is literally close to zero. So including it in your deck leads to just a mulligan a great percentage of the time. Now it's never a mulligan.
I chose to use fling because it's not one of these rares that has an effect you would actually consider cubing. I'm higher on these effects than WTWLF123 by his example because reducing cost by 1 yields 2cmc fling, and I am nowhere close to playing fling. But I hope my explanation explained why I think these cards are all pretty ridiculous.
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However I disagree with the specific presupposition that the tap land option is always better than cycling "by wide margin." Sure, I agree that for the majority of cases that's true, but it depends on what the spell is. For a powerful and impactful spell with cycling option you usually want draw a land if you cycle, and in those cases an actual land option is better than cycling. See the mythic cycle in this set - even without the pay 3 life mode those are obviously better with the land mode instead of cycling. But situational early game reactive spells often prefer to cycle into a better spell if the card is no longer useful. Censor vs the new 2-mana Force Spike is a great example of this. Both halves are bad at a certain point in the game, and the land vs 'maybe another spell' consideration is different.
I think you can apply some of that logic to the clone. If you have enough lands you're left with a situational self-clone, and the card is sometimes completely dead. Cycling is never completely dead because there's a chance you draw an impactful spell. I think the land still makes this card better than if it had cycling, but it's closer than many of the other cards in the set, and the point is that it's more nuanced than "the land option is so much better than cycling on every Magic card."
There's two reasons why I might be cycling a card. It's either because I want to, or because I need to. When I want to cycle a card it's because I think any random card might be an improvement, so I'm willing to trade it for an unknown card. However, when I NEED to cycle a nonland card, the vast majority of the time it's because I need to hit a land. And in those instances, which I believe occur more often than the others, the land option simply can't miss. Whereas cycling won't hit any specific type of card you're looking for with any level of certainty.
Between being capable of finding a land 100% of the time I need it to and the impact that MDFCs have on the landscape of opening hand land/spell ratios, I think they're a significantly bigger advantage than cycling is. The existence of situations where cycling is better doesn't change these aspects of the evaluation. Originally I thought that the "situational" cycling cards would be better off with cycling following the same logic you did. But after simple goldfishing with Jwari Disruption it became apparent that my logic was flawed. 100% land when you need one + guaranteed land instead of cycling when you're making mulliganing decisions has just been much better than cycling so far. This mechanic allows you to keep otherwise unkeepabble hands, and cycling when you NEED to hit a land can't miss. Just so good.
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