MTG Salvation

Venser's 4mv and permanent bounce is the only real edge it has over this, and even that is quite desperate in today's fast and efficient meta.

On the other hand this is more splashable (which is big) and doesn't give them their spell back. It doesn't even need to connect to cast the stolen spell - attacking is enough. On top of that the body is better.

I mean I definitely think this is nuts. White it's true that 5 mana is a lot, especially to hold up at instant speed, blue has considered things like Voracious Greatshark before, and this is leagues better. Welcome to cube, Mr djinn, I can see you staying for quite a while.

I think there's something to be said for the untap ability of this card.
With blue, you get to reuse your looters, and you can dominate with Opposition. With black, you get to keep your Dauthi Voidwalker active. And the best part is in green, where if you have a few mana dorks this does a decent impression of Wilderness Reclamation.
All of this is on top of the Vigilance from combat.

If this were printed last year, it might have had a decent chance at seeing play as a reanimation target + removal on death.
However, I think that Chaos Defiler really took the main benefit this card gave and pumped it to the extreme, to the point where even if this were 6 mana it wouldn't be good enough to contest it.

Quote from LucidVision »

One of the best qualities of big beaters is they are great defensively against Agro. Unfortunately not true here.

Quote from asmallcat »

I don't love that you have to pay the 2 mana every turn to make it a good attacker.

I beg to differ with the both of you - for 2 mana you get a good attacker AND a good defender. It's not multiple bodies, so not stellar, but a 6/6 trampling body is on Prime Time levels, which is nothing to scoff at.
Plus, if you really need the mana, you don't have to pay - this is no Echo or Cumulative Upkeep. Decks that play at instant speed will appreciate this creature for simply swinging for 3 while holding up both a blocker and mana, until you have enough mana to pay 2 along with your spells. Mana sinks are not to be underestimated.

Swords of X and Y have certainly suffered from the blazingly fast cards that MTG has gained over the years. Newer swords, such as Sword of Truth and Justice and Sword of Hearth and Home, have suffered a lot from being printed as synergy cards.

However, this sword offers proper card advantage, or at least as proper as red and green can offer. I'm sure that midrange decks will appreciate getting to dig deeper into their deck, and getting to play more lands is also something that they probably appreciate as well.
The question, then, is whether this effect is good enough for other decks. Aggressive decks probably don't want to spend 5 mana to maybe get an effect, and control will dislike this effect with their counterspells.

I think that if large cubes tested Sword of Sinew and Steel, which has a more conditional ability but better protection colors, they can probably give this sword a whirl.
What do you think?

Giving green the ability to recast their planeswalker or Deranged Hermit every turn has got to be one of the most irresponsible things ever printed. Even if that's the only spell they'll play for the turn, it's more than enough to beat control and aggro on the spot.
And when you have cards like M&B or Oko in green, replaying them is an instant win against anything. Absolutely stone cold nuts.

Unlike original Thrun, this card won't survive wraths, which is a big deal. I'm not sure Carnage Tyrant would have been as good for cube if it were a 5 drop with weaker p/t, since green 5 drops are notoriously overstacked. I don't think many cubes will pick this up.

I love that her +1 has so many niche interactions that are super fun and interesting. Forcing opponent to use Jitte counters, wiping out tokens, resetting Glen Elendra Archmage or cards brought back with Serra Paragon or your Portable Hole... The list is endless and will be explored in cube for a long while.
One important note is that the card is returned on OWNER'S end step, so if targeting an opposing creature, it won't be able to attack the Wanderer during their next turn, which is quite strong! Especially against big evasive creatures.
But the card is so much more than that ability - the token is great on defense, especially when only one creature can attack her in combat, and the facts that you get to choose the cards for her -4 and having it as an option immediately make this absolutely terrifying to play against.
Feels like a slam dunk in any size.

The tokens are what make this card for me. Untouched, it can produce 3 tokens over 3 turns without additional cantrips or shenanigans, which will be 9/9 worth of vigilant bodies and gaining +3/+3 each turn. Seems like a great average case to me.
Of course, this card loves synergies with incidental card draw, like Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, Remand, Arcane Denial, cantrips, and being The Monarch.
Furthermore, cards like Brainstorm and Cavalier of Gales kick this card up a notch while being easily playable in most blue decks.

The way I see it, Teferi's 0 ability will be used in a similar way to Jace Beleren's +2, meaning only enough to facilitate more tokens, unless you're digging for a game-winning ultimate.
Even with that in mind, the card still seems pretty solid as a defense and possible win condition for blue.

The whole point of a 1/4 lifelink is to stall aggro to a halt. However, the Living Metal ability only lets the body be relevant while it's your turn, so the stats are quite irrelevant. The 2/4 lifelink for 2W is much more reliable, but still isn't amazing.
Another drawback is that if you're stuck on the Living Metal mode with no trinket in sight, it can't even become an actual creature.

BTW OP you forgot to put flying in the card text.

Alright, on to the card. A lot of aggro decks would be happy just having a 2/2 flyer for 2 as a 22nd or 23rd card, and in Rx aggro or mono-R this is a lot better than that. I like my R aggro decks to have like 7ish burn spells (or more), and turning your bolts into bolt+2 more damage is great, and it gives you additional post-wrath reach. This seems like an obvious test, and likely long-time include to me.

The only real downside is I wish you could bring it back when your burn spells hit a PW, but that might be too much.

I think this card is worth revisiting - from what I've seen in constructed and limited for GRN, this card is bonkers. I think it's in a weird spot with cube, since spending 4 mana to not affect the board is bad (you're not afforded the same amount of time as regular limited). But you also don't have the same density of cheap burn effects, where Experimental Frenzy is at its best (like in constructed).

That said, I think the card is better than Outpost Siege (and hence better than Vance's Blasting Cannons). Outpost Siege nets you 2 cards per turn - one from your draw step and 1 from the enchantment. Frenzy removes your draw step, so how could it be better than either? Here's I think why:

1. It enables a steady stream of cards -- For you to stop playing cards off the top of your deck, one of two things will happen: either you've run out of mana, or you've run into your second land on top. I wrote a simulation that does the following: assume that we untap on turn n with Experimental Frenzy in play. How many cards can we play off the top of our deck?

I ran a simulation to help me figure this out (for the more technical, a Monte Carlo simulation with 1 million trials). Consider two decks:
A very aggressive aggro deck (16 lands, 8 1 drops, 8 2 drops, 6 3 drops, 2 4 drops)
A typical midrange deck (17 lands, 2 1 drops, 5 2 drops, 6 3 drops, 5 4 drops, 4 5 drops, 2 6 drops)

Produces the following results:


What does this show? It shows that, Experimental Frenzy gets you more than one card on average even if you play it on turn 4, even in a midrange deck. But that's not when you should play Frenzy - you play it when your hand is empty (probably around t6 or t7). At that point, you're getting at least 2 cards off Frenzy. This shows that in terms of raw card advantage, Frenzy is always better in aggro decks than Siege, and usually better in midrange decks.

2. The cards you draw are not lost -- After reading the above, you might say "So what? Frenzy isn't better in terms of card advantage than Siege/Cannons in a midrange deck until turn 7, and it locks me out of access to cards in my hand". But the cards in your hand are not lost. If I don't cast the card revealed off Siege, it's lost forever. I can continue to stockpile cards in my hand with Frenzy, and then pop Frenzy when the cards in my hand are good, regaining access to these cards. There's no real way to quantify this, but there is extra card advantage than what is just shown on the left graph. This is what pushes it above Siege generally imo.

Conclusions
Outpost Siege and Experimental Frenzy are fundamentally different cards. I see Outpost Siege as a big midrange/control card - it's grindy, it's reliable, and it's mediocre (which is why most of us don't cube it). Frenzy is (mostly) unplayable in control; reactive cards, especially counterspells, do not pair well with Frenzy. But in decks that are mostly just pushing their own gameplan, like aggro and many proactive flavors of midrange/ramp, with just removal as reactive cards, I think that Frenzy is quite good (as shown above).

TL;DR - Frenzy is better in many decks than Outpost Siege is in those decks, even if Frenzy is bad in control. I personally think this makes Frenzy the better cube card:

Now, is it cubeable? Maybe not - slots are tight for a 4 cmc red card that does not the turn it hits play. It's a high variance card - the floor is abysmal but can be raised with the right deck. Its ceiling is enormous. I think it deserves more attention than it is getting. I'll be testing it, and I hope that it performs well.

Someone attacked my Sorin, Grim Nemesis with his Archangel Avacyn. I pointed an Anguished Unmaking at it. True story. The flavor!

Josu Vess.....as in liliana vess....as in liliana's big brother, flavor win

Type > Color.

You did this, Eldrazi! Are you happy?!

Destroy all Damnation Memes, they can't be regenerated

its like a 1 time use xanthid swarm. Sick combo with this, and blinking renegade rallier with eldrazi displacer.

The hell is with this set and it's uncommons?!?

Why is this not an elf?

So a conditional Mono-G Burning-Tree Emissary? It's probably for the best, but can still be easily abused with blinks like Cloudshift.