Last week,
magicmerl brought up an interesting point
in the forums that I wanted to talk about further. He talked about a problem that’s familiar to cube designers – there are tons of strong, high-end cards but only so much room for them without destroying your curve. I’m going to relate how I’ve made those decisions for my cube, discuss some popular choices, and talk about criteria to apply when evaluating new cards.
To illustrate the problem, I looked at an incredible resource –
the MTG Salvation Cube Comparison
. This list compiles data from about eighty cubes and presents a list of cards the average cube runs. It’s beyond useful when you’re looking for cards to include or want to see the direction that other cube designers have gone. For example, I’ve recently been unhappy with green in
my cube
. I looked to the Cube Comparison and found Twinblade Slasher, an awesome card I’d completely forgotten about.
Anyway, I grabbed a list of the most commonly played white finishers, which I arbitrarily defined as cards that cost six mana or more. Here are the creatures that would be in a “typical” 720-card cube, in order of how many cubes included them:
Exalted Angel
Akroma, Angel of Wrath
Sun Titan
Yosei, the Morning Star
Eternal Dragon
Captain of the Watch (sneaking in with about a quarter of the votes of Eternal Dragon )
And here are a couple of others that don’t make the 720-card cube, but that more than one cube runs:
Admonition Angel
Iona, Shield of Emeria
Deathless Angel
Pristine Angel
There are a few things to note here. The most played creature is Exalted Angel – because she’s not really a six-drop. There’s no reason not to play something of that power level that can come out on turn 3. Similar reasoning applies to Akroma, who’s often (but not always) going to be reanimated, and Eternal Dragon, who’s never dead and can help you get to seven mana along the way.
The standard of quality for a straight-up I’m-going-to-tap-six-lands-for-this creature is really very high. Sun Titan is the only recent card that has made it in significant numbers. Most of the recently printed finishers aren’t quite there, and unless I’m very much mistaken, the new Sunblast Angel will soon be on the list of almost-rans as well. In short – it’s a tough crew to crack.
In some ways, this is constraining – there are too many good cards to just cube with the particular finisher you happen to like the best. When I started playing Magic, Twilight Shepherd was the first card I really loved. (Jason Chan, you’re my hero!) It was in the cube I learned to play with and does a really cool thing. But between the prohibitive mana cost and the inconsistency of the effect, it gradually become obvious that good ol’ TwiShep wasn’t good enough. We replaced her with Adarkar Valkyrie and never looked back – and Sun Titan recently took that spot in turn.
As much as I sometimes miss Twilight Shepherd or recall the times Adarkar Valkyrie locked down a game, there are clear differences between the staple finishers and the ones you’ll regretfully be replacing in a week. I see three main qualities a high-end creature can have that make it worth a spot in the cube:
1. If you untap with it, you win.
This is the most nebulous and the least compelling quality, but sometimes it’s enough. Flameblast Dragon, Oona, Queen of the Fae, and Adarkar Valkyrie fall into this category. Once active, the card advantage and/or repeatable Fireballs they produce are usually pretty overwhelming.
The downside is that there’s a window where you get nothing at all for your six mana, and these guys don’t have any built-in resistance to removal.
This category of creature will probably find a home in a bigger cube, but when you get down to 300-400 cards, there just won’t be room. In reference to
my column from last week
, Steel Hellkite fits in here as well. As I said there, I still think he’s worth a try, in part because non-white colors need all the versatile answers to permanents that they can get. But I can’t fault anyone for finding him not quite good enough.
2. Resistance to removal, usually combined with a problematic body or effect.
Anything that can regenerate fits here, alongside creatures with shroud, protection, or even flash. Pristine Angel is the poster child of this category – she’s a problem for most decks even though a 4/4 isn’t huge. One could also argue that any black creature has a relevant protection from removal, since a lot of removal spells only target non-black creatures. The creatures in this category are more likely to be cube staples. Some, like Simic Sky Swallower, have a place in nearly every cube.
3. Saving the best for last – creatures that have an immediate impact on the board.
Cards like Sun Titan and Captain of the Watch fit in here, along with monsters like Terastodon and Woodfall Primus. Even if they’re removed right away, you’ve still gotten some value out of them. Anything with haste falls into this category, as well as cards like Triskelion that take something with them even if they go, or at least a chunk out of your opponent’s face.
Another way for a creature to impact the board – this has some overlap with resistance to removal – is to have some kind of unsavory effect for your opponent when it dies. Cards such as Wurmcoil Engine, Keiga, the Tide Star, or one of my personal favorites, Archon of Justice, straddle the two categories.
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There are other, less critical distinctions to consider. How prohibitive is the mana cost of each creature? How unusual is the effect?
As an example, Visara the Dreadful is relatively little played, but I love having her against other black decks. In my cube thus far, the uniqueness and power of her effect has made up for the fact that she’s difficult to cast. Those kinds of decisions often come down to how highly you value uniqueness vs. raw power. With all that said, I think that the high-end is the most reasonable place to let personal preference influence your decision. There’s just a lot more variety there.
For example, in black, the small creatures are largely good because they’re strong, evasive beaters. The ones that cost four are usually good because they kill something when they come into play. There are exceptions, like all-around badass Nezumi Graverobber, but the low- to mid-mana creatures are usually worth a spot in the cube because they fill a specific role.
The high-cost creatures have a little more flexibility because their job is basically “win the game.” There’s lots of ways to do that, and while the Sun Titan way might be objectively strongest, I’d argue that most of the time, the Admonition Angel way will work just as well.
In that case, both cards have impressive and potentially game-ending effects, and there are many situations where the card advantage you get from either one will be enough to turn the game in your favor. You can dream up any number of situations where one or the other is better, but fundamentally, they’re both doing a powerful, cube-worthy thing.
I like to think of this as the difference between comparing a card to the other cards it’s competing with, and comparing it to the rest of the cube. If Grave Titan is the best black six-drop, that’s worth noting, and he should be in your cube. But, if Kokusho, the Evening Star looks good in comparison to the rest of the cube (not just other black six-mana creatures), then she’s still a cube-worthy card. There’s a difference between a card being somewhat outclassed and a card that seems a little embarrassing when you run into it in draft.
In other words, the pool of reasonable finishers is deep enough that you aren’t going to lose much by running a slightly suboptimal replacement. That’s not to say that you should go totally nuts and run Reya Dawnbringer or intentionally use a card you think is weak.
But the cube supports a huge variety of game states and interactions, and one group’s experiences can be legitimately different from another’s. That experience is then going to shape each group’s view of the cards in question, which can be self-perpetuating. I.e., if I get destroyed by Kagemaro, First to Suffer, and then start taking it highly and always running it in my black decks, I have more chances to see Kagemaro be awesome again.
I was recently reminded of this effect when Evan Erwin posted a link to one of his
old cube columns
. In it, he lists his top five cube cards and has some friends do so as well. Five out of six of them list Treachery as one of the top five cards. Now, I love Treachery, and I literally feel like I’m cheating every time I play it. But that’s a strange amount of unanimity for a card that really doesn’t rank above Library of Alexandria, Time Walk, Sol Ring, Sword of Fire and Ice, or Umezawa’s Jitte, among others. But my guess is (and Evan can confirm or deny) that these guys played together and collectively saw Treachery wreck house. It’s not a conclusion they came to independently – it’s one they all saw acted out.
I’m bringing this up not to say that Evan and his friends were wrong, but to point out that it’s okay and practically inevitable to value a card based on your experiences with it. If it really isn’t good enough, then your opinion will change – like my early parting of ways with Twilight Shepherd. But if you’ve been running Deathless Angel in your cube and love it, I don’t see any reason to go out of your way to change that.
Thanks for reading! I highly recommend checking out the Cube Comparison project and adding your cube to the list if you like. Let me know what you thought in the comments, or say hello on
Twitter
.